by Steven Gould
I couldn’t tell if they were alive or dead.
I couldn’t see anyone else through the door but that didn’t mean they weren’t there.
I jumped into the middle of the room and away, as quickly as I could, so sure I’d trip a motion sensor that I panicked, and arrived back in the Empty Quarter with shreds of cardboard flying around me.
Boy, haven’t done that in a while.
I jumped back to the sidewalk, outside. The house was still there. Men with knives weren’t popping out of the bushes or falling from the sky.
Back in the cellar I could see their labored breath. They’d both soiled themselves and for some reason that made me madder than anything. They taped them up and just left them. I wondered how long they’d been without water.
I went to Mrs. Kelson and reached for the tape across her eyes and then froze.
My sloppy jump had dislodged the cardboard stack behind them.
And that’s where the bomb was.
It was a military thing, olive drab nylon bag, one end opened, exposing olive drab metal with screw-down terminals and two different multiconductor wires, each leading across the floor to a chair. The wires went up the chair legs under the duct tape and transitioned to the chair seat, tucked under the backs of their knees.
Pressure switch? When you freed them and lifted their bodies off the chairs, did it complete the circuit or break it?
And could the bastards still detonate it remotely?
Call the bomb squad!
Right. And do they detonate it then, when they see all the trucks pull up?
Fuck it!
I gabbed the back of each chair and jumped.
My arms hurt and I couldn’t keep Patrick’s chair from falling over, but I did slow his fall and we were there, in the Empty Quarter.
Alive.
The wires had broken at the terminals—there was a bit of stripped copper still showing. I wondered if the bomb had gone off or not. Maybe there’d been a delay set.
I took the tape off of their mouths first, and their breathing eased. The tape over their eyes was tricky—I felt like I’d damage their eyelids, so I left it.
Mrs. Kelson groaned.
Patrick stirred. “Who is it? What’s happening?”
I thought about reassuring him, then shook my head.
I left them taped to the chairs and jumped them, one at a time, to the sidewalk outside St. Francis Medical Center in Trenton—it was right across from the east side of E.V.’s high school. Someone shouted and I heard footsteps but I didn’t even turn around before jumping back to Euclid Avenue in Trenton.
The house hadn’t exploded.
I heard the dog barking still, from the backyard, and I was glad.
“Nine-one-one operator. What is the nature of your emergency?”
“There’s a dead man and an unexploded bomb in the basement of a house on Euclid Avenue.” I gave the street address.
I’d used the cell phone to make the call and when I hung up on the 911 operator’s questions, it buzzed again, and I wondered if the operator was calling back.
It was Kemp.
“We’ll kill her mother and brother, you know.”
Did he expect me to turn myself over to them? Or did they have some way of tracking the phone?
“By all means, kill them,” I said. “They deserve it.”
I went back to the cellar, quickly, before the bomb squad got there. I wiped the phone off and set it beside Mr. Kelson’s body. I was about to jump away again, when I saw a baseball bat leaning in the corner. It wasn’t full size—probably left over from Little League. I wondered if it had been Patrick’s or E.V’s.
I looked down at the body.
“Mind if I borrow this?”
The first sirens sounded in the distance and I jumped away.
THIRTEEN
Ends and Beginnings
E.V. was at the table with one of her diet sodas and the bottle of pills. I dropped the bat and jumped across the room, snatching the bottle off the table.
She flinched. In a flat voice she said, “I wasn’t going to. I thought about it—I really did.”
I threw the pill canister across the cave and into the old entrance shaft.
“Why?” I asked. “The bastards are already doing enough. You want to do their work for them?”
She just looked down at the table. She wouldn’t look up.
Love me. Take me back to bed and love me. Make it like it never happened.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry about your fath—”
“Goddamn it! Couldn’t you have lied? Why’d you have to tell me your real name? Why couldn’t you have lied! You lied about the other stuff!”
I’d already had the same thought. Her father would probably still be alive if I’d made up a name. Hell, I could’ve been Paully MacLand, the bastard. I took her elbow, to pull her up, and she lashed out at me. I blocked it automatically. Years of karate were good for something, it turned out. Keep your girlfriend from beating on you.
Something wrong there.
I shoved her back down into the chair and while she struggled to get her balance back, trying to keep the chair from tipping over backward, I stepped in and jumped her to the sidewalk across from her high school.
She twisted away, hunching in on herself, then looked around. “What—why here?” She was staring west, toward the high school.
I gestured behind her toward the medical center, at the large internally lit red cross with the words EMERGENCY ROOM beside it. “Your brother and mother are in there. They’re okay—probably dehydrated, but physically okay.” I shrugged.
Anger, rage, fear, terror, grief—she’d finally managed to hide those, to push them to the background—but this, hope, was too much. I had to walk her the rest of the way, supporting her through the waiting room door, to the first row of seats.
It wasn’t crowded. A woman in scrubs came forward, concern furrowing her face. E.V’s grief was extravagant, unmitigated, loud.
I saw her safely seated and turned to the nurse. “Her mother and brother were just dropped off here. Uh, there was duct tape involved.”
