by Newton, Nero
“Well, you should definitely go,” he said.
“No,” she practically barked. “Wrong. We should both definitely go. Right away.”
Stephen shook his head. “I think I’ll be okay. If they look at what’s on that computer, they’re going to see that…that I’m just some bookworm who dabbles in old texts. They’ll realize I’m not some kind of government agent, or…or some rival drug dealer.”
“Stephen, they don’t give a shit what you’re interested in. They probably won’t even get around to looking at the files before they come here again. They’re probably two blocks away right now, waiting for the police to leave the neighborhood, and then they’ll come back and shoot you, or smash you with a club, or throw you out your own window. These are killers, Steve. Probably the only reason I’m alive is that they decided to get fancy about it and use one of the animals. They lost control of it and they blew the…the hit.”
Stephen finally nodded and said, “Okay. I’ll pack some things, and then we’ll take the cats down last.”
“Now that I think about it, don’t even pack clothes. Just get the cats. I’ll buy you what you need. I got you into this trouble, and I’m going to finance your way to safety. So lets get out of here before we get killed. You got a planner or something with phone numbers of people you need to call?”
He turned to the desk where his PC had been a few hours ago, picked up a slim planner, then tucked it in a pants pocket along with his copy of the police report.
“Where are all your phone bills?” Amy asked. “And all your personal letters? We can’t leave anything that will point these people toward your friends or family.”
Stephen opened a drawer and pulled out a stack of bills, then another drawer full of letters and cards. Amy was already coming back from the kitchen with two cloth shopping bags. “Dump it all in here and sort it out later,” she said. “You sure that’s everything?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay,” she said. “Let’s get the animals.”
“The cats aren’t too bad about scratching things up, but let me put the iguana in the cardboard carrier, because she’ll definitely poke holes in your car seat.”
“Steve, I promise you, the upholstery doesn’t mean shit to me. It really doesn’t. If I cared about things like that, I would have bought a prettier car.”
She grabbed the long-haired black cat, which didn’t at all appreciate being manhandled by a stranger, and charged downstairs. Stephen followed with the iguana and the Abyssinian, then headed back upstairs for the hyperactive young tabby. Amy fished around among some newspapers on the floor of the back seat, where she’d hidden the Finnish pistol. She found it, then went to the trunk for the ammo clip stashed in the spare tire well.
She loaded the gun, then straightened up and closed the trunk. Stephen was already there, leaning into the back seat, and a smallish hooded figure was coming up behind him.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The nationally syndicated TV interviewer half twirled in his chair and glanced down at his notes. He wore a medium blue sport coat with no tie, and his upper three shirt buttons were undone.
“Hugh Sanderson,” he began, “you have challenged a family member, who is also your senior within the corporation, to make moral choices regarding the environment. To the shock and delight of many, he has been persuaded. Now you are trying to accomplish the same thing with other corporate leaders, not only in the logging business but in many other industries. Do you really think that enough of them will join you to make a difference?”
Hugh allowed his eyes to flicker away from the interviewer for half a second, indicating contemplation. He appeared vastly calm and comfortable for his first appearance on a national news show. Hands folded on crossed thighs, eyes penetrating but serene, he smiled as if to show a condescending variety of compassion for anyone who didn’t yet get The Message.
He looked good today, despite the physical stresses he’d endured of late. His tan was smooth and monochrome, really the darkest possible for a fair-skinned man. The cuffs, neck and hem of his off-white flannel shirt flared out just enough to suggest a robe rather than Old Navy casual. As holy men’s garments sometimes do, it hinted at some ancient form of underclothing. Had his eyes been harder, he might have seemed like a Hugh Hefner clone dressed in something that could be easily shed when he summoned his harem. But his expression was far too wise and gentle for that.
“At this point it’s really mostly a matter of – and I know I’m sticking my neck out by saying this – mostly a matter of faith. We have to believe not only that it is right, but that it can be done. There are a lot of technological solutions out there, so of course it can be done. But the essential first step is to open up to…to something that comes from inside us and all around us, and exists in all other organisms. Not only in humans, but in the rest of the living world, and in the air and water and soil we depend on.”
“And you feel that we, as a society,” the interviewer said, spreading meaty hands to encompass the world, “are at a point where this realization has expanded to a critical volume? That the green movement will succeed just because so many people see that it must?”
Before answering, Hugh shifted his facial muscles just enough to make his face explode with beatific radiance.
He had not memorized tonight’s spiel. A few hours before the interview, the world had begun to shine. These days it was no longer just the tropical green glow, but fire and blue jade, and other colors so slight, so fragile, that he could not even have named them. And the shapes formed by those colors had assured him that the thing to do was to wing it. He knew what needed to be said, and it would sound much more natural if he did it without memorizing a script.
He had taken a marvelous ride on the ruby highway the previous day, and today, once the painkillers kicked in, the glow of ruby-aftermath had come. That glow always made activities like this TV interview a lot more palatable.
