I crawl along the base of the wall toward the next window, then the one nearest the door. From the corner I can see two men on the landing, emptying their clips into my original position. Another is coiled on the ground, clutching his guts. Very close to the window someone is whining pitifully above the roar of the guns.
Lining up my sights on the two shooters, I open fire. One of them drops like his strings have been cut, and the other stumbles backward and pitches over the side of the railing, falling to the alleyway below. When I crouch for cover, there’s no return fire, just the wet mewling of the man on the veranda and the echo of feet descending the stairs to regroup.
My pistol is smoking in my hand, the slide locked back. The 17-round magazine is already empty. I eject it to the floor and seat the other mag, dropping the slide to chamber a round. I don’t know how many times I fired in the first engagement. The mag could be mostly full or nearly empty and there’s no time to stop and check. Already I can hear them coming up again, this time with an unnerving deliberation, as if they’re pausing to get the next attack right.
“Hello in there?” a voice calls from around the corner. The English is clear, only lightly accented, with a friendly, paternal timbre. “We would like to have a word.”
“It’s him. The Jefe.”
I turn to find Keller at my side, hunched down with a seeping hand towel against his neck, secured in place by what looks like a rolled pillowcase with a jaunty knot on the side opposite the wound. In his fist, the shiny revolver, its hammer cocked back. The thought of him lurking there behind me, the snub nose in hand, sends a chill through me.
“I believe,” César says, “there is a misunderstanding. We have not come here for you, whoever you are. It’s Meester Keller we want. Send him out and we will go, you have my word.”
In my ear, Keller whispers: “Don’t engage with him.”
“What did you do with Brandon Ford?” I call out.
“What did I just say? ”
“We had a matter to discuss with Meester Ford, I am afraid. But you? You are no one. If you like, you can put down your weapon and go.”
The voice hasn’t changed at all. Hearing him speak, I’m back in that Leesville parking lot, my fists cocked ready to beat him down. One thing in my favor: Magnum was teaching torture techniques to the cabana boys, not combat tactics. The apartment isn’t exactly a fortified position, but with the advantage of the wall and the confined open ground the cartel shooters have to cover just to reach us, we can hold out as long as we have ammo. If they keep rushing us like they did before, we have a chance.
In the distance, I hear the faint ring of sirens. They could be miles away or just blocks, it’s hard to tell. I turn to Keller, who hears them, too, but doesn’t look encouraged. He shakes his head. “The police around here, they’re in his pocket.”
“I have a proposition,” I call out. “Why don’t we discuss this man-to-man, out in the open? I’m not afraid. Are you?”
It’s a silly idea, but I’m grasping at straws. If I can shame him in front of his men, call his machismo into question, then maybe. . But no. Keller’s shaking his head again, disappointed in my maneuver. And in spite of the dire situation, I find his censure irritating.
“If you have anything better to suggest. .”
The sirens are sounding louder. They echo down the nearby streets. I want to believe Keller’s wrong about the local police, that all I have to do is buy time. My gun hangs heavy in my hand, and when I glance down, I find that I’m trembling.
“Well, what do you say?” I yell.
“This is a very interesting proposition. Allow me to think it over.”
He speaks with exaggerated courtliness, inserting long pauses between the words, his conversational tone wholly unsuited to the circumstances. The man is confident, I’ll give him that. The approaching sirens don’t seem to worry him at all.
But perhaps I’m not the only one buying time.
I motion Keller to be quiet and sit tight. Then I creep backward on hands and knees, between the couch and chair, passing the cocktail pitcher. Back at the far window where I started, I pause at the perimeter of broken glass, listening intently.
“Now, señor, I have a proposition for you.”
Just outside the window I hear the faint crush of glass underfoot, the sole of a boot pressing down and twisting slightly. While César was talking to me, they must have sent someone to climb up over the veranda railing. Not bad. I listen to his progress and as his head breaks the plane of the sill, I raise the Browning and light him up.
