Run (31 page)

I bring my hands out wide to each side. But I don’t let go of the Glock.

Drop the weapon, Helmet says to me. And raise your hands. He flattens his foot on top of Jinx’s pistol. Then he says:

Clear.

The second cop slinkies into the room, pistol pointed at the floor, and he’s popped out of the cookie cutter, same chiseled cowboy face, same blue-on-blue. He settles in behind Helmet and I’m showing him my hands, nice and wide, but Helmet isn’t happy that I’m holding on to the Glock and he starts to follow the nose of his pistol my way and that’s when Jinx says to the cops, he says:

Eighty f.

Whatever the fuck it means, that’s what he says, and he says it again and Helmet seems frozen in place, the second cop turning in slow motion, and Jinx comes out of the moose and he reaches toward his right ankle and I can’t believe he’s trying to pull something, go for a piece, what the fuck is he doing?

Eighty f, he’s saying to Helmet.

That’s when Helmet turns and starts emptying his pistol into him.

That’s when the second cop spins toward me and fires, but his first shot kicks wide and he doesn’t get a second shot because I blast back, two shots into his groin that fold him over and put him down. Helmet’s still shooting Jinx when I blow off Helmet’s left shoulder then spray his fucking brains across the far side of the room and I shoot him as I stand and I’m still shooting him when my pistol clicks dry about three feet from his corpse.

I bend over Jinx. I can’t tell how many times he’s been shot, but it’s bad, it’s real bad. Jinx looks at me, and if there are words to describe what happens to his face, I don’t have them. It’s the face of cruel knowledge. The face of death.

He speaks blood.

His mouth opens, his lips move, but it’s blood that comes out. Blood, and at last: Aw, fuck.

Then:

Metro Police, he says.

Yeah, I tell him.

D.C. Police, he says.

Yeah, I tell him. But not anymore.

And he says: No, man. No no no. Not ever. Not here.

What?

D.C. Police, he says again. Aw, fuck. Don’t you see, man? They may be D.C. Police. But this is Virginia.

Oh, shit, I tell him and myself, and I slap another magazine into the Glock, the Teflon-coated KTWs and I head for the door and I’m right on time. Two more of them are shuttling down the hall. The same blue helmets, the same blue uniforms, the same white faces.

Maybe they’re D.C. cops. Maybe not. But even real D.C. cops can’t do shit in Virginia.

The first one doesn’t have a rat’s chance, doesn’t even see me until I snap the Glock up and rack the slide, doesn’t even get to react as I blow his chest out his back. The shots cut through him and then past him, twisting his partner into the wall, his head and helmet fractured into a messy stain. What’s left of them flops onto the floor.

Then: Nobody.

I duck back into the priest’s office and I look at Jinx and the guy’s convulsing. He’s spitting the blood off his lips but he’s talking, he’s still talking.

Eighty f, he’s saying, and he’s pulling at his ankle again, but there’s no throwdown gun, there’s nothing at all, and he’s tearing past his pants leg, he’s pulling off his boot, the man’s delirious, he’s pulling off his boot and finally he gets the boot into his hands and he drives the boot into the floor once, twice, like a hammer, again and again, and his fingers, curled with pain and slick with blood, so much blood, peel the broken heel away from the sole and a shiny rectangle, a piece of plastic, falls from the gap onto the floor.

He drops the broken boot and fades back into the wall.

I put my hand into the tarry black of his blood. I pick up the plastic card that was hidden in his boot. I wipe it off. I try to read.

Who are you? I say to him.

Some kind of laugh rattles and slurps up out of his lungs. Blood bubbles on his lips. He coughs, shooting phlegm and more blood from his nose. Forget what they tell you in the books, what they show you on the TV, in the movies. Dying is never a pretty thing.

I say it to him again: Who the fuck are you?

Eighty f, he says, and his hand reaches to touch the rectangle of plastic. His fingers trace through the blood and now I see his picture, there on the plastic, and at last I hear what he’s saying:

ATF, he’s saying. ATF.

He presses the plastic into my hand and I see the emblem. I see the shield. I see the words that read Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. I see the words that read Special Agent. I see the name but I don’t read the name, I don’t want to know the name, I don’t want to know what’s behind the name, the wife and the kid, the mother and the father and the sister and the brother, I don’t want to know these things, not now, not ever.

