This Body's Not Big Enough for Both of Us

by Edgar Cantero

  The explosion swallowed and regurgitated in the same hundredth of a second the gate and the entry booth, much of the fence, two lime trees, and fourteen people.

  From the mansion, the view of the west side of the villa going up in a Superdome of flames, hurling chunks of fence out of the state, made the sight of the Jaguar swerving off the garden path and charging at the building almost pale in comparison.

  The guards at the front door barely had time to appreciate the homicidal maniac’s cyan eyes before a reflex act, as symptomatic of their inclement childhoods on the streets as it was stupid in practice, made them fire instead of jumping out of the luxury tank’s path.

  Look up from this page and imagine a car in the room where you are right now. Imagine how close to the ceiling it would stand. Picture it in frontal view (a big, boastful, midlife-crisis-palliating luxury sedan), try to frame it in the doorway, and imagine the technical difficulties that simply allowing that monstrosity into the room would pose and how little space you would have left. And now imagine it moving. Imagine it coming through that inconvenient, non-customized door, at the speed you reach when overtaking a trailer truck on the highway. Imagine the momentum of that steel-and-aluminum mammoth entering the room where you are, whether there’s a doorway or not.

  That happened in Villa Leona.

  And it took the house three whole partitions to stop it.

  In its wake lay a razed foyer, the living room from Chapter 3, ten hunting trophies, a minibar, a full bar, a dining room for twenty people, four people, and the best part of a $200,000 titanium kitchen.

  The dust had not even considered settling, and in fact boulders of concrete were still flumping from the ceiling onto the hood of the vehicle, when Juno popped through the sunroof, shot the thug taking shelter in the meeting room, fired several rounds toward the spiral stairs (which were not typically visible from there) until she hit the kneecaps of a second thug she’d heard coming, then spun at the noise of cracking glass behind her to find a maid stumbling out of the ruins of a pantry and shouted her own trigger finger to stay put.

  She puffed—more like gasped—then stayed there, every single muscle tensed, panting like she’d just washed up on the beaches of Normandy, a similar landscape of ruin and destruction surrounding her brittle figure sticking out the top of the tank. She shook the adrenaline and the mortar from her shoulders and shooed the maid away like a fly off a cake. The woman scuttled away through what was left of the service door.

  Another figure crashed in through the devastated dining room, gun in hand, catching the assailant unaware.

  “FREEZE!”

  Juno turned anyway. Kimrean was coming around the car, pointing a gun at her while skipping between fragments of ceiling. Suddenly, she seemed to notice the semiautomatic she had borrowed from one of the corpses outside. She peeped down inside the barrel.

  “Is this loaded?”

  She pulled the trigger; there was a click.

  “Okay.” She tossed the weapon and grinned at the astonished enemy. “Imagine if I didn’t check and found out it’s empty when I meant to fire—I’d feel pretty stupid then, right?”

  Juno hopped out of the car, shoved Zooey against a pillar, and inserted three inches of Brazilian gun barrel into her mouth. Zooey could feel the burning steel tip grazing her uvula as she stared into the same electric-blue eyes she had confronted earlier in Xander’s penthouse. Her balaclava needed fixing; Juno chose to tear it off altogether. The eyes matched a clay-colored, indecisive face, spectacularly young. Short oil-black hair. Five-foot-five—considerably shorter than A.Z. Her feet did look small.

  “Who are you?” she inquired.

  “Eyheekiwea,” Zooey tried, before standing on her toes to distance herself from the gun. “I said A. Z. Kimrean, private eyes. You can call me Zooey.”

  “I will.” She pushed the gun half an inch farther up her throat: “Where’s Victor Lyon, Zooey?”

  Zooey humbly requested some room for phonation, gagged out some spit, then answered.

  “Okay, first off, let me tell you I’m super impressed with your m.o.; you—” She aborted the praise when Juno pressed the barrel tip against her lower jaw. “Right, right, okay, look, I’m usually not this easygoing but you caught me on a particularly positive day, and since I see you and I are a lot alike, I thought maybe we could agree to solve this peacefully if I tell you that Mr. Lyon is hiding in the pool h—”

  Juno cut her off again, this time by striking her with the butt of the gun. Kimrean dropped knocked out on the ruins.

