by Tom Pitts
Calper told Ronnell to leave the garage door open. At this time of night there was almost no traffic. Cars occasionally beaded by on the Great Highway, but on La Playa there were none. The three of them waited in silence for the sound of an engine, a phone call, something.
“Hey man, can I get a drink of water?” Ronnell asked.
“Shut up. Don’t move,” Calper said. He was perched behind Ronnell on the couch, sitting on the back with his feet on the cushions, but something made him stir, a sound, the barely discernable hum of an engine. He climbed down from the couch and stepped lightly toward the window, careful not to let his silhouette’s shadow fall on its frame.
“Headlights,” he said.
Gary’s pulse jumped, his heart began to beat against his ribcage. “Is it them?”
“I can’t tell.” Calper on his tiptoes now, peering down the slope of his nose at the sidewalk. “They stopped, they’re not pulling in. They’re in the driveway, though.”
Gary sucked in a breath and held it. For the first time that night, he wished he had a gun, a big, heavy semi-automatic, like the one Calper was holding.
“It’s them,” Calper said. “It’s a white Honda. That’s what the cops said, right, Gary?”
Gary nodded, but Calper didn’t turn around to see him. He was focused on the car, the Walther gripped tight in his right hand. “They’re not moving.”
Ronnell started to get up, but Gary, forcing words over a tongue that felt like clay, said, “Sit back down. Just…don’t. Stay there. Stay still.” He was aware how cracked and scared his voice sounded, but Ronnell fell back onto the couch.
“The door is opening. Someone’s getting out. I see Jason…Someone is getting out the back now. Juliet. She’s got Linda.”
Gary swallowed. A sense of relief washed over him but was immediately replaced by a sick tide of fear. The volatility of the situation sharpened with each second. The door buzzer rang loud and abrasive.
“You want me to get that?” Ronnell said. His attempt at being aloof fell flat.
“Gary,” Calper said, and switched his position and his aim to the door.
Chapter Twenty-One
Martek couldn’t get a clear shot. He watched Jason DeWildt get out of the car, but by the time he had Jason’s head in his sights, the shot was obscured by the two women. Not that killing the women would have presented a problem, but the likelihood of Jason slipping away was too great to risk. He was paid to take out Jason and that was his priority. Any collateral casualties could be explained away, but he had to be sure he got Jason. He clomped down the dune and started across the Great Highway for the apartment.
With long strides, he walked straight to the door. All the players were inside now, it’d be easy, take them all out and be back on the road heading south in minutes. He loved the anonymity of the freeways, they were his favorite escape route. He patted the two magazines in his back pocket as he approached the gate, an unnecessary but well-worn habit. He tugged at the gate. Locked.
Footsteps sounded flat against the smooth stone stairs. Gary heard more than one set, but he couldn’t tell how many. They started off fast and confused, but slowed as they became louder, closer to the door of Ronnell’s apartment. Then they stopped altogether.
“Linda?” Gary called out.
Calper sneered at Gary. The element of surprise was blown. He turned back to the door to wait with his pistol raised, waiting for a response.
They heard Juliet groan, but it was Jason’s voice that answered. He said to Calper, “We’ve got her, Calper. I fucking knew you’d be here, you piece of shit. I fucking knew it.”
His voice sounded hollow and far away, echoing off the staircase, but Calper knew he stood just beyond the doorjamb.
“You’ve got her, right?” Calper said. “How’re we supposed to know she’s okay?”
Jason didn’t answer the question. “Ronnell was supposed to make a call for me. Is he in there?”
“I’m here,” Ronnell called out. Calper shot him a glare, letting him know he’d spoken out of turn.
“What’d they say, Ronnell? Are they sending somebody?”
Ronnell was about to answer, but Calper spoke first. “I’m that somebody, Jason. I’ve spoken to your father. Come in here and come in slowly, the three of you.”
