This was the end of the road.
His hands trembling, he took the Walther P38 from his pocket and turned toward the lights, which had almost reached the promontory.
There were four of them, he now saw, two men and two women, with Luis Docampo at the head. Three were carrying shotguns, and the fourth held a huge axe. They stopped a few paces away, and for a moment, nobody uttered a word.
“It’s over, Lobeira.” Luis Docampo’s voice was full of tension. “You’re trapped. Put down your gun.”
“No way.” He tried to control the tremor in his voice and pointed the P38 at them. “You put yours down and let me leave. Nobody needs to get hurt here, Luis.”
Luis looked around, as if only just noticing where they were. “There are four of us and one of you,” he replied. “Do you really think you can escape?”
“Your shotguns can each fire once, and I have a magazine with a dozen cartridges,” replied Roberto. “I think that evens things up.”
“Seriously?” Luis looked at him with wide eyes and clicked his tongue. “Do you think you’ll kill all four of us before we fire? I doubt it.”
“You don’t want to find out.” He gripped his pistol tight. “I’m serious.”
“I don’t think you are.” Luis took a step toward him. “I don’t think you’ve got the balls to pull that trigger.”
Roberto swallowed with difficulty. His throat was tight.
Luis Docampo took a step closer, a sinister smile on his face.
Roberto raised the pistol and pointed at a spot slightly above his enemy’s shoulder. Luis was right about one thing: Roberto would never fire at them in cold blood. He wasn’t a murderer. But they didn’t need to know that.
The old P38 trembled in his hand as he squeezed the trigger.
There was a dull click, and Roberto felt as if his heart had stopped.
Decades of salt and rust. A complete lack of maintenance. Old, damp ammunition. There were a thousand possible explanations. He couldn’t know the cause, but the pistol had jammed, just as he had feared it might. He registered a fleeting look of terror in Luis’s eyes before the man realized that the weapon hadn’t fired.
Roberto squeezed the trigger again, desperately, but the mechanism was locked solid. Luis’s expression went from fear to surprise and, finally, to comprehension and triumph. He approached Roberto, who was staring at the pistol with the funereal expression of someone who has just received a terrible piece of news. Almost delicately, the islander removed the gun from his hand while the rest of the party kept their shotguns trained on him. Luis inspected it for a moment, then tossed it into the Devil’s Hole.
“Turns out you did have the balls,” mused Docampo. “I definitely didn’t see that coming.”
Before Roberto had a chance to ready himself, Luis punched him hard in the stomach. Roberto gasped and took a step back, and felt the ground sloping away behind him, marking the edge of the shaft. Being punched by these people was becoming a tiresome routine, but he suspected that worse things were about to happen to him.
“I’ve never liked you.” Luis Docampo grabbed him to stop him falling and, in a delicate, almost intimate gesture, pulled him close. “You have no idea how much I’m going to enjoy killing you.”
Roberto struggled to his feet and, after getting his breath back, gave him a faint smile. “That’s ... never ... going to happen,” he panted. “Ever.”
“Really? And can I ask why not?”
“Because if you kill me, you’ll never find the money.” Roberto gave him a defiant stare, having just thrown his winning card onto the table. “I’ve hidden it well. You can turn the island upside down and you’ll never find it, not a single cent. You need me alive.”
Luis Docampo stared at him for a moment. Then, to Roberto’s surprise, he laughed. But it was mirthless laughter, full of pain. “Do you really think I give a damn about the fucking money?” he asked quietly. “After everything you’ve done?”
“I don’t understand,” Roberto replied, with a horrible sense of foreboding. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I’m talking about my cousin Ricardo, the one whose head you cut off,” whispered Luis furiously. “About old Elvira Couto, who you murdered in cold blood. Don’t worry, we had time to see what you did at her place. You’re a sick, twisted son of a bitch, Lobeira.”
Roberto’s whole body went numb. Luis thought that he was the murderer roaming around the island. That he was responsible for the two deaths. The injustice of the situation made him want to scream.
“The moment you showed up, things started going wrong. You just happened to find my cousin’s body.” Luis was seething with rage. “And we just happened to see you coming out of the home of a woman who’d been murdered in exactly the same way. You come to Ons, and people start dropping like flies and, guess what, you always just happen to be close to the scene of the crime. Don’t insult my fucking intelligence!”
“It isn’t what it seems. I ...oof!”
Another punch, this time to the face, made Roberto lose his footing. He tasted blood inside his mouth.
