by James Grady
Hunters and prey raced through trees and fog. Our vision bounced, saw her searching for a glimmer of go that way amidst the fogged forest world rushing at her; saw us chasing her, glimpsing her, sometimes seeing her completely.
The dead man let us catch her.
She leapt over a dry stream bed but Harry Martin’s too-big shoes made her misjudge her landing. A stone caught the floppy toe of her sneaker, sprawled her into a pile of deadfall, and when she shoved herself up, scrambled for footing in the wet muck, a shoe went one way, her left ankle the other. Cari cried out as we burst through trees thirty feet behind her. She ran through a stand of poplars.
We saw her limp as she fought her way through another hundred feet of clinging trees on that sprained ankle. Burst out of brush and staggered onto a graveled road. Fell onto its rocks and dirt. Pushed herself up. Stumbled limping steps following the graveled road toward where it disappeared in the mist. Didn’t quit. Wouldn’t quit.
Until I snapped her image into my pistol sights, yelled: “Done!”
She heard my feet crunch gravel behind her. Dragged to a stop.
“Don’t fucking make me shoot!” I yelled.
Brush crashed behind me.
My buddy Zane burst onto the road. Whipped the pistol from his shoulder holster, yelled: “Don’t do it!”
Cari spread her gravel-scraped hands out from her waist. She’d left the handcuffs and rope belt back at the pissing tree where she’d picked those locks with the paperclip she stole off the dead man’s desk and hid behind her upper lip through whatever she said or ate. Bent over to pull up her pants, she’d untied the tether between her ankles. Now she held nothing, wanted us to know that before she risked turning around to face us.
She saw me standing in the middle of the gravel road, two-handed combat grip on the pistol staring straight at her with its black bore.
She saw Zane, who’d worked his way across the road and up the barrow pit so he stood ten feet ahead of me and off to my heart side, pointing his pistol.
We made a triangle on a graveled road in the forest of a misty morning.
Suddenly, an epiphany seized me.
“Don’t you do it!” yelled Zane.
He means Cari, I thought; yelled: “Cari! You’re done running! This is over!”
“Nobody do nothing!” yelled Zane.
“Now is not the day to die!” I said. “Now is when to be a spy!”
Cari said: “What?”
Zane said: “What?”
Don’t let your gun shake like that! I wanted to yell as his aim wandered. He had to be as tired as I was, throat dry, chest heaving, heart slamming his ribs. Us catching our breath had to be easy compared to Cari with her scraped hands, twisted ankle and wild eyes facing two pistols hungry to blow her lead kisses.
Cari watched me combat-shuffle towards her, my pistol zeroed on her heart.
“Who are you?” I yelled to her. “What do you do?”
Zane’s gun wavered between Cari and me: “Victor! You’re here. It’s now. Don’t zone out, man! And stop, stop there, you have to stop!”
I stood 15 feet from Cari in the middle of the gravel road. Zane stood by the trees, gun floating like the mist surrounding us. Again I yelled to her: “Who are you?”
Cari glared at me: “What are you talking about? You know who I am.”
“’Xactly!”
“Forget all those lies!” I yelled. “Forget your cover and your other cover, your mission and your real mission, whether you were launched to catch us or kill us. Forget national security and need to know and don’t get caught and don’t get the bosses blamed and failing the fullness of your career, forget all that and look at this new light!”
“Vic,” said Zane, his gun more ambivalent: “Easy…”
“You know who you are?” I said to Cari, softly so ears hiding in the fog couldn’t hear.
She blinked; shrugged.
That meant that even if she was humoring Mister Got A Gun, we had a chance.
“You’re a spy,” I told her. “And that means you’re our salvation.”
“What?” said Cari and Zane, together.
“A spy has to find out what’s real.”
She shook her head. “But you can’t know whether or not I’m one of your hypothetical renegades!”
“I’ll take that chance,” I said. “This is getting too heavy.”
Lowered my gun.
Zane’s pistol pointed towards heaven.
