Peta said, ‘Hi, I’m Peta.’
‘Peta? How about that? You look like a girl to me.’
‘It’s Peta with an “a”. Not an “er”.’
‘Well, thank the Lord for that. The number of times I’ve been taken to ER. Fractured my ankle the last time.’ She patted Martin on the shoulder again and said, ‘My hero.’
‘I’ll go in and make sure that everybody’s ready to leave,’ said Peta. She went inside while Rita stood next to Martin, swaying slightly and clinging to his sleeve to keep her balance.
‘Santos said you had a case of vodka,’ she said slowly, and with special emphasis on the word ‘vod-ka.’
‘I do, Rita. I’ll load it into the trunk of my car, so that we can take it along with us.’
‘It would be good to have a taster. I have to tell you, Martin, I’m jonesing for a drink.’
‘Listen, Rita, you sit down here on the bench and I’ll see what I can do.’
He helped Rita to ease herself down on the low marble bench beside the front door, and then he went into the house. In the kitchen, the Murillo children were gathered around the table, clattering their spoons as they ate their ice-cream. Tyler and Susan were standing by the sink, talking. Tyler looked pale but Susan was blushing.
‘OK?’ asked Martin. ‘Nearly ready to hit the bricks?’
He went along the corridor to Ella’s bedroom. Ella was up and dressed in a pink checkered blouse and jeans. Martin came into the room and gave her a hug.
‘You’re sure that you’re up for this?’ he asked her.
‘Daddy, I’m fine. I think it was maybe a flu bug, that’s all.’
‘You still look a little washed out, if you don’t mind my saying so.’
‘Daddy – I’m fine!’
Martin went into the living room. He opened the cupboard doors underneath the TV, and there it was, untouched since the day that he had left this house, a bottle of Maker’s Mark whiskey with only one measure taken out of it. He had taken that drink as a regretful toast to the past – a past that he had always hoped was going to be his future. He had meant to take the bottle with him, but just then Peta and Tyler and Ella had arrived outside, all ready to move back in.
He went back outside and handed the bottle to Rita. She stared at the label for a long time before she said, ‘I’m not complaining, Martin, but this doesn’t look much like vodka.’
‘I’ve already stowed the vodka in the car. We can crack that open later. Now, we need to be leaving, Rita. And for Christ’s sake don’t drink that all now. At least take a breath or two, in between swallows, OK?’
He checked his watch. Saskia should have reached the park by now. He helped Rita and the Murillo children to climb back into the Suburban, while Tyler and Susan got into Peta’s Hilux and Ella joined him in his Eldorado. They started their engines and Martin could see several neighbors coming out of their houses to see what all the commotion was about.
Martin was just about to back out of the driveway when two black Cadillac Escalades with tinted windows came up the road and drew up nose-to-tail by the opposite curb. He gave Ella what he hoped was a confident smile and said, ‘Hold tight. I think we may need to get the hell out of here somewhat prontissimo.’
He had backed only halfway across the road, however, before the Escalades’ doors all opened and seven men climbed out. Three of them stood in front of him holding up their hands while the other four stood behind him to prevent him from backing up any further. Two of them wore light gray suits, white shirts and dark blue neckties, while the rest of them were dressed in the dark blue uniform of Empire Security Services.
One of the suits approached him. He had cropped gray hair and a squarish head, and he walked with the rolling gait of the very fit and the very muscular. He reminded Martin of one of his drill instructors in the Marines.
‘Misterrr Makepeace?’ he demanded. He didn’t stand too close, and Martin could see his eyes darting from side to side as he tried to take in what was happening here – Santos’ Suburban blowing out exhaust fumes and Peta’s Hilux all ready to back out behind him.
‘What if I am?’
‘It happens that I know you are, sir, and what I need you to do is turn off your engine, exit your vehicle and come with us.’
FIFTEEN
‘Oh, really?’ said Martin. ‘On whose authority?’
‘Empire Security Services, sir, with posse authority from the San Bernardino Police Department.’ The agent reached into his inside pocket and produced a black leather wallet. He flipped it open so that Martin could see his silver-and-blue enamel badge.
