River of Glass

by Jaden Terrell

  Too frightened or too broken to leave.

  Tuyet, sitting at the top of the ladder, squealed and started back down toward her mother.

  James Decker and Mean Billy stood on top of the wall. Billy’s gun was drawn, and at the edge of the glass moat lay four motionless guards.

  “Jared, my man.” Billy spread his arms and grinned. “Let’s blow this Popsicle stand.”

  Decker made a half turn. He shifted his weight, stretched out his hand, and pushed. For a moment, Billy pinwheeled on one foot. His head came forward, his supporting knee bent, and he toppled straight down into the river of glass.

  43

  Mean Billy bellowed, and then he screamed. I shoved the Glock into its holster and ran, glass shifting beneath my shoes. I grabbed Billy by the collar, and glass bit my hands as I hauled him to his feet. Blood streamed down his face and arms. His beard and mustache glistened with red, and bits of glass fell out of the folds of his clothes and jutted from his cheeks and lips and eyelids. A large shard jutted from one eye, another from the webbing of one hand. The cuffs of his white shirt were flowered with red.

  Rain bounced off the glass and I couldn’t tell what was rain and what was glass. He moaned and sagged against me, and glass cut into my skin.

  In the distance, sirens wailed. Another guard came around the corner. His eyes widened. He looked at the tarp and the ladder and the three dead guards. Then he turned and bolted in the opposite direction.

  “Ah, God,” Mean Billy said. He scrabbled at his face and moaned again as the glass in his fingers raked the skin.

  “Don’t touch it, Billy. God, don’t touch anything.”

  “I can’t see,” he said. “Everything’s red.”

  “It’s just blood. You’ll be good as new when they get you sewed up.” His new suit and his new white shirt were in shreds, the cloth dark with blood and rain.

  “God, my eye hurts.” He moved his hand toward it, and I caught his wrist. “He blinded me, didn’t he? I’m gonna be blind. That son of a bitch, that son of a bitch Decker.”

  The sirens came closer.

  “Where is he?” Billy asked. “Tell me he didn’t get away.”

  “Over the wall. He isn’t going to get away.”

  “God.” He moaned again. “Don’t just stand here. Go get him.”

  “Billy, you need—”

  “I need you to catch that little fucker. Can you do that for me?”

  I opened my mouth to protest, but Khanh laid her hand on my forearm. “You go. I take care.”

  Mean Billy growled. “Go.”

  I gave him one last look, and as he sank to the ground, I ran for the ladder.

  THE WOMEN milled around on the other side of the wall. They moved aside as I dropped to the ground. “Where’d Decker go?”

  The willowy girl pointed. Over the sound of the sirens, I could hear Decker crashing through the trees.

  I lowered my head and ran after him. Leaves slid beneath my feet, and brambles caught at my pants legs. They slowed me down, but they slowed him more. I caught a glimpse of his white shirt through the foliage. Then another. A wave of energy surged through me, part rage and part victory. He stopped short, and I burst out of a copse almost on top of him. He cried out, stumbled, and scrambled backward on his hands and knees. Behind him, the swollen creek raged against the bank.

  I said, “It’s over. You got no place to go.”

  “I can’t go to jail,” he said, over the roar of the water. “I can’t.”

  He yanked up his pants leg, came up with a thin-bladed knife, and danced forward, slashing. I thought of the fencing trophies lining the walls of his foyer, noticed how he held the knife, firm but relaxed. He knew his way around a blade.

  I moved in and kicked him in the stomach. He bent double, retching and holding his belly, then slashed upward with the knife. If I’d been wearing a shirt, it might have caught the blade and deflected it. But Khanh was wearing my shirt, and there was nothing but skin between my blood and the blade.

  I felt a sting, like a bee sting, and a thin line of red appeared an inch below my navel.

  “It doesn’t have to be this way,” he said.

  “Yes, it does.”

  “I helped you. I got you in here. Just let me go.”

  “I’m not a sheep,” I said. “You can’t sell wool to me.”

  His voice turned pleading. “You know what happens to guys like me in jail.”

  “Same thing that happened to those women you sold.”

  “I’d rather die.” He sank into a fencer’s stance, swayed lightly on the balls of his feet, choosing his moment. Fear took the edge off his finesse, but it gave him strength. The knife came down. I threw up my left arm, felt the blade bite into my cast. Set my teeth against the pain and jerked the arm upward. The knife, caught in the cast, slid out of his hand. I turned the arm and backhanded him as hard as I could with the cast.

  Pain exploded from my elbow to my fingertips. My vision went gray, then white. His head snapped back and his feet went out from under him, and he staggered backward into the angry water.

  He cried out, fingers scrabbling at the bank. I shook my vision clear and dove onto my stomach, grabbed his wrist with my good hand. The wet skin slipped through my grasp, and he spun away. I snatched at his coat collar, closed my fist around it.

  “I’ve got you,” I said. “Hang on.”

  A branch rushed by, struck his shoulder. The current roared, tugged, wrenched his feet downstream, sloshed into his nose and mouth. He coughed and sputtered, slapped at my hand.

  My fingers cramped. My shoulders ached.

  He turned his face up, the fear clearing from his eyes. He raised his arms and twisted in my hand, and the current carried him out of his jacket and away.