We had a man inside …

You fuck, I tell him.

No, he says to me.

No, he says.
You
fuck. Then:

Don’t you understand? he says. Haven’t you figured it out yet? Nobody’s what they seem. Not me. Not your girl. Not your crew. Not your boss. Not those fucking cops.
Nobody
.

His breath is wet. His eyes wince shut. Pain nearly takes him into the dark. But the guy’s a fighter. He may be down but he’s not out, not yet, and soon enough he’s back and he says:

So?

He holds me with those eyes, those dying eyes.

I tell him: So?

So who are you? he says. Who the fuck are
you?

For about the only time in my life, I don’t have an answer. Not one that works. I can only tell him what I know, which is nothing:

I don’t know, man. I just don’t know.

His eyes go shut and I think it’s over. I think he’s going to find sleep and never wake up. I wipe the blood from his ID and I slip it into his shirt pocket. I take his hand in mine and I wait. Time doesn’t mean much, it could be seconds, minutes, it’s a lost gap until he opens his eyes and he says to me, he says:

I do.

Yeah, I tell him, and I don’t know why, but I want him to see me smile. So I smile, what I’ve got left of one, and I tell him: Yeah. I bet you do.

He blinks his eyes and he coughs more blood and he says to me: I do. So listen to me, Burdon Lane. Just this one time. Listen, okay? See, they say the Lord works in mysterious ways—

Oh, yeah, I tell him, and I want to shut up but I can’t. I tell him:

And you know something? Out of all the things they say, that’s the one I can believe in. Because they’re right. The Lord does work in mysterious ways. All the fucking time. He kills your mother with cancer. Gives three-year-old kids leukemia. Takes down airliners. Aims drunk drivers right smack into school buses. Sets retirement homes on fire for Christmas. Thinks up things like AIDS. Gives people different color skins—

Yeah, Jinx says. That’s right. God does that. All the time. Those are His ways. Mysterious ways, terrible ways. Evil ways. But they’re His ways. And you know what, Burdon Lane?

His hand tightens on mine, and he says:

Somewhere in those mysterious ways, I do think there’s room for you.

He says that word again:

You
.

I want to laugh now but I can’t laugh. I can’t do anything but look into his face. Because I know this face. It’s my mother’s face. At the end.

I can’t leave him this way. I can’t let him die this way. I need to say something, do something, but there’s nothing left to do. Then I remember what I did for Renny Two Hand when I found him at the bottom of that ravine. I can give him that.

I let go of Jinx’s hand, and I reach across the corpses of the cops who aren’t cops, or they’re the wrong cops, I don’t know and I don’t care, and I find what I need: Jinx’s pistol, the Ruger, there on the floor. I wipe blood from its grip and I show it to him, show him that pistol, then press the grip into his hand. It’s so wet, his hand, the gun, my hand, there’s blood everywhere, so much blood, I can’t wipe it all away. At first his fingers can’t hold the weight of the pistol, but I curl his knuckles tight around the grip until he has it. He has it.

He looks at that pistol and he looks at me. He raises the pistol between us. His hand shivers with its unbearable weight.

His face goes calm, resolute, and he says:

I don’t need this anymore.

With whatever strength he’s got left in his body, he throws the pistol aside.

His empty hand reaches for mine, takes it, holds it, squeezes it. After a while his eyes drift closed.

I sit waiting. Trying not to let go. Until he’s dead.

So this is the end: The big silence. The yawn that’s the payoff for a lot of years pretending I had a life. Making my money and biding my time, waiting for something to show me that there was a point to making the money, biding the time, waiting and wishing and wanting and running and running but never getting anywhere but here, where there’s nothing, nada, zip, zero, zilch.

No, make that less than nothing: It’s a hole that sucks everything left of life into that blank space called death.

I’m thinking about a run. A run that was nothing special, the same old same old: Guns for money, money for guns. A run from Dirty City to Manhattan and back, count the dollars, drink myself to sleep, and wake up bleary and weary on another Monday morning. Business as usual.