Martin looked around. He was going to have to play this very carefully. There were so many innocent people around, including his own children, Tyler and Ella. All five of the uniformed security agents were openly carrying sidearms, and he could see by the bulges in their coats that the two agents in suits had shoulder holsters, too.
‘OK,’ he said, raising both hands so that the agents could see them. At the same time, however, he turned to Ella and said, ‘As soon as I get out of the car, pop the trunk, OK? You know where the button is, don’t you, in the glove box?’
Ella nodded, her eyes wide with alarm. Martin opened his door.
The agent in the gray suit said, ‘Please keep your hands up, Mr Makepeace, and walk across to the vehicle on your right. Curtis! You want to open the door for Mr Makepeace, if you would?’
One of the uniformed security agents went over to the second Escalade and opened up its rear passenger door. Martin, still with his hands held high, glanced over his shoulder. Whatever he did now – even if the security agents took out their guns and started shooting at him – Ella and Peta and Tyler and the Murillo family would all be out of their line of fire.
‘Just keep walking, sir,’ said the agent in the gray suit.
But Martin took only one more step before he half-bent his knees and then hurled himself backward, so that he collided with the agent in the gray suit and both of them fell heavily on to the roadway. For Martin, most of the impact was cushioned by the agent’s body, but the agent himself struck the back of his head on the tarmac, and he let out a hoarse, high-pitched wheeze as all of the air was knocked out of him.
The other security agents began to reach for their weapons, but Martin was too quick for them. He rolled over on to the fallen agent’s right side and hooked his left arm around his neck to throttle him. At the same time he reached inside his coat and wrenched his gun out of his shoulder-holster. He cocked the gun, jammed the muzzle into the agent’s right ear and shouted out, ‘Freeze! Drop your weapons or I’ll blow his head off !’
Two of the security agents already had their guns lifted, but Martin pulled the fallen agent even closer, so that he was at least half-shielded by him, and the agents could see that if they opened fire there was a high probability that they would hit their own man, too.
‘I said drop them!’ Martin repeated. ‘Put ’em down – now!’
There was a moment’s pause, but then the other gray-suited agent genuflected as if he were in church and laid his automatic on the ground. He looked around at the other agents and made a flapping sign with his hand. They hesitated for a few seconds, but then they followed his example and laid down their guns, too.
Martin guessed that they were probably carrying hideaway guns strapped to their ankles, like the agent who had shot Charlie, but he wasn’t going to give them the chance to go for them. He climbed to his feet, heaving the agent in the gray suit up with him, and then circled around to the back of his car, keeping his arm around the agent’s throat and his gun pressed hard into his ear.
‘Go easy, will you?’ said the agent, in a strangulated voice. ‘Believe me, you’re not worth getting killed for. I have kids.’
‘You should have thought of that before you came looking for me,’ Martin retorted.
Ella had unlocked the Eldorado’s trunk, so Martin released his hold on the agent’s neck and raised the lid. He reached in
side and lifted out one of the Colt Commandos. Then he shoved the agent out in front of him, tossing his automatic into the trunk and raising the sub-machine gun.
‘I need you all to get back into your vehicles!’ he shouted. ‘Do it now and don’t try anything creative! Like your friend here just said, I’m not worth getting killed for!’
Again the agents hesitated for a few seconds, but then the agent in the gray suit said, ‘Do like he says, OK?’
All seven agents backed away across the road and climbed back into their Escalades. All of them were scowling.
‘Close the doors and don’t try to open the windows!’ Martin told them. ‘And don’t try to drive off, either! Stay right where you are if you want to get out of this alive!’
Once the agents had slammed all of their doors shut, Martin called out over his shoulder, ‘Tyler!’
‘Dad?’
‘Come and pick up all of these guns! Drop them into the trunk of my car, OK?’
Tyler climbed out of Peta’s Hilux and jogged over to collect up all of the weapons that the agents had laid down in the road. Once he had done that, Martin walked across to the two Escalades and slowly swung the Colt Commando from side to side, as he if were preparing to rake both vehicles with bullets.
