After Death(60)

Nina and John must be somewhere inside that building, cornered or already captured. It’s essential that Michael know which is the case. Remaining between two trees, though phoneless himself, he reaches into the telecom system with which Nina purchased service and calls her. Evidently she is holding the phone, for she answers on the first ring.

Although the five men are sixty or seventy yards away, Michael whispers, “Have they found you?”

“No,” she whispers. “Where are you?”

“Looking at a building called ‘Whole Fruit.’”

“My God. Thank God.”

“Five of them are outside. Maybe they’re about to come for you. I think I can take them, most of them. Can you stay low and hidden?”

“Not for long. We—”

He interrupts. “Stay low, low and hidden,” and disconnects.

As far as he can tell, the five men are focused on Whole Fruit and on one another, none scanning the night for a threat, but he can’t be sure. Although he will be a small dark form moving through the vast rural darkness, through curtains of rain, he is loath to step out from the cover of the trees. However, these men are fifty or sixty yards from him, and he needs to close the distance before opening fire. The only chance he has of taking out these five—and one other somewhere; six remaining of the eight—is to maintain the advantage of surprise until he has significantly reduced their numbers.

After killing Masud, he hoped that he would not have to kill anyone else, although he knows it to be a hope unlikely to be fulfilled. The second killing, even more intimate than the first, has weighed on him no less. It has reminded him that the true foundation of duty is not hope, because it is human to hope for the wrong thing. Duty is based on something more profound than hope, on faith that what is too wrong to endure will be made right, rectified by a system of justice that underlies all of nature, far beneath the subatomic level, a system that may right a wrong in a day or through the passage of time or outside of time. The schedule isn’t ours to protest or endorse. His duty is to act with all the skill and wisdom he possesses, not with hope but with conviction.

The nearest building is directly south and about twenty-five yards from his position. Whole Fruit is maybe thirty yards farther and to the southwest, past a smaller structure that bears the word OFFICES in big block letters. He can’t see the name of the building against which he intends to shelter, for the flank of it is toward him and the word or words will be emblazoned on the gable wall, as is the case with the other places.

In recognition of the treacherous footing and because even a dark figure crossing a dark landscape is more likely to draw notice if it is proceeding at a run, Michael leaves the trees and makes for the nameless building at a quick but prudent pace, bent low, fearing a cry of recognition. He reaches the structure without discovery and stands with his back against the wall, ten feet from the corner and just out of sight of the gathered men.

Ideally, he would have had time to practice with the rifle, to learn the idiosyncrasies of its operation. He has had much practice with AR-15s, but every weapon has a unique personality. Accuracy depends to some extent on an intimate knowledge of the piece with which he’s working.

Even this much closer, he can’t hear the men’s voices above the hiss-plop-plonk-rattle of the rain in the near absence of wind. The dull tolling of his laboring heart thrusts lifeblood through tens of miles of arteries, arterioles, capillaries, venules, and veins, an astonishing construction to which the addition of the nanotech in his cells, comprising his shadow self, amounts to little more than an add-on for convenience, like outfitting a Tesla with WeatherTech floor mats.

He eases to the corner of the building and looks toward Whole Fruit. The five men remain tightly grouped, the better to receive their due justice here and now, rather than outside of time.





A BRIEF DEBATE




“. . . cap the bitch’s knees. Leave the face shot for me. I done earned it,” Aleem concludes.

Jason, Hakeem, and Carlisle are good with that, but Kuba has an issue. “Say we take Nina without we have to shoot her.”

“That her decision,” Aleem says.

“Then we don’t got to go directly to the face shot.”

Jason says, “I think I see where you goin’.”

“All the trouble the quiff give us, she got to get more payback than just a four-five in the face,” Kuba says.

Carlisle, being Carlisle, says, “Iffen that hundred was hers, she probably don’t got more than another one. That blue dump she live in, doin’ tax work for laundromats and nail shops, she ain’t got half what it takes to pay me for the shit she put us through.”

“My man,” says Hakeem, “only stupid Philistines think money’s the only thing makes the world go round.”

Impatient with his homey’s geographical prejudice, Carlisle says, “What shit you talkin’, Hakeem? Peeps in Philadelphia they ain’t no dumber than anywhere else.”

Kuba clarifies his concern. “Me and Aleem saw eye to eye on the way here, how she ain’t nothin’ to him no more—”

“And never was,” Aleem injects, to be certain that no one here gets the idea that he would allow any woman to be more to him than a source of sexual satisfaction. “She always was just a prime pump.”