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“Then this might be your unlucky night, because...” The man moved his hand to the left side of his overshirt, and Cartwright said, “Wait!”
“What?” His hand stopped moving.
“Waiting for the bass drum,” she said.
It came: “Boom!” And... BAP.
Despite the suppressor, the shot was loud, much louder than the drums.
Letty jumped: Cartwright had shot the man in the stomach. His eyes opened wide with shock and he sat down, hard, on the dock, then flopped flat on his back. Letty was on her feet with the 938 up and pointing at the other man’s head.
“Your friend might survive a stomach wound, but a head wound, you know, not so much,” Letty said. “Want to find out?”
The man, looking first at the nine-millimeter hole at the end of Letty’s pistol, and then down at his partner said, “Greg? Greg?”
Cartwright told Letty, “Take him down to the end of the dock...” The wounded man was groping for the gunshot wound with his hand, which came away scarlet with blood, and moaned, a rough sound that could be a prelude to death. “...and ask him his boss’s name. Tell him to whisper it. I’ll ask Greg what the boss’s name is, and if they don’t match, we’ll shoot them both. Get Sovern to put them on his boat, take the bodies out to sea.”
“That’s a plan,” Letty said. She waggled her gun at the unwounded man and said, “End of the dock.”
The man moved, reluctantly, toward the end of the dock, Letty keeping a careful six-foot distance away. At the steps down from the motel, the man said, “If I tell you, they’ll kill me.”
“But you’ll make up a story, with Greg, about how we opened fire and he got hit and we ran off and you don’t know nothin’ and never had a chance to talk to us...”
He shook his head and seemed to tense, as though about to jump her, and she said, “I can shoot you three times before you get to me and then you’ll be dead for sure. And I’ll do that. Then we’llkill Greg, to keep things neat and clean. Dump you both in the ocean.”
The man gnawed at his bottom lip for a moment, then whispered, “Mr. Step.”
“Step? What’s his real name?”
Another hesitation, and a look down the dock, where his partner lay pumping blood on the plastic boards. “Arseny Stepashin.”
Letty said, “I’m gonna back away from you, down the dock. You follow. You try to run, I’ll shoot you. I’m a very good shot and I’d be happy to do it.” They stepped carefully down the dock, and once there, Cartwright looked up and Letty said, “How about, Arseny Stepashin?”
“That’s the name I got,” Cartwright said. She pointed her suppressed pistol at the standing man and said, “You’ve got a gun. Drop it on the dock. Take it out with two fingers. You make a move, we’ll kill you.”
The man took a black suppressed Glock from a shoulder holster and dropped it on the dock. Cartwright turned to Sovern: “You ready?”
“I can go now... I need to cast off.”
“Then go. I want you on the way before we call 9-1-1 and get this shot asshole put in an ambulance.”
Sovern still took five minutes before his boat slowly eased out of the slip and made the turn into the boat channel. He called out once, the fading drums of the White Stripes behind him, “Good-bye. I’d like to see you again, Barbara. You can get my email from Ben.”
Letty waved, then looked at Cartwright: “FBI and then 9-1-1.”
Baxter: “About time. I think we’re all done here. With this whole job.”
Cartwright, looking out to the boat channel: “I’d like to see him again, too.”
Letty: “Ah, Jesus.”
Letty calledher FBI contact first, told him where they were and what had happened, asked him to call the Oxnard police and fill them in on their identities.
“I’ll do that and get some of our people on the way,” the fed said. “They’ll be coming from here in LA, so it could be a while. You want me to call 9-1-1 and get an ambulance moving?”
“If you would,” Letty said, looking down at the shooter’s body. “The guy seems pretty uncomfortable and he’s bleeding bad.”
That done, she called Delores Nowak, who was still in Los Angeles.
