Distantly I heard shots. The police in the parking lot ran to crouch down and take cover behind their cars, but they had drawn handguns at the ready. I realized that they formed a cordon all the way up to the street above. I also realized that I’d be dead meat if I continued standing out in the middle of the open lot. I ran around to the other side of the car and followed the police example.
Someone fluttered down from the sky and crouched next to me—St. Maurice, I figured, judging by his Roman-style breastplate over a tunic. In one hand he carried a gladius, the short stabbing sword of the legions. His wings spread hugely to either side like the white spray of the sea breaking over the rocks.
“Ave,” I said. “Si vales, valeo.”
“Bene,” he said. “Valeo, sed maxime obstat tibi periculum.”
I could have told him that. Danger stood in everyone’s way, not just mine. I risked a glance over the hood of the car. Ari and Sanchez had moved behind Sanchez’s unmarked squad car, but they stood tall rather than crouched as they looked up toward the top of the hill. When I followed their glance, I could see something moving through the underbrush.
“Non!” St. Maurice said. “A tergo, stulta!”
I swung around in my crouch and saw a dark-haired man, who might have been considered good-looking if he hadn’t been so unshaven and filthy, emerging from the thickets of Sutro Gardens across the avenue. Doyle’s expensive clothes had not stood up well to sleeping in the underbrush. The cream-colored silk shirt had acquired a lot of tears and stains. He still, however, had a gun with him, a rifle of some sort. I took a deep breath and began to gather Qi.
Doyle dodged across the street. At the edge of the parking lot he paused right out in the open. He must have been trusting that the police would be looking in the other direction, toward Land’s End, but the helicopter hovered above. Suicide by blue, I thought. Chaotic that he was, he never noticed me, the warded agent of Harmony, crouched by the car. I gathered Qi, spun Qi around on itself until it formed the nucleus of a sphere, hot between my hands—fast, ever faster, felt it glowing and pulsing, pushing against my fingers. Slowly, as if he had nothing to fear in the world, Doyle raised the rifle and took aim at Ari.
I stood up fast and flung up my hands.
“Doyle!” I yelled. “Game over!”
He swung around just as I sent the energy sphere flying. It transferred with the speed of light and slammed into his face. For a brief moment an ovoid of silver light surrounded him like an aura; then the force of it knocked him sideways and off-balance. He dropped the rifle and fell twitching to the ground. His face hit the asphalt so hard that his nose spurted blood. I heard Ari yell and running footsteps.
“Bene fecis,” St. Maurice said. “Vale.”
The apparition disappeared just as Ari reached me. He holstered his handgun, then knelt down beside Doyle, who raised his head and smiled, an utterly mindless gape, just as if blood wasn’t flowing over his lip and dribbling onto his chin. His dark eyes looked more like a cow’s than a human’s, placid, unthinking, bizarrely happy, really.
“He’ll be that way for a couple of hours,” I said.
Ari stared at me, then stood up. When I snapped my fingers, Doyle clambered to his feet. When I put my hands behind me, so did Doyle. Ari had him cuffed before Doyle realized what had happened, but again, he showed not the slightest distress, just leaned against the hood of the squad car and smiled. Ari picked up the fallen rifle.
“This is what ensorcellment does?” Ari said.
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s not pretty, is it?”
“No.” He swallowed heavily. “I’m beginning to understand about that license.”
Up on the hill shots rang out, these near, too near. I flinched. Doyle laughed, the gurgling sort of laugh a baby makes.
“The team’s firing into the ground,” Ari said.
“The ground?”
“Any bullets shot into the air will come down again, possibly on you, possibly on the person you’re trying to capture.” Ari gave me a look of faint disgust that reminded me of St. Maurice, calling me stupid. “The idea is to take him alive. We need information.”
“Well, we’ve got one of them, anyway.” The moment I spoke I knew I lied. The full force of a SAWM hit me like a blow. I spun around, looked behind us—nothing—spun back, looked up on the hill just as Johnson burst out between two trees. I heard shouting as Johnson stopped on the dirt path, the rifle irresolute in his hands.
