Moving from tree to tree, Orlando Fiske passes along the flank of a building on his left, and then he comes to an open area around which other structures loom. Two flashlights lay bright cones across the ground. All about lie shapeless forms that might be mistaken for mounds of black-plastic trash bags if one beam didn’t terminate in a face and conjure from the unblinking stare twin amber radiances with red coronas, like the animal eyeshine of a coyote eternally caught in headlight beams as it traverses a highway. The other cone reveals a beseeching hand and a gold watch encircling its wrist.
Orlando keeps moving along the screen of trees, away from the killing ground and toward a building bearing the word OFFICES above its front door. He has the SIG P245 in a two-handed grip, alert for any moving shape in the shapeless night, wondering who has taken down those four homeys and why. Nina is said to have a trey eight; but the reports he heard were too loud and sharp and rapid-fire to be from a handgun. No one in Aleem’s circle of ace kools would turn on him or on each other. Orlando hears rumors about Antoine scheming for a coup, but that fool doesn’t know they came two counties south in pursuit of Nina and the kid. When he’s past Offices, he leaves the trees, hurries across open ground, and presses against the back wall of that building.
Studying the darkness, he waits for intuition to guide him, but his usually reliable intuition has lost its voice. Although he tries to puzzle together what he’s heard and seen into a coherent picture, he can make no sense of the situation. This is the worst—knowing he needs to kill someone but having no idea whom.
Then Orlando moves just because it’s his nature to feel safer in motion, always to choose action over inaction. When he arrives at the missing roll-up door at the back of the third building, he glimpses a dim radiance in that otherwise unilluminated, cavernous space. The pale emanation sweeps left to right, then right to left. The beam is so constrained as to produce no backwash, and it isn’t possible to make out a figure, let alone to determine if he’s friend or foe. The light is near the far end of the building, but Orlando can’t deduce if the carrier has proceeded from this west entrance or has just stepped inside from the east end. The beam turns directly to the right, and holds still for a moment, fixed on something. When it switches off, Orlando drops to one knee, his left side against the frame of the big doorway, presenting as minimal a profile as possible while maintaining a shooting position, in case the light winks on again and the man with it makes his way in this direction.
Michael comes off the top of the stairs and steps to one side.
Whatever chamber he’s in, the air moves in cool currents and carries the scent of rain, evidently entering by certain broken windows and exiting by others. Even a night without moon and stars is less dark than a lightless enclosed space; soon he begins to discern the vague rectangles by which the night breathes through the room. As he moves toward the front of the building, the window glass that litters the floor crackles underfoot.
A rustling startles him, but before he can click on his light, a soft who-who-whooo defines the noise as the fluttered wings of a resident owl annoyed to have an uninvited visitor and adjusting to its roost. This nocturnal raptor will wait until the rain stops to venture into the night in search of prey, but if it becomes too disturbed, by noise or light, it might soar out a window with a cry of protest. If it’s a great horned owl with a four-foot wingspan, its sudden flight will be something of a spectacle; Aleem and the one other remaining gangbanger will likely suspect that the location of the mystery gunman has been revealed.
Michael moves cautiously forward and stops a foot from a window that looks down on the common area and at three structures arrayed east of it. He’s directly opposite a single-story building that might be a garage. To the left of that is Special Accounts. In the open ground between Special Accounts and Whole Fruit, four dead men sprawl around the crossed flashlight beams, like black-robed satanic priests prostrating themselves in expectation of a demonic presence soon to appear at the intersection of lights, in answer to their invocation.
If Michael’s analysis of Aleem’s psychology is on the mark, the creep is more likely to be on the second floor of Special Accounts than anywhere else. There he has the best view of the entire common area and can particularly monitor Whole Fruit, where he seems to be aware that Nina and John have hidden.
The gable wall features three windows on the second floor. None is any longer graced with glass. Michael stands at an angle to all three. He has the clearest view of the southernmost window and an okay line on the middle one, but the farthest offers him little or nothing. If he’s been fortunate enough to deduce Aleem’s response to the death of his four lieutenants, maybe luck will be with Michael a little longer, just long enough to send Aleem Sutter to Hell with the others.
The owl rustles its wings again and scratches with its talons at whatever perch it occupies.
The moist draft continues to flow out of the night and through the room. The air seems to have the faint scent of blood on it, but that odor is the product of his imagination and his irrational but entirely human sense of guilt for having killed even those who would have killed him.
As rain slants inside and patters on the floor, he shifts his attention from the nearest Special Accounts window to the middle one, and it’s at the latter that at last he sees movement, a shape. Too nervous or too eager for vengeance, the man can’t hold himself back at a prudent distance. Whether he’s Aleem or the other bastard not yet held to account, he’s one of them and must be eliminated. Then he actually leans out of the window to take a quick and better look north and south. He isn’t hooded, and his identity is no longer in doubt. Aleem.
Michael brings up the rifle, sites in, and squeezes off four rapid rounds. The first is a hit, maybe only in the left shoulder, and the screaming starts after the second, but it stops abruptly with the third, which might or might not have scored. The fourth shot is wasted on the place where Aleem had been.
Disoriented by the crash of gunfire, the owl swoops around the room, feather-dusting the walls, and Michael ducks, and the bird finds the window, soaring away in search of safer shelter.
Aleem is either dead or down and in bad shape, but the eighth man is still out there. Whether the remaining thug is in a position to see what just happened or instead must rely on sound alone to determine the situation, he is likely to know from where Michael took those shots. Depending on his appetite for confrontation after all that has occurred, he might be coming. So get out now, get out fast.
Michael returns to the stairs. Switches on his light. Rolls it down the old, canted steps to illuminate the way. He quickly follows the spinning beam, left hand on the barrel handguard of the rifle, right hand on the pistol grip, finger light on the trigger. On the landing, with one foot, he sends the light rolling again, down the lower flight of steps. At the bottom, he takes one hand off the AR-15 to retrieve the light from the murky water, clicks it off, shoves it in a deep patch pocket of his jacket.
Having entered the building from the back, he leaves by the front, stepping into the common area, sweeping the rifle left and right. Nobody there. Nobody obvious. He’s not crossing to Special Accounts, not going to climb to the second floor and confirm that Aleem is dead. There’s no time for that, and the risk is too great to be taken. If Aleem isn’t dead, he will be in minutes. He’ll bleed out. There’s no one to call the EMTs, no medical help near enough to save him. Michael keeps moving fast, dodging, head ducked, making as difficult a target as he knows how, heading toward Whole Fruit next door. One guy is still out there somewhere, but it’s a fool’s game to go looking for him on sloppy ground that doesn’t preserve tracks, among these buildings that constitute a three-dimensional spider’s web of traps. Let the enemy do the searching. The bastard knows where Nina and the boy have taken refuge, so he’ll go there just like Michael’s going there, the location of the showdown ordained, if not the outcome.