by Gary Sapp
about your sister’s ambush as you were.”
Roxanne can feel the Marta’s brakes engage seconds before she hear the whine of them engaging with this car finally grinding to a halt. The doors a few feet from them slide open and three patrons disappear through the hatch while none replace them. Roxanne knew the rout well and waited until they were less than two minutes from the next stop before she surprised Angel by standing herself—with her gun raised for all to see.
“Alright,” Roxanne announced aloud. “Unfortunately, through no fault of your won, you people have been involved in a private affair that is far from your concern. I would appreciate if the remainder of you exits the Marta at the next stop.”
A couple of riders protest. One older gentleman laughs heartily, tells Roxanne to kiss his ass and returns to the act of reading his newspaper. Another man, who smelled like an old gym shoe, comments ever slyly that this isn’t his stop.
When the Marta slowed to stop no one moved.
Roxanne Sanchez fired a single shot into the ceiling.
“I said everyone out, right now.” She then sneered something in Spanish. “I won’t ask nearly as nicely next time.
The passengers exit, some running, others stumbling over themselves to get away from the crazy woman with the gun. The man with the newspaper was the last to leave. He folded his paper neatly, grabbed his hat and cursed ever so quietly and leaped off a second before the doors closed once again and the female automated voice announced the Marta’s next stop.
Roxanne found and turned the lock that would allow no further passengers to enter this car. She then plopped into the seat that Angel had first vacated when she came to. She took a deep breath and got a full measure of the woman she’d wanted to confront for so very long.
I’ll give you credit, if you are afraid, Doctor, you are doing a good job of masking your fear. Or maybe you are just as cold hearted a bitch as I’ve always believed you to be.
“Roxanne, I don’t understand why didn’t you ever take the time to contact me?” Angel asked her. “We should have talked. We could have discussed this matter rationally instead of you allowing the years to pass and the bitterness to grow. I can understand what your sister meant to you—“
“Don’t,” Roxanne spat out the word. “Don’t you patronize me, Doctor. I won’t have you treating me like one of your sheep. She waved the gun at Angel again in case the other forgot she possessed it. “And back up off of me. I’m not playing games with you. I intend for you to hear what I have to say, know my pain and then I’m going to kill you, Angel.”
Angel latches her palms to the seat and uses them to methodically slide her torso that soon after she is nearly on top of Roxanne. Roxanne cocks her gun in a reactionary manner, but Angel only unleashes a sneer and gives her full contact.
“Back off of me, Doctor,”
“You’re not very good at this are you, Roxanne. Allowing all of the other passengers to get off this thing was the worst possible mistake you could have made—little girl.”
Roxanne pointed the gun in her face.
“You must have a death wish, lady?”
“Do you think that I am afraid to die? Do you, really?” Angel wrinkled her nose but her big brown eyes went glossy. Roxanne imagined that the other woman, like herself, did not let tears flow very often. “I had one of those resting in my gums by my own hand earlier tonight. So if you think that you’re so very tough and I’m shitting in my panties because you are pointing it at me now—“
“Make one more move towards me and I’ll kill you, Angel. I swear that I will.”
Angel lowered her head so that the barrel rested firmly against the backside of her skull. “Let me help you, dear. I wouldn’t want you to miss. You have helped me miss my stop already. Probably my last chances in helping the FBI avert this Zero Hour deadline catastrophe from dropping on us all has passed. I have nothing to lose by you pulling that trigger. But I do want you to stop wasting our time. I don’t want to hear you whine and bitch about your long lost sister. I want you to do what you say you will do. Put both of us out of our misery by pulling that trigger right now.”
“Oh, my God,” Roxanne shoved Angel away from her and stood with her back against one of the Marta’s sliding doors. “You’re even crazier than your reputation says that you are.”
“Maybe,” Angel answered with a blank stare on her face. And then Angel surprised her yet again by letting the tears flow. After a moment of silence, the doctor said, “Yes, I quite think that I might be a little crazy, but I have enough professional experience in my field to recognize a cold hearted killer when I cross one, Roxanne. Your sister qualified as one. Marie excelled in soliciting innocent patrons, getting them into various compromising positions—and then killing them.”