The man pitches back into the shadows, a vaporous cloudburst erupting from his brow. Keller screams and starts firing his revolver two-handed through the window, each loud, throaty bang accompanied by a long tongue of flame. They’re rushing us again, spilling onto the veranda, and the six rounds in his chamber won’t hold them for long. I scramble along the wall, firing through each window as I pass, then shouldering the door open to empty the last of my clip point-blank into the writhing mass.
Flashing blues and reds cast their glow down the alleyway and the sirens are right on top of us, right inside my head, threatening to burst out. I am slung sideways against the doorframe, my pistol shot dry, looking back at Keller as the hammer of his revolver snaps down on one spent chamber after another. He can’t tell the gun is empty, because he’s still yelling at the top of his lungs, his eyes clenched shut.
On the veranda, men are crawling on top of each other, stumbling back down the stairs in retreat. A pair of blank eyes stares up at me from right at the threshold. I reach out and twist a cocked.45 from his hand. I’m running cold again, my trembling gone. I emerge into the night, stepping over the bodies of the dead and wounded, ignoring the carnage. The landing is slick under my feet. At the top of the stairs, two bloodstained men hold a third between them-silver-haired, in a sodden guayabera. I reach down, taking César by the collar, pressing the borrowed gun into the ear of the carrier on his right.
“Leave him,” I growl.
They spring back, dropping the Jefe against my leg. The one under my muzzle just runs, while the other lets a stray round fly. I snap the.45 toward him and fire. He goes tumbling down the stairs.
Then I start dragging César back, grunting with the effort, my whole body radiating, enflamed. I drag him across the landing, leaving contrails in the blood. I drag him across one of the wounded, who crawls away with a frightening gasp. I drag him across the threshold and into the apartment, kicking the door shut, releasing his shirt.
He sprawls facedown before Keller, who stares at me wide-eyed.
“You’re insane,” he says. “Are you trying to get yourself killed?”
“You’re under arrest,” I say to the silver-haired man. “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say-”
“March, what are you doing?”
“This man is under arrest,” I say. “For murder.”
He edges toward me empty-handed. “What are you trying to say? Are you hurt?”
I sink back against the wall, lowering myself onto the floor like a man relaxing into a hot bath, feeling so wet, so utterly poured out as I break the surface.
“This man,” I say, then stop. “This man is guilty of murder. He beat a girl to death at Fort Polk, Louisiana, in the summer of 1986.”
An amplified voice thunders through the alley in syncopated Spanish that I don’t understand. It sounds official, though, and very soothing. Everything feels very soothing. Keller scoots toward me, reaching out, taking the front of my shirt in his hands and ripping it open, letting the two sides drop. His mouth gapes open at what he sees.
“Are you religious?” I ask. “My wife is. Charlotte. Do you think there’s anything out there? Besides the stars, I mean. Or is there nothing but nothing?”
His hands feel warm on my skin. He’s pushing down on me, pushing me back against the wall.
“I don’t think there’s nothing,” I say.
Up close, I can see the
waffle texture of the dish towel tied to his neck, damp with his own blood. Big Reg is covered in blood, all over his hands right up to the elbows, and his breath is foul and he’s panting right over my face.
My head lulls and I notice there’s an unfamiliar gun in my hand. I open my fist and let it tip onto the floor. Above me, Reg is saying something and his voice is as loud in my head as the sirens were before, only none of the words make any sense, like he’s forgotten to leave spaces in between. They run together into a melodic jumble. Is Big Reg singing? That can’t be right.
The door opens and there are men in balaclavas with automatic weapons, men shining flashlights everywhere and coming in through the broken windows. Reg pulls back, raising his hands over his head, and the farther away he goes, the fuzzier he gets.
“Reg,” I say.
To my left, there’s a white bird. It shuffles uncertainly across the floor, wings canted outward in an avian shrug. A ridge of yellow feathers stands along the crest of its head. This bird is watching me from the corner of its eye, and then the wings spread wide and the bird flaps its way through the open door and up into the sky. Everyone watches, the people around me smudging as they gaze upward.
