Last Days of the Condor (32 page)

Condor thrust the .45 in his belt, grabbed the Glock from Faye, and with Merle muscled and ran the sobbing, blood-matted-haired younger woman from the park.

Nobody's shooting at us! Still nobody shooting at us!

Sirens cut the air.

Their shoes scraped the pavement of Lot Eleven: Chris's car. Condor has the keys. Wet boys should be right behind them, a combat team in
move-shelter-shoot
attack mode. Condor shoved Merle and Faye into the backseat of Chris's car, dove behind the steering wheel, keyed the engine to life.

Any second! The bad guys will start shooting from behind us any second!

He slammed the gearshift into
REVERSE
, punched the gas/stomped on the brake. The car shot backwards out of the yellow-striped parking spot—squealed shuddered stopped. Condor jerked the gearshift to
DRIVE
, smashed his foot on the accelerator.

The car rocketed back into its parking spot.

Crashed through the black chain-link fence.

Flew out of Lot Eleven. Tires bounce on the sidewalk, steel scrapes concrete, the car lurches into the road. Cars coming at it from both sides hit their horns and brakes.

Condor and his surviving crew careened toward downtown D.C., their engine-clattering getaway car spewing hot metal & oil-stench black fumes.

 

28

No more forever.

—Chief Joseph

… head my head dead, he's dead why not me, him not him, head …

Faye's right hand blurred into focus as it dropped from her head and like an echo came her realization:
“Blood on my hand.”

Waking from nowhere, Faye felt herself thrown with inertia—

Caught, held, stopped, cradled in the arms of
woman, some woman
Merle.

Backseat, thought Faye. We're sitting,
riding
in the backseat of a car.

And …

Burning bright sunlight glaring blue and white flashes in all the windows.

And …

Sound, no sound, why is there no sound?

Condor is driving.

Like a bat out of hell,
went through her mind, then:
Not bat, he's Condor.

A swerving right-hand turn sucked Faye into a whirlpool of sound:
Car horns/shouts/crying tires/whooshing wind past the open windows
, and hot, sweating …

“Shot him,” Faye heard herself mutter. “They shot him.”

“Faye!” Condor yelled as he cranked the car around a corner. “Can you focus?”

Merle loosened her grip around the wounded woman. Said: “Are you okay?”

“They shot me in the head,” whispered Faye.

She stared at her blood-smeared palm.

Merle kept her from touching her throbbing/burning skull.

“You're okay,” Merle lied. “The bullet just cut along the side of … Gash in your hair, blood yeah, but … It didn't break the bone, go in your head!”

Condor yelled from the driver's seat: “Concussion!”

Merle locked her gaze on Faye's green eyes with their mushrooming black pupils.

“Yeah,” said the older woman who had gray-blond hair that wasn't matted with her own fucking red gore. “Maybe.”

Engine valves clattered. The hurtling car jerked, spasmed.

Faye said: “Stinks, oil, what's burning, what's…”

The car felt like a fighter plane, veered out, traffic
'n' Condor's swerved the car into empty space at curb, but …

Bus stop. We're parked in a bus stop.

Car door opened as Condor disappeared between her eyes and the windshield.

Faye said: “Chris is dead.”

The curbside door beside her flew open.

Condor helped Merle guide Faye from the backseat to the sidewalk. “Yeah, he's dead. We will be, too, if we don't move. You've gotta move, Faye. Come on!”

But no.

Faye felt herself zoom back as if she could see them standing on that sidewalk:

Condor in his black leather jacket, fretting beside her like a trapped raptor.

Merle looking older, terrified.

And her,
me,
a smear of dark red goo mat on my cracked head.

We're in Chinatown.

