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“You’ll still hear it, if you use it,” Letty said, trying to keep her voice conversational.
“Yeah, but it’ll be just another pop on top of those drums,” Cartwright said. “It’s a hundred to one that anyone would recognize it as a gunshot.”
“You shooting subsonic?” Letty asked.
“No, I want the punch,” Cartwright said. She tightened the suppressor, looked up from the gun barrel and saw that Letty had the 938 in her hand. “Is that the FBI gun?”
“Yeah, it’s okay. I wouldn’t want to shoot it at more than five yards, though. God only knows where it shoots longer than that.”
Sovern poked his head out of the cabin, then stepped into the cockpit, said to Cartwright, “A silencer? Who are you guys?”
“They’re crazy,” Baxter said. “Excuse me while I dive off the dock.”
“Relax, everything is under control,” Cartwright said.
Baxter: “Yeah, bullshit,” and, “Here they come.”
They all looked toward the motel and the two men ambled down a set of steps and along the walkway that led to the dock.
Cartwright said to Sovern, quietly, “Was your father in the movies by any chance?”
“Not exactly. He was a TV weather guy in San Diego. Why?”
“Because you’re really, really good-looking.”
Sovern: “Oh, yeah. I go to music concerts and my looks get me laid. The next morning, the woman finds out I’m a computer nerd and have OCD and she leaves, for good. Also, I might be a little cranky in the mornings. I don’t like to talk before noon... These guys don’t look anything like that couple that was here before.”
“The first ones were scouts,” Letty said. “They were locating you for the killers. They’re probably watching us right now, from somewhere else.”
“They would be, if I were running this op,” Cartwright said. To Baxter: “The guy on the right was the shooter at Loren Barron’s house?”
“Don’t know who did the shooting, but he was there,” Baxter said.
“My fuckin’ toe is busted, I think,” Sovern said. “What are you going to do?”
“We’re gonna ask these guys who their boss is,” Letty said.
Baxter: “Like they’re gonna tell you.”
“They’re gonna tell us,” Cartwright said.
The two mencame down the dock. Both average height but muscular, dark hair with short haircuts, both were dressed like Cartwright with overshirts over tee-shirts, but with a hint of the tactical about them: the overshirts were dark green and dark gray, the tee-shirts were black. Like Cartwright, they both wore black jeans.
As they came up, Cartwright told Sovern, “Duck back into the cabin. Go on. We want them looking at you, not at us.”
Sovern did that, and as he did, one of the men, looking at the three sitting on dock boxes, asked, “How you doin’?”
The words were American, but they didn’t sound American; there was an accent in it.
“We’re doing fine,” Baxter said. “How you doin’?”
“We’re doin’ fine, too,” the man said. “We need to talk to Mr. Sovern, private-like, so if you’d move along, we’d appreciate it.”
“Can’t do that,” Letty said. “We’re his bodyguards.”
The two men looked at each other, and then the talker said, “You’re bodyguards? Two girls and a fat man are his bodyguards?”
“That’s right,” Cartwright said.
