“You pull the string,” I say, collecting my thoughts, “and sometimes it goes from there, like a ripcord. Pull, result. Action, reaction. But sometimes the string is long and tangled.”
“You now have ten seconds remaining,” she says, wandering back in with her blouse thankfully buttoned now. She plops herself on the floor to pull on shoes.
“Sometimes you pull, and you get more than you expected. The sweater unravels, but it turns out to be woven into something bigger, longer. Something connected. Everythi—”
“Time’s up,” she says, dancing to her feet to grab some yogurt from the fridge. Then she is out the door, with not so much as goodbye. She may as well have patted my bald spot on the way out.
“Everything is connected to something else,” I say to nothing, no one.
I stew for a few moments, then wander into the living room to get angry at the television, watching for signs of them at work, listening to the world fall apart almost as fast as me. Sit on something the wrong way, feel a sharp pain and even worse. The local news comes on and gives me ideas. Some foolish, impossible, but some reasonable, for certain definitions of reason. I make mental notes. I look for strings and fontanelles. I weigh options. I squirm and try to find comfort, but the pain will not abate, so I stand, and feel better having done it. I look down and see the cause of my pain is, perhaps not surprisingly, her. Or rather, something of hers, that she should not have left without. I should take it to her, I decide.
I grab my own things from the table: guns, and sharp things. More slowly than she did, minutes ago, proving my point. I need to keep working out, try to undo some of what injury and middle age have wrought. Middle? More likely near the end. If I am lucky. Nature designed us to copulate at fifteen. To die by thirty. And what am I now, nearly twice that?
I was not supposed to live this long. No one is.
• • •
How did Abe find us? Wasn’t he dead? No, that was the other guy. What was his name? Josh? What was happening? Too many questions, no answers. I tented my hands, stayed calm. If they wanted me dead, I would be dead. Get into character. Put up a front. Gather information.
“Where is he?” asked Abe, confirming my suspicion. Not me at all, then.
“Home. Listen, Abe, I’d love to catch up, but let me lay this on the line: my manager is a white supremacist prick with a triple K. If he catches me sitting here yammering he’s gonna come over. And if he does that, then one of us is going to kill him, and odds are it’ll be me. So for now let’s pretend like you’re a customer and I’m a waitress named Dinah.”
He chewed on that for a moment, and I thought I might die. But no.
“Fine,” he said. “But first put it on the table.”
Damn it. I reached back, grabbed my gun, and slid it across behind the menu.
“Not what I meant, but thanks. Now give me your phone.” I slid it over, and he picked it up in both hands, leaving the menu to hide the weapons.
“He won’t answer.”
“Yes, he will,” he said. “Go get me a beer.”
I smiled like they taught us on day one, pulled out my pad, and scribbled down an order. Maybe I could kill him with the pen. Yeah, sure.
“How about some artichoke dip?”
“Don’t push your luck,” he said, idly sifting through my phone. It wouldn’t take long. There was only one number under recent calls. “And don’t fuck around. Stay in the room.”
“Yes sir, right away, sir.” On my way to the bar, I scanned the room as casually as I could, trying to find them. He wouldn’t have come alone. One by the door, maybe. One at the bar. Probably one in the bathroom, one by the back door. Enough to matter. Still, I played it out like a champ, every fake smile and smooth move crisp as I stepped behind the bar, tore the top sheet off my notepad and slapped it down on the counter, making damn sure Samuel saw it.
“I require a pint of your finest bitter, my good man,” I said. “And a Vanilla Coke.”
Read it. Read the fucking slip, Sam. But no, instead he reached for a pint glass—he didn’t need to read the order. We only had the one on tap. Change of plans. I pushed past him and grabbed another glass, hot from the dishwasher. Too hot, almost. I dropped it straight into my apron, juggling it around between nervous hands. Heart thumping faster, fingers itching.
“What are you doing?” he said.
“I’ll get the beer. You do the Coke. I don’t know where the vanilla stuff is.” And read the goddamn fucking slip of paper, you idiot. I looked over to see if Abe was watching. No. He was too busy with my cell. I could totally spit in his beer if I wanted.
Fuck you, Abe, see how you like this.
“What’s wrong with you?” Sam asked, moving off to concoct my potion while I topped off the beer. “You’re acting weird.”
“Your face is weird,” I said, too preoccupied for anything more clever.
By the time Sam returned with my Coke, I was already gone with the beer, dancing between tables, leaving him to puzzle out the meaning of the abandoned beverage and the slip of paper that he needed to read. I presented the glass to Abe with a flourish and quickly sat down, watching bubbles dance down the side of the glass as I whipped out my pad and pen, tap tap tap.
“No, I didn’t spit in it,” I said, trying to push, keep him off balance. “Maybe. Guess you’d better drink it fast. That way you can’t tell. So, business. Are you here to negotiate a peace treaty?”
“Nothing to do with you,” he said, rolling the glass between his hands. “Unless you involve yourself. I’m just here for Edward.”
It took me a second to remember that this was how Abe knew Edison.
“He’s a popular guy. People keep inviting him to dinner.”
