“They released her about an hour ago,” the nurse said. She was Latina, around thirty, with thirty-five-year-old eye bags—the kind of professional whose attitude says, I am a very nice person but also the one who decides where to give you your injections, so don’t try me. “We told her to stay another day, but she insisted on leaving.”
“Do you know where?”
“No. But they left some stuff in the room.”
“Number?”
“You can’t go in outside visiting hours,” the avian clerk nagged.
“Can you show me?” Zooey rephrased.
The nurse sighed and started taking off her coat.
* * *
—
They exited the elevator on the seventh floor, the nurse leading the way, followed by Zooey, followed by Ursula. Zooey caught the scent of chlorophenol as soon as she stepped on the corridor.
“We couldn’t reach her family,” the nurse narrated. “Only the girl who brought her came to see her. More like never left, really. You don’t see that often.”
“You mean, between friends?” Zooey queried.
“ ‘Friends,’ ” she repeated, amused. “More like between humans. You see devout wives, desperate mothers…but this girl…God forgive me, she was like a dog. You know, that kind of purely instinctive loyalty? She stood outside the surgery room while they removed the bullet. She lived here on this floor all week. She washed the patient, she helped her to the toilet, she barely spoke to anyone else. And every time she popped downstairs, even for a half hour, she always came back running out of breath and bringing a gift. We all thought it was weird—like psychological abuse or something.”
“Did you report it?”
“No. I did bring it up to the patient, though, once. She waved it away. In fact said she’d do the same for her.”
“This friend, did she leave Monday night?”
“Uh…yes, that was after the surgery; patient was in ICU, so they kicked her out.”
“Friday night?”
“Yes.”
“How about this morning, eight to ten?”
“Yes! Maybe she went to work; she drove a delivery van.”
“Did she look okay after Friday, or more like she’d been grazed by a bullet to the ribs?” The nurse seemed taken aback by the slightly loaded question, but Zooey found the answer on her own. “Yeah, right—and she had bandages and painkillers readily available, so…Did you catch her name?”
“Yeah,” the nurse searched. “Something with J…Joanne…No, Juno!”
“Five-five, light build? Could she pass for an Asian boy?”
“Yes, totally. Except for the blue eyes. Actually, I think she was Asian, like, Siberian, you know? Like an Eskimo.”
“Eskimo!” Zooey yowled, startling both Ursula and a woman pushing a cart of linen. “Damn, Native Alaskan was my third option!”
“Right, Cecilia mentioned her family was back in Alaska. Anyway, here, this is it.” She pushed the door numbered 714 and waved them in. “I’m glad I’m back, actually. I meant to take a picture before they clean it out.”
Zooey stepped in, absorbed the atmosphere, and felt almost like she could cry with joy at the sight of the glowing red room.
Roses. Roses on the bedside table. Roses on the windowsill. Roses concealing the armchair and smothering the oxygen supply. Roses haloing the headboard and spilling over the pillows, slithering along the rails and swooning off the foot of the mattress like a flowery waterfall; roses climbing over the switchboards and creeping up the tubes; three out of four walls colonized by roses. Roses bleeding out of the bathroom; roses stamping on roses; roses raped by roses. An orgy of roses, a biblical plague of roses, the Wars of the Roses of roses. Every scar-textured, blood-colored petal glaring at the temple raiders from every corolla in every bunch in a hive-minded swarm of roses.
An unmitigated, unreproducible curse word came out of Ursula’s mouth.
Zooey, clutching her head in amazement, green and brown eyes gleaming with bliss, could utter nothing but a sportive, honestly admiring, one-mad-person-to-another chuckle.
* * *
—
After a new ellipsis, Zooey and Ursula were back on the road, testing the indulgence of traffic laws in downtown San Carnal.