For the cameras, he managed to weave with his words a shimmering, primordial, spiral staircase that led up and up and up to greater consciousness, and he gently dared the audience to ascend with him. “…and we need only to extend a hand down to our friends and loved ones and say, take this wonderful journey with me….”
The interview did not make Hugh Sanderson a superstar. It merely revived the low-level fame he’d acquired during the green campaign’s first round, extending his name recognition a little beyond those who had already heard about him through environmentalist mass emails. Because his fame was minor, it caused him no security risk. He attracted no stalkers and, in spite of his good looks and marital status, only a couple of gold diggers.
His days on the green tour were a cycle of speaking engagements, hotel rooms, gyms, and Jacuzzis. There was also a ride on the ruby highway once or twice a week. It was not an unpleasant routine.
It no longer bothered him to be the focus of attention from the strange, multi-generational array of latter-day flower children who turned out for his speaking engagements. He even had a handful of groupies. Five or six of the same faces seemed to show up nearly everywhere he went. The person Hugh thought of as Bluto attended every single event, always wearing the same too-tight, striped shirt; it was probably the shirt as well as the man’s beard and bulk that made Hugh think of Popeye’s nemesis. This same freak had turned up at the Free Forest Campground during Hugh’s several visits there this summer – always alone, always turning to stare at Hugh as he rolled by in his open-topped Land Rover. Bluto would keep staring after him as long as they were in each others’ line of sight. Once, Hugh had driven close enough to him to see that he was holding one of the little airline bottles in which boof was sold. The guy had seemed even more out of place among the travelers at the campground than in the audiences full of eco-people.
But not all of his fans were unpleasant to be near. After every event, there was usually at least one attractive young woman willing to spend time with Hugh Sanderson, eager to show him around whatever to
wn he was in. If it turned out that she had no interest in seeing the inside of his hotel room, a quick, surreptitious application of well-perfumed ruby to the tender side of her forearm would render her compliant. It had worked plenty of times with robust, nicely toned young trail-hiking girls at the Free Forest Campground, and it worked just as well in the city. He had learned how to do this without getting any of the stink juice on his skin, saving his own ruby rides for when he was alone.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Amy screamed, and the sound made Stephen pull himself back out of the car. He was nearly upright when the attacker kicked the back door with furious strength. Then it was Stephen’s turn to scream, howling in pain and shock as the door slammed hard on his left hand.
He looked as though he hadn’t really grasped that he was being assaulted. He backed several feet away from the car, holding his injured hand, but didn’t look around for who might be responsible.
Amy had let her keys fall to the ground and now held the pistol in the same two-handed grasp that the blond cop had used earlier. The attacker was only three feet from Stephen, holding something that might have been a blade
“Get away from him!” she shouted.
None of the nearby streetlights worked, but there was enough ambient glow for her to get a sense of what the man looked like: a couple inches shorter than her, and not heavily built. He was white, or at least light, with an absurdly pointed beard that would have looked silly on a guy who had not just smashed someone’s hand.
“Get back,” she shouted again, leveling the pistol at his chest.
About seven feet separated them, and even someone who had no skill with a gun could have hit that target – if not with the first shot, then with the second or third.
But the elf-bearded man did not move. He looked at Amy and at Stephen, who had sized up the situation and was backing away. She wondered if she needed to prove that the gun was loaded.
“Don’t get too far from the car, Steve,” Amy said. “In fact, come grab the keys off the ground behind me, and get in the driver’s seat. You can start it up.”
Stephen turned to walk past Amy, and Elf Beard suddenly moved so that he was directly in a line with Stephen and Amy, keeping her from getting a clear shot at him. Then he moved closer to Stephen And yes, it was a knife in his right hand, about six inches long and slim. He was going to hold it to Stephen’s neck and make her drop the gun. And then probably kill them both.
Amy had no choice but to try and get to Stephen before Elf Beard, then reach around the schoolteacher and shoot the attacker. It was risky getting that close, putting herself within slashing range.
She took two fast strides – and suddenly Stephen tripped and fell, then rolled away, shouting in pain again. There was nothing between Amy and the assailant but four feet of open air.
The attacker lunged and she fired.
Elf Beard knocked her backwards onto the sidewalk. She managed to break her fall slightly with her right hand, but that was also her gun hand, and she lost the weapon as she went down. The back of her head hit the sidewalk hard enough to set off a starburst behind her eyelids.
Then Elf-Beard was on top of her, trapping her right arm between their bodies. She tried punching with her left, but only had room for very short jabs at his bearded jaw line.
In the next instant, he seemed to be crawling off of her, rather than holding her down. It took a moment to realize that he wasn’t trying to stab her, and must also have been disarmed. She pushed with her left arm, and then her right was free and she shoved hard with both.
Then she feared that he was going for her gun, and tried to wiggle herself at least onto all fours so she could try to beat him to it. She pushed harder still at his side, and Elf Beard gave a short bark of pain. Amy’s hand was suddenly slippery, and she understood that she’d shot him after all, and had just now pushed on his wound.
