The Postmortal (32 page)

The address we were given was located off Dolley Madison Boulevard, in an office-park compound in a cul-de-sac. The street was packed with plug-ins—on the grass, double-parked against the sweep of the curb. Ernie drove another mile and found a place to leave the plug-in on the shoulder. I stashed one gun in the back of my waistband and tucked another into my boot. We both put on our riot gear. There was an arepa stand nearby. I bought one, along with an orange soda. As the vendor handed me the soda, a vagrant ran by and intercepted the exchange, running away with the drink. He chugged it immediately. He stared down my arepa. I stuffed it into my mouth as fast as I could, felt the roof of my mouth burn, and spat it back out. The vagrant ran and scooped up the chewed-up food for his own. He saw the rifle in my hand and the license hanging from my lanyard. He didn’t care.

We walked through a mess of tents and grills to the main entrance of the compound and waited. The grid shut down, and I saw the stoplight on the boulevard go out, though I don’t remember if it was functional to begin with. A man walked out of the gate five minutes later, and we accosted him inside the entrance bay. We didn’t need to say anything for him to know what we required. He keyed in the code for the second door, and we were inside the wall.

The office park was a series of somber town-house rows built up ten stories high. All gray, drab on top of drab. The rooms inside were divided down to nothing, like little cubbyholes, each with its own pathetic little window. I checked the address. It was five houses down. Ernie moved along the wall and stayed low. I saw a brown wooden fence, scaled it, and found myself in an empty backyard outside a dentist’s office. In front of me was a narrow stretch of green. The dentist, framed in one of the windows, stopped his drilling and stared at me, then went back about his business. I gingerly walked down four houses. A small partition jutted out between them, which made for excellent cover. I saw no one in our target’s window. Ernie came up on the WEPS.

“Confirmed?” he asked me.

“Confirmed.”

“Okay.”

I heard Ernie crash through the front door. No shots were fired. Two seconds later a short, fat, bearded fellow came running out of the back door, armed and barefoot. He saw me and raised his gun—a very big, shiny, chunky handgun. I shot him in the gut, and he lazily somersaulted to the ground, as if tripped by a tree root. He shot the ground as he fell, and a sharp vapor of gunpowder enshrouded him for a moment. The smoke crackled in my teeth. I waited as Ernie came out of the back door and kept his rifle on Mr. Lewis. Mr. Lewis didn’t move. The gun smoke cleared, and I advanced on the body, kicking his gun away. It was a Desert Eagle. A show gun. He wouldn’t have been able to hit his neighbor’s house with it. Mr. Lewis was alive, his doughy torso expanding in and out. I rolled him over. Grass clippings stuck to his bullet wound, and blood rose from the opening like the head of a small animal. The bulb of plasma broke like a bubble and ran down his side in thick streaks, like the legs inside an expensive glass of wine. He tried to spit in my face, but it landed back on his chest and melted into his black T-shirt. I hit Record on the WEPS. Ernie ran back in to secure the house. Neighbors gathered at their windows and stared.

I knelt beside Mr. Lewis. “I need confirmation that you are Mr. DeFors Lewis of Tysons Corner, Virginia.”

“Fuck you,” he said.

“Do you have a license on you?”

“Fuck you.”

“Do you have family members you wish to notify of your death?”

“Fuck you.”

“My records indicate that you are the father of Darienne Lewis of 2309 Cribbage Drive in Palo Alto, California. Would you like your soft assets transferred to her? There is no taxable penalty on this transfer.”

He thought about it for a second. “Fuck you.”

“Dude, it’s your kid. If you don’t will your things to her right now, the government is allowed to seize them. You don’t want that.”

He relented. “Fine. You have my approval. Now fuck you.”

“We’re not done,” I told him. “You were tried in absentia for the bombing of a Remo’s Tanning Salon in Sterling, Virginia, on May 3, 2077—a blast that injured five people. You were assigned a public defender named Ken Blodgett. Mr. Blodgett presented your case before the Loudoun County district court, defending you to the utmost of his ability. A jury of your peers found you guilty on February 16, 2079. The judge sentenced you to death, and JonesPlus End Specialists, Inc., LLC, was hired to carry out your hard end specialization. This is your final chance to make a public statement. An admission of guilt and remorse will be streamed to Judge Harry Edwards, who sentenced you. Should Judge Edwards be satisfied with your statement, he may see fit to reward your beneficiaries with a one-time $1,800 tax rebate. Would you like to make a public statement of guilt and remorse?”