“Surrender!” Sanchez grabbed a bullhorn and yelled at him. “You’ve got no hope, Johnson! Drop the damn gun, and put your hands in the air!”
“Tawsi Melek!” Johnson screamed the name, then raised the rifle and turned our way.
Ari grabbed me and dragged me to the ground a split second before Johnson fired. Doyle jerked around and took one step away from the car. He smiled out at eternity, then buckled to his knees. Blood spread across his cream-colored silk shirt as he pitched forward to lie crumpled on the asphalt.
Ari rose to one knee, swung up the rifle with an oddly casual gesture, and fired a single shot. Up on the hill Johnson flung himself—no, he fell over backward. I realized that he was dead just as the SWAT team crested the hill behind him. Ari stood up, tucked the rifle under one arm as casually as if it were an umbrella, and trotted off to join Sanchez. I had just seen him kill a man with less emotion than he showed when he kissed me.
The cold sunlight behind the fog turned much brighter, as if it were molten silver pouring down over the scene. I got up, looked at Doyle’s body and decided that I really wanted to vomit. I staggered over to the ornamental planting and did so. The crazy thought in my head was to make sure and miss the yellow tansy, an endangered species.
I wiped my mouth on an old tissue I found in my jacket pocket and tried to consider what to do next. Returning to the car meant seeing what was left of Doyle again. A second crazy thought joined the first, that I could just walk downhill and buy myself a drink at the Cliff House. I stayed where I was, of course, waiting at the scene of disaster once again as police swarmed around the parking lot.
Sanchez and Ari hurried up the hill to take a look at Doyle’s body. I heard Sanchez say, “I don’t understand what made him hold his fire.”
“Neither do I,” Ari said. “He did trip and fall, though.”
Liar, I thought. But technically, I suppose, ensorcellment did lie beyond his understanding.
More sirens wailed toward us. The police helicopter sank out of the sky and landed on the lowest terrace downhill in a gust of rotors that spun to a stop. The sudden silence made my ears ring. I decided that I needed to sit down and walked back to the car. Sanchez turned to me and frowned in concern.
“I’m glad you’re all right,” Sanchez said. “It’s too damn bad you had to be here and see all this.”
“Yeah?” I said. “That’s just the way it worked out.”
“Your partner is one hell of a shot,” Sanchez went on. “He tells me it’s all in a day’s work.”
I smiled. I had nothing more to say.
The day’s work dragged on for a couple more hours. Forensics, an ambulance, and then the inevitable TV cameras arrived. I sat in the car while Ari stood around talking with Sanchez and making phone calls, some in
Hebrew, some in English. Once my stomach calmed down I took out my phone and called Annie. As I suspected, she’d been the “old woman walking her dog” who’d phoned in the tip to the police. Although she’d done a couple of scans to pinpoint Johnson, she hadn’t gone anywhere near Land’s End. What I hadn’t suspected was that she’d be so upset at hearing both men were dead.
“I feel terrible,” Annie told me, “just terrible. I don’t know what I thought would happen, but I never thought they’d be killed. I’m a silly old woman, Nola. That’s all I can say.” Her voice wavered on the edge of tears.
“No, not silly.” I remembered St. Maurice. “But it’s a war we’re fighting. Shit happens when Chaos gets belligerent.”
“I suppose so.”
>
“Think of Sneezy. Doyle murdered her. I can’t shed any tears over him.”
“Well, true enough.”
Annie fell silent for a long couple of minutes. I could hear Duncan whining in the background. Eventually she said, “there, there, good dog” to him, then spoke to me. “I’m going to lie down, I think,” Annie said. “I’ve had too much excitement.”
“Good idea,” I said. “So have I.”
Next I called Aunt Eileen and left a message on her answering machine, simply saying that I was safe and not to worry when she watched the evening news. Just as I clicked off Ari came back to the car. He slid into the front seat and turned to me.
“Thank you,” he said. “One of the officers down below told me that Doyle was aiming at me just before you did whatever that was.”
“Yeah, he was,” I said. “You’re welcome.”
