His words stop me though. His plan had a wild card, a joker. “We have her” and I look up the street and sure enough, Risina is out of the driver’s side with a gun to her head.
Holding the pistol is Carla.
Carla, who I listened to for hours as she poured her heart out regarding her husband’s betrayal, whom I believed whole-heartedly, whose story I swallowed like a spoonful of fucking ice cream and maybe that’s the part I misjudged the most about my rust, my diminished abilities. I thought my killing skills had dropped, the physical skills, but it’s the mental part that has to be exercised to stay finely tuned . . . the ability to read faces, gestures, voices, lies. I thought I was in shape, but I’m faced with my failure now; I was played like a fool and my sand castle crashed down, stomped on by the ugly woman with the hound-dog face and the black heart.
She’s too far away to attempt a shot and Spilatro sneers as he aims his gun in my direction.
“What say we all get in the car and take a trip?”
He gestures toward the taxi.
“I thought you didn’t like confrontation up close and personal.”
“You shouldn’t believe everything you hear from hostile witnesses.”
I nod, the Glock heavy in my hand.
Spilatro smiles, his voice hitting that fingernails-on-a-chalkboard pitch. “I told you I was smarter than—“
I shoot him in the head, the bullet slamming into his right eye.
His gun goes off, a finger spasm, but I don’t hear it, don’t even wait to see Spilatro drop. My mental game may be lagging but my ability to hit a man at fifteen feet will never flag, and I sprint directly at Carla, my focus on only her, as everything else fades away. I don’t feel the pavement under my feet, don’t feel the wind in my face, don’t feel the wetness searing the edges of my eyes. She’s far away, too far away, why did I park so fucking far? Why did I bring Risina? Why didn’t I—
Carla blanches, then shoves Risina into the car and is behind the wheel and I see her cold-cock Risina with the butt of her gun, one, two, three times, wham, wham, wham, a blur, a whipsaw, and Risina’s face is bloody and out and she’s slumped and the engine cranks and I shoot into the windshield which spiders but the car launches into a left turn, tires screaming, engine thundering.
Only then do I realize I’m bleeding, shot in the chest by Spilatro’s involuntary finger jerk.
I don’t know how to . . . won’t know how to find her if she escapes with Risina.
Wheeling on a dime, I sprint back to the taxi with the damaged front end, the old Crown Vic that Spilatro drove into the Tercel, and I’m in the driver’s seat and behind the wheel and the engine is still running. My breath is a bit shallow like I’m trying to suck air in through a straw but I’ll be damned if I’m going to drop. I will not drop. Not now. Not when someone put a plug in me with a lucky shot after he was already dead.
I catch a flash of beige streaking through a gap in warehouses a block away and hear the bass blast of a big rig’s horn followed by a screech of brakes and tires locking up as they cling to asphalt. Whatever happened slowed Carla’s escape and may be my only hope because I don’t have a plan anymore, certainly don’t have one for Carla, and as soon as she shakes me she’ll kill Risina, I know it, and I won’t let that happen, can’t let that happen. She might’ve thought better of holding a hostage and already finished the job, but fuck if I’m going to think about that . . .
I throw the taxi into a hard right to chase the sound of the semi’s horn and as I whip behind the industrial plant, I just have time to see my rental car untangle itself from the left bumper of a cannery big rig.
I don’t know what parts of Carla’s story were bunk but I’m guessing she hasn’t spent a lot of time as hunted rather than hunter, because she’s panicking at the exact moment when she should have calmly made her getaway, disappeared around a corner and then I would have been lost.
The taxi has a fractured bumper and the alignment is pulling to the right but the engine is still functioning and the wheel responds to my jerks. I’ve spent the last few years with gunsights on me and despite the pain in my chest, despite the way my right arm is shutting down, hanging uselessly, the bullet wound worse than I thought, goddamn, I’m glad to be pursuing, chasing, closing, hunting. At least I have that. If I’m going to die, I’m going to die on offense.
I saw her knock Risina unconscious, and that image—that visual of this haggard woman repeatedly pounding Risina in the head with the butt of her gun—will sustain me until I catch Carla and kill her, bullet in my chest be damned.