“I fucking hate you.”

“It’s your daughter. You have no control over your outcome, but you do have some semblance of control over hers. Your public statement can be just to her, if you like. We can send it to her.”

He blew snot out of his nose. “You take your tax rebate, and your little goodbye e-card idea, and you fucking
die
.”

“Okay.”

I turned off the recording, aimed the rifle at his forehead, and gave the trigger a squeeze. When you fire a gun, the trigger seems difficult to pull, in a physical sense. You have to squeeze it hard, and the second it gives way is when the bang comes, well before you’ve brought the trigger all the way back. That quick release surprises me every time. I heard a muted thump, like a firecracker set off under a pillow. I watched as the blood and gelatin blew out of Mr. Lewis’s cranium in a sudden flare, like flames from a booster rocket. Little pieces of his skull scattered like ocean plastic on the loose grass. Shreds of his scalp ripped open and hung loose. He looked at me, and his eyes were once again those of a newborn. Seeking. Longing to be told everything about everything. All the hate and misplaced righteousness gone.

Ernie came back out with a box of crude PVC pipes and other bomb-making materials. There were also two handguns in his stash. We sealed everything in Ziploc freezer bags and labeled them. I took the official file photos of Lewis’s corpse.

“There’s nothing else inside,” Ernie said. “Just a lot of books. And it’s a rental, obviously. No real estate paperwork for you.”

“Did you check his fridge?”

“For what? Nitroglycerine?”

“No. Water. I’m thirsty. I’m gonna get a drink and see if he has anything else to eat. Call Mosko for a pickup.”

He had bottled water in the fridge, but the setting was so cold that the water had partially crystallized. I took a bottle out anyway and squeezed it until the sides of the plastic hit the iceberg inside. I drank all the liquid in a single gulp. I took the rest for the plug-in.

The Eden Center compound is accessible from our East Falls Church compound via a network of narrow underground tunnels that can only accommodate foot traffic. It was made hastily by a co-op of Vietnamese store owners who didn’t want to lose business from our part of town when it got sealed off. They dug tunnels to us and to compounds all over Arlington and McLean. The tunnels serve as an underground version of Seven Corners.

I like walking down there. The tunnels are little more than giant gopher holes, with halogens strung along the top, and a constant procession of people moving through them like cells in a blood vessel. But the exposed earth is cool to the touch, and I like to stop and press my body against it on days like yesterday, while letting everyone else slip past. It feels like dipping your hand in a spring.

For two decades, Matt has ordered group lunch for the firm, and it’s always been a mixed blessing. He constantly asks what we should have for lunch, then shoots down any idea we throw his way. Thus lunch becomes a stalemate that can drag on well past two in the afternoon. I often end up bolting at twelve thirty to get something on my own, because I know damn well that three o’clock can come and go without a morsel in sight.

On Wednesdays the Eden Center plug-in lot becomes home to a market where you can buy fruit and vegetables and dried goods and even some meats. You can get dried fish and shrimp, but they cost a fortune. The Four Sisters restaurant has a booth that sells summer rolls: rice-flour wrappers stuffed with bean curd, mint, noodles, and scallions. These were in my head as I walked through the damp tunnel and up to the surface of the shopping plaza. I had my gun on me and my ES license dangling from my neck.

I walked up the muddy ramp until linoleum emerged beneath my feet and I was in the center’s generic atrium. Through glass doors, the market beckoned. I walked through them and found myself outside in the bustling lunch-hour chaos. Workers crisscrossing the pavement, carrying pallets of cabbage on their heads. White-collar workers standing with coffee and sandwiches, looking for a place to sit and eat. An abundance of little homemade jewelry booths that couldn’t possibly turn a profit. I zeroed in on the Four Sisters booth and got in line for food. I opened the WEPS screen and texted Matt to ask if he wanted anything. He told me to go screw myself.