A grand three-pagodas-topped arch rose over the city street, a faux portal with fake gilt and green friezes of gold-painted calligraphy that could mean anything or nothing. Past the arch, Faye spotted a mammoth redbrick church with a rusted spire stabbing heaven. This early in the morning, this early in spring, this early in tourist season, vendors had yet to crowd the sidewalks in front of Asian restaurants and stores where you could buy plastic Buddhas (standing laughing or
zazen
somber), satin jackets emblazoned with dragons, black
gung fu
slippers, electronic gizmos for every credit card, herbs & spices and bins of red, white & blue souvenirs, postcards for if you still believed in Ben Franklin's snail mail, umbrellas—whatever the shopkeepers could make your heart desire.

“Come on!” said Condor.

But he left it for Merle to take Faye's arm, to help the wounded woman.

Keeping his hands open and dangling by his sides for
gun,
realized Faye.

“Shooters!” muttered Faye as they made her stumble along H Street's sidewalk.

She pawed her belt where …
No gun! Where's my gun!

“Wet boys, the Oppos, where are they, where … where…”

“They're out here.” Condor led the way across H Street, down toward the massive indoor amphitheater for Bruce Springsteen concerts and hockey games. “Gotta be.”

She saw him scanning the air above other sidewalk shufflers.

What, what's he looking for? What
— Cameras, closed-circuit surveillance.

Who's in that closed circuit?

Condor stepped into the doorway of an abandoned store with whitewashed windows bearing a sign:
COMING SOON!

But what,
thought Faye as Condor pulled her into the doorway that was the size of coffin standing on its end:
What soon comes?

“Turn your bloody side away from the street,” he said. “Act like you're crying.”

Faye heard him tell Merle: “That drugstore. Get baby wipes, disinfectant ones. And there, the store next door, whichever, buy a hoodie sweatshirt for her—a big on her!”

All Faye could do was stand in that coffin-sized doorway.

Head throbbing, oh God fire on the right side of my brain!

Breathe. In. Out. Say: “Why haven't they killed us yet?”

“I don't know,” said Condor.

The only time Faye knew was
now,
but there must have been more, because now Merle was here carrying store sacks that had not been before. Faye felt stinging dabs on the right side of her head, pats and
Oww!
pulls of her hair, smelled …
Lemons,
the wipes Merle's using smell of lemons and alcohol and … and …

“Watch out!” Condor pulled Merle away from the woman hidden in the doorway.

Faye jackknifed forward, vomited.

Staggered—stabilized standing in her own shoes by Merle's grip.

Another swirl of nausea, then Faye felt lighter, clearer.

Felt Merle wiping her face, her lips, a swab inside her mouth. The flutter of a wipe falling into the vomit-smelling concrete doorway
fuck littering
. Faye heard Condor tell the older woman:
“Stand beside me facing out, screen us, watch for scanners or shooters.”
Faye felt him take off her backpack. Make sure the pockets of her black coat were empty. He eased that wrap off her. Tossed the coat over the puddle of what had been in her guts. Condor took the holster and ammo pouch for his .45 off her belt.

Then,
oh then,
that weight she'd carried for years rode holstered on her right hip. Energy flowed into her arms, her hands flexed. She helped more than hindered as Condor slid her into the soft sleeves of something, reached around to pull up a zipper, his hand brushing her breasts
Chris kisses no No NO
and then hands on her shoulders turned her around to face the street, see Condor's face,
blink,
and she's
here, now.

Merle washed Faye's face with lemon wipes, tossed them into the rancid doorway, white squares fluttering down to another lifetime's black coat.

She gave a bottle of water to Faye.

Faye filled her mouth, swished it around, spit out what was to the sidewalk.

“Eww!”
Two teenage girls pranced past toward the rest of their lives.

“Okay,” said Faye. She started to nod
yes,
but that hurt far too much.

Condor covered her wounded head with the hood on the sweatshirt she now wore.

Pink. I'm wearing a candy-pink hoodie.

Condor slid his aviator mirror-lensed sunglasses over Faye's eyes.

Waved down a taxi and beckoned for Merle to climb in, help as he guided Faye in. His eyes scanned the street and he jumped in the taxi, told the cabby: “Go!”

