by Saul Black
She looked up between the interlaced branches overhead. The sky had lightened. This was the magic hour filmmakers allegedly loved, light burgeoning from cobalt to mercury, eventually peach. It was only under the trees that the darkness was complete. She picked her way through the undergrowth to the edge of the gravel track. Safety off. The second gun tucked into the waistband of her jeans. Her simple human self was grateful that she was wearing her favored footwear, a brand called Teva, something between a sneaker and a hiking boot. Maximal mobility, grip, spring, comfort. She spared a mad moment of pity for the days when female cops wore feminine clothes. The lightness of being hadn’t left her. There was still only the one thing that mattered: holding Nick, alive, in her arms—even if they only had seconds to share it.
Second cattle grid. Fifty yards. She kept low.
She could see the open gate up ahead. Maybe thirty or forty feet beyond that, the farmhouse, a solid pale building set in a front yard of weedy concrete, meadow grass growing on either side. She’d have to skirt the open space. Cut around behind the first row of trees. Then only fifteen or twenty yards to the side of the house. No visible cars. Presumably parked around back.
She quickened her pace. Just shy of the gate a second narrow track at right angles from the first. Barely big enough for a vehicle. It startled her as she passed its opening. The raw space was like a presence. The air in there felt cold. Maybe it went down to a stream?
It didn’t matter. She ignored it, passed through the gateway, and veered to her left. Not random: to her left because the most basic instinctive machinery said keep the gun hand—the right hand—between you and the house.
A little more than a minute, perhaps two. She was hot, breathing hard. Her hand was wet around the Glock’s grip. But she was level with the side of the house. A fucking big house, now that she was close up. There could be a dozen rooms in there. No lights showed. Pray one of the doors is open. Can’t afford the sound of a broken window. Can’t afford sound, period. He hears sound and he kills Nick.
(If he hasn’t already. The size of that reality was like a tidal wave she knew had reared up behind her. A wall of dirty water a thousand feet high. She could feel the chill of its shadow on her back. She wouldn’t turn and look. She wouldn’t.)
She straightened. There was nothing left now but to cross the open space to the house. Come what may. I love you, Nick.
It was what she said to herself instead of a prayer.
She had taken three quick, running strides out from under the cover of the trees when the first shot hit her in the back.
It felt like being kicked in the back. She was still wearing the vest, but the force of the slug was enough to knock the wind out of her and send her sprawling onto her front. The ground hit her face with an abrupt taste of turf and pain detonated in her nose. She was aware—even in the moment of impact—of the Glock’s cold mass in her right hand. She hadn’t dropped it. She had to turn. Get her elbow under her. See him.
But there was no oxygen. Her lungs had emptied. It was as if the gun were nailed to the ground. The air was quicksand. The roll onto her side distended time, stretched seconds into minutes, hours, days.
Too long. Long enough for Eugene to break from the trees, night-vision goggles up on his forehead now, giving him the look of a giant insect loping, upright. Long enough for her to see him smile, raise the pistol, fill her vision, and fire a second shot into her thigh, just above the knee.
49
“Where is Katherine?” Eugene said. He didn’t sound angry or urgent. In fact his tone was suave, intrigued.
Valerie was at the end of what felt like a very long ride, dragged by her hair through the farmhouse kitchen and along a corridor to the open door of the basement, where Eugene kicked her down the flight of dusty wooden stairs. He’d relieved her of both firearms. Her leg was a mixture of sensations. It was as if a horse had stomped on it and the stomp had started a fire made, impossibly, of ice. The pain took her right up to the brink of passing out. She could feel unconsciousness there next to her, like the edge of a warm, dark lake she could slip into, so easily, so soothingly. But every time she rolled back.
She opened her mouth to answer Eugene, but the pain halted her for a moment. She turned on her side and vomited. She saw, for the first time, the body of the woman in the corner, facing away. But the French braid reminded her of someone. Through the nausea, it came to her. The moody guard from Red Ridge. She even remembered the name: Lomax. Christ, was that all it was? The simplicity of it disgusted her.
