Gin Palace 02 - The Bone Orchard

without even looking at the speedometer.
    I had played war here when I was a boy with kids from school, poorer kids, mostly, with whom I felt more comfortable than I did with those who lived around me on Gin Lane. I remember being happiest here, I remember those late-summer afternoons and those early nights of winter as the best parts of my unpleasant childhood. As I drove now I could see in my mind’s eye the place where Frank must have taken Augie – a clearing on the shore of Shinnecock Bay, surrounded on three sides by oak and ash trees and thick underbrush. This had to be the place. There was a path leading to it—this path had been there when I first started going there to play war and that had grown deeper when I finally left that and all other boyish games behind me for good.
    There were, I remembered, some fallen trees. And he terrain was uneven, with crests and many depressions that were so deep they were almost ditches. The ground was mainly bare earth with some grass and wild ferns growing in patches, mainly on the highest points of ground. I could understand why Frank would choose this place – the reservation was protected land, the tribe wasn’t growing so fast that there would be a housing boom, and who would build there anyway when the northern and eastern edges of the reservation were on flat land with soft soil and less wilderness? The Shinnecock for the most part built their own homes, and the land by the shore wasn’t the kind of land one could easily level and lay in a crawlspace foundation with shovels and picks and wheelbarrows of cement on a Saturday afternoon.
    I turned off Montauk Highway and back onto the reservation again and followed a dirt road as far south as it went. It came to a stop at the trunk of a fallen, rotting tree. Beyond that was just woods, thick woods. I saw even before I reached the end of the road three cars parked side by side. The first car I recognized was Frank Gannon’s Seville. It was hard to miss. The second was a small pickup with a glossy black paint job. I didn’t get a look at the third till I killed the motor and the light and got out of Augie’s truck and started toward the path that began at the end of the road. But the sight of third car slowed me a bit. I stared at it with almost disbelief. It was the dark LTD that belonged to the man with the limp, to whom I owed my life and who owed me his.
    I continued toward the path. Once I reached it I stopped and listened. Above, the heavy blanket of low clouds, frayed and shredded into long strands, flew quickly past the three-quarter moon. The moon was midway up from the horizon and perfectly white and spread a pale light into the woods ahead of me. It was almost enough to see by.
    Then I heard faint voices. I could tell they were shouts but I couldn’t hear words. I took a step onto the path and then heard a muffled pop, flat and abrupt. It was a shotgun blast. I heard more voices, more distant yelling, and then another pop. After that I heard the firecracker sound of small-arms fire, shots that were right on top of each other and could not have come from one gun.
    I ran full stride into the woods, following a path that seemed familiar only when it was directly beneath my feet. I could not predict it, but there was enough light to make out the line it cut through the dense woods, and I just aimed for that.
    I reached inside the jacket and pulled the Colt from the front of my waistband. Then I reached around, under the jacket, and gripped the other one by its ridged grip and pulled it out. That was the chrome one. I switched off each safety with my thumb.
    I moved over the path, up small rises and down, around the zigzag of turns. I held a full-bore run for a hundred yards, then started my next hundred. My worn-out sneakers slapped the dirt with an even, rapid rhythm. I just focused on staying on the path and holding that rhythm.
    I counted six shotgun bursts but could not keep track of the small-arms fire. With each pumping of my legs the sounds got louder, clearer. I could hear the voices but still could not hear words, not yet, not over my horse-like exhalations and the rushing wind in my ears. Toward the end the path began to zigzag sharper. The terrain was rougher here, more uneven, rising and falling like a tiny roller coaster.
    I hit numbness, I hit runner’s high, and as the endorphins cascaded down through my brain I was struck with the euphoric belief that I could hold this pace forever.
    But