Open Chains

by D. F. Bailey

  Then he heard the first bolt fly. Fissht.

  The Russian appeared to feel a ripple in the air as the arrow flashed past his cheek. He turned as the bolt shot through the open doorway and nailed one of the posts on the kennel across the yard. During the distraction, Finch leveled the AR-15 at Brodie.

  “Drop your weapons.” His voice came out as a murmur. Soft, a mother’s warning to her children.

  The Russian took a moment to come to his senses. He gripped his automatic with both hands, turned toward Finch and prepared to fire.

  Fissht. The second bolt caught him in the nose and penetrated the back of his skull. He let out a light cry, a gasp of surprise, and collapsed on the floor.

  Brodie slumped in front of the chesterfield and fired three shots through the leather upholstery in Finch’s direction. The last bullet struck his right biceps and he tried to suppress a cry. The pain blazed through the length of his arm and into his chest.

  “Fuck.”

  He locked his teeth together, reached over the sofa and threw the AR-15 at Brodie’s head. It grazed his good ear and slid across the floor. To Finch’s surprise, it shot a round that careened against the sink. Must’ve been the bullet in the chamber, he realized.

  “You got nothing left, Finch.” Brodie fired four rounds in Eve’s direction. Then silence.

  Finch realized that Brodie had to reload. He had fifteen, maybe twenty seconds to maneuver — depending on the damage inflicted by the Aussie’s pit bull. Had the dog bites been enough to slow Brodie down? Enough to stop him? The silence ticked past second by second as Brodie fumbled with his bullet magazine. Finch grabbed the kindling ax in his left hand. The blade was four or five inches long, discolored from years of abuse.

  “You all right?” Finch called into the second bedroom.

  “More than,” she said and he knew that she’d prepared another bolt. “Just bring him into range.”

  Right. No more than four feet separated Brodie from Finch, yet they remained hidden from one another. With Brodie concealed below the front of the chesterfield, Finch understood that she couldn’t get a clear shot at him.

  Go. Now. GO! With the hatchet brandished like a tomahawk in his left hand Finch jumped over the sofa. At the same moment he heard the light click of Brodie’s magazine lock into place in his pistol. He stood up to fire but as he raised the gun Finch slashed at his arm — and missed. Then Eve let the next bolt fly. Fissht. The bolt pierced Brodie below the collarbone and spiked through the back of his shoulder blade. The yellow and red fletching at the end of the shaft looked like it had been pinned to his jacket. A medal of honor.

  “Fuck you, bitch!” His face was a fire of rage and he turned toward her, poised to unload his weapon into her body.

  Before he could shoot another round, Finch smashed the butt of the hatchet against Brodie’s wrist and the gun fell from his hand. Then Finch plunged the blade into Brodie’s solar plexus. He felt his hand burning, his arm pulsing with blood. Knowing he had to finish the battle, he tugged the hatchet from Brodie’s chest and in a final thrust, he cut Brodie’s throat just above the trachea. Brodie stood immobile for two or three seconds. Frozen, perfectly balanced on his feet. Then his eyelids fluttered, his mouth released a faint hiss, and a spore of red bubbles formed on his lips as he fell to the floor.

  ※

  Eve slipped Finch’s vest away from his shoulders, tossed it to the floor and unbuttoned his shirt. She made a quick assessment of the bullet wound on his biceps. “Looks like it missed the artery,” she said and coaxed him onto the far end of the chesterfield, three or four feet away from Brodie’s corpse.

  “Stay here,” she commanded and then darted into the bathroom and raked her hand through the medicine cabinet. Nothing. He heard her curse as she rummaged through a second cabinet and then moved into the bedroom where she continued her search.

  “Found it. Just under the bed,” she murmured and returned to the living room with a heavy-duty first aid kit clutched in her arms. “I knew the Aussie would keep something like this on hand.”