Martek stood outside the gate. He saw the three figures at the top of the stairs. Lit from the front, their anonymous shadows played down the staircase while they huddled together. Two females and one male. The steel mesh on the gate was too fine to get a shot through. He lifted the barrel and pressed it against the rust anyway, yearning to fire.
The last one, the one closest to him, turned. She saw him and cried out, “There’s someone down there, at the gate. Jason, they got someone at the gate.”
The male, Jason, leaned between the other two and said, “Fuck.”
There was a distraction. Jason said, “Fuck,” loudly, but it wasn’t to them, the voice bounced in the other direction, and all at once, the three of them came into the room. The two women first, then Jason, backwards, his gun pointing back down the stairs.
Gary felt a prickly wash of relief at seeing Linda, but shock took over. Her face was so swollen she was hard to recognize. Blood stained the entire front side of her shirt. The right side of her head ballooned out of proportion. Her eyes were blackened, one puffed near shut. Dark blood crusted her nostrils.
She looked at him, seeing shock register on his face and tears well up in his eyes. She stepped forward and fell toward him in a rush of emotion, wrapping her arms around him, clinging tightly, trying to smell him, feel him. She’d made it. She was safe.
“Who’s at the door, Calper?” Jason shouted down the staircase, his head still bent around the doorjamb, craning down the stairs.
Calper had the bead of his sights squared on Jason’s back. “What’re you talking about?”
Jason spun around now, ignoring the Walther pointed at his chest, his own .45 hanging at his side. “You fucking try to ambush me? Is that what this is?”
“Drop your gun, Jason,” Calper said. He dropped to one knee, sharpening his aim with a marksman’s stance.
Jason ignored him and turned back to the stairwell. “Hey,” he called. “Who’s down there?”
Juliet stood awkward, blinking at Calper and the PPK, calculating insurmountable odds in her head. She punched Jason in the shoulder. “Turn the fuck around.”
Jason came back around again, this time with his gun raised. Calper didn’t shoot. He knew he should have. There was a gun pointing right at him, but he didn’t squeeze the trigger on the PPK. Now the millisecond of advantage was gone. They were at a standoff.
Gary and Linda stayed clamped onto each other. Now that they were reunited, they didn’t want to let go. Naked without a weapon, Gary felt like recoiling out of the line of fire, but there was nowhere to go in the tiny apartment. They stood at the end of the couch in front of Ronnell, who was frozen in place and quiet.
“Don’t you fucking shoot me, Calper,” Jason said. It wasn’t a plea, it was a command.
“Put the gun down. Just drop it.”
“Did you make the phone call?”
For a moment, Calper didn’t know how to respond, then Jason said, “Ronnell, did you call my old man?”
Broken from his trance, Ronnell blurted, “Yes. Yes, I called. They said someone was on the way.”
The ambiguity of the statement made them all think of the man outside.
“What’s that mean?”
“Someone to help you surrender, to cover your shit at jail. To bail you out,” Ronnell sounded more and more unsure of what he was saying with each word he spoke.
Without taking his gun off Calper, Jason said, “Ronnell, you’re an idiot.”
“That’s me, Jason,” Calper said. “I’m the one. I’m supposed to help you. You’re in too deep. The cops’ll be here a
ny minute. It’s not too late to work something out.”
“I’m not surrendering. Are you nuts? That’s not part of the deal.”
Calper looked at Jason with one eye down the line of his sight. “You have to, Jason. You killed somebody. There’s no other way.”
“Bullshit. You’re not the one they sent. You’re already here. You’ve been here all along.”
Low and even, behind Jason’s right ear, Juliet said, “Let’s just go. He’s lying. Let’s just leave.”
Jason blinked over and over, as though it would ease the suggestion into his head.
“C’mon, Jason. Don’t trust that asshole. He’s the one that tried to kill me, remember? He’s a fucking assassin, he’s not going to help you.”
“Don’t go. It’s true, they want you dead. But if you walk out that door, I can’t help you.” It was Calper pleading now.
