by Sam Sisavath
“Make your choice,” Porter had said, “because if you come with us, you won’t be able to come back, and the path forward is treacherous and it’s lonely, and there will be no parades waiting for you on the other side.”
She wondered if he had given that same speech to Mary, to Xiao, and to whomever else was a part of their crew.
There’s no parade at the end of this, Ben. As if I cared about parades.
I would have settled for you, and I’m sure Mary would have settled for her husband and her daughter…
“Hellooooo,” Ringo called out, his grating voice cutting through her thoughts. “You still there? Or am I talking to myself here? Quinn? Porter?”
“Porter says to go to hell, Ringo!” Quinn shouted back.
Ringo laughed. It was just a bit too loud to be genuine. “So he’s not here after all. That’s too bad. I was looking forward to meeting him. You don’t get to meet a lot of superstars in a cow town like Houston.”
“You’re going to have to learn to live with disappointments.”
“So true. Oh well, tonight’s not a complete loss. The higher-ups still want to take a closer look at you.”
“I’m honored.”
“You shouldn’t be,” Ringo said. “Hofheinz has been talking you up, got the right people really curious about who you really are.”
Get in line, she thought.
The confirmation that Hofheinz had survived his encounter with her didn’t surprise Quinn in the slightest. Maybe it was because of Ringo’s presence. The man was supposed to be dead, but here he was taunting her from across Mary’s living room.
Why the hell aren’t you dead, you bastard?
“Give him my regards,” Quinn shouted back.
“I’ll do that,” Ringo shouted, when the unmistakable sound of the garage door opening on the other side of the kitchen wall rumbled throughout the building.
Quinn didn’t move, because that wasn’t the signal.
“Leaving already?” Ringo shouted.
No, Quinn thought, when something detonated outside the house and ripped across the neighborhood. It had originated from the front lawn, so close that Quinn’s teeth actually chattered for a second even though she had been expecting it.
Now we’re leaving!
She burst out into the living room and raced toward the open door. Her breath hammered against her chest and she jumped over the dead man, and then later Mary’s prone body even as a second explosion tore through the night.
She waited for Ringo to pop up in front of her the entire time. A head. That was all she needed. Just his head and she could pull the trigger and finish him off…again?
Why aren’t you dead? You should be dead, you bastard!
But he never gave her the second (or would this be the third?) chance, and soon Quinn was racing through the door and into the cold night.
She almost tripped on concrete slabs that were once a part of the walkway but had been ripped loose from their placement by the explosion, and managed to hop over most of them at the very last second. There were two large craters in the yard, and a man was standing up from the grass where he had fallen not long ago. A second body lay nearby, its clothes ripped to shreds and what remained of its flesh charred by the blasts.
Ringo? Was the dead man Ringo? God, she hoped so.
The first one either sensed or heard her and turned around, revealing the stump that used to be his right arm and the bloody pulp that covered one entire side of his face.
But it wasn’t Ringo.
The sight should have startled and made her pause, except Quinn’s mind was still filled with Ringo’s smarmy face. The man should have been dead but wasn’t, and suddenly this grotesque sight in front of her didn’t seem quite as unbelievable anymore.
The world’s gone mad, and I’m right in the middle of it!
Quinn shot the man in the chest and felt nothing as he slumped back to the ground, sliding partially into one of the craters that had been left behind by the double explosions that had likely wakened everyone in the neighborhood who wasn’t already wide awake from the gunfire earlier.
She kept moving, sweeping the front yard in search of Ringo. Could the dead second man have been him? He would have been near the front of the house when Xiao sent her “signal,” so it was possible—
No!
He was standing in front of the garage on the other side of the house, firing his weapon into it. The sound of a car backing up, its tires squealing, would have been drowned out by the gunfire if Ringo’s pistol made any noise at all.
There you are, you sonofabitch! Quinn thought and lifted her gun, but before she could take aim, the white Dodge Charger reversed its way out of the garage and smashed into Ringo and sent him flying backward through the air like some kind of human cannonball.
Goddammit!
The body sailed from the garage all the way across the yard before landing on the hood of a Crown Victoria parked at the curb. Ringo bounced off the vehicle and onto the street on the other side, the sound of impacts lost in the squealing tires of the Dodge as it slammed on its brakes in the driveway in front of her.
Xiao, clutching the steering wheel with one hand, shouted out the open front passenger side window at her, “Get in!”
But Quinn didn’t, because she couldn’t pull her stare from the Crown Vic—and Ringo back there on the other side. What were the chances he was still alive after getting rammed by the Dodger? A day ago she would have said very low, but the man had survived four bullets at almost point-blank range. Once you walked away from something like that (Why the hell aren’t you dead? You’re supposed to be dead!), what was getting tossed through the air by a car?
“Forget about him!” Xiao shouted.
“No!” Quinn said, and raced around the Charger.
Xiao said something in Chinese that sounded suspiciously like a curse, but Quinn wasn’t paying attention because a darkened figure had sprung up on the other side of the Crown Vic’s hood and—
You bastard!