“I’m going to drive you back to your apartment, and then I have to go down to the Hall of Justice. There’s no need for you to wait around there.”
“More paperwork?”
“Of a sort.” He cocked his head to one side and considered me for a moment. “Because of Johnson. I have the legal right to use armed force, but not carelessly. He’s dead, and we can’t just shrug and say well, that’s that. I need to sign a statement and make sure they know where I’ll be and that sort of thing. Interpol will put me on paid leave while the review of the incident proceeds. Since there were rather a lot of witnesses, it shouldn’t take long. He shot Doyle with one of his silver bullets. There’s no doubt that he’s the man we were hunting.”
“Right. I’ll have to file something like that myself, justifying the use of ensorcellment.”
“You look exhausted. Let’s get you home.” He put the key in the ignition, then hesitated. “I forgot about the state of your apartment. Would you rather go somewhere else?”
“No. I’ll start cleaning things up.”
“Very well.” He started the car. “I’ll try to drive more carefully.”
He did, too, stopped at all the stop signs, signaled before changing lanes, drove in short like a Californian—no, far better than that. I watched him and wondered what he really felt about Johnson. Anything? His SPP read as perfectly calm, weary, yes, but calm and certainly not remorseful. We stopped at a red light on Twenty-fifth at Fulton. Ahead lay the park, a green billow of tranquillity under the silver fog.
“You’ve killed someone before, haven’t you?” I said.
“Yes. I don’t like thinking about them. I won’t like thinking about this incident, either.”
That answer eased my mind considerably. “I feel like I had something to do with killing Doyle,” I went on. “If I hadn’t ensorcelled him, he would have dropped when he saw Johnson.”
“Johnson would have shot him anyway. I assumed he was aiming at you, but Sanchez saw it from a better angle. Doyle was the target all along.”
The light changed, and we drove on, curving into the trees at a reasonable speed. I was pondering St. Maurice, another one of my image objectifications, I supposed. I must have heard Doyle behind me and—heard what? A man leaving a garden some thirty yards away? With a helicopter banging the air overhead? Not possible, O’Grady, I told myself. No, stupid, from the rear! The saint-image had pointed out the direction of the attack when I could have had absolutely no idea of what lay behind me.
I refused to draw the only logical conclusion.
CHAPTER 12
SINCE I NO LONGER HAD TO WORRY about Johnson, Ari dropped me off in front of the apartment, then drove on. As I crept up the stairs, Mrs. Z’s TV covered the sound, and she stayed in her lair. The sight of my apartment made my stomach twist. Dirty plywood, pocked with old nail holes, blocked the main panel of the bay window. Shards of glass lay scattered on the carpet in front of the disassembled couch. About half of my worldly possessions cluttered the floor.
“What did you expect?” I said aloud. “The good fairies would come while you were gone?”
Getting everything back in order took me a couple of hours of hard work, good, honest, tiring work that I appreciated for the way it filled my mind. By the time I finished making my space mine again, the sky was growing dark, and the streetlights were glimmering outside. I stood by the kitchen window and watched the purple sign over the Persian restaurant start blinking. A streetcar rumbled by, its windows lighted against the night, crammed with people coming home from work. I thought of contacting Y, but I was quite simply too tired to file the ensorcellment report. I promised myself that I’d do it first thing in the morning.
I wandered back into the living room and turned on the floor lamp. With the dirty tan plywood reflecting it back, the quality of the light struck me as unpleasant, but the overhead would have been worse. I was considering moving the lamp away from the window when I heard keys in the door.
“Ari?” I called out.
“Sheboygan.” He sounded exhausted. “Is the chain on?”
“No, I forgot.” It didn’t matter anymore. No one was trying to kill me. For the first time that day I felt relieved, a deep, animal relief. I was alive, and the predators were dead. Our ape ancestors must have experienced the same feeling when they lured a hyena into running headfirst into a rock.
Ari came in, carrying a pizza. Somehow the sight of that utterly mundane cardboard box made me laugh. He smiled at me, the ordinary smile, not the tiger, not the boyish seducer. I took the box from him and carried it into the kitchen while he took off his jacket.