  Then the killer gazed through the shattered windows, toward the swimming pool and the little path that led to the bungalow. Some ninety yards away, she reckoned.

  Better take the car.

  * * *

  —

  From the pool house, a box hedge partially blocked the view of the mansion. The last thing they had clearly spied from there was the explosion at the gates; the rising pyrocumulus was probably visible from Nevada. News of the Jaguar sodomizing the main building they had inferred only from a humongous dust cloud from that direction—accompanied by a similar sound to that of Genghis Khan riding into Samarkand.

  They were three people listening, technically hiding: Victor Lyon, Danny Mojave, and a bodyguard who does not merit a name because he will most likely be dead in the next page.

  Victor sat in a dull armchair, a gun on his lap and his sight wandering around a bowl of fruit. A pear stared back at him.

  “Where is my daughter?” he asked softly.

  Danny, on the lookout by the north window wielding a submachine gun, was caught unprepared by the tone of his voice: still solemn, but nonetheless surrendering.

  “She’s safe,” he answered.

  The Lyon sighed, pitifully. “Do you think there will be anything left to leave her?”

  Danny bit his tongue: he was just remembering a minor plot twist in the penthouse, minutes before Xander was shot. The distant revving of the Jaguar beyond the double glass doors absolved him from answering.

  “Are they coming?”

  Danny tried the radio again. “Mendes. What’s your status?”

  The hedge was blocking the garden path, but he heard again the sound of debris stirring and a car pulling back.

  “Mendes?” he insisted. “Somebody! What is happening out there?”

  There was no answer. No other noise from the outside.

  But then, beneath the pregnant silence, Danny felt a timid trepidation, like the first warning tremor household pets sense before a big earthquake.

  The car purred again, far away. Danny turned and faced the bodyguard standing in front of the fireplace. He saw the mirror over the mantelpiece. He saw his reflection’s weapon, aiming at him. He saw, in the line of fire, Mikey’s red rose trembling in its vase on the mantelpiece.

  He saw the rose and the vase and the mirror and the fireplace and the bodyguard blown into smithereens, and while the shock wave slapped him off his feet and toward the bedroom, he even caught sight of the Jaguar that had just appeared in the middle of the room.

  Victor Lyon was gripping his pistol at that moment, but the entrance had caught him by surprise anyway: he stumbled up so fast he didn’t hear his spine reminding him to grab his cane. He gripped his pistol at the same exact moment that Juno squiggled through the sunroof and pointed her Taurus at him, shouting at the top of her lungs. “Put it down!”

  “You put it down!”

  “I’ll fucking kill you!”

  “Do you think I give a fuck anymore?!”

  “Do you think I ever did?!”

  Danny groaned up to his feet, found himself in the middle of the standoff with way too many fucks to give. His weapon was lost to the ruins like a five-year-old in a mall. He timidly raised his hands.

  A breeze came in through the newly opened hole, sweepin
g the brick dust to the whistling of an Ennio Morricone tune.

  Juno, holding the Taurus with one hand, reached inside the car, retrieved something from the dashboard and lifted it to her face for the audience to see. The red petals exalted the blue of her Neptune eyes.

  The Lyon’s gun didn’t quiver. His mouth did. To Danny, the legendary Victor Lyon, the man behind the ’74 Takeover, looked like a plain old man—another pink, Bismarck-mustached senior citizen from Florida in a Panama hat and unforgivable shirt, miscast in a gangster role.

  He pronounced one word, painfully close to a whimper: “Why?”

  The girl scoffed with something that didn’t remotely pass for amusement.

  “Why, you ask? ‘Oh, why did this happen to me?’ ” she mocked, with the flimsy voice of a coal-smudged orphan in Dickens’s London. “ ‘I worked so hard to get here. Fought so long to build this. How can my story of struggle and success end this way?’ ” She snorted. “You think it’s unfair, don’t you?”

