by James Grady
What he held in his right hand now puffed smoke and flashed the pow! pow! pow! of gunfire recognized by everyone in the cemetery who heard it: after all, this was America, 2016.
The three graveyard workers ducked and ran and scattered amidst the sheltering stones.
Bullets crashed into the grill of the red Ford. Steam hissed into the Thursday morning air. Smells of gas. A popped front tire lurched the Ford down. But the radio didn’t die.
“Get out!” Condor yelled as he popped open first Merle’s seatbelt, then his own. “Run and hide in the gravestones! Get out of here! They’ll come after me!”
She tumble-stumbled out her door, falling scrambling running toward the dump truck.
Condor rolled out of the Ford just as a quirky bullet crashed into the car.
Airbags popped open and filled the Ford’s front seat with vision-blocking white balloons.
Condor rolled up, slipped, the hip-holstered .45 filling his right hand for two quick shots, one bullet wildly missing black cane man, the other whistling past Mr. Eyebrows.
Who turned and ran back toward the get-the-fuck-outta-here open cemetery gate.
His partner squeezed two shots.
Zing! a bullet ricocheted off the dump truck Zang! bounced off the red Ford.
Condor scrambled around the front of the idling dump truck, fired at the blur he saw beyond his gunsight as it rushed bigger, closer, spitting fire and smoke and whines.
He eased down the driver’s side of the dump truck—whirl this way, whirl that.
Combat spin around the back of the dump truck: nothing but gravestones as far as he could see. He Weaver stance shuffled along the dump truck’s upraised box—weight on his bent shuffling forward left leg, right leg bent and out at a bracing angle, arms extended, left hand supporting his right fist full of the .45 that showed Condor the world over its black barrel.
Breathe, breathe in the air you need that smells of shit.
From the dead or at least dying red Ford still came the blare of the broken radio, Foster The People singing “… run, better run, faster than my bullet …” from “Pumped Up Kicks,” their hit song back in 2010 when Condor was still locked up in the CIA’s secret insane asylum.
He whirled around the back of the truck.
Roar and a bullet zinged past his head.
His trigger squeezed from training BANG! rocked him and he spun back behind the truck knowing that he’d missed the charging closer horseshoe bald/black cane man.
BANG! Condor fired a shot into the gravestones to make his attacker think twice about leaping around the back end of the truck.
RUMBLE ROAR!
Condor whirled to see the truck’s bed lift up to dump its mountain of shit sliding down toward him. He got one, got two sprinter’s steps away and leapt before the avalanche of brown crashed into him, swept him forward, slid him face down in the grass.
Gasping, coughing, covered in shit brown, crawling—
Where’s my gun? Where’s my gun? Where’s—
BANG!
Brown call-it-earth burst up from the grass in front of his eyes.
A man’s voice behind where sprawled: “Such an easy shot you are!”
Look it straight on.
Condor slowly turned until he lay on his back, his arms propping him off the grass.
The horseshoe bald man stood five feet from Condor, smiling down at him over the barrel of an automatic pistol Condor didn’t recognize, as if that fucking mattered.
“Black cane has one sniper shot,” said the man who used it. He raised the pistol in his hand. “But now we have plenty more bullets.
“I pulled the lever handle.” Horseshoe Bald Man angled his head toward the now fully raised bed dump truck but never took his eyes off Condor. “We’re pulling all your levers. But you were brave, troll man. You and your crazy woman.”
Horseshoe Bald Man angled his head back toward the cemetery gate.
“Not like the big-talking but gutless wanna be slug they gave me for backup. Ran at your first shot—good shot by the way, not like most of you only video games trolls.”
“I’m not a troll.”
“Sure you are. Justin sold us that. He saw you all the time Top Secret castle clickety-clicking like the head troll, the boss of all your trolls out there trying to click louder than ours.”
Go down fighting. Trying. Spying.
Condor said: “All this is too much for just provokatsiya.”
Horseshoe Bald Man’s lips curled down in appreciation. “You know us.”
And thus, Condor did.
“So,” said the man who would kill him: “You’re not just a troll?”