“I oughta fucking shoot you just for what you did to her.”
“You’re wrong. That wasn’t me. I didn’t try to kill anyone.”
Jason said, “Get behind me, Juliet.” But she was already behind him, outside the doorjamb, standing in the stairwell. Jason quickly turned his gun toward Gary and said, “You got your bitch back. That’s what you wanted. Don’t follow me.”
The tapping of Juliet’s feet hitting the steps was already sounding out. He took two steps back into the stairwell and turned to follow her.
The four inside the apartment were silent, listening to them go. The steel gate opened. Then there was a gunshot.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Martek was waiting. He listened to the shouts from up the stairs, heard Jason call out and ask who was there, but there was no way to open the gate. He had no choice but to wait for them to exit and hope there was no alternate escape route from the apartment. He positioned himself to the left of the gate, so he’d be able to slip in when it opened. Then there were footsteps and his pulse quickened. He lifted his gun to shoulder height as the footfalls grew closer. The gate swung open and the girl stepped out.
He shot her in the temple. A clean and thorough kill. She folded to the ground, wedging the gate open with her corpse. Martek swung his arm around the entry and then his body. The first thing he saw was Jason, pistol raised in his hand. Martek fired twice, hitting him in the torso with both shots. Jason toppled forward and slid a couple steps before lying inert.
Martek stepped over the girl’s body and started up the stairs. In a few feet he reached the crumpled body of his primary target and bent down to put one more through the back of his skull. But before he touched the barrel to the boy’s head—before he could deliver the coup de grâce—a shadow passed over him. Martek lifted the barrel and pointed to the top of the stairs, only to glimpse a flash.
A loud crack sounded and Martek felt a slug punch through his shoulder. The impact knocked him back and he righted himself against a wall. He looked up, but the shooter was gone. Martek bit down hard against the pain and started up the stairs.
Calper pulled back from the stairs, the singe of gunpowder in his nose and the echo of the shot ringing in his ears. “How do you get out of here?”
Ronnell, straight-backed and wide-eyed on the couch, said, “There’s a fire escape through the bedroom. You just have to go through the window.”
Calper heard a grunting behind him. He knew he’d hit the man, but not killed him. He didn’t want to poke his head into the stairwell again.
“Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go, let’s go.”
They began to move, Ronnell first, scrambling crablike through his own home, then Linda, then Gary. Calper kept his barrel trained on the door and stepped backward. Ronnell hadn’t even reached the apartment’s short hall when the first shot rang out.
Calper fired at the figure in the door and missed, the bullet pinging on the cement wall behind him. The figure fired back, missing Calper, but the shot tore through Gary’s back. He fell quick to the ground. Linda, in front of him, stopped, spun around, bent down to attend to her husband.
Calper got off a second shot, hitting the man in the chest, sending him backwards with the inertia, but the man fired as he stumbled and caught Calper in the upper chest. Calper fell back over Linda and the injured Gary, but not before getting one more shot off. A lucky one, it caught the gunman square in the cheek.
Martek stood wavering for a moment, the pain not registering on his face. The wound registered, though, a meaty hole too fresh to even bleed. He was shocked. Shocked he was hit, shocked it was ending. A lightning bolt of white-hot electricity shot through his head, his brain, and then it was over. All of it. He collapsed like a house of cards in the ever-reaching darkness. He was dead.
Calper remained on his back. An awful bubbling sound rose from his chest with each pull of breath. He felt warm, but his skin was cold and prickly, like he had a fever. He heard Linda crying behind him, calling out Gary’s name. He could move, he thought, but he didn’t want to, knew he shouldn’t. He realized the warmth he was feeling was blood pooling on his chest and now under his back. He looked at the light fixture on the roof. Watched it intently. Then he heard sirens.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Then the day came when she burst into his room. The door swung wide and she spilled in, nearly tripping on her short heels.
