Sole Survivor

drove a knee upward, shoving the face down into the knee and jamming the knee up hard into the face, a ballet of violence, and he actually heard the crunch of the man’s nose disintegrating and felt the bite of teeth breaking against his kneecap. The guy collapsed backward on the beach, all at once choking and spitting blood and gasping for breath and crying like a small child, but this wasn’t enough for Joe, because he was wild now, wilder than any animal, as wild as weather, a cyclone of anger and grief and frustration, and he kicked where he thought ribs would be, which hurt him almost as much as it hurt the broken man who received the blow, because Joe was only wearing Nikes, not hard-toed shoes, so he tried to stomp the guy’s throat and crush his windpipe, but stomped his chest instead — and would have tried again, would have killed him, not quite realizing that he was doing so, but then he was rammed from behind by a third attacker.

Joe slammed facedown onto the beach, with the weight of this new assailant atop him, at least two hundred pounds pinning him down. Head to one side, spitting sand, he tried to heave the man off, but this time his breath was knocked out of him; he exhaled all of his strength with it, and he lay helpless.

Besides, as he gasped desperately for air, he felt his attacker thrust something cold and blunt against the side of his face, and he knew what it must be even before he heard the threat.

“You want me to blow your head off, I’ll do it,” the stranger said, and his reverberant voice had a ragged homicidal edge. “I’ll do it, you asshole.”

Joe believed him and stopped resisting. He struggled only for his breath.

Silent surrender wasn’t good enough for the angry man atop him. “Answer me, you bastard. You want me to blow your damn head off? Do you?”

“No.”

“Do you?”

“No.”

“Going to behave?”

“Yes.”

“I’m out of patience here.”

“All right.”

“Son of a bitch,” the stranger said bitterly.

Joe said nothing more, just spit out sand and breathed deeply, getting his strength back with his wind, though trying to stave off the return of the brief madness that had seized him.

Where is Rose?

The man atop Joe was breathing hard too, expelling foul clouds of garlic breath, not only giving Joe time to calm down but getting his own strength back. He smelled of a lime-scented cologne and cigarette smoke.

What’s happened to Rose?

“We’re going to get up now,” the guy said. “Me first. Getting up, I got this piece aimed at your head. You stay flat, dug right into the sand the way you are, just the way you are, until I step back and tell you it’s okay to get up.” For emphasis, he pressed the muzzle of the gun more deeply into Joe’s face, twisting it back and forth; the inside of Joe’s cheek pressed painfully against his teeth. “You understand, Carpenter?”

“Yes.”

“I can waste you and walk away.”

“I’m cool.”

“Nobody can touch me.”

“Not me anyway.”

“I mean, I got a badge.”

“Sure.”

“You want to see it? I’ll pin it to your damn lip.”

Joe said nothing more.

They hadn’t shouted Police, which didn’t prove that they were phony cops, only that they didn’t want to advertise. They hoped to do their business quickly, cleanly — and get out before they were required to explain their presence to the local authorities, which would at least tangle them in inter-jurisdictional paperwork and might result in troubling questions about what legitimate laws they were enforcing. If they weren’t strictly employees of Teknologik, they had some measure of federal power behind them, but they hadn’t shouted FBI or DEA or ATF when they had burst out of the night, so they were probably operatives with a clandestine agency paid for out of those many billions of dollars that the government dispensed off the accounting books, from the infamous Black Budget.

Finally the stranger eased off Joe, onto one knee, then stood and backed away a couple of steps. “Get up.”

Rising from the sand, Joe was relieved to discover that his eyes were rapidly adapting to the darkness. When he had first come out of the banquet room and run north along the beach, hardly two minutes ago, the gloom had seemed deeper than it was now. The longer he remained night blind to any degree, the less likely he would be to see an advantage and to be able to seize it.

Although his rakish Panama hat was gone, and in spite of the darkness, the gunman was clearly recognizable: the storyteller. In his white slacks and white shirt, with his long white hair, he seemed to draw the meager ambient light to himself, glowing softly like an entity at a seance.

Joe glanced back and up at Santa-Fe-by-the-Sea. He saw the silhouettes of diners at their tables, but they probably couldn’t see the action on the dark beach.

Crotch-kicked, face-slammed, the disabled agent still sprawled nearby on the sand, no longer choking but gagging, in pain, and still spitting blood. He was striving to squeeze off his flow of tears by wheezing out obscenities instead of sobs.

Joe shouted, “Rose!”

The white-clad gunman said, “Shut up.”

“Rose!”

“Shut up and turn around.”

Silent in the sand, a new man loomed behind the storyteller and, instead of proving to be another Teknologik drone, said, “I have a Desert Eagle.44 magnum just one inch from the back of your skull.”

The storyteller seemed as surprised as Joe was, and Joe was dizzied by this turn of events.

The man with the Desert Eagle said, “You know how powerful this weapon is? You know what it’ll do to your head?”

Still softly radiant but now also as powerless as a ghost, the astonished storyteller said, “Shit.”

“Pulverize your skull, take your fat head right off your neck, is what it’ll do,” said the new arrival. “It’s a doorbuster. Now toss your gun in the sand in front of Joe.”

The storyteller hesitated.

“Now.”

Managing to surrender with arrogance, the storyteller threw the gun as if disdaining it, and the weapon thudded into the sand at Joe’s feet.

The savior with the.44 said, “Pick it up, Joe.”

As Joe retrieved the pistol, he saw the new arrival use the Desert Eagle as a club. The storyteller dropped to his knees, then to his hands and knees, but did not go all the way out until struck with the pistol a second time, whereupon he plowed the sand with his face, planting his nose like a tuber. The stranger with the.44—a black man dressed entirely in black — stooped to turn the white-maned head gently to one side to ensure that the unconscious thug would not suffocate.

The agent with the knee-smashed face stopped cursing. Now that no witnesses of his own kind were able to hear, he sobbed miserably again.

The black man said, “Come on, Joe.”

More impressed than ever with Mahalia and her odd collection of amateurs, Joe said, “Where’s Rose?”

“This way. We’ve got her.”

With the disabled agent’s sobs purling eerily across the strand behind them, Joe hurried with the black man north, in the direction that he and Rose had been heading when they were assaulted.

He almost stumbled over another unconscious man lying in the sand. This was evidently the first one who