Condor ignored the question: “So if not provocation … what, a failed attempt to take out your counterpart threat?”
“Does all this look—does it smell like failure?”
BANG! Zing of heavy bullet.
Before Condor and Horseshoe Bald Man finished flinching—
—Merle yelled: “Stop!”
Condor saw her standing there—behind and beyond the Russian, her hands wildly shaking with the Ford’s glove compartment heavy .45.
The Russian stood frozen with his gun locked on Condor.
Who yelled the big lie: “She’s a great shot and I’m expendable!”
Whining closer from down in the city came police sirens.
“And you’re out of time,” yelled Condor. “All alone in a graveyard.”
“Am I out of options?”
The faint low whump whump whump of a closing-in helicopter.
Condor stood but the man who felt Merle’s gunsights moved not. Condor spotted his .45 on a sprawl of manure, picked it up, wiped it off, did what he probably technically didn’t need to do, racked the slide—out jumped a bullet, clack of metal on metal.
BAM! Condor blasted a .45 slug into the stinking soil.
Merle flinched.
Condor faced the other man whose pistol was not aimed at the ground.
“You give us everything you got in exchange for not ending up here.”
“My name is Fydor. And first I give you that big eyebrows coward fuck who ran away and left me here. But I won’t trade anything if all it does is let me live. No prison safe house where I get tortured with talk talk talk, bad phone, no friends, nothing cool, and no cash to do, no women. A boss troll like you gets a woman, why not Fydor after I give you everything from this graveyard? SVR agent no more. I give and I get.”
“You don’t inherit the sweet life from here, you earn it for us and from us out there.”
Fydor shrugged.
Nodded.
Thumbed his gun so the ammo mag dropped out of the pistol handle and hit the dirt.
Put the gun on the ground.
Faye ran down the grassy slope of the graveyard toward them, gun in her hand as her mouth moved frantically for the Bluetooth earpiece under her dyed red hair.
A dark blue helicopter roared over their heads and stuck a landing back by the gate. Out leapt eight blue jumpsuited, body armored, combat helmeted, assault rifle pointing gunners who had been on Standby Backup for the primary duty White House Secret Service Tactical React Team. They set about securing the area as ordered by whoever issued orders.
White, red, and blue striped, sirens-wailing DC police cars charged through cemetery gates, stopped and held cover position for active shooter alert via the graveyard crews’ cell phones. They held their positions waiting for backup that got cancelled until the Feds released the scene where some random feuding gangbangers accidentally charged into a previously-scheduled undercover law enforcement operatives’ street training session amidst a graveyard work crew whose schedule had been screwed up by computer error, somehow.
The next day’s Washington Post carried a four-paragraph story about this Marx Brothers
debacle with no reported casualties, no arrests, investigation on-going on Page C3 of the Metro section on that A Section news day about pop star Prince dying and Texas flood waters rising.
Faye eased the pistol out of Merle’s wildly waving hands. Tucked it in her belt under the blue nylon windbreaker with bold gold letters on the back proclaiming “FEDERAL POLICE,” the anonymous identification that by 2016 had become a common sight in America.
Merle let Faye give her a hug as warriors’ shouts came closer.
Faye stepped away. Kept her face toward Condor. Kept her eyes on Fydor.
Said: “Holster your gun, I got him.”
Condor did.
Faye told him: “We killed his phones minutes ago so he couldn’t hear and track you, so now they can’t hear us.”
Then she yelled: “Heads up! That third man is with us!”
The SWAT team threw a perimeter around these federal agents they’d come to rescue.
Merle leaned back from Condor’s stench as the SWAT team hustled their three protectees to the whump whump whumping helicopter, told him: “You need a shower.”
CHAMBER FOUR
Secret Heart of Lonely
She walked down the concrete steps’ narrow passageway, past the bouncer at the door, into the beer and bricks scented underground tavern, claimed a Sundown Service barstool and ordered whiskey from Molly, who gave her welcome without giving her a smile, reached toward the bottle-fronted mirror for that night’s bar pour—
—got stopped by the newcomer with dyed red hair: “Give me something good.”
