Persuader

without coming too close to Paulie. It was like he was a mythic figure. Like he was capable of anything. I knew how they felt. He had two broken arms, but I was watching him like my life depended on it. Which it did. If he ran at me and knocked me over he could crush me to death with his knees. I began to doubt that the Colts would do anything to him. I imagined him swarming at me, and emptying twelve bullets into him and watching them hit without slowing him down at all.
    "Walk," I said.
    He walked. He turned away and started up the driveway. I followed, ten paces behind.
    Richard and Elizabeth moved farther onto the grass. We passed them and they fell in behind me. At first I thought of telling them to stay where they were. But then I figured they had earned the right to watch, each in their own separate ways.
    He followed the carriage circle around. He seemed to know where I wanted him. And he didn't seem to care. He passed by the garage block and headed behind the house and out onto the rocks. I followed, ten paces back. I was limping, because the heel had come off my right shoe. The wind was in my face. The sea was loud around us. It was rough and raging. He walked all the way to the head of Harley's cleft. He stopped there and stood still and then turned back to face me.
    "I can't swim," he said. He slurred his words. I had broken some of his teeth, and hit him hard in the throat. The wind howled around him. It lifted his hair and added another inch to his height. Spray blew past him, right at me.
    "No swimming involved," I replied.
    I shot him twelve times in the chest. All twelve bullets passed straight through him. Big chunks of flesh and muscle followed them out over the ocean. One guy, two guns, twelve loud explosions, eleven dollars and forty cents in ammunition. He went down backward into the water. Made a hell of a splash. The sea was rough, but the tide was wrong. It wasn't pulling. He just settled in the roiling water and floated. The ocean turned pink around him. He floated, static. Then he started drifting. He drifted out, very slowly, bucking up and down violently on the swell. He floated for a whole minute. Then two.
    He drifted ten feet. Then twenty. He rolled over on his front with a loud sucking sound and pinwheeled slowly in the current. Then faster. He was trapped just underneath the surface of the water. His jacket was soaked and air was ballooned under it and leaking out of twelve separate bullet holes. The ocean was tossing him up and down like he weighed nothing at all. I put both empty guns on the rocks and squatted down and threw up into the ocean. Stayed down, breathing hard, watching him float. Watching him spin.
    Watching him drift away. Richard and Elizabeth kept themselves twenty feet from me. I cupped my hand and rinsed my face with cold salt water. Closed my eyes. Kept them closed for a long, long time. When I opened them again I looked out over the rough surface of the sea and saw that he wasn't there anymore. He had finally gone under.
    I stayed down. Breathed out. Checked my watch. It was only eleven o'clock. I watched the ocean for a spell. It rose and fell. Waves broke and spray showered me. I saw the Arctic tern again. It was back, looking for a place to nest. My mind was blank. Then I started thinking. Started scoping things out. Started assessing the changed circumstances.
    I thought for five whole minutes and eventually got around to feeling pretty optimistic.
    With Paulie gone so early I figured the endgame had just gotten a whole lot faster and easier.
    I was wrong about that, too.
    The first thing that went wrong was that Elizabeth Beck wouldn't leave. I told her to take Richard and the Cadillac and get the hell out. But she wouldn't go. She just stood there on the rocks with her hair streaming and her clothes flapping in the wind.
    "This is my home," she said.
    "Pretty soon it's going to be a war zone," I said.
    "I'm staying."
    "I can't let you stay."
    "I'm not leaving," she said. "Not without my husband." I didn't know what to tell her. I just stood there, getting colder. Richard came up behind me and circled around and looked out at the sea, and then back at me.
    "That was cool," he said. "You beat him."
    "No, he beat himself," I said.
    There were noisy seagulls in the air. They were fighting the wind, circling a spot in the ocean maybe forty yards away. They were dipping down and pecking at the crests of the waves. They were eating floating fragments of Paulie.