The bird, though, I can see clearly, every feather perfectly articulated. As I watch it ascend, I have this funny idea that I’m watching my own soul. Which would mean I have one, or at least I did. And I don’t want it back. Don’t come back. Keep on going until you reach whatever’s up there.
A boy crouches over me, his body dwarfed inside a Kevlar cocoon, a spike of matted hair jutting from his forehead. He puts a cool hand against the side of my face, frowning mightily. When he gets up, he starts to yell, but in a woman’s voice. “We need a doctor here. . doctor, how do you say doctor in Spanish? Now! ” I know this voice. I try to get up.
“Stay there, March. You’re going to be all right. Don’t try to talk. There’s gonna be plenty of talking to do, don’t worry about that. But not now, not yet. You just hang on, you hear? You just hang on.”
“I know you,” I say.
“Don’t try to talk.”
“It’s Jess, isn’t it?” I say. “They told me you were dead.” My lungs inflate with joy. I try to raise a hand and pull her toward me. “They all told me, but I knew. I knew it wasn’t true. Why did they tell me you were dead?”
The boy’s hand is on my forehead now, and there are people above me, doing things to me. I watch them with far-off benevolence. There’s something over my nose and mouth. I feel myself levitating. The ceiling of Keller’s apartment sinks away to reveal a heaven full of stars, a million constellations, all of them swirling in a clockwork dance. And circling in among them, wings outspread, is a white cockatoo, and in my ears the cooing of doves.
Interlude: 1986
“Cheer up, sir. This is what you wanted.”
Crewes stood in my doorway, arms crossed, watching me toy with the plastic alligator, staring pensively at the clock on the wall. More time had passed, and after the first morning neither of us spoke about Magnum or the dead girl again. It was Major Shattuck who issued the orders. The unnamed suspects in the girl’s death had all left the country-they’d been spirited away before Magnum even summoned the MPs-but he had been given assurances (presumably by Magnum) that the incident would be reported to the appropriate authorities in their home country. And that was that. On the sly, Crewes informed me that a little rough justice was in the cards. On the flight home, one particular cabana boy would be making an unexpected snorkel dive in the Gulf.
I pretended to believe him, because it seemed to make him feel better. But I remembered what Magnum had said. Seeing the body, he’d thought, This is the one. There was no way he’d lift a hand against that particular killer. César. He had high hopes for the man back home.
Besides, what I’d said to Magnum the night of the murder was right. He might think César was his puppet, but César had other ideas. The ease with which he’d done the deed, knowing he was under surveillance, knowing I had seen him with the girl, made that perfectly clear.
So the clock ticked down, my enlistment ran out, and before long I was sitting with a plastic gator in my hand, pondering the whole course of my life up to that moment. Ironically, during my whole hitch with the MP battalion, I’d never once considered a future in law enforcement. The uncle who’d raised me was a cop, invalided out in a wheelchair, making his living by running a Richmond Avenue gun shop where he cut all his HPD buddies a good deal. That was never a life that appealed to me.
Now I rarely thought of anything else. That feeling of being in the right, of being the only person left to stand up for the dead-I liked it. It suited me. Though it would be a while before I’d see another corpse, and a long while after that before I’d be responsible for bringing a killer to justice. I had found my purpose.
I made the first phone call from my desk at Ft. Polk, first to my uncle and then to his old commander, who by then was a shift lieutenant in the patrol division. After my discharge, I took some time off, did a little traveling, spent a few weeks on the Gulf with some fishing buddies I’d stayed in touch with off and on since college. Then it was back to Houston, the academy, the badge, and the mean streets.
The last time I saw Magnum was the day of my discharge. On base, we assumed he was long gone after the night of the murder. Maybe it was just convenient to tell ourselves that. I’d already taken care of business at Ft. Polk. All that was left was wedging the last of the things at my off-base apartment into an already-packed car, then driving the four hours to Houston.