“I knew it!” Zooey chanted, banging on the wheel. “She’s the perfect match! Introverted, invisible, cut off from mankind except for one person, one soulmate that she can communicate with and goes on to fill every role: sister, friend, lover—her only mediator with the outside world. I tell you, I’ve seen guys like this before; there’s one in every nuthouse. They usually end up smothering their mediators or killing them out of jealousy, but these two—oh, they make the perfect storm! Just picture Juno: young gay native girl raised in a rural godforsaken state? The amount of shit she must have taken, the anger she’s holding inside! But this Cecilia knows how to tame her! Did you hear the nurse? Didn’t that strike you as very zen? ‘Someone shot me in the tit, my girlfriend’s going crazy, but it’s okay?’ That’s a chillingly cool head. (Understanding.) That is Juno’s left brain, right there. And Mikey and his men almost removed it from her.”
“I don’t get it,” said Ursula, trying to ignore the speed at which they were stealing off the expressway, under an ovation of eighteen-wheelers. “So she killed Mikey because he shot her girlfriend by mistake? Why did she kill the others?”
“Because one body’s not enough!” Zooey raved over the roar of a fire truck they were overtaking. “You and I would kill Mikey and move on—we’re easygoing like that. But for Juno, it doesn’t equate. It’s not a life for a life, because Cecilia is not just a person, she’s her voice of reason, her god! Did you see that room? That wasn’t a room; it was a shrine! And Mikey is nothing, he’s less than a person; to Juno, he’s a by-product. Her own past determines her view of the problem: it’s not just Mikey, it’s the system that made Mikey, it’s the communities that raise bullies, it’s Victor Lyon’s fault! So she takes out the spawn first, just to show him, and then she’ll kill him last!” She continued to slap the steering wheel like she would a horse, ignoring the Camaro’s pleas for clemency. “Oh, it’s so good! Everyone was thinking of cartels and power struggles, they thought we were in a Mafia movie, but we’re not! We’re in a one-woman-against-the-world movie—it’s a crossover! She’s Kevin Bacon in Death Sentence! Denzel Washington in The Equalizer! Liam Neeson in Taken! But you had to think in genre principles to see the pattern, see? That was me! Remember this: Adrian didn’t solve this one—I did! I detected this one!”
URSULA: Wait a minute—so now that she’s done with my brothers, she’s gonna take out my father?
ZOOEY: Sure, now that Cecilia’s safely home? I bet she’s heading to Villa Leona right now!
URSULA: And you’re driving me there?!
(Zooey’s mouth vanishes from her face in the blink of an eye.)
(Pause.)
ZOOEY: Okay. See? This is the kind of thing that Adrian is good at.
* * *
—
Too few minutes later, the screeching Camaro swerved out of Palm Drive at a speed never seen outside the Fast & Furious franchise, bowling through a set of poorly placed trash cans, and revved onto a dirt road that stretched through a modest grove of inbred pines and then a corrugated desert flanked by cacti, heading for the tender cyan shadow of yet another moody Sunday night.
Danny Mojave, sitting atop the sentry booth in Villa Leona, registered the incoming yellow-striped blue car through his binoculars. He put them down and gazed naked-eyed at the sunset. He felt the angst of Sunday evening in his bones. The undone top buttons in his shirt exposed a crimson mark around his neck, where a nylon rope had almost choked him to death that morning. The day might die, but this souvenir from it was a stayer.
Tiredly, he stood up and signaled the sentries to
open the gate. The blockade of gangsters wielding $250K worth of black market military-grade weaponry moved aside to allow Kimrean and Ursula into the last bastion of the Lyon family.
Zooey drove up the slope to the garage, but veered off the first curve and ruined some thirty yards of lawn and two flocks of petunias before pulling up near the outer brick wall, behind a hedge and a small kiosk, hidden from both the front gate and the main building. She keyed off the engine, exited the vehicle, and pointed a dictatorial finger at Ursula before she could follow.
“Get in the backseat, lie down, and whatever happens, do not leave the car. Ever. You’re trying to stay off the clichés, so don’t become the child who leaves the shelter to stroll right into the epicenter of the disaster, because that’s the absolute worst.”
“How do you know the killer won’t come for my father, then steal this car to escape and take me along?” Ursula asked.
Zooey granted the scenario a full second, then answered: “Because now that you said it aloud, it’s unlikely to happen.”
She slammed the driver’s door and ran back to the front gate, where the soldiers had retaken their positions, watchful of the bleeding western horizon.