“You have no idea,” he said, menacing. And as he sipped his bitter beer, I shot a glance back at the bar, saw Sam on his cell covertly dialing the number I wrote on the slip, hoping my threes didn’t look too much like eights.
• • •
It always feels good to be moving, going somewhere. Even if it is only to visit her at work. I think movement is the key. I need to be moving, getting more exercise, taking the air as they used to say. I have been doing more of it, in various ways, while she works. Something to do with my time because sitting in the house all day—as she thinks I do—is too stifling, like a too-tight, too-warm sweater. Uncomfortably comfortable.
We are in the same sweater, too. She seems content, perhaps even happy, but it feels wrong. Dangerous. On the surface things are calm, but it cannot last. We live in a crumbling, burning house of cards. A slow burn, granted, but building strength. She wants something from this … partnership that I cannot offer, and in her perfect image of us I think I am on the bottom, and she is on the top. Not that it matters, because it will kill us both, one way or the other, unless something changes. And she does not seem inclined to change.
Once she looked at me with fear, or awe, or respect. Now there is only pity, though she denies it. I am the bird with the broken wing, and she has me in her little shoebox and tends to me. The child never wishes the bird well. Healthy things fly away: you let them go, and if they were yours, they come back, or whatever bullshit that is. Healthy things fly away forever. Sick things come back. Broken things never leave. And I am broken.
I stop and rest near a bus stop, leaning heavily on the post. Knees aching but enjoying the pain, somehow. Pain is change. Pain is becoming. Pain means you are alive. Lack of pain is death. Is that what she wants? Painless, stagnant death?
I imagine her, for a moment, lying still in that hole I dug outside Portland. Would I be better off with her dead? Would she? She would have never been at the diner, and they would never have tracked her there, and I could be doing so much more. Images from the television return to haunt me, ideas that are not quite so ridiculous, plans, actions, worthwhile things that are more than this nothing I am. Than we are. Things I could be doing, instead of nothing. Changes I could be making. Getting back to what was.
Being change, instead of being changed.
I told her to practice, to learn to be alone, but I should have done that instead of watching myself rot and wither. I cannot end like this. I have little future left; I may as well borrow from the past while I still can. How long has it taken me to get this far? How old and broken am I, really? I reach for my phone to check the time and realize that I am apparently very much of both. For I have forgotten to take it with me, again.
• • •
Sam shrugged and pocketed his cell. Shit. No answer? What now? Improvise. Yeah, shut the fuck up, Nick. I’d been doing nothing but.
“Know how we found you?” Abe asked as I wrote four-letter words on my order pad.
“License? Fingerprints?” I asked, admiring my fingertips. “I should file these off.”
“Edward’s pills,” he said. “One too many favors called in, not enough money, a few loose lips. I imagine you know all about that, though, right?”
I ignored the obviously crass innuendo as he chuckled and took his first big sip of bitter brew. It’d been months since Edison called in the last of his favors, to get medical help in the wake of our flight from Seattle. If that was really it, it had taken them quite a while to catch us. What had taken so long? And why was it Abe? He wasn’t in Seattle, he was in San Francisco with …
“Nick,” I said. “This is about Nick, isn’t it?”
He laughed as he hit the Call button on my phone, then set it down to take a sip of beer.
“Nick thought he saw the big picture,” he said. “But he only saw a small piece. He was just a pawn. Like the rest of them. Edward did me a huge favor when—”
“Us.”
“Hmm?” he said, sipping. Frowning, watching the phone call go unanswered.
“You said ‘the rest of them,’” I said. “Don’t you mean ‘the rest of us’?”
“Oh, I was including you in there, don’t worry. You’re just a pawn, too.”
He smiled, and I finally understood what he was getting at.
“Them, not you,” I said. “You were what? Nick’s boss? Handler? Whatever it’s called?”
“Fixer,” he said, almost having to choke the word out. “Is what you mean. But no, it’s different. Nick was the fixer. He arranged the crew. I set him up with the work. Him and others.”
“So why are you here? I thought everything was supposed to stay nice and separated.”
“Yeah, well, things are different now.” He angrily shoved the phone at me. “Call him.”
“You think he can tell who dialed?” I toyed with the phone. “Maybe he’s not even home.”
“Well you better find him, because if he’s not here in twenty minutes I’m breaking your fingers.”
“Didn’t do enough damage to me last time?”
He looked confused for a moment as he fiddled with his collar, but then it dawned on him what I meant: what had been done to me in San Francisco, after I’d been set up.
“That was Nick,” he said. “Not me. I wasn’t part of that.”
“Oh, come on. Maybe you weren’t there in person, but you knew what was going on. You set up all the jobs, right? I don’t know why I had to be involved in your grand scheme, but—”
“You really wanna know what it was all about?” Abe asked, coughing. “Bec—”
“No. You know what, fuck it. I don’t care. Shit happens. ’Cause of shitty people like you.”
“Fine, enough chit-chat then,” he growled. “Where the fuck is Edison?”
I leaned in conspiratorially, the better to see his reddening face.
“Answer my question, and I’ll answer yours,” I stage-whispered.
“What?” he asked, his face betraying a sudden, suspicious concern.