Tyler was climbing back into the Hilux now. ‘Dad!’ he called. ‘Come on, Dad!’
Martin raised his left hand to indicate that he had heard him. He guessed that by now the agents had already put in an emergency call to their headquarters and asked for a back-up team, but since the ESS were helping the police to handle the riots downtown he doubted that they had the manpower to respond very promptly, if at all.
He took two or three paces backward, and then he fired a burst into the leading Escalade’s front tires and into its engine compartment. The bullets made a series of satisfying bangs as they penetrated the SUV’s front fender.
He fired another burst into the rear tires, and then he turned to the second Escalade, and shot its tires out, too. He finished with three single shots into its radiator grille. He couldn’t see the expressions on the agents’ faces because of their darkly tinted windows, but he could imagine their tightly closed eyes and their tightly clenched teeth. He had been in a Buffalo armored personnel carrier in Afghanistan when it was hit by Taliban machine-gun fire, so he knew from experience that you just grit your teeth and pray.
He climbed back behind the wheel of his car although he kept the sub-machine gun lifted in his right hand in case any of the agents took it into their heads to fire any retaliatory shots at him as he drove away.
Ella was still pressing her fingertips into her ears. ‘My God, Dad! I think you’ve made me deaf.’
Martin reached across with his left hand, started up the engine and shifted the Eldorado into gear. He blew his horn twice to alert Peta and Santos that they were leaving now, and he backed up to allow them to reverse out of the driveway. As they headed off down the road, he saw the driver’s side window in the leading Escalade drop down three or four inches, but he aimed his sub-machine gun at it and it was quickly closed up again.
He followed Peta’s Hilux, but he kept glancing in his rear-view mirror from time to time, just to make sure that it hadn’t occurred to the ESS security agents to commandeer a vehicle from one of her neighbors and come after them.
‘Dad,’ said Ella.
‘What is it, sweetheart? Are you OK?’
‘I’m OK. I’m really OK. It’s you.’
He gave a last quick look in his mirror. There was nobody following them so he lowered the Colt Commando on to the floor behind the passenger seat.
‘Me?’ he said, deliberately pointing to himself like Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver. ‘What about me?’
Ella shook her head, although she was smiling, too. ‘Don’t you ever get scared? I mean, what happened back there, they could have shot you, those men, and you could have been killed.’
‘You can’t go through life being scared of dying, Ella. That’s one of the things I learned in Afghanistan. If you go through life being scared of dying, you’ll never live. Not properly – not the way God meant you to live. And the sad part about it is, you’re going to die anyhow, sooner or later.’
They had reached the end of Fullerton Drive, and Martin could see a green Buick LaCrosse parked beside the children’s playground in Lionel E. Hudson Park. He flashed his lights and blew his horn to tell Peta and Santos to pull over, and then he pulled over himself, in front of the Buick, and climbed out of his car.
He walked back to the Buick and as he did so the door opened and Saskia climbed out. She was wearing a black silk blouse and tight black jeans and very high-heeled black ankle-boots, and when she came toward him she strutted almost like a model on a catwalk, one foot in front of the other.
They stood facing each other for a moment, not saying anything. Martin couldn’t read Saskia’s expression at all. Her chin was lifted and her lips were slightly pursed and even though she was looking him directly in the eyes she was repeatedly blinking, as if she had lost the power of speech but was trying to give him a coded message.
‘Are you OK?’ he asked her. ‘We’re leaving now … heading for the mountains. Are you sure you want to come with us?’
Saskia nodded. She had appeared to be so confident and professional when he had first met her – scathing, even – but now she sounded as if she were falling to pieces. She grasped the shoulder of his shirt and said, ‘I’m scared, Martin. I’ve never been so scared in the whole of my life.’
Martin went back to talk to Santos. As Santos put down his window, the children all stared at Martin in awe. Mikey pretended that he was holding a sub-machine gun and spraying bullets in all directions.
‘That was so cool, the way you shot up those SUVs! That was unbe-lieve-able!’
