The other man was bigger, and skilled. He punched Hannibal hard enough to crack a rib. Then he managed to gain the top position, straddling Hannibal’s waist. Hannibal managed one solid right cross before his enemy locked fingers around his throat. The starless night sky was a solid deep purple shroud, threatening to cover Hannibal permanently. He heard his own breath rattling in his throat. His hands and feet scrambled for leverage, but the mud beneath him offered no purchase. He could feel the welts rising on either side of his larynx.
Rage shook him when he glanced at the impassive face of the man strangling him to death. Then his right hand hit something that was not mud. A root? No, a stone. It was small, but it made a sickening crunch when Hannibal swung it up and slapped it into his enemy’s temple. The fingers weakened and the man fell to the side.
As the stranger crumbled to the earth, Hannibal felt an unexpected joy. He struggled to his hands and knees, gasping to suck in as much of the frozen air as he could. Then he felt around until he found his pistol and clambered up on the path to follow in Ivanovich’s footsteps. Ahead of him, two shots came from the right, out in the swamp. Ivanovich jerked to the side, returned fire, and dropped to his knees. As Hannibal reached him, he could see the shooter off to the side, crouching in the mud behind a mound of earth. Hannibal dropped low beside Ivanovich, who wavered and tumbled to his side. Blood poured from his chest and neck.
“Hang on, man,” Hannibal whispered. “Help will be here soon.”
Ivanovich shook his head, and offered Hannibal a half smile. “Only one left. We saved her. Finish it for me.”
“Fuck that asshole, and the girl too,” Hannibal said, pressing a gloved hand against Ivanovich’s neck wound. “You need to focus on saving yourself.”
“No,” Ivanovich said, staring into Hannibal’s eyes in the darkness. “This time, you know the song. I’ve held it for my final words for years.”
“What are you talking about?”
Ivanovich swallowed hard, clenched his teeth as if accomplishing his next task was vital, and mumbled out, “I try to save myself but my self keeps slipping away.”
“Are you crazy?”
Ivanovich continued, as if it was a mantra to guide him into Valhalla. “Try to save myself but myself keeps slipping away. Try to save myself but myself keeps slipping…”
When life slips away, a human body feels different. Startled by the change, Hannibal dropped Ivanovich’s head to the path. These were not final words to be remembered by, so he mentally stepped over them to Ivanovich’s previous words. Finish it for me. He stood straight up and stared at the last man. He thought it was Vladimir, the man they met at Boris Uspensky’s office.
“Just you and me now.” He said it softly, but he was sure the other man heard him. “Soon, just me.”
He stepped over Aleksandr Ivanovich and off the boardwalk. His foot sank ankle deep in the soft earth but he kept going. Vladimir fired at him and Hannibal had no idea where the bullet went. The clouds jostled each other again and the moonlight vanished.
He could make out the other man’s form on the ground in front of him now. Vladimir fired again. Pain lanced through Hannibal’s right arm but the bullet didn’t throw him down. That meant it had not encountered bone, but just dug a divot of flesh out of the side of his arm. Too bad for Vladimir that Hannibal was lefthanded.
In the distance he heard a loud hailer asking for whoever was in the park to identify themselves. He kept going. Left foot, right foot, like he remembered his father saying when he was small. That’s how you get where you need to go. Left foot, right foot.
A dozen feet away, Vladimir raised his gun and Hannibal raised his as well. As Hannibal stepped closer, waiting to be in certain one-shot-kill range, the two men looked down their sight posts into each other’s eyes.
A light beam slid between them and Vladimir squeezed his trigger. Hannibal heard the hollow clack of a hammer falling on an empty chamber. It seemed that Vladimir had lost count. Vladimir turned on his back, watching Hannibal between his own feet. Hannibal continued on until he stood inches from Vladimir’s shoes. Now he could see that Vladimir was bleeding from his right side. His face was calm, placid, as Aleksandr’s had almost always been. Did this man understand that Hannibal had to finish his friend’s business?
“He was already mortally wounded you know,” Vladimir said. As if that made any difference.
“You don’t want to shoot me,” Vladimir said. “You are not like us. You are not a killer.”
Hannibal lowered his weapon, took a deep breath, and raised it again.
“You think you know what I am? I’ll tell you what I am.” Hannibal took another deep breath, and heard Ivanovich’s voice in his head. Or Trent Reznor’s.
“Broken. Bruised. Forgotten. Sore. Too fucked up to care anymore.”
Vladimir nodded slightly, indicating that he recognized the lyrics. Hannibal squeezed, but never felt the trigger let off. The slide rocked back and slammed forward, but Hannibal never heard the blast. Vladimir’s forehead offered no resistance to the jacketed hollowpoint on its way into the ground. Then Hannibal dropped to his knees. Some number of seconds later he heard a familiar woman’s voice scream. Then a cluster of light beams flashed around him, illuminating the entire swamp. There was a lot of conversation, but it all seemed muddled to him. A coat fell around his shoulders and he heard Orson Rissik’s voice.
“Hannibal. It’s Orson. I got here as fast as I could.”
“Seemed like all night. Is it midnight yet?”
“Midnight?” Rissik asked. “Son, it’s barely six. We had daylight until we arrived but finding you out here in the dark was a bitch. Are you OK?”
“I’m fine,” Hannibal said as Rissik and another man laid him on a stretcher. “At least, better than anybody else out here except…did you find the girl?”
“Yeah, she’s fine. Not a scratch on her.”
“Yeah, that figures,” Hannibal said, rummaging through his jacket for his phone.
“Hey, we need to get somebody to look at that arm,” Rissik said. “Whoever you’re thinking of calling, it can wait.”
“No,” Hannibal said as they bounced him along the boardwalk toward the parking lot, “no, it can’t.”
Epilogue
There was no way to see in the window at Kinkead’s, just a couple blocks from the White House. Watching snowflakes melt as they hit the restaurant’s fogged-up bay window, Hannibal spared himself a smile, thinking of the conversation he had on his cell phone while sitting in the emergency room.
“It’s your own fault for being in the office so late, Mrs. Abrogast,” he had said. “I’ve already tried her home phone and her BlackBerry. And I’ve got a feeling you know where she is.”
“She left late, Mr. Jones. I believe she had an appointment.”
“And that would be where?”
“I don’t have her appointment book handy.”
“Come on, Mrs. A. You keep it all in your head anyway.”
“I’m surprised she didn’t tell you. Maybe if you hadn’t stood her up for lunch…”
“Look, Mrs. A,” Hannibal said through clenched teeth. “I have had a really shitty day.”
“Excuse me, young man?”
“I haven’t eaten since breakfast, I have huge bruises on my throat from where a guy tried to strangle me, and I’m sitting here watching some guy from Pakistan stitch up a bullet hole in my right arm. The jacket’s ruined too. I just need to talk to her, all right?”
There was a long, hard pause. He heard a deeply drawn breath. He was through. If she didn’t talk she wouldn’t, but he would not ask again.
“She’s meeting him for a late supper,” Mrs. Abrogast said.
“Terrific. Where?”
And that was what brought him to Kinkead’s. He ignored the maitre d’s questions and glanced only briefly at the stairs. No, she wouldn’t want to go up to the formal dining area. She would prefer the more casual feel of the street-level cafe and bar. He brushed past the man telling him how long the wait was. He brushed past the