  She was breathing faster now; she noticed and steadied the gun with both hands.

  “Do you want a real story? I met…”

  False start. She swallowed, started again.

  “I met Cecilia when we were eleven. I was a dirty commie immigrant to a Christian community in Alaska. She was the reverend’s daughter. The second we locked eyes, we knew the rest of the universe was context. I endured their daily insults, for her. I stopped punching back, for her. I left my family for her. They caught us kissing in a barn. I was beaten. By teenagers. She was flown to North Carolina and put in a torture chamber masquerading as a Christian boarding school for deviant children. I rose from my ashes for her. I set their farms on fire for her. I hiked across the winter tundra for her. I lost toes for her! The day I rescued her and she made love to me, I knew neither of us would ever long for anything else, that we could live without warmth and food and air as long as we had each other. I worked a strip club for her. I wrestled hobos for her. I have crawled coast to coast through the sewers of this kingdom of bigots, bullies, and bipedal maggots, this place you anuses call the land of opportunity, to carry her in my arms to San Francisco, so we could be left alone. And we made it.

  “And then one night, after my twelve-hour shift carrying dirt in a garden center, I drive to the diner where she works to give her a rose and drive her home, as I always do…and out of nowhere comes this coked-up punk. He orders a hamburger, insults her, points a gun at me, and then leaves, and ten minutes later he starts shooting at the diner from the parking lot like it’s a stall in a carnival. They gun her down! Just like that! And no one even notices! They don’t give a shit! Not him, not any of your spoiled children, not you! Do you think your business is the main plot of the universe, and the rest of us are just sitting here like disposable extras to add a splash of color when you blow off our heads?! Well, I’M FUCKING NOT!! You, and your family of amoral cunts, are accessories in my story, and I’m weeding you out! Do you hear me?! I killed all three shitstains that were your sons! I shot them down like the damaged animals they were! I razed in one week what it took you a life to build, so weep! Weep like a man for what a woman stole from you, you weak, disgusting, laughable old shit!”

  A stone that was, against all odds, still sitting on top of another one tumbled down, announcing a new entrance.

  ZOOEY: Okay! I heard enough!

  Kimrean, a blue-purple bruise blooming around her left cheekbone, stepped in through the front door, preceded by a new gun to join the standoff. She chose a nice unobstructed spot, equidistant to the other two weapons and close to Danny, who asked her, “How long have you been here?”

  “Awhile,” she answered, keeping Juno in her crosshairs. “She was at the bit with the kiss in the barn when I arrived, so I stood by in case the story got saucy.”

  JUNO: (Smiles.) Hey, Zooey. Did you check the gun this time?

  ZOOEY: No. I realized it’s stupid to waste a round to check, so from now on I’ll just trust my luck.

  DANNY: (At the top of his lungs.) But why don’t you just release the magazine and look?!

  (Pause.)

  ZOOEY: Oh. Okay, I’ll try that next time. (To Juno.) Easy there, honey. You still need to look after Cecilia.

  Juno had not yet had the courtesy to aim back at Kimrean, although she was showing definite interest now.

  “How did you find me?” she asked.

  “I used my imagination,” Zooey replied. “The little things just fit. Like the fact that Mikey recognized you when you climbed through his window. Or the fact that you hesitated when you were running out of the club after Frankie, because your instinct was to stand in line for the ladies’ room. By the way, the lost toes thing?” she said, aside to Danny. “That explains the shoe being too big for her foot size.”

  “Yeah, I got that, thank you.”

  “Okay. Just making sure.” She returned to Juno. “It was a nice puzzle, all in all. But since you’re so adamant on giving your stories a happy ending, you ought to know that the good guys must always win.”

  “These people aren’t the good guys.”

  “The old one isn’t.” She head-signaled at Danny. “This one is.”

  That line made a couple guns waver and a few eyebrows rise. Juno’s Taurus slowly shifted toward the unarmed man with the curly hair.