Molly flowed her tattoo-sleeved, night-worker pale arm to the top shelf like a ballerina.
And yeah, he saw all that unfold as he was racking glasses behind the bar and watching Molly for any signals of need she might make. Not that Molly needed anything, brass hair and cobalt eyes that missed nothing, steel nose stud, ruby lips, a clean jaw, strong under her Quarry House Tavern T-shirt topped by a snap button, brocaded cowboy shirt that across the back read:
BEAT IT
CREEP
Then the bar got slammed and he didn’t pay any more attention to the red-haired stranger until the night she sat the bar arguing with some random dude who motioned him over, said: “You’re P.V., the guy who loves old movies, right?”
“Right enough,” he answered.
Figured Random Dude remembered him because he was one of the few men of the Quarry House crew who wore no beard on his clean-jawed, high cheekbones face. He wore his dark brown hair in a brushed down buzz cut above indigo eyes.
“Yeah, whatever.” Random Dude leaned across the bar to make his point and not let P.V. slip away. “Faye here says the best black and white horror movie was The Thing.”
That Faye looked straight at P.V. as he said: “She’s right.”
Random Dude said: “Better than the newer one, all color and shit?”
“Yes. No. Different.”
Redhead Faye said: “I like different.”
“That’s why you come here, right?” said Random Dude on the stool beside her at the bar, his hand sweeping them together as one with a gesture that took in the whole—
—or hole—
—of where they were.
Could have been anywhere in real America, but wasn’t, was here in downtown Silver Spring, Merry-land, mark it six blocks north of the border with De-See—few miles and many light years from the white marble castles and monuments to heroes who mostly nobody remembers and factories for making the do’s and don’ts of this here and now democracy.
Back in June 2016 before that then and there slipped into the river of gone, Silver Spring still ranked as out of the loop with the rest of the Beltway burgs that the never was a “sleepy Southern town” capital city had already consumed.
True, giant praying mantis construction cranes lined the sky every which way you looked, but the half square mile-plus of downtown still held streets full of American Everybodies. Ethiopian one-time refugees, now owners of cafés and hookah bars. Hard workers who spoke Spanish with accents from all over South of the Border. Elegant ebony Africans arguing in flawless French. Italians and Jews and Greeks who’d run this turf after the 1968 riots’ white flight from Washington. Vietnamese-Chinese-Thai-Lao-Japanese and others with visible roots in their corner of the world now dealing with ignorant eyes that saw same-same. American blacks of all shades. Two women in hajibs walking out of the Halal grocery store. Plus a river of who knows what they are besides white skins flowing with crowd. Was somebody from everybody if you stood still and watched long enough.
They all had cellphones.
What else you’d see was a going-going-almost-gone American Dreams town. Pawn shops. Barbershops. Nail salons. A gun store. A corset store with a double-front wide full window display of the goods on sale and none of those foundation garments were about eros. A car rental office. Health food store. A rare coin shop. An artist supplies store. Christians with pamphlets. The thrown-out, strung-out, left-out. Most weekend nights meant Hare Krishna’s a-chanting and a-dancing and a-bonging drums when the four block outside pedestrian mall was packed with moms and dads and grammas and OMG teenagers and Millennials like P.V. and Molly who he trusted and the dyed redhead named Faye. Most of the outdoor mall walkers were movie going or late shopping or bar hopping, data blasting them from forty-foot-tall searing screens selling shit. For those flesh and blood souls there in Touchable Town, there was a craft brew beer house and a sports bar and a wine bar run by an ex-Marine and maybe twenty-five other places that sold booze with food but none of them—
—none of them—
—none of them were underground like Quarry House Tavern.
Oh yeah. Even after fire and flood, same as before.
Underground.
One way in, one way out. Down the concrete stairs on the corner alongside a white tablecloth Indian restaurant, a diagonal shaft to a brown door, through it to facing the L-shaped bar Molly rocked most nights and P.V.’s whatever job kept him hopping and bopping and making sure everything was fine with her, plus being a service soldier working the painted cement floor.