  I LAY on the bank, rain washing into my eyes and hammering my scalp, my shoulder blades, the backs of my thighs. It hammered on my cast, and the pain in my arm pulsed in rhythm with my pounding heart. After a while, I pushed to my knees, rocked back on my heels, and waited for the throbbing to recede and the police to come.

  The police came first.

  Frank held out a hand and pulled me to my feet. “Next time you’ve got a shoot-out on your calendar, could you try not to book it around the biggest hostage crisis of the year?”

  Malone crashed into the clearing, gun out. When she saw us, she put it away and said, “Jesus, McKean, I told you to wait.”

  “Nice to see you too,” I said. “Is Billy—?”

  “En route to Vanderbilt’s trauma center, but . . . I don’t know. In this weather . . .”

  I closed my eyes. Billy would be fine. He had the constitution of a rhino. It would take more than a few shards of glass to take him down. Besides, he’d promised me a beer.

  I tilted my face up into the rain and said, “What happened with the Executioner?”

  “Torched himself,” Frank said. “Sent out a whole new manifesto on the Internet, then doused himself in gasoline and lit himself up. He’d soaked the whole house. It went up like a rocket booster.”

  “No great loss,” Malone said. “Of course, the official line is, we’re so very sorry that Mr. Hogarth’s illness led him to this tragic course of action, blah blah blah. Jesus, McKean, you look like you’re about to heave. McKean? You okay?”

  I opened my eyes, realized I still had Decker’s coat collar clenched in my fist. I flexed my fingers, made myself let go. “Decker. He went into the water.”

  Frank reached out, plucked a sliver of glass from my shoulder. “Don’t worry. We’ll find him. Right now, let’s get you to a doctor.”

  44

  They found Decker’s body a mile downstream, wedged beneath the roots of a half-uprooted oak. I wondered if he’d thought he had a chance, or if he’d meant it when he said he’d prefer death to prison. I wasn’t sorry he was dead, but neither was I glad. Some ledger had been evened, but it was too late for the women he’d helped sell or bury.

  Claire, resilient as Talbot had pr
edicted, held a press conference. She didn’t make excuses, and she didn’t whitewash anything. Instead, she apologized for her naïveté, opened her books to the public, and devoted Hands of Mercy to the restoration of the women we’d rescued from Talbot’s compound. Trust would be a long time coming, but looking at her sincere face, I knew it would come.

  The storms passed, the air behind them hot and steaming. Khanh said it felt like home. In early June, five of us waited at the airport security gate. Khanh and Tuyet stood with their arms around each other, looking eagerly at the arriving passengers. Their wounds were healing, and Tuyet’s brand was hidden by a high-collared shirt.

  Paul stood up straight in his Cub Scout uniform, occasionally giving his Wolf patch a proud pat. He looked up at Jay on his other side and grinned.

  A flood of people poured through the gates. They came in waves, first the Type As, heads down, taking long strides, then the regular folks, and finally the elderly and infirm and families with small children. Tuyet nudged her mother and pointed. “Bà ngoạingoa!”

  A moment later, I spotted an airline attendant pushing a small woman in a wheelchair. She looked hunched and withered, lines of hardship webbing her face. She wore tan slacks with sandals and a white sleeveless blouse. Around her neck was a tiny jade monkey on a silver chain.

  The attendant wheeled the chair through security, and Khanh and Tuyet rushed forward to take over, chattering in Vietnamese. Paul edged closer to me, pressed his back against my legs.

  “It’s okay, Sport,” I said.

  Tuyet slipped her hand into the older woman’s, and Khanh pushed her over to where I stood with Paul and Jay.

  “You very like him,” she said, and took my hand in hers.

  “This is Paulie,” I said. “Paulie, this is Khanh’s mom. Phen. You have something to give her.”

  He handed her a small velvet-covered box, then stretched up and gave her a sticky kiss. “You get well now.”

  She opened the box, and Dad’s silver star winked up at her. She stroked it with her fingertips, and for a moment, I saw them both, a younger Phen laughing, with flowers in her hair, my father, young and uniformed, smiling in a rice paddy ten thousand miles from home. Ghosts of the living and the dead.

  We stopped to pick up Billy, who hobbled out to meet us. He looked stitched together, the patch over his eye giving him a piratical look. Paul smiled and pulled up his shirt, showed the small scar where the surgeons had gone in to repair his heart.

  “Look, Uncle Billy. We bofe look like Frankenstein.”

  Billy ruffled Paul’s hair and gave Khanh a kiss on the top of the head.

  Back at home, Khanh filled a bowl with spring water and flower petals. Tuyet lit a stick of incense and handed another to Paul. Together, we marched through the house, Khanh chanting a prayer and sprinkling drops of scented water, Tuyet and Paul waving sticks of incense, filling the house with sweet-smelling smoke. Jay and I walked on each side of Phen, supporting her insubstantial weight, while Billy stumped along beside us.

  The house felt lighter with her blessing. But we had shed blood, and our blood had been shed. I’d added more bodies to my balance sheet. It had been justified, but no matter how justified, killing has its costs. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that.

  Khanh looked back at me and smiled, then walked on, chanting, not ridding us of our ghosts, for they are always with us, but maybe—at least for the moment—making peace with them.