After Death(61)
“Woman like her turns a boy like John into the trick he is now,” Kuba continues, “she got to be taught what wrong she done. Anyone don’t want to teach her—he got somethin’ wrong in his head.”
Jason nods thoughtfully, flicking rain off the rim of his hood. “We talkin’ about pullin’ a train on her?”
“If I know Kuba,” says Hakeem, “we ain’t talkin’ about readin’ her righteous passages from the Bible.”
As much as Aleem just wants Nina and her brat dead so he can stop thinking about them and get on with his life, he is wary of backing out of his promise to let Kuba not only jump her but also break her down. Kuba is his main man, and they are tight, but that doesn’t mean Kuba lacks the potential to be the next Antoine. When he wants something bad enough, he leans on Aleem in a way he never should, and maybe Aleem has indulged him too often out of brotherly affection. That can better be corrected in days to come, not in this weird place with everyone jacked up by what’s gone down. They need to relieve their tension and feel good about themselves again, feel powerful.
Jason says, “That building, Cider and Juice, it’s dry. Okay place to party, say you got a hot piece like Nina.”
“Gonna be hours ’fore Modeen and Lincoln get here, after one o’clock,” Hakeem observes. “Say we don’t have Nina to play with, how we gonna pass time without we do somethin’ we’ll wish we hadn’t?”
“First,” Aleem says, conceding the issue, “we gotta grab the bitch without no extra holes in her. Hakeem, Carlisle, go round the far end, block that big open door like I said. Jason, Kuba, and me—we come in from this end.”
Just then, Jason’s face pours out of his hood. Because the sound of the shot comes a fraction of a second after that gush of biological debris and is muffled by the rushing rain, this radical event appears supernatural, diabolical. For a fateful instant, as Jason’s corporeal life seems to evaporate inside his raincoat and the roomy garment folds to the ground as though it’s been cast off, Aleem and his homeys are flummoxed by bewilderment, as if Jason has proven to be a magician of astonishing power. The truth registers with them, and they pivot away from the dead man. The second and third shots punch Kuba in the back, and he pitches to the earth in front of Aleem, twitching like a cockroach that’s been stepped on but not fully crushed, screaming into the puddle in which his face planted.
Aleem Sutter knows guns the way a carpenter knows a hammer, not the way a man with military training knows guns. When Aleem resorts to a firearm rather than a more intimate weapon, he kills those whom he needs to kill in deserted warehouses and abandoned factories where the bodies can rot undiscovered for years, or he surprises them in dark alleyways, or he blasts them from a moving vehicle. He never experiences firefights in which survival depends in part on the ability to quickly deduce the point from which incoming rounds originate. Although he’s seen the pistol that Nina possesses, though he’s searched her house in her absence and knows she doesn’t—or didn’t previously—own a high-powered rifle, he’s seized by the conviction, unlikely as it is, that she’s the shooter and is cutting them down from the cover of Whole Fruit. He crouches and hurries away from the cavernous opening in the gable wall. He turns the corner of the big building, rises to his full height, and races west along a twenty-foot-wide sward of dead grass and mud between Whole Fruit and Specialty Products, away from the killing ground, as the rifle bangs out rounds as fast as the shooter can squeeze the trigger.
A PHONE CALL
To Nina, the shots sound as if the rounds are powerful enough to penetrate walls, and the board walls of this place are probably already weakened by termites and time. In their rat hole, she and John slide down as low as they can.
After the last of the shots and shouts and screams, a silence settles but for the incessant rain. For a minute or so, the absence of shooting is worse than the clatter of it, because she worries that Michael took return fire—five against one—and that he is either dead or badly wounded.
Then her phone vibrates in her hand. She takes the call, her voice hushed. He’s all right. He’s not been hit.
“Four of them are down,” he says, his voice as quiet as hers.
“Dead?”
“Or as good as. Plus two I got earlier.”
Shaped by hard experience, Nina has become something of a church lady at heart, a homebody, a cookie baker, a tinkerer in the garden, crunching numbers for a living, not a lover of excitement, a seeker of peace and simple pleasures, who values the lives of others hardly less than she values her own. So she is surprised to feel a bloodthirsty thrill travel through her at the news that Michael, amazing Michael, has killed six. Surprised but not in the least dismayed. She’s aware of the original and accurate translation of the commandment—Thou shalt not murder—and it is Aleem and his kind who transgress all interdicts that make civilization possible. If there are none who will stop their kind, kill their kind, then they will murder, murder, murder until no one is left to be their victims. The violent will bear it away.
“One ran,” Michael says, “went around the side of Whole Fruit. The eighth man I haven’t seen yet. Stay where you are till I get them.”
“Or they get you.”
“This isn’t their turf. They don’t know who I am, where I came from. Their cars, their phones, now this—they’re panicked.”