“Did it go okay down at the hall?” I said.
“Oh, yes, all routine.” He sat down in a kitchen chair and stretched out his legs with a sigh. “Grim, but routine. I’ll be on admin leave until everything’s settled. Annie’s going to get the reward, by the way. I made sure to ask. It’ll take a while, bureaucrats, you know, but it’s hers.”
“Good.” I took a couple of the plates that I’d washed earlier and put them on the table. “Forks?”
“Why? It’s probably not very hot.” He opened the box and contemplated the pizza within. “Vegetarian again. I thought you’d prefer that.”
“I do. Thanks.”
I put a stack of paper napkins on the table, then sat down opposite him. He picked up a piece and laid it onto his plate, then looked up.
“I’m going to have nightmares tonight.” His voice was so calm that he might have been commenting on the food. “Do you want me to sleep on the couch? I’ll probably wake you up otherwise.”
“No, the bed will be fine. I’d rather be right there if you need me.”
He did have nightmares. Somewhere around three in the morning he started thrashing around. I woke up and heard him speaking in Hebrew, a few sharp short words that he repeated over and over. I got the impression that he was ordering someone to do something. I sat up and turned on the bedside light. According to the counseling courses I took for my master’s, I should have let him work through the nightmare on his own, but he was shaking and sweating.
I ran my fingers through his hair and kissed his face until he woke up. He propped himself up on one elbow and stared at me in utter incomprehension, then smiled when he recognized me.
“The usual dream again,” he said.
“What is it?”
“I’m back in the army on guard duty, and the boy starts walking up to the gate. I see him reach under his shirt, and I shoot him.”
“Suicide bomber?”
“He was, yes.” He lay back down with a long sigh. “They gave me a medal for it, but all I could think of was that he was sixteen years old, and I killed him.”
“You didn’t. The men who sent him did.”
“That’s what the commanding officer told me, too. But don’t you see, I didn’t know he was wearing the vest when I fired. He could have been scratching an itch.” He stared at the ceiling for a moment. “I panicked, Nola. I killed him because I was frightened, not because I knew he was a threat.”
“How old were you then?”
“
Nineteen. Why?”
“Old men set boys up to do their dirty work for them, that’s why.”
I left the light on and lay down next to him. He rolled into my arms. I held him for a long time, that night, just held him, until we both drifted off to sleep and ordinary dreams.
In the morning I woke much too early to a barrage of messages on my landline answering machine. Aunt Eileen three times, Maureen once, Kathleen once, Sean twice, and—the call I regretted missing—one from Dan, who’d been allowed to phone by his commander in Iraq, where he was stationed at the time. Kathleen had sent him an e-mail with the news. The subject was always the same: getting Michael home.
I returned calls while Ari made coffee and finished the pizza for breakfast. I had no way to call Dan back, but Aunt Eileen told me that he’d been given compassionate family leave because of Michael’s disappearance and would be returning home as soon as possible.
“It’ll be so good to see him,” I said.
“Yes, especially now.” She sounded tired for so early in the day. “I’d better hang up, dear. I need to call your mother.”
“You’re a braver woman than I am.”
“I’m older than she is. It makes it easier.”
“Still—good luck!” On that note I clicked off.
Ari brought me coffee and sat down next to me on the couch.
“I take it,” he said, “that Kathleen’s forgiven you for not telling her about your brother.”
“Yeah, she has. I don’t blame her for being upset about it. The politics in my family are almost as complicated as the situation in the Middle East.”
“Not quite as deadly, I should hope.”
“Well, no. Though there have been a couple of Christmas parties that came close. Usually some of the older men had too much to drink and then started arguing about politics.” I suddenly laughed at one of those memories that’s only funny in retrospect. “I remember one party at Aunt Eileen’s when Harry O’Brien, the family’s token Republican, got into it with Uncle Jim over some local election. I forget the issue, but Uncle Jim was whipping the cream for the pie while they argued. And all at once he lifted the electric mixer and just sprayed Uncle Harry up and down with whipped cream. From the spinning blades, you know.”