by Derek Haas
The car is smoking and buckled but there are no emergency lights strobing through my eyelids, no sirens pounding my eardrums, so the collision must’ve just happened and though I was out momentarily, it must not have been for long. The taxi is upright, still centered on all four tires though it must’ve flipped at least once. The pain in my chest is pure heat, like someone is holding an iron to the spot, and I can’t so much as raise my elbow or curl the fingers of my right hand. Whatever damage the bullet caused was exacerbated by the wreck, and patches of light swim in and out of my vision like a swarm of gnats.
Out. I have to climb out of the car.
My door won’t budge, but the window is gone. Half the breakaway glass is in my hair, on my face, in my lap. With my good arm, I hoist myself through the opening while I bite my lip to keep from losing consciousness. Somehow, I pull myself into a sitting position, half in and half out of the car, then look around and spot the rental sedan on its back, tires up, rocking on its spine like a dog submissively showing its belly, overpowered.
Risina emerges from the passenger window and simultaneously, Carla crawls out of the driver’s side, all elbows and knees, a clutch of metal in her right hand. She’s managed to hold on to her pistol.
They both rise to their feet at the same time, body and shadow, mirror images, only the inverted wreck between them to throw off the symmetry.
Carla raises her pistol, a look of disbelief, of exasperation, of disgust on her face, and I spill out of the taxi, stumble, find my feet, no weapon, no gun, nothing, just an impossible gap, a gulf, the beginning and end of life between us. I charge Carla like a demon, and I don’t hear my voice but I know I’m screaming, and I don’t hear my footsteps but I know I’m running as fast as I’ve ever run, and the gun still points at Risina who stands like an offering waiting for the sacrifice, resigned to die fifteen feet from the barrel.
“Carla!” I shout as loud as a cannon, but I know I’ll never reach her in time.
As though I willed it to be, the mutt-faced woman swings the revolver toward me and Risina anticipates the distraction and closes on her like a pouncing cat and the gun goes off, but the bullet ricochets off the pavement near my feet before it spins off to God knows where.
Risina tackles Carla to the ground and drives her elbow into the woman’s jaw while her other hand wrenches the gun from her grasp.
I have thirty more feet to go before I can help. From my periphery, I see vans race up from various directions, insects swarming an open wound, black vans, unmarked, at least four of them but how can I be sure? I feel like I’m moving underwater now, swimming, hallucinating.
Twenty more feet and Risina straddles Carla and drives her elbow like a piston again and again into Carla’s nose. Wham, wham, wham.
The vans blow past me and screech to a halt in the intersection.
Ten more feet and Risina levels Carla’s gun. Men spill out of the van just as I arrive, suited men, dark men, and Risina points the weapon directly into Carla’s face and pulls the trigger.
The concussive sound of the gunshot is like a bomb going off as two men sweep me off my feet in a dead run and my head hits the ground and the world snuffs out as dark as death.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Would you listen to a story told by a dying man? You’ve been with me this long. I owe you. I owe . . .
The bullet is out of my chest, and clean dressing and a suture are packed over the wound, but the right side of my body is numb. An oxygen mask covers my nose and mouth, but I still can’t seem to suck in enough air. A light shines in my face, but I can’t see past the bulb and whatever that damn machine is that pings with each heartbeat is pinging slowly, irregularly, a submarine’s sonar that can’t seem to locate an enemy.
It takes all my energy to twist my head to the side. I’m not in a hospital, that much is clear. This is a makeshift medical room that looks like it was cobbled together in a dilapidated warehouse. Piles of what appear to be sewing machines are stacked in a corner next to discarded reams of fabric. A few folding tables line the far wall. A leg is twisted on one and it leans over like a disabled man missing a crutch. Sewing machines seem fitting for some reason I can’t quite put together. My thoughts are jumbled, like I’m trying to read the contents of a folded letter through an envelope held up to the light.