  She snapped open the twin lock tabs. The box revealed an array of bandages, a tourniquet, splints, antibiotic creams, medicines. “Okay, let’s have a closer look at this.” She took his arm in her hands and examined the two holes in his flesh. “Looks like the slug went straight through,” she said. “The blood’s not spurting, so the artery’s good. If you’re lucky, it missed the bone, too. No matter what, we need to get you to a hospital.”

  “Burns like hell,” he said through clenched teeth. Now that the fight was over, the pain began to blaze through his arm. He suppressed a cry and ground his teeth together.

  “I’m sure.” She tugged on a pair of latex gloves and applied an antiseptic cream to both sides of the gunshot wound. She applied two compresses to stop the slow bleeding, then bound his arm with several turns of three-inch gauze bandage, cut it, and taped the loose end in place. “I don’t see any morphine, but it looks like he’s got some Tylenol Three in here. Want some?”

  “With codeine?”

  She nodded.

  “Gimme two. And a bucket of water.” He tipped his chin toward the sink.

  “Me too.” She found two tall glasses, filled them from the tap, drank from one and passed the other tumbler to Finch. “It’s warm.”

  He took a long drink. Then he placed two tabs of Tylenol on his tongue and knocked them back with another gulp. When he felt more stable, he looked at her and held her eyes in a steady gaze. “Fuck,” he whispered. “We made it.”

  She nodded. “Fuckin’ right we did.”

  “You got your cell phone?”

  “No.” She shook her head. “It’s in my purse.”

  “Mine’s in my vest.”

  She stepped past Brodie’s body to where she’d tossed the vest.

  “Inside pocket,” he said.

  She dug out the phone and raised her eyebrows. “Think we’ll get a connection out here?”

  “Worth a try.”

  She gave him a doubtful look and punched in the three numbers.

  Within five seconds she heard a woman’s voice. “9-1-1. What’s your emergency?”

  ※ — SIXTEEN — ※

  EVE WOKE WITH a gasp. She sat up and clutched the blankets to her breasts. Not again, she murmured to herself. The same dream continued to haunt her two or three nights a week. Stalked her with unrelenting persistence. If the dream were a person, she’d get a restraining order against it. Must remain at least a mile away at all times. Then the stark realization came back to her. You killed a human being.

  The dream had no story, no plot or rising tension. Not quite a nightmare, it always arrived in a shroud of heavy mist. The cloud enveloped her so that she could never identify her surroundings. That’s when the ghost appeared. His image arose as if it were a Russian nesting doll popping out of itself, endlessly coming back to life and confronting her again and again. A Matryoshka, that’s what they’re called. Having this word in her mind seemed to calm her. It was a toy. A harmless novelty.

  She glanced at Will, his fists balled together under his chin. Two weeks after their return from Ashland and they were both still feeling it. The horror, the anxiety, and this weird, guilt-fueled relief. They alone survived Brodie’s madness. Everyone else was dead. Why? How? When she realized that she might never find the answers, she decided the only solution was to forget the questions. If only it were so easy.

  She dragged herself from bed and made her way to the bathroom. As she showered she recalled the intensive interviews she and Finch had endured. First with the Ashland Police, then with the FBI in their San Francisco office on Golden Gate Avenue. What would normally have been a murder investigation had been downgraded to an inquiry. Brodie was dead, and all the witnesses to his crimes had become his victims. At times she felt as if she could tell the FBI any half-cocked story and they would have to accept it at face value. On the other hand, both she and Finch knew that the FBI inquest would be exhaustive. They wou
ld unearth testimonies and arcane data that she could never imagine, facts that had to be consistent with her narrative of events. The one — the only — truth that she and Finch agreed to conceal concerned the man she still called Nine. Fuzzy, Michael Jahnke, whatever name he bore — he had simply disappeared. To remain a mystery forever. She hoped.

  Every morning she and Finch sat together at the breakfast table. Sometimes they ate in silence, other days they couldn’t stop talking about the battle they’d endured. Over the first two weeks, Eve imagined that she bore the heavier load. Then she realized that he simply possessed more efficient powers of compartmentalization.

  “It was horrible. Devastating. I know that,” he said. “But you have to take the trauma, seal it in a box and bury it in the back of your mind.”