“You’re a spy,” I told Cari. “And you’re out here in the fog. With us. And yeah, you got sent here to do us—whatever, however, I fucking don’t care. Doesn’t matter now. Not for this moment of clarity. And yeah, we’re crazy, you’re not, so what.
“Out here with us is why plus enough whats to add up to why not. Why are we all here? Why did Dr. F die? If we killed him, what about Nurse Death? If we didn’t get the gun that shot her from her, where did it come from? If she had it, why? Rectal exams? I don’t think so, she was working a temporary mental hospital gig. Why is her cell phone set up as a classic Op cover job? And who is Kyle Russo?”
“He’s a name written on an index card taped above the windshield of the white car you stole from a dead man.”
“Exactly,” I said for Zane’s benefit, hoping he was getting it, too. “But why?”
“Because you can. Sometimes that’s the whole reason for doing what you do.”
“You are so cool!” I whispered.
Cari blushed. Her eyes finally let go of the gun in my hand. “What are you talking about?”
“The heart of your Op, of any spy Op, is knowing. Merely catching or killing us leaves you as ignorant as before. Here, now, you’ve got a chance to be who you are and do what you’re supposed to do.”
“What?”
“Be a spy. With us. On us.”
“You… you’re offering me a chance to join your pack of mad dogs?”
“You don’t qualify. You’re not crazy. But you’re already our witness. Fold that into being more than dragged along until whatever’s going on is over.”
“Or be ‘over’ myself, dead here on this road.” She didn’t blink.
“We can shoot you any time. Choose something better, smarter, more true. Be our witness. Be who you are. Be a spy. Find out what you don’t know.”
“Then?”
“When it’s then, do what you do. Report. Finish satisfied.”
“If I help you, odds are I won’t be able to walk away.”
“Nobody walks away,” I told her. “So what are you going to do?”
Zane said: “He’s right. Do it. If nothing else, you need to be here to make it the best it can be. Because we’ll keep going, and you’ll end up no better than us.”
“You’d… trust me to… do whatever with you?”
“Hell no,” I said. “We trust you to be the spy you are.”
Cari said: “What if—”
“What if what if what if what if!” I yelled. “Fucking find out. Or walk.”
My gun flicked towards the road waiting behind her back.
“Shit,” she said.
Voice booming behind us! Hailey, calling out: “Sorry I’m late.”
We all turned to see her standing at the edge of the forest and road, arms hanging down, a dazed look on her sweat-slick, thorn-scratched ebony face.
Hailey seemed to float like the fog onto the gravel road, glide towards us as inexorably as the dawn, stepping onto the gravel road, coming closer, closer.
“Sorry Vic,” she said. “Sorry Zane.”
“’S OK,” I said as she stepped past me and walked straight to Cari—slammed the bore of her automatic against the white woman’s forehead.
Freeze, all I could do, all we all did was freeze.
“Sorry,” said Hailey and a
ll Cari could see was the whites of her eyes. “Beat me once: sorry, shit happens. Beat me twice: makes me a sorry loser.”
Hailey thumbed the pistol’s hammer to full cocked with a snick!
Smiled as Cari trembled, the gun pressed against her forehead.
“Third time’s the charm,” said Hailey as her gun’s black barrel bored a perfect third eye on Cari’s skull. “Three strikes and I’m out—right? O—U—T out.”
No quick karate move, no simple twist of fate would snap Cari to safety before Hailey’s finger could squeeze the trigger/slam a bullet through Cari’s perfect brain.
“So the sane move,” said Hailey, “the smart move, the good move, the rational move, the fucking spy move… is one sweet squeeze of my finger. Pre-emptive strike. Problem… solved. Every future ‘losing’ battle with you would be averted. I’m dying anyway, but best to die free and making everything worth it.”
Can’t. Move. Can’t. Talk. Can’t. Think.
“DAAA!!!” The gun barrel thrust so hard into Cari’s skull that she staggered as Hailey yelled: “But I’m not smart rational sane!”