The bed I’m lying atop isn’t a bed, just another folding table with a mattress stuck on it. The IV I’m hooked up to and the pinging machine look authentic but what do I know? I haven’t spent much time in hospitals.
Risina. Did I see her shoot Carla in the face at close range? Did I pass out before that? Something keeps shaking my brain. She wrenched Carla’s gun away, jammed it in the woman’s face, pulled the trigger and then I was pitching sideways like a sailboat tossed in high winds and then ping, ping, ping, here in this warehouse doubling as a clinic and I can’t catch my breath and Risina, ping, Risina, ping, Risina . . .
Footsteps approach and I don’t have the energy to feign unconsciousness. I feel a thumb press my eyelids open and then a penlight shines into my eyes as a man with a tight beard frowns in my face. If I weren’t so drained, if I could even lift my right hand from my side, I might try to wrestle that penlight from his hand and bury it into the side of his neck until his throat lit up like a fucking runway, but I can’t seem to muster the strength.
“Can you talk?” he asks after he checks my pulse.
I shake my head, or at least I think I shake my head, and his frown grows more pronounced.
He turns to another man standing over his shoulder, a man I didn’t realize was in the room. “It’s not good.”
“Chances?”
“Fifty-fifty.”
The other man bullies past the first and lowers himself inches from my nose. After a moment’s inspection, he says, “I’d take that bet,” then spins and exits my field of vision, if not the room.
I’ve never seen either man in my life.
I tried to change but I couldn’t. Ping. I thought I’d evolved but I hadn’t. Ping. I thought I could protect her but I couldn’t. Ping. I thought I could end this but I didn’t. Ping.
With each ping, my pulse seems louder, steadier. I can feel it in my throat, the ends of my fingers, my earlobes. I’ve never defaulted on a job, not one, and the only times I’ve failed to make a kill were by my own volition. This isn’t a job, but the path was the same. Someone put my name on paper and I killed him for it. Someone else hired him to do it, “dark men” he called them, and I’m going to kill them all. Every last one of them. If they hurt Risina, if they touched her, they’re all going to die.
My fingertips. Ping.
I can feel the pulse there, yes, and now that I concentrate, I can flex the fingers. They don’t do more than twitch, but they do twitch. It’s not much but it’s something. Maybe Spilatro’s bullet didn’t cause as much damage as I presumed, maybe I’m not paralyzed, maybe I’m not going to die.
I owe. I owe . . .
I know that focusing on a goal can increase your chances at recovery, that pledging to see one last relative, one last birthday, one last wedding, one last reunion can help the dying live for days, weeks, months longer than a doctor or surgeon thought possible.
Whatever they did to her, are doing to her, that’s what I have to use to sustain me, to heal me. Hatred I can let grow inside me to replace the pain. Ping. Hatred I can let flow inside me as warm as medicine. Ping. I’m going to kill these motherfuckers, these dark men, and I’m not going to die before I get the chance to bury them.
I owe . . . I owe . . .
Can I bend my elbow? I concentrate solely on my right arm as I will it to flex. It responds, only a millimeter of movement, probably invisible to anyone but me. But it was there; I felt it. Ping.
A woman enters and breathes onions into my face while she checks my pulse, my blood pressure. I crack my eyes just enough to see that her face matches her breath.
“Back to the land of the living.”
I try
to respond to that unimaginative opening but my throat feels like it is filled with sand.
She holds a cup of water to my lips and I start to gag, but when she withdraws the cup I manage to croak out “more.”
She returns the water and it goes down better this time, like a sudden squall washing the dust from a dry creek bed.
“Your vitals are all solidly in the green,” she says. “You look rough but you’re gonna live for a bit.”
I cast my eyes about the room. We’re alone but there are a couple of cameras affixed to the ceiling. The dark men may not be here, but they’re watching.
I have to watch too. Wait and watch for a mistake. I owe. I owe . . . Ping.