“I repeat,” Eugene said: “Where is Katherine?”
“Let him go,” Valerie spat, “and I’ll tell you.”
She had met Nick’s eyes just once. Long enough to say: Whatever happens, I love you. Thank you. I’m glad we’re together. Nick, still silenced by the duct tape, had returned the look. Then, of all things (and yet of course), winked. I know, Skirt. I love you, too. She had smiled.
“Let him go and you’ll tell me,” Eugene said, as if weighing it up. Then he stepped over to Nick and pulled the knife out of his belt.
“No!” Valerie screamed. “Wait!”
Eugene jammed the blade into Nick’s left shoulder. Nick writhed. Fish on a hook. Eugene twisted the blade. The sound of Nick’s sealed-in scream tore through Valerie. “All right!” she roared. “I’ll tell you. Stop it, goddamnit, you fuck. I’ll tell you.”
Eugene withdrew the blade. Nick screamed again behind the tape. He looked at Valerie, shaking his head: No. Don’t. He’s going to kill us anyway.
She knew that. This was the endgame. The only thing it was possible for her to win was a quick death for her and Nick. A quick death. Together. At least together. One night, years ago, lying close in bed and talking about death, Nick had said: I don’t mind how I go, just as long as I’m not alone. I’d like someone there with me, even if it’s a complete stranger. Someone to say good-bye to. It hurt her to remember this, and yet at the same time she was glad. He wasn’t alone. She had given him that, at least.
“She’s in the trunk of the Chevy,” Valerie said. “On the track between the first and second cattle grids. I shot her, but I don’t think it’ll kill her.”
“Thank you,” Eugene said. “In that case I’ll take a look. It’s a shame to forgo what we had planned for you two—where the devil are you off to?”
Valerie had begun dragging herself toward Nick. She wanted to touch him, even if it was just to grab hold of his ankle. Together.
Eugene stomped on the wound in her leg, ripping a cry from her throat. “Oh no, no, no, no,” he said. “None of that, if you don’t mind. Christ, you’re positively medieval. Now, who wants to go first? More painful for Nick to watch you die? Or for you to watch him die? Decisions and imprecisions … Oh well, I know what Katherine would want.” He raised the gun and aimed it at Nick’s face.
At which moment a peculiar thing happened. Simultaneous with the sound of the shot, some small fragments popped out of the top of Eugene’s skull in a little spurt of blood.
His knees went from under him and he collapsed onto them. He seemed to stay like that for a long time. Long enough for Valerie to note the strange look of vacancy, one eye rolling back, showing almost all white. Long enough for her to see the gun drop from his hand. Long enough for her to think he was trying to say something.
Then he fell forward onto his face, one arm twisted under him.
There was a bullet hole in the top of his head, and the fair buzz cut was dark with blood.
She followed Nick’s gaze, turned, looked up to see Will Fraser crouched halfway up the basement stairs, Smith & Wesson still trained.
“I fucking hated that guy,” he said, taking out his phone.
50
It was hard for Valerie to communicate all the information she needed. She was afloat in pain. Red and black nothingness kept coming close. And through all of it she was straining for the sound of sirens. She wanted to surrender to the soft currents of confusion. A siren was a w
inged female creature whose singing lured sailors to shipwreck on the rocks. A siren was a beautiful woman. Katherine was a siren. And yet a siren was what she wanted. Why did they call them sirens?
Somehow, she managed. Will passed on the location of the house where McLuhan and his team were watching the bomb clock tick down. Two disposal units would be dispatched, one there, and one here, since there was every possibility Eugene had rigged it such that both sets of tech hardware were involved. Vaguely, Valerie imagined headache for the squad. Imagine that job. Every day tiptoeing through a minefield. Every day.
“Katherine’s back down the track,” she said. “Cuffed to a tree near the Chevy.”
