After Death(39)
At the front of the Ford, she meets John—“Stay close”—and leads him out of the southbound alley and west through darkness, splashing across saturated ground that sucks at their inadequate shoes. She isn’t blind, but the colorless landscape is black and grainy shades of gray, like a CT scan, and her sense of vision is reduced to something like computed tomography that requires the training of a radiologist to accurately and easily read the way ahead. The trees are shapes without form, but they are a shade darker than the sky and thus define the harvesting alley, although the treacherous footing prevents her from hurrying as fast as she would like. She doesn’t dare use the Tac Light and reveal their location. She doesn’t want to move among the trees until her eyes become somewhat dark-adapted, when she will be better able to discern and avoid low-hanging limbs and the snares of fallen apple wood that could trip them or gouge them with the ragged spears of broken branches.
They have gone fifty or sixty yards when her fear suddenly ripens into dread, which she takes to mean that intuition is warning her of an imminent, lethal encounter. She stops and halts John and looks north, surveying the cloistered night from west to east. The lights of four vehicles were previously visible, filtered through the trees, but now all is darkness. The headlamps have been doused. Aleem and his seven homeys haven’t gone away. They’re coming for her and John, and though they’re as hampered by the darkness as she is, they have eight times more guns than she has and God knows how many knives. More important than weapons, they have an unshakable confidence born of the overweening self-esteem that sociopathic gangbangers all seem to share, and they will never stop any more than wolves, electrified by the scent of prey, will relent in the hunt.
Since John issued from her and she first saw his sweet face, Nina has wanted nothing more than the freedom to make something of herself and support her child, the freedom to raise him to be wiser than she had sometimes been and to be a blessing to others. But in this world where the powerful too often fail to see the humanity in those weaker than themselves and seek to rule by fear, freedom is fragile, sustained only by sacrifice and fierce determination.
She has unconsciously pressed her right hand to the waist of her jacket, under which she can feel the pistol nestled in the belt scabbard. She doesn’t want to be forced to use the gun, but if she must, she will. The men seeking her are not the kind to whom you can turn the other cheek without exciting in them the desire to answer your submission with a bullet in the head.
Although her eyes are not fully acclimated to the dark, she leads John into the row of wind-clattered and graceless trees along the south flank of the alley. Past that rampart of dead wood, they come to another east-west harvesters’ passage and hurry across it, into more trees, as if they know where safety lies, though they do not.
THE PAIN OF LIVING AND THE DRUG OF DREAMS
When Calaphas and Santana arrive in the fifth-floor apartment, Carter Woodbine and Delman Harris are facing each other across the kitchen island, silent and solemn, as if that granite slab is an altar on which someone will be sacrificed at midnight if not sooner. The attorney is dressed in Dior Homme—black suit, white shirt, striped tie—at a cost of maybe six thousand dollars, projecting the image of a reliable traditionalist. Harris’s zippered Hermès jacket in a bold abstract pattern of green and gray and black costs nearly as much as a Toyota; he wears it over a black T-shirt, with black slacks by Berluti and Converse sneakers, four or five colorful Montecarlo silver-and-alutex bracelets on his right wrist, a Cartier Drive watch on his left. He is obviously convinced that he’s above the law, considering that any cop who’s ever worked the narcotics division would, on sight, ID him as a major player in the drug trade. These two look as if they attired themselves out of the same issue of GQ, neither of them having noticed the pages that most appealed to the other. They are united by their beverage, Macallan Scotch served neat, and by the offense they have taken at Calaphas’s lack of punctuality, which they express not with words, but with tight lips and stares as sharp as ice picks.
Calaphas offers no apology for his tardiness. He doesn’t even acknowledge it. He’s got his own agenda, as he always does. “You have a picture of Mace?”
Printed on glossy photographic paper, it lies facedown on the island. Without a word, Woodbine turns it over. Calaphas doesn’t find anything impressive about Michael Mace’s appearance. The guy looks like a TV game-show host whose smile and pleasant banter with contestants help the lonely, the unemployed, and the homebound get through the pain of living.
“Julian Grantworth might already have told you that we’re after this man. The photo will help.”
Woodbine says, “What did Mace do that has you on his trail?”
“I’m not at liberty to say.”
“I’m not an average citizen, Mr. Calaphas.”
“Yes, I am aware of that.”
“Your agency and I have mutual interests.”
“But this,” Calaphas says, “is a matter of national security.”
Woodbine nods and considers his Scotch without bringing it to his lips. “National security. So let’s speak in private.”
“It’ll still be national security in another room.”
“Come with me,” Woodbine insists.
Calaphas remembers what Grantworth said at the restaurant. Woodbine has something else he wants to discuss with you, something he’s not keen to share with just everyone, not even with me.