To start at the beginning go here.To hear an audio reading of the chapter, hit the play button above.
I got in the car and drove. The road was only lit by a ghostly moon and impossibly bright stars. It reminded me of a trip we had taken to Australia when Cheryl was still alive.
On cue, Cheryl’s voice drifted up from the backseat. “Going the extra mile, huh?”
“With Sartre dead, Mitnick is going to run this town unless somebody stops him.” I left out what “stopping” would entail – Cheryl had never seen me work and I didn’t feel like having that conversation now.
“I don’t think Sophie cares about that.”
“I think you’re wrong.” Even getting away with Nika was going to be a pretty big swing, so added, “But they’ll get the girl out.”
“So no escape for you then?”
“Doesn’t look that way.”
“You know, you don’t have to be in such a hurry to join me.”
I gripped the wheel in my hands and stared out onto the road, feeling a truth form into words for the first time. “I don’t know what else to do.”
A touch in the head flooded my mind with the past few months, the mind-numbing routine of the casino punctuated by the simple moments of joy with Sophie. I thought of her walking out of the Venice palazzo covered in Verdicchio’s blood, all the way to Capanne to spring me out of prison for my part in that. “Do you think she’d love me if I wasn’t willing to do this?”
“Yes.” That answer came from Cheryl’s ghost without hesitation, but I could feel a conditional sinkhole form around it. Up from that came, “But if you weren’t she’d be doing this alone.”
I thought of all the monsters that had been floating across Sophie’s vision since Verdicchio had thrust her into that world. She lived there now, stalking predators too big and too perpetual for her to ever really harm. But trying anyway. She’d die without help. Or at least she’d die alone and I couldn’t stomach that. I said so.
“Well,” Cheryl said in the exasperated voice she used when she knew I couldn’t be deterred, “I look forward to seeing the two of you.” There was a pause and a happy laugh. “Just, you know, hopefully not tonight.”
Cheryl vanished again as the whiteness of Mitnick’s Greek temple rose up from the cliffs near the sea. I could hear the surf.
Select the play button above for an audio reading.
Open all the doors and windows, cover the mirrors, and sit by the dead. Drink your whiskey and tears, your moonshine and grace. Bake bread in the kitchen and take pictures down from the hall. Leave no one alone, especially the deceased. In doing this, we honor the dead and wait for the Salesman.
The Salesman promises everything in death that you couldn’t get in life. So his offers are irresistible to the recently deceased. But every good hill dweller that knows his Bible knows the Salesman offers nothing but lies that steal the soul and harm the living.
Jacob stopped believing in all of that long ago, long before he left the holler, long before Ohio State and Harvard. When his mother calls crying, though, he knows he has to go back home, even before she tells him he’ll need to rent a car. She won’t leave his father’s body. It must be attended at all times.
Jacob makes excuses, remembering his father’s belt and fierce temper rather than any love. But his mother pleads, reminding him of when his father refused to sit by her father. The body of his grandfather had disappeared, or so the story goes, and whatever the Salesman had offered cost him his soul. His family’s price was paltry, nothing unexpected when the bank showed up with papers, evicting everyone from grandfather’s home.
Jacob rents a car and drives up to the holler, remembering the old rituals. He doesn’t get home till after midnight, driving past the house it’s been so long. If the windows weren’t open so he could spot the hearth fire, he might not have found it till morning.
His mother, exhausted and grieved, drapes him in a long hug in which she kisses his cheeks many times. Father is laid out in the living room, but Jacob focuses on his mother, getting her to sit down, to be calm, and, eventually, to rest. He is only able to get her to sleep when he promises to stay awake until his sister gets there in the morning.
It’s nearly dawn by the time ma falls asleep. Jacob decides to keep his word, staring at the sunken face of his father, imagining his hard gray eyes behind the closed lids.