Rolling, the taxi's driving us through downtown D.C.

Condor told the taxi driver to take them to the National Zoo.

Faye whispered: “We're going to see the animals.”

No one in the cab knew if that was a question or a statement.

Didn't matter. After five minutes of Condor checking mirrors and side streets as the taxi drove, just past the hotel where a well-off white boy who'd failed as a Nazi and a rock musician tried—
and failed
—to murder President Ronald Reagan in order to impress a movie star, Condor said: “Pull over. Beautiful day, we'll walk from here.”

The three of them stood on the curb near the first communist Chinese embassy.

Condor waited until he knew they'd vanished from the driving-off taxi's mirrors.

“Come on,” he said. “We gotta get over the bridge.”

Head-throbbing, but clearly, I can see clearly through his sunglasses.

Faye said: “You've got to be fucking kidding me. I've been … he's dead and…”

“
We're,
” he said. “Focus on that:
we are
. All the blood and shit, but
we still are
.

“And now, we are getting our asses across that bridge.”

“Paris's great bridges,” muttered part of Faye not yet back under her control.

But this was not Paris.

This was Washington, D.C.

Call it the Connecticut Avenue Bridge. Call it the William Howard Taft Bridge.
Who was he to the man whose name Chris taught us for the Capitol Hill tower with ringing bells?
Call it a long-ass way Faye wasn't sure she could walk.

Merle whispered: “What if they can see us?”

Maybe they could, but Faye could only shuffle one step in front of where she'd been, follow the sidewalk of this billion-mile-long bridge through the heart of Washington, D.C. Far on the other side, she saw two-story stores and cafes near the Woodley–National Zoo subway stop, knew she couldn't actually see the colorful high wall mural portrait of a white-blond wondrous Marilyn Monroe—
M.M., Merle is M.M., too, but gray-blond and Condor's something and holding my arm.

Giant bronze statues of lions guard each corner of that bridge.

Faye glanced up at the lion they walked past: “He's got his eyes closed.”

Halfway across this stone bridge supported by concrete arches a hundred feet above the treetops of Rock Creek Parkway, Faye looked over the corroded green railing—

Swooned with vertigo, swayed inside Merle's grip, closed her eyes behind Condor's sunglasses until the universe stopped spinning.

Let herself look.

Traffic whizzed past on the other side of the railing, its
whoosh
as unbalancing as looking down to the treetops and the long fall.

Faye glanced up to the blue sky.

Green lampposts topped by green metal eagles, their wings spread wide.

But they can never fly away.

There! The other side of the bridge, we made it, we're … Still in killers' gun sights.

What a sight we make.

A sliver-haired, craggy man wearing a backpack purse over a black leather jacket.

A gray-blond
used to be a beauty
who could still move but had nowhere to go.

A slumping shuffling loser
bitch
hiding inside a candy-pink hoodie and aviator sunglasses with matted hair and stinking of vomit.

Condor led them away from the street corner with its subway entrance and outdoor cafe tables, down the slope of Calvert Street toward the access road for Rock Creek Parkway. Farther in that direction loomed the sprawling complex of a hotel that catered to conventions and tour groups and expense accounts and neighborhood residents who in the coming summer would scam their way in to use the outdoor pool. He led Faye and Merle to a grassy apron between the Parkway entrance/exit road and the hotel's fence of metal bars. Led them to shadows on the grassy slope made by three close-together trees. Led them to the other side of those tall living sentinels where they could sit, collapse, not so easily be seen.

Merle passed the last water bottle she'd bought in Chinatown.

Condor took a swig. Held the bottle to Faye: “Replenish.”

She drank half of what was left, saved the rest for Merle.

Who took three swallows and clearly yearned for more as she screwed the cap back on the water bottle, saving some
just in case
.

Condor said: “Why was there only one shooter?”

“What the fuck!”
exclaimed Merle.
“How many does it take!”

Faye said: “Sami has an army.”

“And our Uncle Sam sure does.”