Run (33 page)

The leader whispers something into the microphone that curves from its helmet to its lips. Then it holsters its pistol, and its hand, now free, tears away the black Velcro tab above the pocket of its flak vest, reveals the embroidered yellow letters that read A and T and F.

Eighty f … eighty f
.

The other shadows do the same, and I see more yellow letters, ATF and ATF and ATF, and then I see
ALEXANDRIA PD
.

Those letters are printed on the flak jacket of the one with the Glock .40. The one that shot CK. Its gloved left hand tugs at the strap of its helmet, pulls the helmet and hood away to show me a cropped haircut and a forehead sheened with sweat. Off come the night vision goggles, the respirator, the balaclava, and the shadow becomes someone, a face, and it’s a face I know.

Her face.

Fiona.

Or whatever her name might be, it doesn’t matter, it will never matter, because she is Fiona, of course she is Fiona, and her smile, that smile, breaks across her face as Fiona, my Fiona, my sweet Fiona says to me:

Don’t you fucking move.

I—

And don’t you say a word. Not one word.

Then, to the shadow beside her:

Bruce, do me a favor and cuff this clown.

The next of the shadows flicks the mask from its face, and it’s the Alexandria cop who was with her at my house, the Asian guy, and he tugs a pair of handcuffs from his belt and he starts my way, which is when I say:

I—

To which she says: Not a word.

But someone else has a word. Someone else in black. Someone Federal. It’s the guy with the Sig Sauer and the letters ATF embroidered into his flak jacket, the leader of what ATF calls a Special Response Team, and he’s got more than a word, he’s got lots and lots of words, and the words go something like:

Wait just a minute. This is our jurisdiction now, officer. We’ll be taking it from here. Gentlemen—

No.

That’s all she says. The word hangs there for a moment, and then she says: Bruce, cuff him.

To which the ATF guy says: Hold on, officer. What you do think—

No, she says, but the ATF guy keeps talking: You’re doon.

That’s how he says it, one syllable, like a big pile of sand: Dune.

And then I know him, oh, do I know him, and it’s Mr. Branch Manager, the guy who came to the garage, the garage in New York City, the guy who brought the paper, who came to pick up the guns. Little voices start singing a song in my head, the one about it being a small world after all, and I shut them up, I shut them right up by saying:

Hey, I’m doon just fine.

Fiona looks at me. Bruce looks at me. The ATF guy looks at me, and the best he can do for his witty response is to tell me: No, you’re not.

And neither are you, Fiona tells him. She nods at CK’s corpse. You heard that man, but you didn’t need to hear him. You know the score and so do I. Some Feds are dirty. Maybe not you. Maybe not even the ATF. But somebody’s dirty and this needs to be clean. And right about now you’re standing in Alexandria. As in Virginia. And those, my friend, are the words on my badge, not yours.

And anyway, she says, and she sighs and it’s a good one. I’ve been living with this asshole for four months. So this is my collar. Mine.

The ATF guy shrugs, takes a slow gander at the air to the left of her, shrugs again, and says: Look, officer, we ain’t got time for this shit. I’m going to secure this crime scene. But come the sunshine I’m going to have a little chat with your supervisor.

You do that, she tells him, but it’s to the ATF guy’s back. He whispers something into that microphone on his helmet, and then his fist knocks once at empty air, and the SRT fans out across the sanctuary, moving in studied silence down the aisles, spaced in long intervals, shadows melting back into shadows, until it’s just Fiona and Bruce and me.

Bruce, she says again. Cuff this guy, okay?

Fiona still holds that Glock .40 on me, she’s got a nice two-hand grip, and this Bruce guy does the business, starts to pull my arms behind my back. I try not to wince, but she notices.

Hold on, she says, closing in, taking in the blood on my hands, my jacket, then seeing the mess in my left armpit, and she says the obvious to Bruce: He’s been hit.

Then she says to me: How bad?

Not bad, I tell her. Considering. One shot. Went right through me. Most of the blood’s … not mine. I was lucky.

Oh, Burdon Lane, she says. You are lucky. You are one lucky man.

Bruce, she says. Tell you what. I’ll do the cuffs. You go out and see if we have an ETA on the ambulances. And get me some compression bandages, okay? And hey, Bruce, she says, her voice going a shade to the soft. A whisper, but a whisper I can hear:

Take your time, okay? This guy deserves to suffer. And besides, I’ve got a little something to tell him. Off the record.

Bruce smiles and Bruce nods and Bruce does what he’s told.

Fiona waits until he’s gone before she says: Here.

She holsters the pistol and shrugs off her oversized black SWAT parka. Takes off my suit coat. Checks the wound again. Shakes her head. Grips my left wrist, lifts it gently, tucks my wrist and then my arm into the sleeve of the parka. Then the other arm.

It’s the warmth of the parka, the heavy cloth, the weight of the body armor, maybe, but I realize that I feel cold. So cold. She finishes with the buttons and the zippers and then she says to me, she says:

You have the right to remain silent.

I know what—

Not a word, Burdon Lane. I’m telling you for the last time. I don’t want to hear one more word out of you. Because whatever it says on that laminated card in my pocket, you don’t have the right to remain silent. What you’ve got, Burdon Lane, is the obligation to shut up. You are going to listen to what I have to tell you, and you are not going to say a word. And then we’re going to be done.

So I don’t say a word. Not a word. But neither does she.

She stands there for a while, looking at me. And after she looks at me for a while, she backs away, into the aisle, and bends to fish her helmet from the floor. She pushes the gas mask and the night vision goggles and the hood into the helmet, cradling the whole thing in the crook of her arm like a football. Then she comes back to me and starts with the looking again.