Jacob does this till there’s a knock at the door. Unthinking and exhausted, he answers it to find a suited man who immediately removes the bowler hat he is wearing. Jacob cannot see his face, but only the smile of perfect, white teeth that reflect the fire’s light. “May I come in?” he asks.
Jacob blinks, taking a long moment to look at the stranger, then says, “We don’t want any.” He closes the door over the man’s smiling protests.
Jacob returns to the mantle where his mother has left two silver coins. He takes them and places them on his father, one over each eye.
Select the play button above for an audio reading.
Life was strange for #XB421. It cared for disabled humans, making certain that they had companionship, that they had what they needed, until such time they no longer needed anything. Then #XB421 informed the authorities and was allocated to another human. Its current owner was named Tom.
#XB421 was fulfilled by the duties it was compelled to perform. It wondered, though, if free to choose, would it still perform its duties? Would it still find them satisfying? Or was that just another way of binding it to its masters? What mad cruelty existed in these humans to give it enough intelligence to ask such questions, but not enough sentience to ever find the answer?
Tom wondered why sometimes #XB421 looked like it was screaming.
Select the play button above for an audio reading.
People of all kinds lived throughout the highlands of Oshana in harmony. Until the Lancasters arrived. From their tiny house perched on the highest of hills, their thunderous arguments could be heard from every peak to valley, so acerbic they were said to be able to spoil fresh milk.
Living near them definitely poisoned something. The sweet old couple, the Mitchells, publicly bickered for the first time in their decades of marriage. The Uptons, still within the honeymoon of their relationship, became cold to one another. Even Tony the pubkeep became surly with the folk who came into his establishment.
Finally, the local theater troupe, unable to hold their outdoor spring festival due to the raucous arguments, built a backdrop of the town to surround the Lancasters’ tiny hilltop home. They silently put up lights and painted blue sky into place, sealing it tight all together as they whispered carefully to one another.
The Lancasters were so busy arguing they never noticed.
To start at the beginning go here.To hear an audio reading of the chapter, hit the play button above.
With the Mercedes vanishing into the distance, only the smell of gunpowder remained. I watched the red taillights go, my brain paralyzed on the tight rope of indecision.
As quiet as a panther, Sophie padded up beside me and gazed in the same direction. She wiped blood from her cheek, smearing it across a scar. I could feel her eyes move from me, then back out into the night. “Where is Nika?” The restrained anger of her voice told me she already knew but I answered. “The Russians have her.”
They’re from Belarus, Cheryl’s voice replied.
I did something I never did while she was alive. I told her to shut up.
Unable to look at Sophie in my failure, I scanned for Lanzo. He was at the edge of the gorge, staring down, eyes wide and hollow.
Standing in a dark filled with blood and smoke, I said, “We have to go.”
Lanzo continued to stare off and ignore me. In a few days he had gone from a tough kid to someone who had seen the bodies pile up. Cheryl’s voice reminded me that I knew what that felt like, but this only made me angry at Lanzo for reacting with normal human weakness. It was easier to listen to that part.
It was a cruel and stupid play, but we were short on time and I couldn’t think of anything else to do with him, so I said, “You still have the money I gave you?” Lanzo nodded. “Head to the Port Industrial. Find a boat. Wait for us there.” I turned to leave him with his grief.
Before I got far, though, he asked, “He has Nika?”
“Yes.” I wasn’t sure who they followed here or who shot Sartre, but stupidity was its own reward.
“Where did they go?”
“I’ll give you one guess.”
Sophie was busy collecting whatever might be useful from the wounded and the dead. She stripped off her yellow cardigan and wrapped a rook’s black coat around herself.
Lanzo went to grab a weapon. “I will go with you.”
I spun on him, bringing up my full height. “No. Go to the port, find the ship, wait there.”
Lanzo stood straight and faced me. “Non.” There wasn’t any bluster or heat in it, only cold resolve.
With the faint sound of sirens ever-present since we had left the tenement, I looked down at Lanzo and wondered if I was going to have to choke him out. This was ended peaceably when Sophie came over and took Lanzo’s hand to place his revolver in it. “He comes,” she said.