The rental sedan blows through a red light and I don’t hesitate, don’t brake, just keep the accelerator pinned like I’m trying to stomp the pedal into the street. The taxi sways all over the road like a bird with a clipped wing and I hug the middle of the asphalt steadily, closing the distance with every swerve Carla makes.
She brakes into a hard right at the next intersection, swinging wide, and I’m able to cut the corner and narrow the gap between us to the length of a car. A UPS truck pulls out into our path and Carla swerves around it while I shoot the gap on the other side and when we bullet past the truck, I emerge right on her bumper.
Risina’s head rises in the Taurus’s passenger seat as she regains her senses.
No.
No no no no no no no.
Stay down, play dead, pretend to be out, don’t call attention to yourself. Don’t dangle bait in front of a desperate animal.
I wish these thoughts straight into Risina’s brain, but she doesn’t get the message. I see her head wobble and then her face turns towards Carla in the driver’s seat. Even at eighty miles per hour, I can see this taking place through the back windshield as clearly as if I were in the front row of a stage play. Risina slowly comprehending her position. Carla quickly deciding she has a better chance of losing me if she doesn’t have to deal with a living, breathing passenger. You can’t keep a wild dog near by if you don’t want to get bit. She raises her pistol to shoot Risina in the face at close range.
I upshift and tag her bumper just as she pulls the trigger. The gun jerks and fires, blowing out the rear passenger window. Startled into sobriety, Risina launches for Carla’s face, going for her eyes with her fingernails leading the way.
I plow into the sedan’s bumper again and this time our cars lock up and spin and twist and crumple and the world turns weightless before a blackness drops over me as suddenly as if a bag were thrown over my head.
The car is smoking and buckled but there are no emergency lights strobing through my eyelids, no sirens pounding my eardrums, so the collision must’ve just happened and though I was out momentarily, it must not have been for long. The taxi is upright, still centered on all four tires though it must’ve flipped at least once. The pain in my chest is pure heat, like someone is holding an iron to the spot, and I can’t so much as raise my elbow or curl the fingers of my right hand. Whatever damage the bullet caused was exacerbated by the wreck, and patches of light swim in and out of my vision like a swarm of gnats.
Out. I have to climb out of the car.
My door won’t budge, but the window is gone. Half the breakaway glass is in my hair, on my face, in my lap. With my good arm, I hoist myself through the opening while I bite my lip to keep from losing consciousness. Somehow, I pull myself into a sitting position, half in and half out of the car, then look around and spot the rental sedan on its back, tires up, rocking on its spine like a dog submissively showing its belly, overpowered.
Risina emerges from the passenger window and simultaneously, Carla crawls out of the driver’s side, all elbows and knees, a clutch of metal in her right hand. She’s managed to hold on to her pistol.
They both rise to their feet at the same time, body and shadow, mirror images, only the inverted wreck between them to throw off the symmetry.
Carla raises her pistol, a look of disbelief, of exasperation, of disgust on her face, and I spill out of the taxi, stumble, find my feet, no weapon, no gun, nothing, just an impossible gap, a gulf, the beginning and end of life between us. I charge Carla like a demon, and I don’t hear my voice but I know I’m screaming, and I don’t hear my footsteps but I know I’m running as fast as I’ve ever run, and the gun still points at Risina who stands like an offering waiting for the sacrifice, resigned to die fifteen feet from the barrel.
“Carla!” I shout as loud as a cannon, but I know I’ll never reach her in time.
As though I willed it to be, the mutt-faced woman swings the revolver toward me and Risina anticipates the distraction and closes on her like a pouncing cat and the gun goes off, but the bullet ricochets off the pavement near my feet before it spins off to God knows where.
Risina tackles Carla to the ground and drives her elbow into the woman’s jaw while her other hand wrenches the gun from her grasp.
I have thirty more feet to go before I can help. From my periphery, I see vans race up from various directions, insects swarming an open wound, black vans, unmarked, at least four of them but how can I be sure? I feel like I’m moving underwater now, swimming, hallucinating.
Twenty more feet and Risina straddles Carla and drives her elbow like a piston again and again into Carla’s nose. Wham, wham, wham.
The vans blow past me and screech to a halt in the intersection.