Ringo was turning around when she snapped off a shot—and missed!
She blamed it on the surge of adrenaline, on her boiling-over hatred of the man throwing off her aim.
Whatever the reason, Ringo didn’t give her a chance at redemption and was already turning and running. He was moving impossibly fast for someone who was limping badly on both legs and who had just survived almost being run over by a car, not to mention the fact she had shot him earlier in the shoulder. And yet none of those things seemed to be slowing him down as he sped up the street, his dark clothes making him difficult to pick out whenever he wasn’t running across bright halos from the street lights.
He had already put thirty meters—forty!—between them when she fired again and again as fast as she could pull the trigger. She might have landed at least one bullet because he seemed to stagger, but it wasn’t enough to stop him. She would have kept firing if the Glock’s magazine didn’t become empty (No! Not now! Not now! Dammit Ben, why couldn’t you have given me a gun with more bullets?) and she had to stop and reload.
She kept her eyes on Ringo, saw him slowing down and turning around until he was only backpedaling down the street. She couldn’t see his face from this distance, but she swore the bastard was grinning at her.
The Charger reversed its way into the street and stopped next to her, and Xiao leaned across the front seats. “You done?”
She was going to tell Xiao to chase Ringo so they could finish him off when the man vanished. One second he was there and the next he had stepped into a dark pocket of shadows and she couldn’t locate him anymore.
No. No, no, no, NO.
“Come on,” Xiao said. “We got bigger fishes to fry.”
Quinn bit back her anger and climbed into the Dodge. She hadn’t completely sat down when Xiao pressed the accelerator and the vehicle took off. They passed the spot where she had last seen Ringo, and Quinn expected him to pop out for one final good-bye and was ready to unlo
ad the fresh magazine into him, but there were no signs of him.
Why aren’t you dead? You should be dead.
Fresh air flooded the front seats through the bullet holes that stitched the front windshield, and when Quinn glanced over her shoulder, she saw more of them in the back glass. The car’s upholstery was shredded, though Xiao looked unharmed despite driving with just one hand and apparently having braved a torrent of gunfire.
“You good?” Xiao asked.
“No,” Quinn said, and gritted her teeth.
“Good enough.”
“Where’d you get the grenades?”
“Under your seat.”
Quinn leaned over and reached down. There was a small black box clearly designed to fit into the available space along with a handle that she pulled on. The lid popped open as soon as the case cleared the seat, and Quinn counted three rows of three grenades each, with two missing.
“Porter’s like one of your Boy Scouts,” Xiao said. “He’s always prepared.”
Quinn glanced at the rearview mirror, hoping to see Ringo peek his head out of the darkness. But there was nothing back there except Mary’s house, and Mary in her living room…
Everyone who helps me dies. Who’s next?
The neighborhood around them was impossibly quiet, even though most of the houses had turned on their lights. Their owners were wisely keeping inside their homes, but Quinn could see a few brave souls peeking out from behind window curtains.
“Was he the one?” Xiao asked.
“Who?”
“The one you were chasing like Wile E. Coyote back there. Was he the one who killed your friend?”
Quinn nodded, but didn’t trust herself to speak any further. The boiling rage had started to extinguish itself little by little, but she was still staring at the side mirror waiting to get another glimpse of Ringo.
Somewhere back there in the shadows, mocking her…
“The good news is, you’ll be seeing him again very soon,” Xiao said.
Good, Quinn thought. Good…
Xiao was about to take another turn when there was a flash in the distance, coming from, as far as Quinn could tell, the other side of the city. It was some kind of detonation—something big had gone off—and it seemed to spit upward into the sky in the shape of a brilliant white mushroom cloud, brightening the dark universe as it climbed and expanded.
“Porter?” Quinn asked.
“Porter,” Xiao nodded.
Quinn leaned forward and watched the brilliant flash continue to brighten the dark sky, and thought, What the hell have I gotten myself into?
Chapter 22
TERRORISM HITS HOME. HUNDREDS FEARED DEAD scrolled along the bottom of the TV screen while a reporter with perfect hair looked somberly into the camera. A caption under the feed read: LIVE FROM DOWNTOWN.
Footage of a crater north of downtown shot from a circling helicopter played in the upper right corner. The camera was too high up to make out details, but it was easy to imagine the chaos at ground level. She’d seen footage of terrorist bombings before, but those were always exercises in objective study.
This…was too personal.
This…was now.
Quinn stared at the screen, not sure what it was exactly she was feeling.
Porter had done that. He had left her at Mary’s after dropping off Xiao to go do that.
Why? Because that was what he does.
“Don’t believe everything they tell you. Especially when it comes to Porter,” Mary had said last night.
But she was wrong, because there were things about Porter that was now proven correct. Xiao had confirmed this was what he had returned to the States to do.
You did this, Porter. You did this.
HUNDREDS FEARED DEAD screamed at her from the ticker at the bottom of the screen.
So why wasn’t she more…angry? Filled with righteous indignation? What did it say about her that she was almost…numb (?) by what she was seeing? Things would have been different twenty-four hours ago, never mind a week ago before the operation at Gary Ross’s nightclub changed everything.