And she whirled to her right—BAM! blasted first one, then all ten rounds in her gun BAM! BAM! BAM! one right after another, slugs zinging into the trees and fog, brass casings ejecting and clinking into the gravel, until the pistol slide blew back locked open and in the roar of gunfire echoes through the startled trees, in the gunsmoke swirling around her into the fog, she stood there, said: “Out of bullets.”
I took the gun from Hailey’s limp hand, told her: “We have more.”
BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! The sound of a car horn cut through the fog: Eric sounding recall after hearing war he could only hope was won by the right soldiers as Russell charged into the woods to rock it against anyone wrong in his gunsight.
Hailey didn’t resist as I took her arm. Zane and I holstered our weapons, I stuck her empty Sig Sauer in my belt, realized: Same kind of gun I used for my second suicide.
“Well,” said Cari as the horn beeped, “at least we know the way back to our car.”
42
Cari drove.
“You sure about this?” she asked when I opened the driver’s door for her.
“I’m beat and our crew ain’t much better,” I said.
“Tell her if she fucks us,” said Russell, “I’ll shoot off her kneecap.”
“Tell her yourself,” I said from the front seat between Cari and Zane.
“Hey Blondie,” said Russell. “If you—”
“Got it.” She roared our white Caddy to life, drove out of the Pine Barrens and merged onto the New Jersey Turnpike.
We were in the ride. We let voices and music from the invisible radioland make our moments. We listened for news reporting something that we needed to hear. Found zip. We never changed a station playing a good song. Our four lanes of fellow travelers zoomed south as fast as they dared. We traveled inside the law.
“Why fuck with life more than you need to?” I said.
“’Xactly.”
Russell adjusted his sunglasses. “Sometimes life needs you to fuck with it.”
“Could I have something besides those optometrist blinders?” Cari asked. “The sun’s coming up on me.”
Zane passed her a pair of Bonnie Parker gangster girl shades.
Cari slipped them on. Asked me: “Are your hands shaking?”
“Not now,” I answered. Truthfully locking every muscle tight.
“And Zane,” she said, glancing past me: “You look… unusually calm.”
He said: “I guess.”
Cari faced our windshield, but I saw her sunglasses record the rear view mirror where Hailey rode with her head on Eric’s shoulder, his eyes open, hers closed as her lips muttered soundlessly. Russell slumped beside her, the road vibrating his skull while he matched Hailey’s private mutters with face-shifting, mouth-working soundless songs.
Cari said: “You guys need to hold it together.”
Russell said: “Maybe we’ve held it too together.”
“Sure,” I said, my hands definitely not shaking. “That’s been our problem.”
The radio played The Beach Boy’s ‘Don’t Worry, Baby.’
“Maybe that was Brian Wilson’s problem,” said Russell as that rock poet soared high notes in the radio song about being consoled and counseled by his lover. Russell had blared the song ‘Lying in Bed (Just Like Brian Wilson Did)’ about that Beach Boy’s crackup through Ward C to taunt Dr. F just before the big oh-oh. “Maybe if Brian hadn’t fought being crazy, he wouldn’t have gone down.”
“He was in pain!” I said. “He was doing what he thought would work.”
Russell shrugged. “But what about the songs?”
A huge computer lettered sign over the highway glowed with official edicts:
TERRORIST ALERT REPORT SUSPICIOUS ACTIVITY
“Do you think that’s for us?” said Zane.
Nobody answered as we whizzed under the sign.
Miles of interstate highway, then the Caddy slowed.
“The Delaware Toll Bridge,” said Cari. “Coming up fast.”
With tollkeepers. For drivers to pay. Pass notes to. Shout to.
Zane gave a $5 bill to Cari.
Forty, thirty, twenty miles an hour, the Caddy slid into a line of cars rolling towards a tollbooth where a woman in a uniform worked, taking what she was given.
“State trooper!” I said. “Parked just the other side of the toll-booths!”
“Don’t see him!” said Zane and for a moment I feared I’d suddenly lost it, then Zane said: “Got him—No! Got two!”