  “You can do that. Just like that?”

  “I’m not saying it’s easy. But, yeah, you can do it.” He leaned forward and caressed her right hand. The nails on her bruised fingers had healed. “It’s like your Matryoshka dolls. Take everything that happened that day. Everything. Put it in one of the nesting dolls and bury it.”

  She let out a breath of air and withdrew her hand.

  “Listen. You have to use what’s given to you, Eve. Did you consider that these dreams you’re having, that they might be your subconscious trying to rescue you? The hollow dolls are the perfect receptacle. Shove all this psychic garbage inside them and be done with it.”

  She sat a moment in silence. Maybe it was true. She never imagined that the haunting dreams could provide her salvation. Over the following week, whenever the dream returned, she visualized wrapping the dead Russian into a tight ball and stuffing him into one of the dolls. At the same time, she returned to her daily practice of yoga. She encouraged Will to join her and every evening they transformed their living room into a candle-lit yoga studio. After a few days they began to make love again. Soon the ecstasy she found in her body became a craving for life. She started to cook again. She went back to work at The Post. And one day, she realized, she’d finally returned to the living world.

  ※

  “Do you … remember … Tony’s uncle?” Finch struggled to fit his words between his wheezing as they jogged around another corner on the chip trail that led up to Immigrant Point Overlook.

  “You mean the man we met at the funeral?”

  Eve panted through her open mouth as Finch struggled to regain control of his breathing. Today was the first time that he’d tied on his running shoes since they’d returned to San Francisco. Two weeks ago, Eve had resurrected her running routine and had almost returned to form. Five miles in thirty minutes. But now that she’d convinced him to join her for a jog through The Presidio trails, she cut her pace so that he could keep up.

  “Yeah. His Uncle Tom,” he said.

  They reached the spot where the vista overlooked the lush green salal that cascaded down to Lincoln Boulevard and Baker Beach below. This was the breach in the Pacific coastline that led to the Golden Gate and San Francisco Bay. But apart from the few cars gliding along the scenic drive and the distant sailboats driven by the light wind, the view was similar to what the Ohlone people would have seen thousands of years ago. An unimpeded wilderness paradise.

  “Let’s take a break. Smell the roses.”

  “For sure.” She leaned forward and pulled the top of her socks over the tongue and collar of her Nikes.

  “I was thinking about Nine,” he said when his breathing finally settled. “Were you with me in the funeral chapel when Tom mentioned his baseball cap?”

  She studied him a moment, a puzzled look on her face. “What baseball cap?”

  “Tom said that when Nine came to visit Tony, he forgot his baseball cap. He left it behind.” His eyes followed a sailboat tacking toward the bay. “But it’s the way he said it. As if he wanted to give the cap to me. So if I saw him, I could pass it along to Nine.”

  “Maybe he just wanted to get rid of it.”

  “Probably. I guess it’d be a constant reminder of Tony’s death.”

  “So.” She continued to examine his face, the strong jawline that angled above his neck. The nick in his ear lobe. “Why are you bringing this up now?”

  He turned to face her. “It may be the missing link.”

  She exhaled a mute laugh. “Okay mister riddle master, get to the point.”

  He smiled. “You still have the cigarette butts we collected above the rocks where Turino’s body was found?”

  She nodded, a distant look in her eyes.

  “Okay, so we never conclusively proved that Nine is Michael Jahnke.” He drew his forearm over his face to brush away the sweat dripping from his forehead. “But since Jahnke was completely bald, there should be some skin contact DNA on the inside sweatband of the cap.”

  “So if the DNA on the sweatband matches one of the cigarette filters, we’d have proof.” Now Eve turned her gaze to the sailboats approaching the bay. “Even better if the DNA on the bullet casings is a match.”

  “Right.” Finch could see a smile forming on her lips. “Then we’d be certain that Nine is Jahnke.”

  The first of Brodie’s men who’d tried to kill them back on Mayne Island, she thought. It still felt like yesterday. “But it’s not enough,” she said. “We need to get some of Tony’s residual DNA, too.”