A third of the walls had 1950ish basement rec room wood paneling, a third were exposed but sealed brick, and a third of the walls were rippling slabs of stone painted shiny neon red.
The customer mix tallied techs and quants and admins from two giant multinational cyber corporations hq’d in Silver Spring, plus refugees from DC marble, space scientists from NASA, weather worriers from the within walking distance fortress for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA—as in Noah’s arc.
Don’t get them started on the vanishing glaciers.
Families came to Quarry House—rents and runts of all ages, like the night when five-year-old Frances and her three-year-old brother, Alban, took over the floor by their parents’ table and gordo danced to whatever was on the jukebox while Molly and P.V. kept servers and customers out of their way. Molly and he couldn’t stop grinning as two kids from parents who were their age rocked out.
Many of the bar’s usual crowd nested in one of the dozen humongous blockish apartment and condo towers that burst out of Silver Spring’s sleepy pavement starting back when the second Bush was President. QHT gave them all a taste of real they thought they’d once had and since lost, especially the heavily represented Baby Boomers fifty-five-plus crowd who grew up with a jukebox that was the bar’s only mass media—not a fucking sports game or taking head TV screen in the whole place.
The whole place was shaped like a square-cornered U, with the door being in the top right corner while the left corner held the “for everybody” bathroom with graffiti like: “CALL YOU’RE MOTHER!” “YOU call her, I alreaDy did & she said yEs.” Penis drawings. A nice sketch of a grinning duck. “Je ne suis pas comment je peux vive”—graffiti Faye told P.V. meant I am not how I can live, and when he told th
at to Molly, she said: “No shit.”
Walk in and the bar is dead ahead, then as you go through the main room, you pass the bar on your right where Molly might see you as she rimmed a glass with salt, tossed a pinch over her left shoulder while the jukebox blared crashing guitars from The Dead Kennedy’s, head-banger punk rock music from before Molly was born.
Molly and the QHT crew passed out fried food menus, poured shots and pulls of fifty-plus beers and sometimes made mixed drinks, sometimes not: bartender’s call, this was no fancy place with blenders and cutesy concoctions. You want that, climb the stairs and go back into DC for Hipsterville or Dealtown joints. Drive over to big bucks Bethesda or cross the river into Virginia where you can find respectable and reasonable crowds at their drinking and doing spots with windows to the street so everything inside can be seen and envied.
None of that in this underground dive bar.
Was there with its aromas of flesh, beer, and whiskey, fry grease floating from the kitchen and lingered smoke from the nicotine junkies, was there that it took him three, four nights of red-haired Faye drinking at the bar and catching him for snatches of repartee about movies and novels and philosophies that mattered, was there after a surprising amount of then’s that he noticed the musk of Faye’s perfume.
Molly rolled her eyes when she saw that happen.
With Faye, it wasn’t that he hadn’t noticed her noticed her. As a woman. As hot. Which, oh, she was. Like him and Molly, somewhere between the starting out twenties and the settling situation forties. Faye’s rust-colored hair cupped her face and her face, wow: the eyes, the cheekbones, the lips, a trim body with all the right curves, sleek legs in the black slacks she usually wore. Just the kind of woman who he never stood a chance with back when it was OK for him to think he could and maybe take a shot.
A shot.
Yeah, he once “took a shot.”
Faye’s lips glistened.
She leaned close when she talked to him. And not because of the bar noise or jukebox.
Was on that slow biz Monday night of June 13, 2016. Newspapers screamed stories about the crazy loner who’d sprayed his hates and fears as rapid fire bullets through an Orlando, Florida, gay nightclub, killed forty-nine people, wounded more than fifty. Every time the Quarry House door opened, everyone swiveled to look, to see, to hope, all of them thinking it can’t happen here, it can’t happen to me, but gut sick that they might be wrong. Long about eight, waiter Marco accidentally flipped over his metal tray—the clatter made everyone flinch. After that, the crowd really thinned out, nobody saying why they were making it an early night, nobody needing to. Faye’d been in for a couple hours, left before the place felt like a ghost town.