Page 16

Calloway strolled forward with his hands in his pockets, in no hurry, a man at a market.

He pointed.

Once.

Then twice.

Two women were hauled into the light by their arms.

I knew nothing about them. Then the scope found one.

Her dress hung in tatters, green once, torn at the hem and dark across the front. Splatters, black under the bleached yellow light. I knew blood when I saw it. I knew how it dried and how it looked at this distance. Her hair had come down on one side. Her mouth was swollen. She was staring at the man gripping her arm with a fury so complete it burned through the glass.

Something moved in my chest that had no business moving.

She swung. A fist, wild and clumsy, all shoulder, and it caught him on the ear. The woman beside her, smaller and just as furious, did not hesitate. She flung herself at the other man, nails first.

The leather jacket’s hand lifted. A boot drew back.

“Fuck.”

I stopped thinking.

Aim. Squeeze.

Calloway had turned to point again, his back to me, his head tilted toward the container. The crosshair settled at the base of his skull. The rifle coughed. He went down as if his strings had been cut, and the flag pin skittered across the gravel.

Aim. Squeeze.

The terrible shirt folded in half, his hand still on the girl’s arm, and released her as he fell.

Aim. Squeeze.

The aide dropped his folio. Papers lifted and scattered in the mist before he dropped beside them.

Aim. Squeeze.

The leather jacket turned toward the dark, toward me, and found nothing. He was down before he had decided what he was looking at.

No one moved.

The driver sat frozen behind the wheel, hands raised above the dashboard. The women stood in the light with their mouths open and no sound coming out. Smoke from the barrel mingled with the mist.

Then a door banged open at the workman’s cabin. Men spilled out, half a dozen of them, shouting, flashlights swinging. Security. They began to converge on the car and the containers, beams sweeping the dark in long white arcs.

I was already moving.

I tore the rifle apart by feel, jammed every piece into the bag, swung it over my head and across my body. The emergency stairs were rusted and slick. I had climbed them one careful rung at a time. Now my hands slid along the rails and I did not use the steps at all. I swung over each landing and dropped to the next, boots barely touching metal.

At the bottom I dumped the bag in the shadow near the exit and ran for the yard.

Containers rose on either side of me like cliffs. My boots pounded the gravel. Wet air scraped my lungs. And somewhere between one stride and the next, the borrowed rooms in my head came apart.

They did not knock.

Boots on gravel. Boots on boards. The same rhythm. The same weight.

She asked them to wait. She said the children were sleeping.