This morning she wasn’t sure.
About this, about anything—about everything.
She glanced back at Xiao on the other side of the room. The other woman had taken off her jacket and was checking on her bandaged left shoulder using a small piece of broken glass propped up against a desk. There was some blood on the gauze, but not enough that Xiao looked worried. Or maybe that was a product of Porter’s “magic” pills.
Her face was a little paler than when Quinn first saw her, but for someone who’d had a metal rod shoved through, then pulled out of her not more than ten hours ago, Xiao looked remarkably healthy. The pot of coffee they had boiled using a propane kettle probably helped a little bit, but Quinn had no doubt most of the “cure” was from what Porter, then Mary later, had given her last night.
They were on the first floor of a warehouse about fifty miles from Mary’s. One of the many safe houses Porter had stashed across the city, according to Xiao. But then how safe could it really be? Mary’s was supposed to have been a safe location, too.
The Charger was parked on the other side of the building and filled up some of the empty spaces, but the warehouse was wide enough they could have parked a dozen more vehicles and still had room left for her and Xiao, along with the TV and the old wooden desk it sat on. Oil stains covered the concrete floor, and the walls were solid sheets of metal. There was a second floor with some offices, but there were no overt indicators what the place had been used for before they showed up.
“Who owns this place?” Quinn asked.
Xiao had picked up her jacket and was shrugging it gingerly back on. “Porter has a lot of friends. They supply him with things he needs. This is one of those things. If you tried to trace it, you’d end up with a shell account in the Caymans.”
“Mary was one of them. His friends.”
“I’ve only met her a couple of times over the years, but she was a good woman. As brave as they come, knowing what she knew.”
“She asked me about the Sons of Porter. If I was one of them.”
“What did you say?”
“The truth. ”
Xiao nodded. “The truth is always a good policy. Until it isn’t.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
The other woman smiled. “You will.”
“Tell me about them. The Sons.”
“What do you wanna know?”
“Do they actually exist?”
“Only if you look into very specific dark corners of the web. They’re smart; at least, the ones that want to stay alive. Talking about Porter, about the things he’s done—or the things they say he’s done—automatically puts you on a list. People have disappeared for less.”
She remembered what Porter had told her back at Gary Ross’s nightclub:
“They’re going to come after you. They’re going to want to find out everything I said and did in this room. And when they’re done with you, they’re going to kill you. I’m sorry, but you’ll be on your own. Good luck.”
And he had been right. They had come after her. First at the hospital, then Ringo had taken her to Hofheinz to find out everything she might have kept from them. She had become a loose end, just as Gary had been. Except somewhere after meeting Hofheinz, things had changed.
“Give it a rest,” the driver had said in the alley. “They want you alive, but it doesn’t have to be in one piece.”
Like with Porter last night, she kept that last part from Xiao.
“How many of them are there?” Quinn asked. “These SOPs.”
“Depends on who you ask,” Xiao said. “There’s as few as a couple and as many as a few hundred. I’ve been trying to get Porter to bring them into the fold, but he doesn’t think it’s a good idea.”
“He didn’t want to bring me in, either.”
“No, he didn’t.”
“Why?”
&nbs
p; “Simple answer: Porter has trust issues.”
“What’s the complicated answer?”
“He has every reason to have trust issues.”
Quinn waited for Xiao to expand on that, and when she didn’t, Quinn said, “So you know where to find them. These SOPs.”
“Message boards, chat rooms, dark nets, et cetera. Contrary to what you might have heard, the paranoid ones don’t all hide in bunkers without Internet access. A lot of them have devoted so much time to this stuff they’re smarter about how the web works than your average YouTube-obsessed teen. I’ve been in contact with a few on and off over the years. Nice bunch of blokes, if you can get them to drop their paranoia. But then it’s not really paranoia if they’re actually out to get you, is it?”
“I wouldn’t know anything about that.”
Xiao chuckled. “Of course not.”
“So why hasn’t Porter brought them in? It seems like he could use as many allies as he could get.”
“We have plenty of allies. They just aren’t the most active types and prefer to donate money and secret slush funds and, of course, empty buildings that officially no one owns. Besides, Porter doesn’t trust them. The SOPs, I mean. He’s got a point, for the most part; a lot of them haven’t been vetted yet, and as we all know, all it takes is one bad apple to spoil the whole bunch.”
“Vetted? Like how you let me run around out there on my own before finally making contact?”
“I had to be sure.”
“Of what?”
“That you had what it takes to face the truth.”
“Are you? Sure?”
“You’re here, aren’t you?”
Quinn grunted. But she had to admit, Xiao’s honesty was preferable to Porter’s constant dodging or his ability to answer questions without actually answering them.
“I thought they worshipped him,” Quinn said. “The SOPs.”
“I wouldn’t go that far. More like they see him as a symbol—someone who represents the truth.”
“So what is the truth?”
“You’ll find out soon enough.”
“When?”
“Soon.”
Quinn sighed, thought, She’s just like Porter after all, and turned back to the TV.