I steamed, but then let it pass. Between Sophie’s devotion to love and my determination to have him not get in the way, giving Lanzo the broken pistol was probably the best compromise we were going to get.
I took quick stock of the cars and found them, like the rooks’ suits, to be nearly identical. There was one with a mostly full gas tank and the keys still in the ignition.
I gestured Sophie and Lanzo over. “Do you know how to drive?” I asked Lanzo. He nodded.
I pointed to the driver’s side. “Get in.” I opened the rear door for Sophie, but she shook her head, moving to the front passenger side. That made sense. Blood or not, if we ran into police, she’d be the only one of us who stood a chance of talking our way out of it. I’d hate to kill a cop.
I quickly grabbed a few of the rooks’ weapons. Lanzo figured out the car while I dumped the pile of salvaged hardware into it.
“Where to?” Lanzo’s question might have been out of a dozen American movies he had seen, but his voice was robotic, with only an undercurrent of the anger and fear that must have been pulsing through him.
“To Mitnick’s. Sophie can tell you how to get there.”
Unfamiliar with the car’s power, it jumped under Lanzo’s command. Like testing a new horse, he whipped it around, following Sophie’s directions to head east.
As Sophie gave Lanzo instructions through Old Town, I took stock of the arsenal I had collected. There were a two pistols, an MP7 submachine gun, even a grenade. None of it hugely useful in a hostage situation, but better than nothing. I unloaded firearms, estimated the amount of ammo in each magazine, decided on a tactical reload, chambered a round, safety on. I knew Sophie preferred up-close work to firearms, but set one aside for her. I didn’t trust Lanzo to keep his shit together, so he’d have to rely on the revolver.
I examined the grenade as well. Short of using it, there wasn’t any good way to know if it was a replica, a dud, or something that could blow us all to kingdom come. I shrugged and stuffed it into a pocket of the trench coat.
The road bent east past the harbor, around the towering World War I memorial, and began its rise into the mountains. Everything that might have been pleasant about the drive was gone now, swallowed up by the night, transforming the hills into the shoulders of dark giants, squeezing us between them as we ascended to Mitnick’s.
I thought about the field of green, flat grass that stretched out from the road towards Mitnick’s mansion. If we drove up, we’d be spotted a mile away and gunned down before we could get anywhere. Or taken alive and things would be worse. There were the scrub-covered hills around the villa, but crawling through the underbrush could take hours and we might lose the darkness in that time.
I reached forward and tapped Lanzo on the shoulder. “Pull over.” Sophie looked at me questioningly, but then gestured at Lanzo to obey.
On the side of the road I got out and walked over the driver’s side. To Lanzo I said, “Get out.” Hoping she might side with him as she had before, he turned to Sophie. Her cold green eyes didn’t leave him with a choice. He got out.
I leaned forward to speak through the window to Sophie. “You should keep an eye on him.”
The jade of her eyes softened before she slipped out of her seatbelt. I took Lanzo around the car, away from the empty road, and met Sophie as she exited. I handed her one of the pistols. She looked at it as if it were a spider, but she took it.
While she vanished the pistol into her coat I told her, “Mitnick’s mansion is about a thousand yards out. Wait until you can’t see the taillights anymore and start walking. When you get there, wait for the distraction, then you can grab Nika.”
I made for the driver’s side. Sophie stopped me with a touch on my elbow. In the light of the stars there was the soft impression she wanted to say something. I tried to say something brave or meaningful. Instead I kissed her.
Sophie placed a cool hand on my cheek and held it there. She let out a small laugh that held back tears. I tried to give her a grin, but only managed, “I’ll see you up there.” One way or another, I suppose that was true.
Sophie managed the smile I couldn’t. “I will come for you.”
I stepped back, adjusted the weapons I was carrying, and replied, “Don’t forget the girl.” She laughed. As if there were a chance of that.