‘Yes, well, thanks, Mikey, but that wasn’t supposed to be a lesson in how you should normally deal with a sticky situation.’
‘Shit – I wish I’d of had that machine gun when I was in my math class! “Mikey – what’s nine times thirteen?” “Who gives a shit, Mrs Terman?” Brrrrrp-brrrrrrp-brrrrp!’
Rita turned around in her seat and said, slurrily, ‘You watch your language, Mikey, you little prick!’
Mina whispered, ‘I’m thirsty. And I’m hungry.’
‘Me too,’ said George.
Martin said to Santos, ‘Do you know your way from here?’
‘I’ll be OK once we get to the Rim Of The World Highway. But I’m running pretty low on gas.’
‘There’s a gas station on the way, at Wildwood Plaza,’ Martin told him. ‘Go back the way we came, but hang a left when you get to West Fortieth Street. It’s only a couple of miles.’
‘This other woman is coming with us?’
‘Saskia, yes. I’ll introduce you when we stop for gas.’
‘You can trust her?’
‘What makes you ask?’
Santos pointed to his eyes and then pointed to Saskia, the same way he had pointed to Martin and Tyler when they had rejoined him after ramming Big Puppet’s pick-up.
‘Even as a child, I could see things when others were blind. Many of my people have that gift.’
‘Oh, yes?’
‘That woman is not only dressed in black. She has a dark shadow around her.’
Martin turned around. Saskia was standing under the trees but apart from that he couldn’t see any shadows.
‘Let’s worry about that later,’ he said. ‘Right now I think we need to get out of here. You go first, then Peta and Tyler will follow you. I’ll bring up the rear, just in case any more of those spooks come after us.’
‘Whatever you say, Wasicu.’
Martin knew that Santos had called him ‘Wasicu’ to make a point. It was to emphasize that he was a white man, and didn’t have the sensitivity to see the auras that surround not only people, but animals, and birds, and even trees. He didn’t say anything, but patted the roof of Santos’ Surbuban and went back to join Saskia.
‘Let’s go,’ he told her. ‘It’ll make things a whole lot easier if you leave that rental car here and come with me.’
He introduced Saskia to Ella. Ella, guardedly, said, ‘Hello,’ and then, ‘I’ll go sit in the back.’
Martin gave a wagons-roll! wave of his hand and Santos drove off, closely followed by Peta in her Hilux. As Martin pulled away from the curb, Saskia said, ‘You know that Wrack isn’t going to let up. He’s going to do everything he possibly can to find us. He’s that kind of person.’
‘You don’t have to tell me,’ said Martin, and he described how the ESS agents had tracked him down to Peta’s house, and how he had shot up their SUVs.
‘Oh my God,’ said Saskia. She pressed her hand against her forehead as if she were starting a migraine. ‘It’s not just Joseph Wrack, either. It’s Halford Smiley. Once Halford finds out that I’ve run out on him, he’s going to want me out of the way, too, just as much as Wrack, if not more.’
‘So what is it between you and Governor Smiley? If anybody had asked me, I would have said that you were a woman who wasn’t afraid of anybody.’
Saskia glanced at Ella, who was now sitting in the back of the Eldorado, leaning her elbows on the seats in front of her, her hair blowing across her face. ‘I can’t tell you now, Martin,’ said Saskia. ‘Let’s just say that I’m much more afraid of me than I am of him. The me that I used to be, anyhow.’
Martin was about to ask her what the Saskia that she used to be had done to frighten the Saskia that she was now, but decided against it. It was clear that she didn’t think that it was suitable for the ears of fourteen-year-old girls.
They were approaching Wildwood Plaza, at the intersection between East 40th Street and North Waterman Avenue. As they neared the intersection they passed a McDonald’s Drive-Thru and a Del Taco restaurant and a Starbucks. Outside McDonald’s a large cardboard sign announced NO WATER SORRY CLOSED TILL FURTHER NOTICE. Del Taco and Starbucks, too, were both closed, their doors shuttered and their interiors in darkness.
Drought Page 15