“The wind will have carried it away,” she assures him.
“Maybe not.”
“The wind will have taken it,” she insists.
THE BITTER BITE
He takes the turn at considerable speed, the heavy Bentley pressing to the pavement as though it possesses a gravity greater than that attendant to all other things on Earth. In the sudden turning, its bright beams slap across the trunks and lower branches of the leafless grove ranked on the elevated land. The trees twitch as if physically struck and shuddered by the light, and then fall away into darkness as the headlamps align with the slick blacktop straightaway on which glittering raindrops dance like spilled diamonds.
Michael’s shadow self lives in the nanotech that webs every cell in his body, and those skeins are woven into the spectrum of data-bearing electromagnetic waves that is the worldwide web of the internet and all the computers connected to it. As the car slows with the barren orchard on both sides, a stylized and luminous compass appears in the upper-right quadrant of his vision. This signal seeker leads him not by indicating magnetic north, but by pointing toward the transponder in Nina’s smartphone.
He pulls onto the shoulder of the road and puts the sedan in park and switches off the lights and wipers. He shrugs into the thigh-length Helly Hansen rain jacket that belonged to someone at the house in which he’d meant to spend a few days, a respite upended by the mad-dog gangbanger, Aleem. Zippered pockets accommodate the three spare magazines for the rifle as well as a box cutter that he found in a desk drawer in the Corona del Mar residence. He pulls up the hood and secures it under his chin with the Velcro strap. When he checks the mirrors, the road behind him, to the north, is dark and at the moment untraveled. He kills the engine, retrieves the AR-15, and gets out into the storm.
The door is open, and he is behind it. When he looks over the top to be sure no traffic is coming from the south, he sees someone approaching, forty or fifty feet away. The guy is tall, wearing a full-length black raincoat with a deep hood concealing his face. He’s a medieval figure, like a mendicant monk on a pilgrimage to ancient Rome, who has crossed half a world and a thousand years from one step to the next. He isn’t on the shoulder of the highway, but he walks in the middle of the southbound lane. He calls out, “Need help there, mister? She break down on you?”
It isn’t his shadow self’s high-tech analytic capability that warns Michael of danger. It is the profound intuition with which he was born, an unshakable recognition of evil. This stranger is not a generous Samaritan venturing into foul weather and darkness with the hope of doing a kindness for someone. Nevertheless, Michael isn’t capable of opening fire on the man without being certain of his intentions. Besides, the crack of the rifle will carry far even through the cry of wind and sizzle of rain, announcing his presence to others of Nina’s pursuers sooner than is ideal. He raises his voice above the storm, and by his words he asserts both that he knows what’s happening here and that he has been called to assist. “I’m looking for Aleem.”
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.