There was a scuffling at her side, and fast movement. Elf Beard screamed and rolled completely off of her. She sat up, looking around frantically for the gun, just in time to see the assailant scoop something a few paces away, then scramble off. The blade glinted in his hand as he ran.
Amy sat on the sidewalk. Stephen was coming off the small lawn in front of his building, holding the grip of her gun between his thumb and index finger, as if though carrying a dead mouse by its trail. The toe of his right sneaker glistened very slightly in the faint light.
A big engine started half a block away, and the sound disappeared down some side street and was lost.
“You kicked him?” she said.
Stephen nodded, then went into a noisy series of dry heaves before speaking. “I got him right where you shot him. In the side of the chest. You must have just grazed him, but it got rid of him.”
Her head was still spinning from the fall and the struggle. A siren was already yowling somewhere in the neighborhood. She looked up at Stephen’s left hand and saw fingers splayed in unhealthy-looking angles.
“Some of the fingers are broken, aren’t they?” she said.
“Along with some of the bones in my hand. Those’ll probably be a bigger deal to straighten out.”
“We’ve got to get you to an emergency room right away.”
She took the gun, wiped all its surfaces down with her shirt, and slid it far under her car. “I’ll pick it up after the police are gone, unless they find it.” She looked into his eyes. “Either way, are you willing to lie to the cops and say that it was that thug’s own gun that went off when he jumped on me?”
“I’ll say whatever you need me to say. I’m sure you saved my life just now.”
“Thanks,” she said. “Hey, did you actually trip when you were between him and me? Or did you drop down to give me a shot at him?”
“I dropped down on purpose. I’ve seen it in a million movies, and it was the first thing I thought of. I figured he was about half a second from stabbing me”
“And then you booted him where he was wounded. That was pretty fast thinking, especially since you were reeling from getting your hand smashed.”
“I’m still reeling plenty.”
* * *
Amy spent a good part of the night going between the emergency room and her car, where the edgy cats and iguana waited. Stephen was finally released with a ponderous cast on his left hand, a head full of Demerol, and a couple bottles of lesser painkillers. The doctor said healing would take several weeks, and physical therapy several months after that. He also warned that the cast was going to start itching like crazy after a few days, especially if this heat kept up.
Amy paid for another room for Stephen at the suburban hotel she had checked into earlier that day, then stole a couple of his extra-strength hydrocodone tablets just to make sure sleep would come. She spent the last of her waking energy smuggling Stephen’s animals into her room.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Stephen was in the hotel restaurant around eleven o’clock the next morning, feasting on the best pancakes in history – or maybe it was just the painkillers making him gushingly agreeable – when Amy sat down across from him. Her cheeks were flushed as though she’d already been up and active for a while.
“I just got back,” she said. “When you weren’t in your room, I was afraid maybe you’d forgotten everything that happened last night and gone back to your apartment.”
The flush made her tan shine, and that somehow made her green eyes even more striking than before. Again she wore a tank top that exposed her arms and shoulders, their flowing muscles every bit as attractive as the rest of her curves. It wasn’t the pills telling him she looked great. He’d felt the same way last night in the diner, watching her take off that baggy shirt to show the scars on her shoulder.
“Where’d you just get back from?” he asked.
“Buying a car for the second time in a week. The bastards know what my Buick looks like now, so I ditched it and got something else. So far, I think the cats approve.”
Stephen smacked his fo
rehead. “I can’t believe it. I’ve been so zoned that I hadn’t even thought about them until now. Thanks for looking after them.”
“My pleasure. If I didn’t travel so much, I’d have cats. I’d be one of those crazy ladies who lives alone with ninety cats. And your iguana’s gorgeous. I’m completely in love with her.”
“What kind of car?” he asked.
“A five-year-old Camry something-or-other. Great sound system. And I made sure to get an automatic in case you need to borrow it for anything.” She nodded at his cast. “With your left hand on sick leave, I mean.”
“Thanks.” He finished off his pancakes and took a slug of coffee. “So where’d you get the gun?”
She told him about one of her late husband’s friends, a guy whose family had collected guns for generations.
“Andre and I got practice with other kinds of guns, too,” she said. “Even tranq rifles.”
“Tranq?”
“Tranquilizer. Andre used to insist on going into the field with some of the researchers whose work we funded. A few times it involved darting animals so they could clip transmitters on them. It’s a lot trickier than it looks on the wildlife shows.” She signaled the waitress for coffee. “I’ve been meaning to ask you about your friend who found the drawings in Baja,” she said. “How’d you get mixed up with a Mexican priest?”
“Guatemalan priest. Mario was kind of famous for standing up for the peasants in Guatemala about thirty years ago, back during the civil wars.”
“I was a little kid when all of that ended,” Amy said. “You must have been, too.”
“Of course. But years later, Mario had joined an international group that did lecture tours, talking about the horrors they’d witnessed – people who lived through Pol Pot and Pinochet, things like that. They came to Point Brumosa when I was an undergrad there. I happened to meet Mario right after he arrived, and he asked me to hang around with him and do some interpreting, since his English was kind of so-so. We’ve stayed in touch since then.”