“Does it really taste like almonds?”
And at that point he’d had just about enough, and he tried to do something, but there was nothing for him to do but collapse across the table, twitching, clawing, heart seizing, exploding like fireworks. Perfect timing, really. But that was the end of perfect, because this couldn’t not be noticed. People began rubbernecking and across the room. It was suddenly clear who they were, because they were on their feet and reaching into holsters. I lifted the menu and took a gun in each hand and as bystanders panicked, I slid under the table to collect what few thoughts I had.
Improvise. Right. What did I have that they didn’t? What was my advantage? Where was the string to pull? What was nearby? Crayons. Olive oil. A corpse. Not much. Back to basics then.
Run. Always run.
I looked for exits, ways out. It was a math problem. Trajectories and angles, physical and otherwise. Back door? Two guys, methodically headed this way. Front door? Edison.
Edison?
• • •
I take the first one down about three seconds in. He never sees me, is facing the other way, and since he’s pushing in and everyone else is trying to get out, I make a bold assumption that he’s one of the bad guys—yeah, I know, perspective. I step right up behind and, really quite easily, no strength required, I push him off balance and bury his face in a stone planter. That’s probably enough, all things considered, but just to be sure I pull out my 941 and water the plants red. I am disappointed when they turn out to be plastic.
Before anything else can change meaningfully, I find another likely target and fire a few rounds his way, the first two hitting bystanders but the last taking my target in the neck, I think. It’s very hard to tell: panic increases, if that’s possible, but this is what I want, just what we need. There are more of them than there are of us only if you leave out the sheep. With them on our team, albeit unwillingly, the odds are in our favor. I shoot at a few more, mostly intentionally missing and as hoped and expected, some turn and ridiculously move back into the fray.
I’m sorely tempted to just say fuck it and make this a party, but I restrain myself and save the ammo. They have heard the shots now—all of them, however many that is—and they go down low and so do I. Through the chaos and the tinnitus, I hear shots from across the room, Xtian’s P3AT. And I think, for just a moment, that we have them right where we want them, and then I wonder about that word, “we.”
The crowd thins, too much, too fast. And this is suddenly and completely not my thing, not my element. This does not work, guns blazing into a mostly empty room full of armed killers, this in fact is quite the opposite of work; it is guaranteed permanent unemployment. This is not even how they fight wars any more. This is stupidity. When I did this with Josh, I expected to die and nearly did. This time around, I’m really not looking forward to it.
I fall to my knees and get behind the planter and reload and look for a way out. Run.
But then there are two more shots, followed by silence.
I crawl to the corner of the planter and look, watch as Xtian walks across the room, gun in hand. And the last of them, mortal already and bloody besides, is scrabbling towards the kitchen. He pulls himself up and barely has time to turn to face her before she puts the gun up to his face and ends him, cold, face unblinking as he spatters and fades. Just like that.
She sees me, reloads, stepping over and on and through bodies, moving like liquid glass, and I stand and meet her gaze, incredulous.
“What’re you doing here?” she asks loudly, voice almost inaudible through the ringing in my ears, and in response I just reach in my pocket and toss it on the ground, something small, insignificant, something sharp and now bent. Like so much is.
“You forgot your name tag,” I say.
• • •
We didn’t have time to burn down the restaurant like he wanted, barely had enough to get out the back and sneak through the park, ditching the guns beneath a footbridge in the goose-shit pond. We took the extra-long way home to make sure we weren’t followed, even with him limping and gasping, and by the time we got back after dark both of us were exhausted. We put the news on immediately, and of course the restaurant was the top story, but they didn’t even have o
ur pictures up yet, probably in great part because the security cameras in the restaurant were just for show and had never worked. It would take a while for the police to find us, anyway. It’s not like I’d used my real name and address.
Edison was most upset about the cyanide, which I found amusing. He did, too, after a few moments. I told him I was just taking his long-ago advice to heart. I’d planned on having to drink it myself, one day. I wasn’t ever going through what Nick had put me through again.
“How long have you been carrying that around?” he asked as I carefully rinsed out the little vial of not-almond extract at the kitchen sink, idly thinking about all the marzipan-scented fish I was killing somewhere at the far end of the pipe.
“Since Seattle,” I said. From when I’d packed up his things, assuming he was gone forever.
“You take it to work with you?”
“Took, yes.” Work was past tense, now. Among other things.
“How many of my things do you have that I don’t know about?”
“Noth— get out of there!”
I chased him into my room, which he playfully ransacked with nervous energy, and I think we laughed, though now it’s hard to remember that part. It all ended with us laying there on the same bed for what seemed like hours, watching the ceiling, imagining little green stars, maybe, as I told him what little Abe had told me, and Edison tried to piece together a plot out of it.
I realized as he rambled that something felt inside-out. Some invisible string between us had snapped, and we were no longer tethered, to each other or anything else. Our whole life had been either him rescuing me, or me rescuing him, or one of us trying to get the other killed. What had happened in the restaurant was different. It was just two people in the same place doing the same thing. Two equal partners. And I wasn’t sure Edison could handle working with someone who didn’t need him. Someone he didn’t need.
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