Carla raises her pistol, a look of disbelief, of exasperation, of disgust on her face, and I spill out of the taxi, stumble, find my feet, no weapon, no gun, nothing, just an impossible gap, a gulf, the beginning and end of life between us. I charge Carla like a demon, and I don’t hear my voice but I know I’m screaming, and I don’t hear my footsteps but I know I’m running as fast as I’ve ever run, and the gun still points at Risina who stands like an offering waiting for the sacrifice, resigned to die fifteen feet from the barrel.
“Carla!” I shout as loud as a cannon, but I know I’ll never reach her in time.
As though I willed it to be, the mutt-faced woman swings the revolver toward me and Risina anticipates the distraction and closes on her like a pouncing cat and the gun goes off, but the bullet ricochets off the pavement near my feet before it spins off to God knows where.
Risina tackles Carla to the ground and drives her elbow into the woman’s jaw while her other hand wrenches the gun from her grasp.
I have thirty more feet to go before I can help. From my periphery, I see vans race up from various directions, insects swarming an open wound, black vans, unmarked, at least four of them but how can I be sure? I feel like I’m moving underwater now, swimming, hallucinating.
Twenty more feet and Risina straddles Carla and drives her elbow like a piston again and again into Carla’s nose. Wham, wham, wham.
The vans blow past me and screech to a halt in the intersection.
Ten more feet and Risina levels Carla’s gun. Men spill out of the van just as I arrive, suited men, dark men, and Risina points the weapon directly into Carla’s face and pulls the trigger.
The concussive sound of the gunshot is like a bomb going off as two men sweep me off my feet in a dead run and my head hits the ground and the world snuffs out as dark as death.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Would you listen to a story told by a dying man? You’ve been with me this long. I owe you. I owe…
The bullet is out of my chest, and clean dressing and a suture are packed over the wound, but the right side of my body is numb. An oxygen mask covers my nose and mouth, but I still can’t seem to suck in enough air. A light shines in my face, but I can’t see past the bulb and whatever that damn machine is that pings with each heartbeat is pinging slowly, irregularly, a submarine’s sonar that can’t seem to locate an enemy.
It takes all my energy to twist my head to the side. I’m not in a hospital, that much is clear. This is a makeshift medical room that looks like it was cobbled together in a dilapidated warehouse. Piles of what appear to be sewing machines are stacked in a corner next to discarded reams of fabric. A few folding tables line the far wall. A leg is twisted on one and it leans over like a disabled man missing a crutch. Sewing machines seem fitting for some reason I can’t quite put together. My thoughts are jumbled, like I’m trying to read the contents of a folded letter through an envelope held up to the light.
The bed I’m lying atop isn’t a bed, just another folding table with a mattress stuck on it. The IV I’m hooked up to and the pinging machine look authentic but what do I know? I haven’t spent much time in hospitals.
Risina. Did I see her shoot Carla in the face at close range? Did I pass out before that? Something keeps shaking my brain. She wrenched Carla’s gun away, jammed it in the woman’s face, pulled the trigger and then I was pitching sideways like a sailboat tossed in high winds and then ping, ping, ping, here in this warehouse doubling as a clinic and I can’t catch my breath and Risina, ping, Risina, ping, Risina..
Footsteps approach and I don’t have the energy to feign unconsciousness. I feel a thumb press my eyelids open and then a penlight shines into my eyes as a man with a tight beard frowns in my face. If I weren’t so drained, if I could even lift my right hand from my side, I might try to wrestle that penlight from his hand and bury it into the side of his neck until his throat lit up like a fucking runway, but I can’t seem to muster the strength.
“Can you talk?” he asks after he checks my pulse.
I shake my head, or at least I think I shake my head, and his frown grows more pronounced.
He turns to another man standing over his shoulder, a man I didn’t realize was in the room. “It’s not good.”
“Chances?”
“Fifty-fifty.”
The other man bullies past the first and lowers himself inches from my nose. After a moment’s inspection, he says, “I’d take that bet,” then spins and exits my field of vision, if not the room.
I’ve never seen either man in my life.
I tried to change but I couldn’t. Ping. I thought I’d evolved but I hadn’t. Ping. I thought I could protect her but I couldn’t. Ping. I thought I could end this but I didn’t. Ping.
With each ping, my pulse seems louder, steadier. I can feel it in my throat, the ends of my fingers, my earlobes. I’ve never defaulted on a job, not one, and the only times I’ve failed to make a kill were by my own volition. This isn’t a job, but the path was the same. Someone put my name on paper and I killed him for it. Someone else hired him to do it, “dark men” he called them, and I’m going to kill them all. Every last one of them. If they hurt Risina, if they touched her, they’re all going to die.
My fingertips. Ping.
I can feel the pulse there, yes, and now that I concentrate, I can flex the fingers. They don’t do more than twitch, but they do twitch. It’s not much but it’s something. Maybe Spilatro’s bullet didn’t cause as much damage as I presumed, maybe I’m not paralyzed, maybe I’m not going to die.
I owe. I owe…
I know that focusing on a goal can increase your chances at recovery, that pledging to see one last relative, one last birthday, one last wedding, one last reunion can help the dying live for days, weeks, months longer than a doctor or surgeon thought possible.
Whatever they did to her, are doing to her, that’s what I have to use to sustain me, to heal me. Hatred I can let grow inside me to replace the pain. Ping. Hatred I can let flow inside me as warm as medicine. Ping. I’m going to kill these motherfuckers, these dark men, and I’m not going to die before I get the chance to bury them.
I owe… I owe…
Can I bend my elbow? I concentrate solely on my right arm as I will it to flex. It responds, only a millimeter of movement, probably invisible to anyone but me. But it was there; I felt it. Ping.
A woman enters and breathes onions into my face while she checks my pulse, my blood pressure. I crack my eyes just enough to see that her face matches her breath.
“Back to the land of the living.”
I try to respond to that unimaginative opening but my throat feels like it is filled with sand.
She holds a cup of water to my lips and I start to gag, but when she withdraws the cup I manage to croak out “more.”
She returns the water and it goes down better this time, like a sudden squall washing the dust from a dry creek bed.
“Your vitals are all solidly in the green,” she says. “You look rough but you’re gonna live for a bit.”
I cast my eyes about the room. We’re alone but there are a couple of cameras affixed to the ceiling. The dark men may not be here, but they’re watching.
I have to watch too. Wait and watch for a mistake. I owe. I owe.. Ping.
It happens a week later. I can’t be precisely sure of how much time passed, but it feels like a week. Nurse Onions has been in and out at regular intervals, what I’m guessing are eight-hour shifts, replaced by Orderly Tough Guy and Nurse Eyebrows. I did my best to extract some personal information out of each, but Onions is the only one who strung more than two words together. I haven’t asked about Risina. I won’t. If they already know I care for her, then I’ll make them question how much. If they don’t know, I’ll make them think she was only my pawn.
My strength returns, slowly. I’ve been flexing my legs under the sheets and my arms, I’ve been swinging in small concentric circles just above the mattress. I hope it’s unnoticeable to the cameras as I lie in the dark. I make barely enough movement to toggle a few pixels on their monitors or maybe they’ve figured out what I’m doing. A man named Mr. Cox used to lock me inside a house all day when I was a kid. While he was gone, I’d work on my strength until I was ready to confront him. I don’t have the time or the freedom to do pushups, chin-ups, sit-ups like
