by Alan Hruska
Phil flips his own on. Half blinds them in its powerful beam, and glints off the barrel of Alec’s aimed rifle.
“Never aim for the head,” Phil says. “It’s a fool’s play. Too easy to miss.”
“Thing is,” Alec says, “I’ve got two hands on this rifle and a damn fine sight. You, one hand on a handgun. Carrie turns off the light, I dodge your light and shoot.”
“Carrie, honey. Go on back to the house with Sarah. I finish here, I’ll take both of you home.”
She holds the beam steadily on Phil’s face.
Alec says, “What I’m looking at, Phil, is your finger. I see it so much as twitch? My gun, locked on your forehead, goes off. You like the odds—take ’em.”
“You got something to say I might want to listen to?”
“Yeah. We put the guns down. How ’bout that? And then either I kill you with my bare hands, or you kill me.”
“While Carrie runs to the police,” says Phil.
“Exactly. I’m gambling that, if I can’t finish you myself, I can hold you off long enough for her to get there.”
“You really that stupid?”
“We put the guns down nice and slowly,” Alec says. “We release our grips and raise our hands.”
Phil, looking around with bemusement, says, “What’s the plan? You thinking of stabbing me with one of these—what are these? Swordfish bones?”
“Whatever works.”
“Jesus Christ! You are that fucking stupid!”
“What I said was, we put the guns down. After that, we can use anything we find.”
“All right, asshole. You want it, you got it.”
Alec, still in the firing stance he’d been taught, starts lowering his weapon. Phil follows. Inch by inch. Eyes of each on the other. Until the guns lie on the ground. Equally slowly, the two men raise their hands.
“One more thing,” Phil calls out.
“We kick the guns away?”
“I’ll go first,” says Phil, “and I’ll trust you.”
“Okay.”
“I can trust you? You will do this?”
“You do it, I’ll do it.”
Phil, eyes staying on Alec, kicks his gun to one side. Eight or nine feet. A soccer swipe. And out of sight.
Alec, returning Phil’s stare, does the same. Then dives for an object on his left.
Letting out a soul-searing laugh at Alec’s apparent hoisting of a swordfish bone, Phil dodges Carrie’s beam, throws his own flashlight to one side, and comes smashing like a rhino through the reeds. At Alec. With blood lust. Taking the long knife out of his pants leg as he comes. Not breaking stride. Eyes gleaming with the image of the kill.
Thump! Jocko Rush’s samurai sword sinks to the hilt into Phil’s belly, a residue of fluorescent paint ringing the hole in his shirt. The force of contact ripples through Alec’s arms. Phil looks astonished as Alec pulls out the sword, and, with a grunt, Phil drops to the ground. He utters no further sound, his face a mask of speechless amazement until the life leaves his body and his eyes freeze.
Alec plunges the sword into the soft earth. Carrie sinks to her knees, stares blankly at the space above Phil, digs her nails into the dirt beside him. Slowly, Alec pulls her up, holds her. She can’t look at him, can’t look anywhere but the distances of her mind. With gentle insistence, he leads her from the marsh toward the house. The blare of sirens, the sight of flickering lights from approaching police cars rouse her from the trance.
Cops are everywhere.
“In the marsh,” Alec says to one of them. “I think there are people alive.”
“This your dog?” the cop says about the mongrel that’s trailing him.
“Never seen him,” Alec says, but as he heads toward the house, the dog, Vito’s dog, Friday, peels off to follow him.
Lights now blaze from the first-floor windows. Medics are dealing with a body on the deck. Two men in white are attempting to resuscitate a figure that could be Harvey sprawled in the front hall of the house. Alec dashes there, struggling to get a glimpse of the man’s face. Then he hears Harvey’s voice calling out from the living room. “Hey, kid! Looking for me?”
Harvey is reclining on the sofa propped by a mound of cushions. He’s smiling despite a shoulder wound that the medics have already bound up. Next to him is a shotgun. The body in the foyer is Vito.
Alec says, “How the hell did you get that shotgun through airport security?”
“Didn’t,” says Harvey. “You brought it up for me, dummy. In the Cadillac.”
Two plainclothes cops come into the living room. The older one, graying and bespectacled, is carrying Alec’s samurai sword wrapped in plastic. “This yours?” he asks.
“Yes.”
“Given to him,” Harvey says, “by the CEO of Telemarch News.”
“You’re damned lucky,” says the cop. “It’s three feet longer than the knife in the other guy’s hand. Went right through his bullet-proof vest.”
“Did you find a gun on him?” Alec asks.
“A forty-five. Strapped to his back. I guess he thought he could get you with the knife.”
Alec looks around for Carrie. She’s not there.