I clicked off and saw a flash of strawberry on the edge of my vision—a crop of hair that stood out against the mostly Vietnamese crowd like a golf umbrella. I turned to it and saw the back of a woman wearing a tight jean skirt and red tank. An impossible body. A slinky gait that begged you to follow in its majestic swagger. A sashaying creature that inspired pure want. I abandoned the line and walked behind her, bobbing and weaving through the commingling rush of workers and eaters. I took out the WEPS and got a snapshot for a reverse ID. The proportions were a match. She stopped at a coffee stand one hundred yards away from me and waited patiently for a drink. I walked in a zigzag, flowing with the pedestrians, charging left and right, and slowly getting closer, never moving above three o’clock in her line of sight.

But I fucked up and walked directly into a worker schlepping a box of cantaloupes. They bounced to the ground and broke and gushed on the asphalt. I crouched down and helped the worker scoop up the mess, saying nothing. I kept my eyes on the ground for a moment, that one crucial microsecond when I knew people would turn and look. I let it pass, then looked, and she was gone. I popped up and saw a flash of red sailing to the back of the shopping plaza. I broke into a sprint and hurried after her. The Four Sisters restaurant was to the rear left of the plaza, and I saw her rushing for it. I ran through and over and around the masses. A man tried to stop me, and I yelled out “ES! ES! ES!” and the sea parted. She turned and looked at me. Suddenly, we were standing near the Queensboro Bridge, she was blonde, and the eighth floor of 400 East Fifty-seventh Street was being demolished in an instant, my dear friend blown into the atmosphere. Solara Beck gave me the same look she had six decades before: a mix of fear and aggravation I didn’t understand then but know every nuance of today. Here she was, the time between now and when I saw her last flattened like a bug that’s been stepped on.

I ran into the restaurant after her. The entrance was separated from the main dining hall by an oversized aquarium, and I saw the girl running to the back of the hall through a pristine village of seahorses and clown fish and other inedibles. I wove through the enormous round tables to the back. Lu, one of the four sisters—and the only one who speaks English—waved to me as I passed. I waved back. Solara ran out the emergency exit to the parking lot and grease dumpsters at the back. I ran through the door and into a mess of dented plug-ins. She was nowhere to be found. I took out my gun. The back of the plaza extended to my left, and the outside wall of the restaurant kitchen jutted out on the right. I ran along the outside of the kitchen wall and peered around the corner. I saw the girl forty yards ahead, scaling the center’s brick wall. I ran for her. She turned, gun in hand, and fired at me. I hid behind a minivan. She blew out the rear windows and the tires. I looked again and saw that she had made no further progress up the wall. I ran for her, and she threw her gun at me, nailing me in the shoulder. I winced in pain as she got a better hold on the white brick and neared the razor wire on top.

“What are you gonna do when you get up there?” I asked. “That’s razor wire.”

“I’ve fought through worse.”

“You need to come down. I’m not gonna kill you.”

“Fuck you.”

I leapt for her and grabbed hold of her ankle, bringing her back down. She fell on top of me, then gave me a swift kick to the head. She kicked my hand to dislodge the gun, but I kept my grip in spite of the agony. She ran for the opposite side of the parking lot. I got up and followed suit.

She was an excellent runner and clearly spent a good amount of time running in marathons and steeplechases and parkour superstar competitions and anything that required a proficiency in bipedal locomotion. I can’t say the same for myself. The gap between us widened, and I fired into the air to shock her. She stopped, turned, and then went back to sprinting like an Olympian. She fled around the back of the center and up the covered walkways of the front to the main lobby. Bodies in the way slowed her progress as well as mine. She turned to look back, and I kept my eyes square on her. She went in the lobby and down into the earthen tunnels. Now we were moving single file, with stacks of people in front of and behind us. I rudely cut in front of as many as I could, and I saw her stumble as she tried to do likewise, toppling the man in front of her. Catching up to her, I laid a hand on her shoulder to see if she was okay. She pivoted and punched me in the gut. I grabbed her upper arm violently, like a parent frustrated with a child, and shouldered her into the wall. We held up traffic, and complaints started coming down the line. With my gun barrel now firmly planted in her back, we turned around, and I led her out into daylight in the most uneasy two-hundred-yard walk of my life. We went behind the Eden Center. She turned and slugged me again, just for good measure. I held firm and kept the gun on her.