Noel felt his body morphing back to his normal form. Wherever he was it was daylight outside. He smelled animals and manure. Instinct replaced conscious thought. He threw himself sideways, hit the floor (it was dirt and straw), rolled to his feet, and drew the gun from his shoulder rig and the gun from behind his back. There was the roar of a shotgun blast but it was muffled because his ears were still ringing from the alarms.
The muzzle flash showed him Jaako being blown backward, erupting blood as the pellets took him full in the chest. Noel quickly narrowed his eyes and sought for the shadowy form behind the shotgun. There. He double- tapped. The figure folded over, gave a grunt, and fell to the ground.
Mathias went scrambling into a stall. The cow and calf inside began lowing in alarm. The wooden side boomed as the cow kicked at the intruder.
“Shit! Somebody’s got a gun!” someone else yelled.
Noel whirled and fired two shots at him. From the grunt Noel knew at least one bullet had found a target.
Off to his right Mollie screamed and cried out, “Daddy!”
Noel sprinted toward her. Someone reached out and grabbed the back of his jacket, bringing him up short.
“Got her… uh him!” one of the brothers caroled in triumph. His captor was behind him. It was a bad angle for a gun. Noel went limp. The sudden loss of resistance took the young man off guard, and he nearly dropped Noel. It allowed him to bend over enough to reach the sheath in his boot. He dropped the Browning Hi Power, pulled the knife from the sheath, flipped it until the blade was pointing straight back, and drove it deep into the boy’s belly.
The boy added his screams to Mollie’s; there were curses coming from the father…
Guess I didn’t kill him. Pity. Noel reached Mollie, flung his arm around her throat, and pulled her tight against him. Her screams became a gurgle as he laid pressure on her windpipe.
“Mollie? Mollie, honey?” Mr. Steunenberg called out, panicked.
“I have her and I will blow her brains out unless you throw down your guns and turn on a goddamn light.” There was the sound of things hitting the straw. Halting steps moved to the side of the barn, and suddenly fluorescent lights sprang to life.
“Mathias, secure their weapons,” Noel ordered.
The Hungarian emerged from the stall. Now Noel could see the carnage. Jaako was well and truly dead. His chest looked like raw hamburger. One brother lay on the straw with a sucking chest wound, victim of Noel’s first shots. The Steunenberg paterfamilias clutched at his thigh, blood seeping from between his fingers. Another brother lay on the straw, hands clutching at his stomach. He alternated whimpers with calls for mama. Still another brother, this one maybe fourteen or so, cowered against a giant bale of hay.
Noel ground the muzzle of his pistol into Mollie’s temple. “Now, Mollie, you’re going to open a doorway to the warehouse in Kongoville. And you, Mr. Steunenberg, you and your uninjured son are going to move these pallets through that doorway because if you don’t I’m going to kill Mollie. Then I’m going to hunt you down and kill you too, and that means your other two sons will die because you won’t be able to call for an ambulance.”
“My wife… my wife will be calling the police. They’ll be here real soon.”
“Oh, I doubt that. Because the last thing you would want is the police coming around, and you having to explain how you have all these pallets of gold ingots.” Another twist of the gun brought a whimper from Mollie. “Now make up your mind. I’m not a patient person, and you’re interfering with my plans.”
The man looked from his suffering sons to his daughter trapped in the curve of Noel’s arm. Noel loosened his grip on her throat. “Mollie, help your daddy make up his mind.”
“Daddy, we need to do what he says.”
“Good girl,” Noel said, and patted her cheek with the barrel of the gun.
Steunenberg gave a short, curt nod. One of Mollie’s fourth-dimensional doors opened in the center of the barn. Steunenberg and his son pushed the still-floating pallets through the doorway. This time Noel saw the familiar outline of the warehouse they had rented lit by work lights. Once all the gold was back in Africa Noel pulled Mollie through. Mathias followed.
“You gotta let her go,” her father called out desperately.
“In time.”
Central Park
Manhattan, New York
It was snowing. Not hard, but steady. Dots of white no bigger than a pinhead drifting down from the occluded New York sky. Bugsy and Simoon walked along the twisting pathways of Central Park, the world white and grey around them. He was trying not to touch her. Snuggling up right now would have been a lie.
“So no word yet,” Simoon said.
“No. Not yet. Jayewardene’s fighting it out with the bigwigs of the global internationalist conspiracy or, you know, whoever. He’ll get an answer pretty soon.”
“I wish there was a way to get past the Radical and talk to Mark Meadows, you know?” Simoon said.
“I wish there was a way to kick his fucking ass,” Bugsy said, his tone light and conversational. “It freaks me out how everything we do in this country is about what happened in 1968. It’s not just Meadows, it’s everyone. It’s the Vietnam war and the Summer of Love. It’s Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin and Thomas Marion Douglas, who was, by the way, an arrogant dick. I met him.”
“I know you did,” Simoon said. A dog bounded through the snow, barked at them once, and bounded away.
“I look at all the shit that’s going on now. The Nshombos. Kid aces, I mean holy shit, that’s creepy. And the Sudd. And New Orleans. And Egypt and the Nur before that. That seems like plenty enough without hauling along three decades of old business. It just… it pisses me off. It just pisses me off.”
“You don’t have to do this,” Simoon said. “I mean, if you don’t want to.” She stopped and sat on a stone bench. Her breath was a mist. A fog. A ghost.
“Do what?” Bugsy said.
“Get all worked up and angry,” she said, looking up from under Ellen’s lashes. “I get it. I do. You’re breaking up with me, right?”
Bugsy’s heart stilled and sank into his belly. He looked at his shoes. He sat. She was crying.
“It’s not going to work,” he said. “You’re great. And Ellen’s good folks. Nick… well, given that I’m sorta kinda sleeping with his girlfriend, I guess he’s taken it all pretty well. But this… Aliyah, this is nuts.”
“I don’t know,” she said between sobs. “Did I… do something wrong? Was I…”
Jonathan took a deep breath. Oh, this sucked. “You died. Years ago. In Egypt.”
“I don’t even remember that,” Simoon said.
“I do. And here’s the thing, if we were just fuck buddies, hanging out, having that post-AIDS hookup culture casual it-is-what-it-is thing? To begin with, you would never have gone for me. You traded down when you found me, and I love you for it, but we both know that’s true. And another thing, you’d have ditched me by now. Or I’d have ditched you. We’d have had coffee some night, agreed that we’d be in touch about next weekend, only really weekend after next, and we’d both never follow up.”
“That isn’t true,” Simoon said in a voice that meant she knew it was.
“So why are we together?” Bugsy went on. “Because you’re dead and don’t think you can do any better. And because I feel like I’m killing you if we break up.”
“Aren’t you?” she whispered.
“No. I’m not. Because you died years ago.”
“Convenient,” Simoon said bitterly. “Really nice and simple and convenient for you, isn’t it?”
“Actually, it really sucks. But look. It was talk to you about it like this or else just tell Ellen to never put the earring back in. And I did it this way.”
“Why?” she said. “So you could hurt the girl a little more before you killed her?” She was talking about herself as if she were someone else. As if Ellen were speaking and not Simoon.
“So I could say good-bye before I let you go,” he said.
“You’re a fucking monster,” Simoon said softly. There were tears steaming on her cheeks. The snow around them was grey.