Before I left town, I stopped at the cemetery where the dead girl was buried. All that my heroics had managed was to ensure that her headstone bore her name. That she didn’t just disappear without a trace. Maybe that was enough. I crouched down beside her grave and tried to remember everything about her. I’d only spent a few minutes in her presence, so it didn’t take long. If I had realized she was only the first, one of a long line of victims, mostly women, whom I would mourn without knowing, whose killers I would hunt and sometimes catch but never bring to justice in any ultimate sense, my intention to become a cop might have ended right there. Nicole Fauk, stabbed to death by her high-flying husband. Hannah Mayhew, killed for staying true to her friend. Evangeline Dyer, whose body rests in the unfathomable depths of the Gulf, and Simone Walker, copycat victim of a psychopath whose career was nipped in the bud.
There are so many, some without names, and behind them all, haunting my sleep, the little girl I could never save, my own daughter, Jess, taken by chance while I was miles and miles away. Hunched beside that grave in Leesville like Atlas taking on the first of his weight, I had no idea what was in store for me or I would have run.
Then again, maybe I wouldn’t have. This is the way I was made. I came from the factory with a sense that time was out of joint and had no Shakespearean qualms about being the one to set it right. Righteous indignation ran in my veins long before I had any reason to feel it. All that’s happened since has only confirmed what I knew from the cradle. The world had long since fallen into the ditch, but that didn’t mean we belonged there, caked in mud.
As I walked back to the car, I found Magnum leaning on the bumper.
He had his arms folded, the right hand tucked under his suit jacket casually. Probably gripping the butt of a pistol.
I stopped.
“I could kill you from here, if that’s what I wanted,” he said, flashing his grin.
“All right, then.” I closed the distance between us, pausing a few yards off. “You’ve got a gun under that coat, and this here’s a cemetery, but I’m not to read anything into that?”
“Read whatever you want into it.”
“You’re just here to say your goodbyes.”
“Is this goodbye? What makes you think that?”
“For one thing, I’m leaving. For another, I’m gonna be a cop. Since you’re an accomplice to murder and probably a murderer in your own right-”
“Hold
on, there, partner. There’s no need to get worked up. You’ve got the wrong idea about me entirely. I’m on the side of the angels. The world’s just not as black and white as you seem to think.”
“That girl out there,” I said. “Maybe you ought to pay your respects while you’re out here. Didn’t see you at the funeral.”
“The thing is, March, I was telling myself there was still hope for you. The way you handled yourself that night. . I was impressed. I know a lot of guys with resumés that would put yours to shame who couldn’t pull off what you did. What I’m saying is, I think we ought to have a talk.”
“I think we already did.”
“Don’t blow this off. That would be a mistake. There are opportunities that come only once in a lifetime. I’m talking about the major leagues here. The big show. There’s no glory in it, no recognition to speak of, but that kind of thing doesn’t matter once you’ve looked behind the curtain.”
“I already got a peek back there. Didn’t like what I saw.”
“Come on, now. I’m not going to throw myself at you-”
“Is that what all this is about? You’re trying to recruit me? This is how it works?”
He wasn’t smiling anymore. He looked at me with a strange fierceness. “This is my core,” he said. “This is my inner sanctum I’m opening up to you. You have no idea what I’ve seen. No idea what’s happening all around you every day. Men like you sleep at night because men like me don’t. All I’m saying is, you made a bad move back there, but it revealed something about you I hadn’t seen before. Now I know.”
“Now you know what?”
“I know I can make something of you, March.”
“No thanks.”
The suddenness of my answer surprised him. It surprised me, too. There was a time not long before that I would have jumped at the offer. To hear a man like him saying these things about me would have galvanized me. Now it meant nothing. I’d seen his world for what it was, and I couldn’t unsee it.
“I don’t care who you are. I don’t care what you’ve seen. I don’t care what’s behind your curtain. If we cross paths again, I’ll put you in cuffs as an accessory to murder.”
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