I hustled through the door and yanked it shut behind me. The salesman behind the desk had his eyes and his mouth open wide. You couldn’t blame him for being startled. First a bullet whizzed out of nowhere into his office, and then a crazy guy wearing nothing but swim trunks followed it in a split second later.
The salesman had a letter opener on his desk. I grabbed it. I looked around for another object like it and didn’t see one.
“They don’t want you,” I said. “Stay inside, stay low, and you’ll be all right.”
I threw open the door and dived back out. Epunamlin tried to draw a bead on me, and then thought better of it. Probably because right about then, Sylvester’s truck pulled up, and the weeping willow man climbed out.
I crouched back down beside A’marie. “What are we doing?” she asked. Her voice was tense but not panicky, and she’d caught her breath.
It only took a few words to explain, although with Sylvester and Epunamlin moving in on us, it felt like it was taking forever. When I finished, A’marie said, “Be careful.” She put the pipes to her lips and started playing.
I sneaked away. Sylvester and Epunamlin stopped where they were. The big guy stamped one foot like a trick horse counting, and the snake swayed from side to side and waved his pistols around. I still hadn’t had a good enough look at them to know what kind they were. Something that didn’t hold many more rounds, I hoped.
Unfortunately, the magic only kept Epunamlin and Sylvester trying to dance for a couple seconds. Then, just like A’marie had expected, they shook it off.
“Darn it!” Sylvester shouted. “Stop it, A’marie! We still don’t want to hurt
A’marie did stop playing. “You don’t want to hurt anybody!” she yelled back. “You’re not a killer! Just calm down and let us talk to you!”
Sylvester looked at Epunamlin. “You know why we’re doing it,” said the snake. His baritone voice almost sounded prissy, like he’d learned to enunciate perfectly because he was afraid that if he didn’t, humans-and near- humans-wouldn’t be able to understand him at all. The sunlight gleaming on his black scales made him look as wet as A’marie. “And I am a killer. Just help me catch him, and I’ll take it from there.”
Sylvester’s mouth tightened under the mask of hair. “Okay,” he said.
“Good man,” Epunamlin said. “You swing left and I’ll go right.”
I’d figured they’d spread out to search. I actually wanted them to. But it still made for a nerve-wracking game of hide and seek. They hunted me along the rows of cars with prices and messages like “Cold Air” and “Super Clean” painted on their windshields, while I tried to maneuver around behind whichever one I could. My mouth was dry with knowing that Sylvester was tall enough to look over the cars. And though Epunamlin generally crawled with his head and about a yard of scaly body raised-maybe to keep his wooden arms from banging and scraping along the ground-all he had to do was dip down to peek underneath.
But like I said before, I’m sneaky when I want to be. Eventually I made it to Sylvester’s six, then straightened up and rushed him, charging down the space between an F-150 and a Civic.
Sylvester heard me coming and pivoted too soon. But A’marie blew a trill on the pipes, and that froze him for the instant I needed. I jumped like I was dunking, ripped the white and gold kerchief from around his neck, and backpedaled, crouching back down as I put space between us.
The eyes behind the coarse, dangling hair opened wide, and then he hunkered down, too. I grinned because it meant I was right.
I’d guessed that he and Epunamlin weren’t wearing identical neckerchiefs because they had the same fashion sense or belonged to the same Scout troop. The scarves were the charms that made them invisible to normal people. And now that Sylvester had lost his, anybody who drove or walked by could see him.
He started after me. I draped the scarf over the point of the letter opener. If I jerked it down hard, the point would pop through.
“I’ll do it!” I said. “The humans will put you in the zoo!”
“Just stay down!” Epunamlin said. “I’ll get him!” He was somewhere behind me, and close enough that I could hear him even without the use of Sylvester’s Bluetooth. As I glanced around, he slithered into view an aisle away, but with a clear line of fire from him to me. He pointed the pistols.
With the Honda on one side of me and the F-150 on the other, I didn’t have a lot of options when it came to dodging for cover. I threw the letter opener and neckerchief into the cargo bed of the truck, then grabbed the sidewall and heaved myself in after them.
I didn’t exactly stick the landing. I thumped down hard. But I didn’t break anything, so I snatched up my stuff again and jumped off the other side.
Then it was back to playing hide and seek, or maybe it was more like tag. Whatever it was, Epunamlin made me feel like I’d lost my touch. He was more careful than Sylvester, and kept checking his six. Twice, I started creeping up behind him, only to have him look around. Then the guns spun toward me, and I dived for cover with not an instant to spare.
I struggled to think of a way to get him. Then I spotted the Coke can some litterbug had tossed on the asphalt.
I picked it up, crouched behind a truck tire, and waited. Sylvester yelled, “What’s going on?” Apparently he was upset enough that he’d forgotten he was wearing the Bluetooth, and I doubted that Epunamlin appreciated having that shout suddenly boom into his head. But he had better sense than to respond to Sylvester to say so, or to say anything and give away his position.
Luckily, when he got really close, the whispering sound of his coils slithering on the pavement was just loud enough for me to hear. I threw the can, and it clanked down a couple aisles away.
Sometimes the oldest, simplest tricks still work the best. When Epunamlin crawled into view, his attention was focused in the direction of the noise. I let him keep moving for another second. That hid the front half of him behind a Kia Sephia, which I didn’t like, but it also put me more or less behind him instead of off to the side.
I rushed him. The twisting S curves of his tail nearly filled the narrow lane between two rows of cars, and I almost tripped over it. But I saw I was about to set my foot wrong and managed to hop over that particular section of rippling, scaly reptile.
Maybe I made noise doing it, because Epunamlin started to twist in my direction. But by then I was within reach of his scarf. I jerked it away, ran on past him, then lurched around. I showed him that I had both neckerchiefs ready to stick on the end of the letter opener, and he aimed the pistols at me anyway. They were vintage Lugers, which only have an eight-round mag. I would have sworn he’d fired more than sixteen shots at A’marie and me, but maybe it had only seemed like it. One bullet seems like a lot when it’s flying at you.
“Don’t do it!” I gasped. “It won’t stop me from tearing the scarves. Maybe you could sneak away. But the big guy? Not a chance.”
Epunamlin stared at me. When I described him before, his headset, scarf, and puppet arms may have made him sound goofy-looking. Up close, he was anything but. I could feel the cold determination in the lidless, slit- pupiled eyes, and, long as it was, his body looked thick and solid with muscle. It was easy to imagine him blowing me away, then swallowing the body whole and crawling around with a Billy-shaped lump in the middle of him.
“You aren’t as clever away from the poker table,” he said at last. “After I shoot you, Sylvester and I will simply drive away.”
“A’marie!” I yelled. “Hit it!”
To my relief, the horn of Sylvester’s pickup blared. She’d managed to sneak around to it while its owner and the snake were focused on me.
“It will only take her a second to trash the ignition,” I said. “Then you and Sly over there will go down in Old People history as the dumb-asses who tipped off the human race that your kind are real. Is that what you want?”
He kept staring. The snake face was impossible to read.
“You better hurry and make up your mind,” I said. “The cops are going to show up soon.”
“How do you wish to proceed?” he asked.
“Give me the Lugers.”
“So you can shoot me?”
I gestured with the letter opener. “This isn’t much of a knife, but if I’d wanted to, I still could have jammed it into Sly’s neck. And yours. But never mind. I probably wouldn’t give me the guns, either. Just drop the mags, and get the rounds out of the chambers.”