Ten more feet and Risina levels Carla’s gun. Men spill out of the van just as I arrive, suited men, dark men, and Risina points the weapon directly into Carla’s face and pulls the trigger.
The concussive sound of the gunshot is like a bomb going off as two men sweep me off my feet in a dead run and my head hits the ground and the world snuffs out as dark as death.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
W
ould you listen to a story told by a dying man? You’ve been with me this long. I owe you. I owe . . .
The bullet is out of my chest, and clean dressing and a suture are packed over the wound, but the right side of my body is numb. An oxygen mask covers my nose and mouth, but I still can’t seem to suck in enough air. A light shines in my face, but I can’t see past the bulb and whatever that damn machine is that pings with each heartbeat is pinging slowly, irregularly, a submarine’s sonar that can’t seem to locate an enemy.
It takes all my energy to twist my head to the side. I’m not in a hospital, that much is clear. This is a makeshift medical room that looks like it was cobbled together in a dilapidated warehouse. Piles of what appear to be sewing machines are stacked in a corner next to discarded reams of fabric. A few folding tables line the far wall. A leg is twisted on one and it leans over like a disabled man missing a crutch. Sewing machines seem fitting for some reason I can’t quite put together. My thoughts are jumbled, like I’m trying to read the contents of a folded letter through an envelope held up to the light.
The bed I’m lying atop isn’t a bed, just another folding table with a mattress stuck on it. The IV I’m hooked up to and the pinging machine look authentic but what do I know? I haven’t spent much time in hospitals.
Risina. Did I see her shoot Carla in the face at close range? Did I pass out before that? Something keeps shaking my brain. She wrenched Carla’s gun away, jammed it in the woman’s face, pulled the trigger and then I was pitching sideways like a sailboat tossed in high winds and then ping, ping, ping, here in this warehouse doubling as a clinic and I can’t catch my breath and Risina, ping, Risina, ping, Risina . . .
Footsteps approach and I don’t have the energy to feign unconsciousness. I feel a thumb press my eyelids open and then a penlight shines into my eyes as a man with a tight beard frowns in my face. If I weren’t so drained, if I could even lift my right hand from my side, I might try to wrestle that penlight from his hand and bury it into the side of his neck until his throat lit up like a fucking runway, but I can’t seem to muster the strength.
“Can you talk?” he asks after he checks my pulse.
I shake my head, or at least I think I shake my head, and his frown grows more pronounced.
He turns to another man standing over his shoulder, a man I didn’t realize was in the room. “It’s not good.”
“Chances?”
“Fifty-fifty.”
The other man bullies past the first and lowers himself inches from my nose. After a moment’s inspection, he says, “I’d take that bet,” then spins and exits my field of vision, if not the room.
I’ve never seen either man in my life.
I tried to change but I couldn’t. Ping. I thought I’d evolved but I hadn’t. Ping. I thought I could protect her but I couldn’t. Ping. I thought I could end this but I didn’t. Ping.
With each ping, my pulse seems louder, steadier. I can feel it in my throat, the ends of my fingers, my earlobes. I’ve never defaulted on a job, not one, and the only times I’ve failed to make a kill were by my own volition. This isn’t a job, but the path was the same. Someone put my name on paper and I killed him for it. Someone else hired him to do it, “dark men” he called them, and I’m going to kill them all. Every last one of them. If they hurt Risina, if they touched her, they’re all going to die.
My fingertips. Ping.
I can feel the pulse there, yes, and now that I concentrate, I can flex the fingers. They don’t do more than twitch, but they
do
twitch. It’s not much but it’s something. Maybe Spilatro’s bullet didn’t cause as much damage as I presumed, maybe I’m not paralyzed, maybe I’m not going to die.
I owe. I owe . . .
I know that focusing on a goal can increase your chances at recovery, that pledging to see one last relative, one last birthday, one last wedding, one last reunion can help the dying live for days, weeks, months longer than a doctor or surgeon thought possible.
Whatever they did to her, are doing to her, that’s what I have to use to sustain me, to heal me. Hatred I can let grow inside me to replace the pain. Ping. Hatred I can let flow inside me as warm as medicine. Ping. I’m going to kill these motherfuckers, these dark men, and I’m not going to die before I get the chance to bury them.