“Okay, listen everybody,” Zooey called. “Bad news is it’s not the yakuza—it’s something worse. Good news is…(Thinks.) Sorry, there is no good news. I was just trying to give positive reinforcement.”
The few soldiers who had seemed to care resumed their duties while Zooey nodded to herself reassuringly: “Good pep talk.”
Danny came to join her in the back lines.
“You know who it is?”
“Yes. Remember the civilian Mikey shot in the diner in neutral land? Congrats, you angered a lesbian in love. It’s okay—it’s a common mistake.”
Danny frowned.
“What are you talking about?”
“The waitress whose tit you blew off on Monday? Her name is Cecilia. It’s her girlfriend, Juno.”
“What…How’s she connected to this?!”
Zooey paused, considered reordering the words. “She’s Cecilia’s girlfriend.”
“You said this was personal!”
“It is. You guys shot Cecilia.”
“And the girlfriend happens to be a trained assassin?!”
“No, nothing that interesting. She’s from Alaska.”
“Are you telling me a random woman just waltzed into Villa Leona to kill Mikey Lyon?”
“No, you showed her the way in,” Zooey said. “Every time you need to make a private call or smoke one of your hand-rolled specials, instead of the Newports you smoke when you’re in business mode, you go to the north side of the fence, because it’s private and has phone signal. How many times did you go there the day after the shooting? All she had to do was watch: you showed her the safest route in and out.”
Danny listened, took a minute to gain control of his mouth again for the follow-up: “What about the cameras at the club?”
“She passed two out of four in rotation. Her odds were good: she had a…56.25 percent chance of missing both. (Shakes her head.) Oh, wow. Is this what the left brain is for? (Checks again.) Holy shit. Math is fun!”
“But what about the chrysanthemum?!”
“It’s a rose! She delivers flowers and she likes those roses a lot. It was a coincidence; this was all about revenge.”
“Revenge?!” cried Danny. “She gunned down six men because one stray bullet killed her girlfriend?!”
“Oh, no, it didn’t kill her—she was just released from the hospital.”
Danny wandered away from the conversation, rubbing his forehead, his mien like that of a man who is ready to walk out of the theater and ask for his money back.
“But…” he tried, turning to give the narrator a last chance. “I mean, now she’s gonna come and kill the crime lord of Southern California because some asshole shot her girlfriend?”
“Yes,” Zooey said. She was perfectly at peace with the simplicity of the whole plot. “I mean, she came here once already, and she’s better equipped this time, so…I don’t know, it’s what I would do.”
“All right,” Danny puffed. “Tell me, what can we do to stop her?”
“Well, it’s a little late to send her chocolates and a get well card, so—”
“Zooey, shut up! Adrian, what can we do?”
“Uh…Adrian’s not home. Care to leave him a message?”
“What…what do you mean ‘not home’?”
“Yeah, we had a fight, and…I won!”
“Zooey, where is Adrian?”
“I’m glad you asked, because the answer calls for many beautiful, symbol-rich analogies: remember that episode from Buffy the Vampire Slayer where Buffy goes catatonic or something and Willow has to get inside her head and in her memories Buffy is just placing the same book on a shelf over and over again? Okay, well, it’s not like that at all.”
“ZOOEY!”
“Listen, we don’t need Adrian, okay?” Zooey appeased him. “I found out who the killer is, I know how she thinks, and I’m the one who knows what she’s going to do next. So, where is the Lyon?”
“In the mansion, with four other men and two more by the door.”
“Move him to the pool house. This time she’s taking the mansion.”
“How? I thought she only brought what weapons she found from the previous scene.”
“Yeah, that’s my point: in the previous scene she got a tank.”
She pointed west, right before the sentries spotted the lone white dot against the purple farewell of the day. The camera shot off Kimrean’s index finger and zoomed across .74 miles of desert into Xander’s bulletproof Jaguar in the middle of the dirt road, just as the driver in a balaclava rolled back her electric-blue eyes with the last scent from the Erithra lunis caressing her nose, then tossed the flower on the seat to her right, next to the Taurus BA-44, cracked her knuckles, gripped the steering wheel, and floored the gas.
