After Death(57)

The apparition halts twenty feet away. Still no face can be discerned in the hood, not even the slightest trace of eyeshine. “What’s an Aleem?”

There’s no curiosity in the question, as ought to be the case if this is an average citizen, but only a cold note of challenge, which pretty much identifies the man as one of the gangster’s crew.

As he responds, Michael reaches back into the car, feels for the added kill switch on the steering column, finds it, and flicks it, activating the GPS and navigation system. “I was told Aleem needs transportation. Here I am.”

“Told how?”

“He phoned Brett Bucklin, and Brett phoned me. I live in the area. You know Brett Bucklin, Aleem’s attorney?”

“How Aleem phone you?”

The longer Michael stands behind the open car door, the more it appears he’s using it for protection, and the less it seems that he is who he claims to be. He can’t go forth with the AR-15 in hand and assume the response will be judicious. The stranger hasn’t seen the rifle and might take it as a threat no matter how casually it’s carried. Michael props the weapon against the open door, butt plate on the pavement, and steps into the southbound lane. “No, he didn’t phone me, he phoned Brett Bucklin, his attorney in the city.”

“All our phones went to shit.”

“Evidently not Aleem’s.”

“Wind is shoutin’ you down, man.”

Michael raises his voice. “Aleem’s phone didn’t go to shit.”

Rain blows under Michael’s hood, and he blinks it out of his eyes. The gangbanger might be holding something in his right hand. Michael can’t quite be sure. The darkness and weather are aids to deception.

“So you sayin’ Aleem called Bucklin.”

“That’s right.”

“Then Bucklin he phones you.”

“Like I said. Can we get this done? This weather sucks.”

“You here for transportation, take us where?”

“Wherever you all need to go.”

“Say what?”

Michael raises his voice again. “Wherever you want to go.”

“Eight plus you in one car.”

Michael tries to let the wind outspeak him without making it obvious that he’s doing so. “An associate of mine is on his way in an Escalade. He’ll be here in a few minutes.”

“Louder, man. Who will what?”

“I can’t outshout the damn storm,” Michael says and moves toward the man. They’re only five or six steps apart. “My name’s Easton Ellis. Who’re you?”

“Masud. Why Aleem call a lawyer ’stead of another homey?”

“None of your homeys live here in Shitkicker Valley,” Michael says, going online as he speaks, entering the navigation service’s system, sliding down the transponder signal into the Bentley, taking over its electronic controls.

The car alarm shrieks and the headlights flash, startling Masud, who brings up the pistol in his hand, aiming at the sedan. He might not be one of Aleem’s more intellectual thugs, but he’ll only need three seconds to realize that if someone in the Bentley poses a threat, then so does the man who was driving it.

Michael needs less than two seconds to thumb the razor lock on the box cutter concealed in his right hand and slash the wrist that Masud exposes when the raincoat sleeve slides back from his extended gun arm. A thin razor cut is instant hot-wire pain, worse than a knife slash, a shock to the system. The pistol clatters to the blacktop.

As the car goes dark and silent, Michael body-slams the wounded man. Masud goes down in a billow and rustle of raincoat, rapping the back of his head hard on the pavement, and Michael falls atop him, pinning him to the road. The dreaded moment is upon him, the mortal task he has the training to fulfill but for which the necessity has never before arisen and certainly never the desire. At a distance of mere inches, he at last sees the face within the cowl, a countenance as human featured as his own, eyes briefly clouded by concussion. Masud is a monster, one of eight who must not reach Nina and John before Michael can spirit mother and son away. Cruelty, brutality, and murder are essential to these men’s business model, and there’s no way to thwart them but the hard way. He plucks Masud’s dropped pistol from the pavement, grips it by the barrel, raises it above his head. Masud’s eyes clarify, and Michael hesitates, and Masud’s frozen features distort with hatred. Michael hammers the butt of the pistol into a sudden snarl and glare of homicidal fury, hammers it again and again and yet again, until the struggling man goes slack under him.

The highway is little traveled at this hour, in this weather, but there has been no Armageddon that made the world a graveyard. Someone is likely to come along at any moment.

Michael gets to his feet and tosses the gun into the drainage channel, where it vanishes under the rush of muddy water. He grips the dead man by the ankles and drags him off the blacktop, onto the shoulder of the highway, and rolls him into the same ditch. Although the current is swift and the runoff is deep enough to cover Masud, the corpse is not borne away. Animated by trapped air, a portion of the black raincoat swells above the turbulent surface of the runoff, shuddering and strange, as though a vengeful spirit strains to free itself from the body in which it can no longer enjoy life.

Badly shaken by what he’s done, Michael looks at the tortured shapes of the apple trees, which stand in cryptic testament to the history of humanity. He remembers Nina telling him this valley is as near to Eden as anywhere she’s ever seen; that was when the orchard was productive. Knowledge is transformative and elevating, but it isn’t a reliably sweet fruit. They say that, from the first Eden, innocents came naked into the outer dark with the bitter knowledge of lost immortality and a grim recognition of a new life measured in meager years that quicken to the grave; worse, they soon learned that although they must submit to death, they could also subject others to it on as little as a whim, and for some that became a pleasure. Michael takes no pleasure in it, and he hopes that he won’t have to kill anyone else. His duty to Nina and John, however, will require him to do what must be done. Killing and murder are different things, and killing evil men to prevent them from murdering others is not wicked work. Just the same, he’d rather not be burdened by such memories as the sound of flesh splitting and facial bones shattering under the hammering butt of a pistol.