“They weren’t innocent,” Roxanne said. “Don’t talk to me about innocent. Those men were pigs…all of them. They cheated on their wives and girlfriends with whores—just like my sister Marie. I’m sure their rendezvous with her weren’t any of their first. How could you call these bastards innocent?”
Angel stood with her.
“True enough, those men had sinned.” Angel nodded long and hard. “But the judgement belonged to a higher power. They didn’t deserve to be murdered in cold blood and mutilated. She cut their throats when they least expected it, Roxanne. She sliced off their genitals and left their naked remains for the dogs and other scavengers to feast on.”
“And what about the FBI’s sins,” Roxanne asked her. “Marie was guilty enough to be sure. She should have been brought to justice. She should have been tried by a jury of her peers, sentenced—and perhaps even given a sentence of death for what she’d done.” Roxanne rubbed the sweat from her brow with the gun. “She didn’t deserve to be cut down and carved up like some animal.”
Angel nodded slowly again.
“I agree. She did not. I know that she did not. And I wept for her. But I swear to you that the agents that I was working with never fully informed me on what their ultimate end game was for Marie. My job was to aid in finding her sister. Once that task was completed, I was to help in convincing her to come in.”
“I guess you did your job very well, Doctor.” Roxanne said sardonically.
“And I guess you did yours as well.”
“Shut up,”
“Well, you did, didn’t you?” Angel asked her. “Maybe these entire episodes, this Marta ride from hell that takes us full circle is about your role in that fiasco, not mine.”
“I said, shut up.”
Angle circled her.
“Maybe, you killed her after all.”
Roxanne fired a round—intentionally behind Angel that shattered the Plexiglas casing. She fired an identical warning shot on the opposite side of the car that netted the same result.”
“I’ve told you before, Roxanne, don’t waste time or shots—kill me if that’s what you brought me here to do. Let’s do the dance.”
“Go to Hell, Angel.”
“Do it,”
Roxanne pulls the trigger…but her piece only clicks with an empty chamber.
A teary eyed Angel said, “A part of me wishes that you would have saved a bullet. At least our little conversation—this girl talk would have accomplished something worthwhile.”
Roxanne caught her breath.
“What in the hell are you babbling about now?”
“Like I said before, I missed my stop. Apparently you’ve been following me for some time. You were there when those women outside the Marta Station reacted the way they did towards me. Why do you think that I would risk showing my face anywhere near Downtown Atlanta right now unless I was trying to reach someone important.”
Angel told Roxanne the short version about one of Atlanta’s missing children showing up alive and reasonably well at his home. She also told her how the country seeing this child before the Zero Hour arrived could have aided in avoiding casualties that were surely to occur even in a limited racial standoff in the streets.
And then Angel punched Roxanne.
“You’ve denied me my last chance to make this right.” Angel spat out as she swung wildly again, Roxanne barely able to dodge a series of windmill rights and lefts. “It’s over now, Roxanne. The life in this country as we knew it is over.”
A few tired minutes later, Roxanne Sanchez couldn’t recall how many more of the other woman’s blows she’d fended off.
She also couldn’t remember how many tumbles down the platform…and down the stairs they both made after the door opened when the Marta reached its latest stop.
She sure as hell couldn’t remember when or where the throbbing pain of shattered bones in her ankle first struck her senses.
And finally, Roxanne Sanchez couldn’t vividly recall the instance where she’d successfully stabbed Doctor Angel Hicks Dupree in her side with a knife.
Louis
It was finally his time.
The man who had once been known as Louis Keaton unbuttoned his shirt in a slow and deliberate motion. Moses watched him with eyes as bright and large as flashlights. Hugh—that is what he thought of himself now—Hugh seemed to be only using the tips of his fingers, each stroke of movement calculated, and every tug on the shirt’s fabric measured. He’d come a long way physically, mentally and emotionally. Why would it be necessary to rush through this now?
Out of the corner of his eye he could see Serena’s two guards she’s left behind to watch him. And we needed to be watched did we not?
What? Who?
They