But it was the last run. The run that would close down UniArms and all the spiderwebs in its attic. The run that Fiona and Jinx and the rest of the cops and the Federal agents worked so long and so hard to set up, to get inside of, so deep inside that they would own it, make it happen, watch its every move to the moment when the badges and the handcuffs would start to shine. The run that would end with arrests and convictions and maximum jail terms, that would take out the gunrunners
and the gangbangers in one package wrapped so tightly and brightly that it just might look like Christmas.

And I’m thinking about another run. The run inside the run. The run that the cops and the Feds didn’t know about, at least not most of them. Not Jinx, maybe not Fiona, maybe not even that grey ghost who was sitting in my chair, in my den, in my house.

It was the run that was about killing the Reverend Gideon Parks. Killing a movement, killing a dream. The run that someone in some high fucking place wanted, and that Jules Berenger and his mad dog CK, who wanted to stay in business and out of jail, were pleased to make happen … with a little help from their friends. The run that no one, cops or Feds, would investigate for very long, because they were inside the thing, it was their run, they had made it happen, and what the hell, they had the perfect patsies, very black and very dead, for their fall guys.

So I’m thinking about that other run, and I’m thinking about the cops and the Feds and the patsies and the rest of the pawns. The guys who did the running. The guys like Renny Two Hand and Juan E and Jinx. The guys like me. The good soldiers who did what they were told, at least until they got wise or got dead.

And I’m thinking about the other guys, the guys in the suits, the guys who sit behind those big oak desks in those quiet grey buildings, the guys who aren’t the pawns or the bishops or even the kings.

They’re the guys who move the pieces.

The guys who owned Jules Berenger. The guys who CK wants to own him. Who CK wants to be. Those guys. Those fucking guys.

I’m thinking about those guys, but my head hurts, my heart hurts, and motherfuck my shoulder hurts, and I’m so damned tired of thinking.

Somehow, someway, I struggle onto my knees. Force myself to stand. It hurts so bad, and it’s not where I’ve been shot. It’s the other wound, the wound inside. I want to stand, I just want to stand, and then I am standing, I don’t know how, but I am standing, and when I stand I feel nothing, I hear nothing, and I see what’s left of the light begin to fade.

I snap a fresh magazine, my last, into the Glock. I step over one of the dead D.C. cops. Another good soldier.

I don’t look at him, and I don’t look back. I just find the door.

Outside the priest’s office is the hallway. To the right is the sacristy and the sanctuary. To the left is thirtysome feet of linoleum and then another door, a windowless metal slab with a red bar for a handle. A fire door. The placard on the door reads no exit.

And that’s right, that’s the truth, the sign says exactly what it means:

There is no exit. Not for me.

There’s nowhere left to go.

Nowhere but back into the sanctuary.

Because Doctor D was right. It’s not over. It’ll never be over.

We kill and kill and kill, and we’ll kill again, for as long as the guns are in our hands. We will kill the sinners and we will kill the saints. We will even kill the saviors. We will kill and keep killing and we will never, ever stop.

As long as we keep holding on to the guns.

So I follow my pistol, and I follow the sound, the sound of footsteps, my footsteps. The path is marked in red. Blood is everywhere. It paints the walls, the floors, curdles in dull pools, trickles and pours and wets all the world with its stain.

The blood leads me down that hallway and through the sacristy, finally brings me to the altar, that silent place of vows unmade and vows that were broken.

Slim and twisting wisps of gunsmoke, mist, fog, rise around me and drift toward the shattered ceiling. Ghosts. Angels. No no no: dust. It’s only dust and ashes.

Death. More death. Always death.

I wipe at my eyes. More blood on my hands. But I need to see. I have to see. And through the broken windows of the cathedral I see everything … and everything is dark.

I forgot it was night.

As if that would matter. The darkness is out there, in the night, but it’s here, too. It’s here. Inside. With me.

The sky’s gone out. There are no stars. A false sunset fades over Alexandria, a shrinking bloom of violence where the city block of warehouses that was UniArms is a smoldering vacancy. Closer, fire shines across the churchyard and into the lawns of the bordering neighborhood,
consuming the shrubs and wooden fences. Fingers of flame stretch to grasp at trees and finally the houses.

The parking lot of the cathedral is littered with the twisted wreckage of cars and people. At intervals on the pavement are bodies, sprawled where they fell or were thrown by gunfire or explosions. In their midst are men with guns, walking and shooting, walking and shooting.