“C’mon, baby. We have to go.”
Jason sat cross-legged on his floor with a few mismatched toys splayed out in front of him. He was confused; they’d only come home an hour ago. He scrunched up his face and peered up at her, a look that was supposed to convey all he thought: that he didn’t want to leave, that he was tired, that he wished she could go back to being Mommy.
But her face was dark, backlit from the hall and shadowed by tangled hair. She held her hand out, clapping the four fingers into her palm. Jason saw she was in slippers, pajama bottoms.
“I have to get my shoes,” he said.
“No time, baby. Let’s go. We’re late.”
“Late for what?”
She didn’t answer, instead she tugged him up off the floor and pulled him out of his room and down the hall. He stumbled behind her, not comprehending the urgency. Was there a fire, he wondered, an earthquake? He didn’t smell smoke or feel any shakes, but it felt like something was wrong, like they were trying to escape. He wanted her to slow down. His arm hurt. She was moving too fast.
They sped through the kitchen, Maureen’s inertia pulling them both now. Out the white door and into the garage where Mommy’s new Mercedes sat. Gun metal grey. Jason liked that color because he heard his father say its name. He liked to think of it as a big gun.
She swung open the back door and pushed him into the back. She didn’t reach in and buckle him up like she usually did. She didn’t even say, watch your fingers. Instead she slammed the door, urgency overriding her rituals. When she slid into the driver’s seat and keyed the ignition, Jason heard her saying, “C’mon, c’mon, c’mon, c’mon.” She said it quietly to herself or to the car, like she was praying. He looked through the windows, half expecting to see what they were running from. Bad men, maybe. Or the police.
The garage door rolled up at its usual languid pace, letting bright sunlight infuse the garage with daytime spirit. She batted her hand against the steering wheel as she waited. As soon as she thought there was enough room for the Mercedes to clear, she racked it into reverse and hit the gas. The wheels squeaked on the painted cement garage floor and the antennae twanged on the moving garage door as they rolled back.
Bright blue skies littered with puffy white clouds. It didn’t seem like a day for any kind of disaster. Jason pushed his nose against the window glass and promptly bumped his head as the car rocketed around a corner.
He asked again, “Where are we going, Mommy?”
Her answer was to turn up the radio, but instead of catching the volume, her fingers spun the wrong dial and the radio crested between stations. A chaotic fusion of
two stations melded by static filled the car, but she didn’t seem to notice. It played on, careening from one beat to the other.
Maureen’s Mercedes strained at the corners, pushing past the speed limit and clearing the tiny streets of oncoming traffic. They lived in Pointe Dume and midday traffic in their little neighborhood was light, but what cars there were yanked themselves to the side at the sight off the grey Mercedes barreling down the shafts. She’d slam on the brakes and glower down a lane, then punch the gas as they pushed onto the next lane, slowly working their way to the cliffside ocean view. Jason often went there for picnic-time with Mommy. Not that often, he thought; they hadn’t been there in a long time.
They pulled into a vista parking lot sparsely populated with cars and sightseers. She rolled slowly down the row, looking for a spot to pull in. When she arrived at the perfect space, she hooked the car right and jumped the makeshift curb separating the parking area from the walkway bordering the cliff.
A man walking with a pregnant woman shouted, “Hey! Hey! What the hell are you doing?”
Maureen threw the car in reverse and spat gravel as she sped out of the parking spot. Her prayers had turned to, “Damn it, damn it, damn it, damn it.” Steady as a heartbeat. The car fishtailed in the dirt and a horn blasted as she pulled onto the pavement of Cliffside Drive. She ignored it and pressed the accelerator, barely making the hook where Cliffside became Birdview Avenue and twisted down the hill toward Zuma Beach.
Jason’s fear rose up within him, a hard lump forming in his chest. Something was wrong with Mommy, not the world. They sped down the narrow road, twice edging off the side, tree branches lashing the sides of the car.