“Got it,” Will said. “Jesus, I leave you alone for five minutes…”
When the tape was removed from his mouth and his hands and feet freed from the cuffs, Nick couldn’t stand without Will’s support. Will laid him on the floor next to Valerie.
“Hey,” she said, laying her hand on his chest.
His lips were swollen. “Hey, Skirt,” he slurred. “Remind me later there’s something I need to ask you.”
“I’d have been here sooner,” Will said. “But that crazy girl … Jesus, if she hadn’t come back to her house to pick up a goddamned pair of shoes … You know it’s one of Katherine’s guards, right?”
“Yeah,” Valerie said. “I know.”
* * *
Nick and Valerie entered the world of the hospital, the white world of beneficent drugs. The bullet had missed Valerie’s femoral artery but chipped the femur and ripped through a ligament. She’d be in the hospital for at least a week. And reliant on a crutch for a while after that. Two of Nick’s ribs were broken and the knife wound was deep. “You’ll get patched up,” the doctor told him. “But there’s a lot of damage to the muscle. You might need help reaching a top shelf, possibly for the rest of your life.”
“I’m retiring,” Nick told him. “And emigrating.”
“Oh yeah? Where?”
“Polynesia.”
Nick called Will to come see him.
“Listen,” he said. “I need you to get something for me from the apartment.”
“Holy shit,” Will said, when Nick told him what it was. “Don’t you want to wait until you guys are out of here?”
“I’m done waiting,” Nick said. “She gets shot too often.”
Later that evening, an orderly deposited Nick at Valerie’s bedside. She was on the phone to McLuhan.
“Well,” she said, when she’d hung up, “at least we know now who he was.”
“Who was he?”
“Ethan Muller. Of the banking Mullers. His family cut him off years ago—bought him off, I should say—but he’s still worth about two hundred million.”
“That’s some buy-off.”
“Cheap at twice the price, according to his father. He tried to rape his sister when he was thirteen. She was nine. The old man’s glad he’s dead.”
“So am I.”
For a moment, they looked at each other. So much that didn’t need to be said. Death had come so near, for both of them. Neither of them would have thought they could be any more close, and yet their shared survival had stamped something on them, a new certainty where they had thought they had certainty before.
“You didn’t remind me,” Nick said.
“What?”
“You didn’t remind me there was something I wanted to ask you.”
“Oh, yeah. Sorry. I had just been shot.”
“I wanted to wait and ask you when you were brushing your teeth. I’m not sure why.”
He pulled out the small, black velvet box. Opened it.
“Oh my God,” Valerie said.
51
One Sunday, three weeks after she’d come out of the hospital (she’d been back at work—desk duty only—for one), Valerie filled up the Taurus at her local Mobil and drove out to Red Ridge to see Katherine Glass.
She was curious. Not morbidly (the job had long since satisfied that quota), but out of a strange interest in her own capacity to assimilate the non-assimilable. The problem—if it was a problem—with surviving the sorts of things she had survived was that it opened up new room in you. It invited you into what felt like an elite human activity: understanding humans. So much of what she had never understood had remained impenetrable to her not because it was inherently mysterious, but because she was afraid of it. And now, apparently, she was afraid of nothing. If you were fearless, it was your obligation to do what others were too afraid to do.
Throughout her stay in hospital, and in the weeks since, the thought of visiting Katherine had flickered in and out, then stuck, then become a reliable preoccupation, then a calm certainty. It had a neutral, incontrovertible logic: she had to see her because she wasn’t afraid. She couldn’t even say quite why she understood this. Only that she did understand it. It had burgeoned in her like a benign revelation.