  “I know him,” Juno said, not bothering to hide the quiver in her voice anymore. “He was there, in the diner. He was with that asshole while he harassed Cecilia.”

  “You might remember I was trying to calm him down,” Danny tried.

  “Not fucking hard enough!” Juno yelled. “You are all the same scum!”

  “Actually, he’s nothing like them,” Zooey said. “He’s a cop.”

  She took a moment then to watch the reactions. Juno said nothing. Danny said nothing. Victor Lyon said nothing. But the Jaguar with its Rocky-at-the-end-of-each-movie countenance seemed to gape at the revelation.

  “What?” said Juno in a soft voice.

  “What?” Victor echoed, very loudly.

  Danny whispered, “Zooey, why don’t you go to sleep?”

  “I’m serious,” Zooey resumed. “He’s been undercover for eighteen months!”

  “San Carnal cops are no better than the mob,” Juno retorted, gun dangerously shivering in her hands.

  “He’s not with San Carnal. He’s from San Francisco. Just like you girls.”

  That line, for some strange reason, made the Lyon boil up.

  “YOU!” His gun had swerved ninety degrees and was aiming at Danny’s skull—if shoving two inches of barrel into the target’s hair counts as aiming.

  DANNY: Zooey…

  ZOOEY: C’mon, we were stuck! Let’s stir it up a little more, see where it takes us.

  VICTOR: (Shouting, into Danny’s ear.) I trusted you with my son’s life! You traitor!

  JUNO: You are both lying!

  “Juno,” Zooey called. “Listen to me. They’ve been working the Lyon family for a year. They’re purging San Carnal too. But they need the old man alive, so you can’t kill him. And Danny is a good guy, so you can’t kill him either.”

  “You’re lying!”

  “I don’t lie. Even this room is bugged.”

  VICTOR: WHAT?!

  Zooey ignored him, her attention and her gun on the girl atop the car. “I’m serious. You can check yourself. There’s a framed portrait under your front left tire; there’s a hidden mike in it. The FBI’s listening right now from a paint store on 10th Street. Good agents, Marlow and Dawes. They must be on their way right now, if they’re not too busy making passionate love on the desk. (Shouting at the portrait on the floor.) And if you are, I’m so happy for you guys, but come here anyway!”

  Juno swallowed something the size of a golf ball.

  “Show me,” she ordered.

 
Zooey lowered her gun, picked up the picture of nine-year-old Mikey and his mom, and took some pleasure in carelessly smashing the glass against the car hood. From behind the photograph she scraped off a black plastic circle, half an inch across, and showed it to the audience. No one needed any more clues.

  There is a first time for everything: Zooey was, unbelievably, the coolest head in the room at that moment.

  Danny, on the other hand, could feel a zero Kelvin drop of sweat freeze his spine. Victor’s hands as he gripped his own gun showed symptoms of imminent heart failure. Juno had trouble breathing again. Her breast heaved with every intake of air. Tears were building up in her eyes. She compelled herself to take a deep breath—and hold it. Her pulse steadied.

  Then she turned the gun ten degrees to the right and shot Victor Lyon.

  By the time the drug lord fell to the floor, everyone in the room had comprehended the strategy behind that move: the shot wasn’t lethal, but it would be in a few minutes. She had avoided the vital organs, but not the main arteries; he would bleed to death.

  Juno then aimed at Zooey, blue irises sparkling, brimming with pride, a demented smile distorting her gentle traits.

  “You need him alive? Then run!”

  Zooey didn’t argue; she tossed the gun and ran to attend to the old man. The cleanness of the wound didn’t stop it from hurting like hell; the Lyon had not ceased yelping since he’d hit the floor. It intensified when Zooey used a tablecloth lying around to apply a tourniquet.

  The next move was a little harder to follow but still masterful: Juno got off the car and shot Danny in the leg.

  Danny screamed only once, more out of surprise than actual pain, and fell down as Juno rushed to grab him and put the gun to his temple. Zooey lurched for Victor’s gun, but Juno uh-uh-uh’ed her out of it.