The cop says, “I can see self-defense all over this, although we’re going to want you to sort it all out at the station. But tell me now, why’d you paint the sword?”
Harvey says, “You see those painted swordfish bones out there?”
“Hard to miss.”
“In the dark, some feet away, could you tell the difference?”
The cop looks down again at the sword. “Oh, I see,” he says.
Alec, with a grim smile, points upstairs. “Won’t be a minute.”
On the second floor, Carrie makes her way down the hall. “Come out, sweetheart! Come out, come out, wherever you are!”
No response.
In the room decorated for Sarah, Carrie sees her—or at least her foot—sticking out from under the canopy bed.
Gently, Carrie lifts the child into her arms, and slides her under the covers.
“I won, Mommy,” says Sarah, more asleep than awake.
“Yes, we did, darling.”
Alec, confirming that Carrie and Sarah are all right, heads quickly back to the marsh. A young cop greets him on the lawn. “We found the two live ones,” he says.
“You’re sure? Two?”
“Yeah. Man and woman.”
Two stretchers are being carried out of the reeds. Alec walks along with his father’s. Sam is conscious. Looking up at Alec, he smiles.
“Why?” Alec asks.
“I’m sure you can figure it out,” says Sam.
EIGHTY-FIVE
The local hospital, serving five small communities, is a four-story red-brick building, sitting on a promontory, about five miles up the coast. Sam has a corner private room with a view over marshes and salt ponds.
He says to Alec, who arrives near noon, “You cleaned and painted hundreds of swordfish bones just to disguise one samurai sword?”
“It worked.”
“A lot of things might have worked.”
“No doubt. And you put a tap on a mob boss’s phone.”
“That’s right.”
Alec gives him a long look, as if to say, And that wasn’t crazy?
“Also worked.” Sam says.
“Bad odds,” Alec says.
“I didn’t have much choice, son.”
Alec gestures to the next room. “Abigail Vaccaro. She’s your girlfriend?”
“That’s right.”
“Your doctor says she’ll pull through.”
“She got it in the hip,” Sam says. “Will probably need a replacement.”
“You try to stop her from coming?” Alec asks.
“Whatta you think?”
“Yeah, no, I know how that is.”
“She had her own grievance,” Sam says.
“I see,” says Alec, not wanting to pursue it.
Alec strolls to the window, takes i
n the view. “Great room,” he says.
“Aren’t many people here.”
“No. People seem healthy here. Not many gunfights.” Alec turns, ambles to the end of Sam’s bed. “Look, Dad.”
“You want to thank me for saving your life.”
“Yeah.”
“You would have done it for me.”
“True.”
“Only problem we have is talking about it.”
Alec smiles.
“Pretty funny,” Sam says. “Two guys who make their living by talking.”
“We’re both salesmen, you’re saying.”
“Union shops, burglar alarms, somebody else’s arguments, what’s the difference?”
“Better than fighting about it,” Alec says.
Sam laughs. “I don’t know. Sometimes you just pardon the ravens.”
“I’m rejoining the doves.”
“That what you call it? What you do in a courtroom?”
“My boss calls it sublimated violence.”
“No wonder you’re good at it,” Sam says.
From the railing of their second-story deck, Alec looks out over the point where the bay flows into the ocean. Behind him, Carrie and Sarah, bundled up in a deck chair and bathed in sun, have both drifted off to a light sleep. Friday naps at Carrie’s feet. His attachment to mother and child has quickly become mutual.
At the seawall, the bay, blue-black like Parker’s ink, is chopped to whitecaps by the wind, and stands of birch trees bend like dancers. Under a pale bright sky, the neighbors’ grandchildren, five or six of them, scamper over the lawns, scattering swordfish bones, careless of snares and boundaries.
The children’s cries ring out like squeals of mice and squirrels and trilling birds. Alec looks back at Carrie, who stirs, and smiles at him. Alec, smiling back, returns his gaze to the children playing in his yard. Seeing them on the afterprint of Carrie’s smile, Alec experiences a series of extraordinary near-hallucinatory images: their own children, and then children of those children, playing on these lawns.
He leans down on the rail. Whatever the future, he thinks, it will, necessarily, be a product of this moment—and this place.
The wind picks up again, whipping through the tall reeds and grasses of the marsh. Carrie’s now fully awake. “We should go in.”
“Right.”
“Are we going to be okay?”
“Absolutely,” he says.
“Anything could happen now.”
“Whatever, we’ll be fine. Don’t worry.”
“Don’t worry?”
“I’ll think of something,” he says.
Carrie laughs, for the first time in days.
Alec takes Sarah in his arms and looks back once more over the railing. He sees sunlight dancing on the reeds, as if the marsh itself were alive.
