foam.
Then the sky behind us lit up with battlefield gunfire, tracers razor-slashing the night.
“It wasn’t the detonator,” Pryce told me thirty-six hours later. “It was armed, all right, but he never got his finger on the button before . . .”
I didn’t say anything. The detonator man had wanted to blow up the world . . . and the last thing he saw was it happening to him.
“We got all of them down the ramp and into the drink but the last one,” Pryce continued. “He must have put a timing device in that one . . . just to be sure.”
“How many—?”
“We lost four,” he said quietly. “The driver, and the three closest on the perimeter.”
“Your people were fantastic,” I told him. Not knowing a better word for heroes. Wishing I did.
The news reports said all six neo-Nazis had resisted. Five had gone down in a blaze of gunfire. No word about the silencer-equipped snipers who had taken out each of the drivers as soon as they were in place. Or how all the gunfire was for show, way after it was really over. The fire-team would have waited until they got the all-clear, counting on their backup to seal off the area. But the explosion on the river had told them they were out of time.
“Seems the van driver took Lothar’s way out,” Pryce replied dryly, telling me that was going to be the story for the press.
“I never thought you’d be able to use tranquilizer darts,” I said. “At that distance . . .”
“It was the only way,” he told me. “Even with that pink flag flying from the antenna to tell us which vehicle had your man inside, we couldn’t risk being wrong.”
So the whole gang had been alive when the river blew. But only one had survived to the end.
One plus Hercules.
“And the one we captured,” Pryce continued, “once we explained the true plan to him, once he realized the detonator man was going to take them all out, he started singing like a canary on crank. We took down almost a hundred of the others all around the country before the media even had the explosion on the air. And there’s more to come.”
Not a word from him about Clarence the pimp. Or Michelle the hooker. Or Crystal Beth the getaway driver. They’d all passed through the sealed cauldron like some vague rumor, leaving it to the whisper-stream to tell the story.
And not a word from me about how Herk and one of the lucky Nazis had gotten tranquilizer darts and nothing else . . . while the rest of them went down in a hail of lead thick enough to shield out X-rays. The others got it easier than the detonator man—they were already asleep, never saw it coming. Pryce had to have been right there—he was the only one who could ID Herk.
“I’m gone,” he told me quietly, holding out his hand for me to shake. “None of the numbers you have for me will be any good after today. And I won’t have this face much longer either.”
I took his hand, wondering if the webbed fingers would disappear too. Watched the muscle jump under his eye. I’d know that one again.
“I’m gone too,” I said.
“You’re really going?” I asked Vyra, unable to keep the surprise out of my voice.
“Yes.” A lilt in her usually waspish voice. “We are.” She was standing next to Hercules, who was vainly trying to cram another pair of shoes into a monster pile of suitcases.
“I’ve got . . . people still in Oregon,” Crystal Beth said. “That’ll be their first stop. Or, if they like it there, they can—”
“It doesn’t matter,” Vyra interrupted her. “We’re going to be together. From now on.”
Hercules stood up. He was bare-chested, sweating with the strain of “helping” Vyra pack. On his chest, the black swastika was now a murky Rorschach blot only a warrior could read. Or could be entitled to carry. His eyes were wet.
“I never fucking doubted you for a minute, man. I knew you was too slick for those lameass motherfuc —”
“It’s done now, Herk,” I told him.
“We never gonna be done, brother,” the big man said.
Crystal Beth and Vyra kept hugging and crying.
I stepped away from it.
“Are you going to stay?” Crystal Beth asked me late that night. “Tonight? Sure.”
“With me? And not just tonight?” she asked.
The time for lies was done. “I don’t know,” I told her.
CHOICE OF EVIL
I nosed the Plymouth carefully around the corner, checking the street the way I always do when I’m heading home. The garage I use is cut into the closed-off base of an old twine factory which had been converted into upscale lofts years ago. Above the designer-massaged floor-through apartments is what the yuppie occupants think is crawl space. That’s where I live.
A pal had tapped into their electricity lines and installed a stainless steel sink-and-toilet combo. A fiberglass stall shower, a two-burner hot plate, a duct to the heating pipes below . . . and it turned into my home.
I’ve lived there for years, thanks to a deal I made with the landlord. His son got himself into a jackpot—an easy enough feat for a punk who thought ratting out his rich dope-dealing friends was a fun hobby—and ended up in the Witness Protection Program. I stumbled across him while I was looking for someone else, and I traded my silence for a special brand of rent control. Didn’t cost the landlord a penny, but it bought his punk kid an anonymous life. And safe harbor for me.
Some of my life is in that building. And when I saw the pack of blue-and-white NYPD squad cars surrounding the back entrance, I knew that part of it was over.
I just sat there and took it. The way I always do—fear and rage dancing inside me, nothing showing on my face. I’ve had a lot of practice, from the hospital where my whore of a mother dropped me—dropped me out of her, I mean—to the orphanage to the foster homes to the juvenile joints to prison to that war in Africa to prison again and . . . all of it.
It didn’t matter anymore. Nothing did. Somebody had dimed me out. And the cops would find enough felony evidence up there to put me back Inside forever once they connected it up.
I watched the cops carry Pansy out on a litter, straining under the huge beast’s weight. Pansy’s my dog. My partner, not my pet. A Neapolitan mastiff, direct descendent of the original war dogs who crossed the Alps with Hannibal. I had dreamed of having my own dog every night in prison. They’d taken my beloved little terrier Pepper from me when I was a kid, that lying swine of a juvenile court judge promising me there’d be another puppy in the foster home they were sentencing me to. I remember the court officer laughing then, but I didn’t get the joke until they dropped me off. There was no pup there, and I had to do the time alone, without anyone who loved me.
I never saw Pepper again, but I did see that court officer. It was more than twenty years later, and he didn’t