Surviving death had made her feel, paradoxically, both young and old. Young because, naturally, the ordinary pleasures of being alive—the simple fact of being alive—had been tenderly refreshed; but old because death (with birth) was the oldest human thing, and to have touched it was to have brought some of its ancient imprint back with her into her life. Katherine had, she now realized, always seemed old to her. Katherine had touched death from the other side, by giving it to people. Valerie’s half-shed moral self still railed against that, but she was already beginning to see that the railing would morph into first sadness, then a kind of clean (and possibly terrible) understanding. An understanding without pity, but an understanding nonetheless. She had begun thinking of Katherine as someone who was doomed to get a particular bit of math wrong, every time. And it was this single mistake that would forever prevent her from … From what? Valerie didn’t know. But she had an intimation that Katherine thought the same way. Beyond good and evil. Good and evil were the languages we fell back on because we couldn’t understand the mistake. In all her dealings with Katherine she’d been bothered by the feeling that Katherine knew something that she, Valerie, did not. Now, having come back from death, she’d found herself thinking maybe it was the other way around—or at the very least, mutual: Katherine believed Valerie knew something that she, Katherine, did not.
None of this was clear to Valerie. She didn’t feel, merging with five lanes of traffic in the bright morning (it had rained earlier, and the world had a fresh, rinsed feel) that she had thought it through. It wasn’t thought, really, that had brought her here. It was something either subtler or more crude. But whatever it was, it moved her with a force of disinterested inevitability.
At the prison, she stood for a few moments outside, smoking a Marlboro and finishing a cappuccino she’d picked up at a rest stop a few miles back. The morning’s clouds had dispersed. Now blue sky showed, and sunlight winked on the puddles. She was thinking of the Venerable Bede and Cassie’s description of the feasting hall. Drinking and eating and arguing and laughing, fighting and making love. But there was more going on in the feasting hall than that. Katherine Glass and Ethan Muller were there, too, doing what they did. You have to make sure you see everything. All of it, as much as you can. You’ve got a moment, that’s all.
Inside, she went through the security drill. Gun. Purse. All sharp objects. No food, no drink, no cigarettes. The guards went about their business with the same bored diligence she remembered from the times before. The buzzers buzzed, the doors slid open and pounded shut. The place’s smell of cramped life and brutal cleaning products was unmistakable. The air was heavy, close, migrained.
In the visitors’ room a hard-faced blond guard Valerie hadn’t seen before was on duty, along with Warrell, the guard who had accompanied Katherine with Melody Lomax on that first visit, what felt like a lifetime ago. Because her machine couldn’t stop what it did, Valerie remembered that on that visit Warden Clayton had told Warrell to take Katherine back to her cell and Lomax to bring her and Will along to her office for debriefing when the inte
rview was over. But in fact Lomax had gone back with Katherine to her cell and Warrell had escorted them to see Clayton. All these small things. No matter how good your machine, there were always things it missed.
Katherine sat at the same table, cuffed at wrists and ankles, leaning back in her plastic chair. She looked tired, but her hair was freshly washed, pulled back in its trademark ponytail. For a while, when Valerie took the seat opposite her, neither of them spoke. They just sat and looked at each other.
“I knew you’d come,” Katherine said.
It didn’t seem strange to Valerie that those were Cassie’s words, what felt like a lifetime ago.
“I guess a promise is a promise,” Katherine added. “Even to a monster.”
“You need to remember what I promised you. I said that if the information you gave us led to his arrest, I would come and visit you once a month until they killed you. Those were my exact words.”
“And so?”
“So, we didn’t arrest him. He’s dead.”
Katherine looked at her as if with grudging admiration. “That’s the letter of the law, not its spirit,” she said.
“As was your so-called information.”
“You’ve changed,” Katherine said. “Something’s different.”
Valerie didn’t reply. Katherine was studying her, bright-eyed, suddenly. A childlike excitement. As if her intuition was being proved right.
“It’s the strangest thing,” Katherine said. “I knew you’d come, but I didn’t know why.”
“I’m not sure I know why, either,” Valerie said. “But here I am. Maybe I’d like to hear your story. The real story, if it’s of any interest to you to tell it.”
“Do you think there’s any hope for me?”
“Hope of what?”
“Redemption. Salvation. Avoiding Hell.”