Our white Caddy suddenly felt trapped in a rolling steel stream funneling down towards the wall of tollbooths.
“They’re leaning on their cruisers talking to each other,” I said.
“That’s all they’re doing,” said Hailey. “Maybe that’s all.”
“Don’t think about them and they won’t notice you!” called out Eric.
We stared at our scientific genius.
“Is that true?” I asked.
Eric shrugged.
Six cars away, five, four, the Caddy rolled towards contact with a woman toll-taker. She had a badge on her white shirt. Was she hiding a gun?
Russell shifted in the back seat. His left hand slid behind the apparently sleeping Hailey. Russell could shoot almost as well with his left hand as his right.
The Caddy stopped at a tollbooth. The woman collector took the $5 from Cari. As she made change, the collector with a silver badge on her white shirt said: “Nice old car.”
“Thanks,” said Cari. “It comes with a nice old husband.”
Two women shared a laugh and off we drove.
The state troopers seemed to join in on that joke, laughed with each other.
We never saw them give us a special look.
Russell and I checked on our mirrors.
“Didn’t see her push any buttons, make notes, stop collecting tolls,” said Russell.
“They take pictures,” said Eric.
“Yeah,” I said, “but even if the cameras caught our faces, by the time analysts or computers review them, we’re gone.”
“So all they’ll know will be our incredibly discreet vehicle,” said Russell. “Where we were when and which way we were going. Nothing to worry about.”
“’Xactly.”
“The trooper cars are still parked back there,” I said.
“The only toll left is Baltimore’s tunnel,” said Cari. “Then it’s free road.”
“You did good,” I told her.
“What did you expect,” she said, not a question, not a glance at me.
And not a thing wrong with the way she paid the Baltimore toll. We dropped into a tunnel under the Chesapeake Bay, a sunless, moonless shaft o
f yellow brick walls smudged gray by toxic car exhaust. Air pressure squeezed my eardrums as we dove beneath seawater following the red eye taillights bouncing in our windshield while we fled the yellow eye headlights riding in our mirrors.
Then we swooped out to blue sky, the expressway curving like a seagull towards clouds. Baltimore receded, its glistening urban towers cupping the inner harbor where no freighters sailed away loaded with U.S. steel. The FBI Santa in the gym of my second suicide swore that even with its glitzy inner harbor, Baltimore was still a fine town for heroin.
“Thirty minutes to D.C.,” announced our driver Cari.
Highway hummed under our tires.
Signs for the approaching Beltway zoomed past.
“Which way?” asked Cari.
Hailey opened a map, said: “Wheaton is… Take the Beltway West.”
Cari nosed the Caddy into the right lane as the Interstate began to split in a Y.
“Which exit?” she asked.
No one answered as the Caddy curved onto the massive Beltway. Cari stole a glance at us. “Do you guys have a real plan?”
“Real,” I said. “There’s a concept.”
“Shit.” Cari merged our white Caddy into zooming traffic on the expressway girdling the capital of the most powerful nation on earth. “Can I make a suggestion?”
We took her idea and the second exit, joined suburban traffic that streamed past a 30-foot tall alabaster statue of Jesus. We turned onto a street that led past somber brick high rise apartment buildings where a bus stop sheltered three men who looked Pakistani and were dressed for blue collar labor. We passed a parking lot where men from every country south of Texas swarmed a contractor’s idling pickup.
Zane said: “Stop in front of that convenience store, I’ll find someone to ask.”
Our white Caddy parked in front of a store that sold eggs, milk, disposable diapers, soda pop, condoms and lottery tickets. The restaurant on one side of the store advertised Guatamalan cuisine, the restaurant on the other boasted Mexican fare, and next to that café, the windows of a “DOLLAR STORE” had signs in English and Spanish. Across one street was a Chinese food carryout shed that also sold fried chicken and Italian subs through a bulletproof window. Kitty-corner from us was a delivery/carry-out pizza shack. The pink stucco building on the intersection’s fourth corner was a Maryland state liquor store.