It happens a week later. I can’t be precisely sure of how much time passed, but it feels like a week. Nurse Onions has been in and out at regular intervals, what I’m guessing are eight-hour shifts, replaced by Orderly Tough Guy and Nurse Eyebrows. I did my best to extract some personal information out of each, but Onions is the only one who strung more than two words together. I haven’t asked about Risina. I won’t. If they already know I care for her, then I’ll make them question how much. If they don’t know, I’ll make them think she was only my pawn.
My strength returns, slowly. I’ve been flexing my legs under the sheets and my arms, I’ve been swinging in small concentric circles just above the mattress. I hope it’s unnoticeable to the cameras as I lie in the dark. I make barely enough movement to toggle a few pixels on their monitors or maybe they’ve figured out what I’m doing. A man named Mr. Cox used to lock me inside a house all day when I was a kid. While he was gone, I’d work on my strength until I was ready to confront him. I don’t have the time or the freedom to do pushups, chin-ups, sit-ups like I did then. I’m just going to have to make a move with the strength I built from those little circles and flexes. They made a mistake not handcuffing me to the bedrail.
Onions enters carrying a steel tray of food. Some kind of protein shake, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, a bowl of fruit. They haven’t given me a single utensil, and that pen-light hasn’t made another appearance, but sometimes larger objects can do the trick. Ping. They should have brought everything in on a paper plate. Ping.
As she moves to set the tray in my lap, I spring up with more agility then they’ve seen out of me since they dragged me here. I grab the tray with both hands and as Onions leans in to restrain me, I slam the flat steel into her face with everything I have. She spills backward but doesn’t drop as a metallic clang reverberates around the warehouse. Her nose is broken, and her hands go there instinctively, as I spin the tray around like I’m twirling a football and smack her with the flat end a second time, this time to the back of the head. She topples forward on to the bed now, a moan rising up like a foghorn from somewhere deep inside her.
I hear footsteps rushing in my direction from the darkness and I’m going to have to move quickly now. I charge the footsteps and just as Orderly Tough Guy steps into the light I hit him with the edge of the tray into the white of his throat and he falls to his knees, his strength sapped as he gasps for air. Twirling the tray again, I set my feet like a baseball batter and swing for the fences, the flat of the tray catching him in the temple. He capsizes the rest of the way to the floor and I’m into the darkness, looking for an exit.
I find an open doorway in the corner and enter a narrow corridor only lit by emergency lights. I move quickly now, the tray curled up in my arm. A man in a suit swings out from a doorway fifteen feet away, a gun in his hand, and this might’ve been the end of my escape, but as he pulls the trigger, I realize he’s firing a stun-gun, one of those devices that shoots out an electrode along a connecting wire. This ignorant bastard thinks we’re playing a game of capture or be captured instead of life and death. The electrode flies forward and I swat it away with the tray like I’m backhanding a tennis ball, and then I fling the tray at his head. It frisbees through the air, making the sound of a ringing bell as it slices into his forehead and nearly rips his scalp off. He drops instantaneously, as though his bones and muscles turned to jelly after the flying tomahawk nearly decapitated him. I scoop up the tray on the way through the door from which he just emerged.
The room is something akin to a break room, complete with a couple of vending machines, a long table lined with folding chairs, and a microwave. I flip through drawers along a row of cabinets, nothing, nothing, nothing and then jackpot: metal silverware. I take a handful of knives, start to leave my tray behind, then think better of it and retrieve it before heading through another door.
A new hallway, this one with a sign above a door at the end of it that reads “exit,” but might as well say “freedom.” I’m tired, sore, a little dizzy if I took the time to admit it, but all of that is just vague wisps at the back of my brain as I glide through the corridor and hit the door in full stride.
It slams open and slaps the outside wall with a bang and I’m surprised to find it overcast outside, like the beginning of a summer storm. It might be dawn, it might be dusk, impossible to tell.
Two cars are parked in an otherwise empty lot, a pair of foreign sedans and it won’t take me long to jump one, get the hell out of here, and figure out where the fuck I am before I make my next move.