  “Like what?”

  “Dunno.” She shrugged. “A comb or hairbrush. So we can match it to the second cigarette butt.”

  “His uncle would have to give something to us.” He shook his head with an air of doubt. “That could be a challenge.”

  “Not for you, it’s not.” Her lips curled into an affectionate smile. “Like everything else you do, darling. Call Tom, then just talk him into it.”

  “You think it’s that simple?”

  “Hey, that’s how you got me into bed the last three nights in a row.”

  Her eager mood lit up his face. She could do that to him. Paint her words with the colors of lust and intimacy.

  “Gotta say, Eve. You’re just an easy lay.”

  “An easy lay! Me?”

  “Yeah. You.”

  She slipped into his arms and, propped together, they began to laugh with such abandon that they could barely stand. As their laughter subsided he kissed her and she wrapped her arms around his neck and surrendered to the moment. The warmth, the passion — their intimate renewal — almost led them to a mid-morning tryst behind the cedar trees. But then reality set in. Brodie, Turino, Sinclair. Nine. The unrelenting drumbeat still drove them forward.

  “You’re very sweaty, you know.” She pulled herself from his embrace and studied his face. A mock frown played on her lips.

  “And you’re not?”

  “Of course not. All right,” she said and tipped her head toward the trail. “Let’s get back. You call Uncle Tom. And I’ll ask Leanne Spratz to run the DNA tests for me. With any luck, she’ll have a complete profile two or three days after I give her the samples.”

  ※

  After he showered and prepared a coffee, Finch called Tony’s uncle Tom Costello from the desk in his writing loft overlooking Alta Street. The old man answered on the third ring. Finch knew there were several ways to steer the conversation, but like all the business interviews he did, he preferred to get to the pertinent facts as soon as possible. In this case — with the circumstances of his nephew’s death now revealed to the world — certain niceties had to be observed.

  “Mr. Costello, this is Will Finch calling. I met you at your nephew’s memorial service.” When Tom Costello failed to respond, Finch added, “At Tony’s service. Up near Sacramento last month.”

  “Oh yes, I remember you. The reporter.” He hesitated. “Are you the one who wrote about this man, Deacon Brodie? About all the killings?”

  Finch suspected that Tom was trying to assemble his memories in some sort of logical sequence. First the tragedy of Turino’s death. Then the possibility that he’d been murdered. Now he was hearing the voice of t
he man who’d exposed the conspiracies in The Post.

  “Yes, that was me.” For a moment Finch wondered if Tom might harbor some grievance or misgivings about the news. Perhaps he felt that Finch had opened an old wound and forced Turino’s family to relive their grief. “I’m sorry if that troubled you or your family.”

  “Well, it hit us pretty hard. But we still don’t know if Tony died by accident, or not. What do you think now that this story with Deacon Brodie is out?”

  Finch paused to consider the legal dangers he faced if he disclosed any knowledge of Tony Turino’s death — and Nine’s role in his demise. “Unless the Canadian police say otherwise, I think most people are going to accept their report as it stands,” he said.

  “I guess you’re right.” Tom said, and Finch could almost see the old man nodding in bewilderment. “It’s always better to know the truth, I suppose. Last month two FBI officers interviewed us. We had to go through the whole thing all over again.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.” Finch said and decided to shift the direction of the conversation toward the FBI inquiry. “Was that with Agents McClaugherty and Wishart?”

  “Yes. Yes, that’s their names. A man and woman. You know them?”

  “Yeah. More than I’d care to.” Finch laughed to suggest that he and Tom had survived the same ordeal. “They gave me quite a grilling.”

  “I imagine they would’ve.” He paused to clear his throat with a light cough. “So how can I help you Mr. Finch?”

  How can I help you. There was the deal-maker. Now that Tom had offered to help, it meant he’d come on-side.

  “Please, just call me Will.”

  “All right. And you can call me Tom.”

  “Great. So Tom, I’m trying to sew together a few loose threads that are left hanging.”