The nurse’s eyes widened. “The police are—”
I held up my hand and something in my face made her recoil and stop talking, midsentence.
I put E.V.’s pocketbook in her lap, touched her hair and said, “I hope you never have to lie about who you are, E.V.” I took a deep shuddering breath and felt the tears coming.
I no longer cared who saw me or not.
“Good-bye.”
I jumped.
I could still smell E.V. on the bedding. Hell, her coat was still lying there, with mine, on top of the dresser. I took it with me to the bed and buried my face in it.
It was all mixed up—stuff from Mum and Dad, stuff from Sam and Consuelo, Henry. E.V. E.V.’s grief for her father, a man who’d really just wanted to make sure his daughter was safe. I wish he’d left well enough alone. Everyone would’ve been happier or, at least, alive. I wanted to be angry with him but hard as I tried, it all turned inward.
After all, what was the common denominator, if not me?
It was the worst night, the longest night.
I’d jumped that day, accidentally, when Paully charged me. Mum and Dad were dead.
Going to live with Alejandra had doomed Sam and Consuelo. If I hadn’t sent the INS in, would the agents still be alive?
If I hadn’t used my real name with E.V. or real details about where I lived. Me, me, me, it was all me.
I hated myself. I even thought about the pills down the tunnel. I fell asleep and had nightmares. I woke up and the reality was just as bad.
E.V’s smell was a torment and a comfort and I thought about wrapping myself in her coat, going down the old tunnel, and getting the pills.
I soaked in that for a while—wallowed, really—but then the other common denominator gradually surfaced.
Them.
I snatched San Diego Sheriff�
��s Department investigator Bob Vigil from the parking lot at the Lemon Grove substation. He’d just shut the door on his car and was turning toward the building when I appeared, grabbed his collar, and jumped.
He came down on his back, hard, in the Empty Quarter, but his hand came out from under his coat with his service automatic pretty darn fast.
I wasn’t there anymore.
I watched him for a few minutes, sitting in the shade on top of the ridge. He tried his cell phone but it didn’t get a signal. He put away his gun after a few minutes and I jumped, jabbing him in the right arm with the black cylinder. He fell over in a very satisfying way and I had his gun, his Mace, his extra clips, his cell phone, his wallet, and his handcuffs before he was able to sit up, much less stand.
When I’d first grabbed him, in the parking lot, I’d felt the stiff edge of his Kevlar vest. I’d been planning to shock him in the back, but I changed to the arm instead.
I didn’t bother threatening him with the gun. In fact, I popped the clip out and then aimed it off to the side, to see if there was a bullet chambered.
There was. We both flinched at the noise.
“How’s that shoulder, Bob?”
He glared at me. I pulled up my shirt, on the left side, and twisted to show him my scar. “See that, Bob? That’s where your friends tried for my kidney. Pretty, huh?”
His expression went from angry to wary.
“I’m not happy about that, Bob. I think that’s pretty understandable.” I jumped twenty feet directly behind him and said, “Do you understand, Bob?”
He twisted so fast he tangled his feet and staggered off to one side. “What are you?” he asked hoarsely.
“Didn’t they tell you, Bob? Didn’t they give you some justification?” I jumped again, twenty feet off to his left, and he recoiled again. “You set me up. What did you think would happen?”
“They said you were a threat to, uh, national security.”
“A sixteen-year-old kid? A threat to national security?” I opened his wallet. He had three twenties and a few credit cards but there was a zippered compartment behind the cash. I pulled the zipper, spread it wide, and whistled. I held it out to display a thick sheaf of hundred dollar bills. “How good is the pay at the sheriff’s department?”
“Go fuck yourself,” he said. “I don’t have to tell you anything!”
“Oh,” I said quietly to myself, “I really think you do.” This time I jabbed him in the right buttock with the shock stick. He dropped to the side and yelled.
I crouched down about five feet away. “I’m not the police. I’m not constrained by your rules of evidence and prisoner treatment.” He was watching me and twitching. I swayed to one side and his eyes followed me. “Of course, you don’t seem that constrained by the rules, either. I almost believed you about the national security thing.”
He snarled.
“I don’t even care about you. I don’t know if they told you they’d be trying to knife me or not. But I want to know what they told you. How they contacted you. If—no—how they wanted you to contact them if I showed up again.”
I played with the black cylinder, passing it from hand to hand. “Why don’t you just tell me? You do, and it checks out, I’ll let you go.”
He swore at me in Spanish so I switched to that.
“Este es tu momento de la verdad, Roberto. Literally. Your moment of truth. They didn’t quite get me, but they killed someone else two days ago and I’m not happy about that. You can probably tell. Not only can I do this—”
I feinted toward his leg with the cylinder and he cried out, “Stop!”
I rocked back on my heels. “But I can also give information to the FBI about your involvement in that murder. They cut his throat while his hands were tied behind his back. And then there’s the INS—they’d probably like to know that you’ve been taking bribes from the people who killed six of theirs.”
I sort of smiled but I could feel the wrongness of it, like fingers tugging my features around. “I’m not sure you’d see trial”
Now this, where the physical stuff didn’t seem to be getting through, actually seemed to work.