Just as I approach the driver’s door of the black one, a familiar voice shouts from the doorway, jolting me as abruptly as if that guard’s stun-gun had sent a thousand volts into my body.
“Columbus! Wait!”
I can’t believe the voice I hear. I don’t even have to turn around to know who it is. I start to shake my head, my hand poised inches from the sedan’s door handle.
“Hold up just a second, now,” he calls out.
I turn, an about-face, and a wave of nausea suddenly springs up and threatens to cloud my vision. The first drops of rain prick my head, cold.
“Archie?”
It comes out more of a question than a statement, like he might disappear, a mirage.
“First thing I gotta say before you hit me with that silver tray, Columbus. I wasn’t part of this. Not directly.”
He doesn’t disappear. The rain starts to fall harder but he’s really there, wet but not washing away.
“What the hell’s going on, Archie?” In my mind I say this calmly, but I can hear it come out with a sharp edge.
“Well, I can answer that. I will, too. But what say you come back inside and we talk about it out of this mess.”
“What’d they do to you, Archie?”
“Come inside, Columbus.”
“If you think I’m walking back inside that warehouse, you’ve forgotten everything you know about me.”
He nods at that as the rain accumulates in his close-cropped afro. “You gonna make me talk about this in the rain, aint’cha? Goddam.”
He steps away from the warehouse door and approaches as cautiously as a bird looking for breadcrumbs under an occupied park bench.
“Second thing I gotta say is I didn’t know.”
“What didn’t you know?”
“Can we at least sit in that car to do this?”
“Only if we drive it away from here.”
“Sold.”
I ready my elbow to smash in the sedan’s window. “Wait!”
He holds up a set of keys. “That’s my rental.”
“Then you drive.”
“As long as you don’t kill me before I tell you what for.”
“Depends on what your answers are, Archie.” I slide into the passenger seat and wait for the car to come to life. The rain patters the windshield like gunfire.
A back booth at Dunkin Donuts admits us a place to talk and eat, two of Archie’s favorite pastimes.
“It all played out how you know it. Some men put hands on me in the middle of the night. I put up a fight and they cracked me till I was flat. I didn’t know it was Spilatro or the Agency or none of that. No one told me this was coming. You gotta believe that. I meant what I said when I said I’d help you stay gone.”
Archie doesn’t smile as much as he used to. That was his trademark, flashing his teeth, making you feel comfortable, even when you thought maybe he was trying to pull one over on you. Maybe after his sister died, he couldn’t bring himself to put on that show anymore. Or maybe this business with the government shook him up.
“How long have you been working for Uncle Sam?”
“Not working for. Working with. There’s a continent of difference between those two prepositions.”
He bites into a cinnamon twist, but doesn’t look down, his eyes stoic.
“Any fence worth a whit does some Agency shit time to time. They outsource the domestic bloodshed. It’s their culture. They use their talent on foreign soil, but back home? They contract out the wetwork, same as everyone. You’ve done a job or two for them over the years, guaranteed.”
“I don’t care.”
He holds up his palms defensively, like he wants me to let him finish. He hasn’t dropped his hands below the table since we arrived.
“I know you don’t, Columbus. You a Silver Bear and you don’t look to know who hired you. A kill’s a kill and it’s all about the hunt. I get that. I’m just trying to put some background on this thing we’re in.”
He coughs into his fist, like he’s still sorting out his thoughts. “Some people in the government found out you was the one what killed that senator . . .”
“Congressman.”
“Politician. Presidential candidate. Abe Mann. Whatever. We on the same page.”
“How’d they know it was me?”
“They got a name and that’s all they got. Contractor named Columbus did it. There are only a few like you in the whole damn world, so the field was narrow. Who knows how the whisper became a fact, but they knew, and when they found out it was you, they found out about me.”
The cinnamon twist is gone and after he licks the sugar crystals off his fingers, he’s on to an old-fashioned.