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.”
“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.