“It’s on my phone. In my contacts. There’s a number labeled saltador! But that’s all I know, I swear!”
I laughed out loud. Saltador is Spanish for vaulter or jumper.
I left him there while I checked for a signal. I got one at the Texaco petrol station out on Old 80, barely. I jumped to the ridgetop where I used to meet Sam and Consuelo and found that it was closer to the cell tower, three bars on the signalstrength indicator.
Vigil was standing when I got back but looking around, confused. The sun was high overhead and he wasn’t sure which direction was which. I threw his wallet to him, high, and as he jumped up into the air to grab it, I jumped him and spilled him onto the ridgetop.
“Hey!” he yelled. “I told you what you wanted to know!”
I said soothingly, “Yes, you did. But did you want me to shock you again, to get you here? That was the alternative.”
I took the shock stick out of my pocket again. “Now. All I want you to do is tell them that you convinced me they were following you, that you’re on my side, and I’ve agreed to another meeting out at Sam Coulton’s place. Uh, nobody’s moved in there, have they?”
“Hell no. Eight people died there. The cousin who ended up with it wants to sell but nobody is interested.”
“Okay. Tell them it’s set for three o’clock.”
He looked at his watch. “That’ll only give them an hour to get out there.”
“So it will.” I flipped open his phone and found the entry and dialed it.
He did it as I’d told him and, after he told them when and where, he said, “So, I’ll see you—” He tilted the phone in his hand and stared at it. “They hung up.”
I held my hand out for the phone.
His fingers closed around it and I lifted the shock tube.
“Hey, it’s my phone.”
“Sure,” I said.
He relaxed and I jumped, only two feet to the side, and kicked the phone out of his hand. It really flew, high, higher, and came down in the brush thirty feet away.
He was clutching his hand to his chest and swearing. I walked over, picked up a fist-sized rock, and hit the phone three times.
I set his gun and ammunition and the Mace and handcuffs on the fragments of plastic and circuit board. “See the highway?” I said pointing at the distant gray line.
He held up his good hand and flipped me the bird.
“I bet you can walk it in about two hours.”
I jumped away.
I was on my back, under Sam’s couch, my nose just clearing the cotton batten and steel leaf springs. If I’d been one inch thicker, it wouldn’t have worked.
I heard their footsteps first, but just barely. Didn’t hear a car so I presumed they’d parked their vehicle somewhere off the road, out of earshot. They came sooner that I expected, but I’d been there for thirty minutes and was reasonably confident that they hadn’t felt me arrive.
Not unless they’d been camping within range.
The door was locked but they opened it. Didn’t know if they had a key or if they’d picked it but they didn’t force it—that would’ve given the game away.
They checked the house carefully, though, opening closets and cabinets, peeking up into the attic crawlspace. I’d been planning on waiting up there, myself, but it was like an oven so I’d checked the couch on a whim.
Fortunately, they didn’t.
“What about the grounds? He could be out there.”
Young voice, American English, nervous, it seemed.
“Relax,” said the other, older, more confident. There was something faintly European in his accent. A trace of Scandinavian—like a young Max von Sydow “If he’s already here he’ll still have to show himself when Vigil arrives.”
“Kemp should be here.”
“We kill jumpers. We’re not jum
pers ourselves! How’s he supposed to get here from New Jersey in time?”
“I’d just feel better. He’s had more experience, right? With grown jumpers? All I’ve ever dealt with are the kids.”
“Well, yes—only Roland’s group has more experience.”
“Christ. Roland. Now that’s one scary paladin.”
The older man breathed out sharply, an exasperated sound. “Go watch out the back but be careful. Don’t show yourself. Don’t scare him off. He could approach on foot, but don’t forget he knows this house. He could jump in. This one … if we get him, well, it will reflect well on us. Roland has been reading the reports and he’s not pleased.”
I barely heard the footsteps as the other man moved off.
I’d give them that—they were stealthy bastards.
Only two of them. Only two of them in the area, then. They’d have sent more if there’d been more. I just had that feeling.
All I’ve ever dealt with are the kids. Huh. I remembered the man in the car, back in Lechlade, when I was five. I remembered the night when I was nine. Go after ’em when they’re young enough and they’re easy.
All right, fuckers, time to pick on someone your own size.
By rolling my head to the side I could see under the skirting at the base of the couch. Across the carpet I could just see partway up his boots, brown, soft soled, back near the hallway, where he could look out both the front windows and also step back out of sight when someone showed up.
I didn’t change posture as I jumped, staying down on the floor, jabbing the shock stick up into the back of his thigh. He got off a shot but was unable to aim, and the cables and spikes smashed one of the front windows as he fell over. For good measure I jabbed him again in the side, then, hearing footsteps, I jumped away, to the old stable across the graveled front yard.
He didn’t use the door—he jumped out through the smashed window, then rolled sideways across the porch to his feet. He charged across the yard like a winger heading out of the scrum for the goal, changing directions randomly to avoid the opposing players. He had one of those guns, the spike and cable projectors, a hand on the handle and the other cradling the barrel.