A Tokyo-razing roar burst from the engine and the tires kicked up a ballpark’s worth of dirt in dust-cloud form the second before the 1.7-ton luxury missile gunned straight into Villa Leona.
“Go!” shouted Zooey, bumping Danny off the front row, over the chorus of clicking guns and gritting teeth. “Get the kingpin out of there, now!”
Among the horde of the badly shaved, badly suited, sunglassed men forming the army, a late ’70s beach bully with sideburns and in brown corduroys, acting as second-in-command, stepped in as soon as Danny left running for the mansion and barked a commendably simple order: “Stop that car!”
A cloud of parrots scampered off the palm trees at the break of thunder: every rock, every pebble, every grain of sand of the desert shook with the rumbling orchestra of machine guns being fired at the one-woman cavalry half a mile ahead and incoming, like a louder, meaner version of the credits shot for Knight Rider. Just as fast. Just as fearless. Just as symbolic of the end of all things.
“My money’s on the car,” Zooey confided to Sideburns. “No offense.”
“None taken,” the commander answered, before he shouted over his shoulder: “Bring the jalapeños!”
The back row of the blockade gave way to a big, long-haired goon with the kind of mustache that automatically bans you from working within five hundred feet of a school, dragging a large khaki suitcase with Cyrillic characters stenciled on it. Kimrean could not contain an excited “ooh” and some clapping when she identified the Russian RPG-7 the grunt was now bringing into the battle. Two other men helped him support the six-foot rocket launcher between the bars of the front gate, while Big ’Stache loaded an anti-tank grenade and propped himself on one knee, ready to fire.
Juno, flying against the bulletstorm clinking off the Jaguar’s bodywork like horizontal hail, shifted to fifth and lowered her side window. The thunderous noise of t
he 140 mph desert wind flooded in.
“On my signal,” Sideburns ordered. “Hold it…”
Juno pulled the key out of the starter.
“Hold it…!”
She stuck her hand out the window, 7.6-caliber rounds whizzing by her exposed, skinny arm.
“Hold…!”
Even at that rapidly abridging distance, Zooey could tell she wasn’t holding a gun.
That point was confirmed when an unattended green LED flared up on the security gate’s control board, and the hinges clacked and squeaked to life.
“…Ffffffuck!”
Sideburns aborted the order as the gates swung inward, forcing the gunmen to move back, dragging the rocket launcher stuck between the bars, causing the operator to tip off-balance and sway the weapon to aim into friendly lines. Lyon’s troops scattered, bumping against the moving gates and surrendering to chaos.
Zooey checked the car again, which she had averted her eyes from for exactly one second. It had come so much closer!
An instinct she’d forgotten she possessed made her scram instead of staying in the first row.
Amid Sideburns’s hysteric cries as he stood right in the RPG’s line of fire, Big ’Stache was still struggling to pry the weapon from the moving gate, until with a final teeth-gritting yank he pulled it out, and in the same movement fell on his ass, and the weapon discharged.
With a basilisk hiss, the rocket launcher spat a grenade in a perfect vertical, followed by a twirling trail of blue smoke that Sideburns watched ascend and disappear into the remote twilight sky.
And just as he looked back to ground level, the Jaguar knocked him into the stratosphere. Juno hardly caught a glimpse of him flying way above the hood like a bumped mailbox as she swerved up the slope to the main building, not even dreaming of tapping the brake.
The rest of the scattered sentries regrouped and resumed firing at the car’s tail, while the artillery guy, lying faceup on the ground, wiped the gravel from his eyes and scrutinized the sky.
Up there, in the starry silence above the gunfire, the rocket-propelled grenade coughed up the last fumes of fuel, reached the zenith of its trajectory—wings spread out, tail still smoking—and came to a glorious stop at the top of its parabola. Then it gracefully bowed back, gently rotating around its axis, and let gravity pull it back to earth, hardly a couple yards from its takeoff point—actually very close to the khaki army case where it came from and the remaining grenades waiting for their turn, which, incidentally, would never come.
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