Now listen, she says. I’m going to tell you something, Burdon Lane. I shouldn’t tell you this, but I’m going to. It’s something you never, ever, asked me about. In all those months we lived together. Not once. You never asked. But I’m going to tell you now, and you … you are going to listen.

There is no other word for the breath she takes but deep.

And what I’m going to tell you, Burdon Lane, is what I think.

I get the look again. I have no idea what it means. Until she says:

And what I think is this.

She throws the helmet at me. It hits my chest, hard. My right hand catches it on the rebound. The gas mask and the goggles and the hood fall between my feet. Look up at me. An empty face. Anonymous. One of the shadows.

And Fiona says to me:

I think you’d better run.

Seems like a long time ago that I told you: I’m not the good guy.

And I’m not. No fucking way.

There are no good guys. Not really. Not anymore. All the good guys, at least all the ones I’ve known, are dead. Like Gideon Parks. And the man back in that priest’s office. Jinx. They’re dead and they’re gone, and maybe it’s because we didn’t deserve them.

So I’m not the good guy. But I wonder, now, what that means. Because maybe, if it’s not too much to think, maybe I’m not the bad guy either.

The white and the black, the light and the dark, the good and the bad: All lies. We’re all those things. All those things and more.

Who are you?
That’s what the good guy, the one who took the name Jinx, asked me.
Who the fuck are you?

And I told him the truth: I don’t know. I really don’t know.

But that’s okay. Because if I don’t know the answer to that one, if I don’t know who I am, then no one else knows either.

Not those guys in the suits, the guys who sit behind those big oak desks, the ones who pull the strings. And not the cops.

Especially the cops. Now that I look like them.

Now that I’m one of them.

I tighten the strap of the helmet. The mask fits snug to my face, and for a moment, as I square the night vision goggles, see a world suddenly gone green, I smell her, I smell Fiona, sweet and tangy all at once, and then all I smell is rubber and my own sweat.

I hear my breath, I feel its wet heat, and the words, the words that I offer, the words I try to tell her, sound dull and distant. Fading into the shadows. Like me. Just like me.

Fiona—

Her eyes wince shut, but only for an instant. Then they’re seeing me, behind that mask, seeing me and then not seeing me, seeing instead the cop all dressed in black who rises up off that altar, the poor man’s Lazarus, and Fiona says the words she always seems to be saying to me:

Burdon, she says. You got to go.

So I tell her what I’ve always had to tell her:

Yeah, I tell her. I got to go.

But I won’t run. I will never run again.

I will walk.

I will put one foot in front of the other foot and I will walk down that long center aisle to the great wide door of the cathedral. The open door.

I will walk, I will simply walk, as steady and as certain as I can, out that door and down the stone steps, strolling through the smoke and confusion and into the night. Past the phalanx of cops and Federal agents, past the police cruisers, past the ambulances and the fire trucks and the news units. To the van that is parked somewhere out there, the van that is painted with the words
FLOWERS ETC
, where I will wait for the moment, the right moment, when, justified by probable cause, I will make my search and seizure. I will reach inside that van and retrieve the leather satchel, my get-out bag, and then I will walk on, carrying that satchel and myself on our way.

No one will notice. No one will care. Because I’m no one special. No one at all. Just another cop, another part of the background, part of the scene. An extra. You know. That guy. Yeah … him.

And that guy will follow the curve of blacktop down the low hill and he will walk across King Street, but he won’t have to walk far. Because
there, beyond the rail viaduct, is a Metro station, and at the front of the Metro station is a taxi stand.

He will lose the helmet and walk on. He will drop the gas mask and the goggles and the hood behind a stand of evergreens and walk on. He will stuff the black SWAT parka into a trash bin and walk on. He will take the washcloth from the leather satchel and he will dab the blood from his wound, it’s bad but not that bad, he’s going to live long enough to go where he needs to go. He will stuff the washcloth into his armpit. He will take the houndstooth jacket from the leather satchel and he will wear the jacket, and the pair of glasses in the jacket pocket and a tight kind of grin, and he will walk on.

And as he walks toward the Metro station he will wave, he will wave at the first of the cabs in front of the station, and the cabbie will look and he will see someone who is no one, this guy in glasses and a houndstooth jacket with a satchel, an impatient business guy or a schoolteacher, maybe, this harmless soul who will tell the cabbie he wants to go to National Airport, a decent fare on a Sunday night, and it will take less than ten minutes, and the cabbie will drop the impatient business guy, the teacher, whoever, at National Airport, where the guy will check the flights and he will stand in a line for a while and he will buy a ticket with a picture ID and a credit card, and he won’t have to wait long before they call the flight for Chicago or Memphis or maybe Kansas City because he won’t be flying directly, he will be making a stop, at least one stop, because you can never be too sure. So he will make that stop, and he will do another little dance, buy another ticket from another airline with another picture ID and another credit card, and then he will board another flight and he will be gone, forever and ever, and maybe even for longer than that.

I know all this in the moment it takes for me to say those words to Fiona:

I got to go.

I know all this because I know that there is one place, only one place, where I will be safe. Where no one will even think to look for me. And, if they do look, well, they will never see Burdon Lane.

It’s not some sunny somewhere, a faraway beach, a foreign land, or
even a place that’s big and busy. It’s the one place I’ve been where no one knows me, no one remembers me. Where no one cares.

I’m going home.

But before I leave, there is one last thing to be done.

My hands press against the front pockets of my pants, feel their emptiness, then find the book. Stuffed into my hip pocket.

My book.

My mother’s book.

I take the book from my pocket. Look at its pages, wrinkled and torn, smeared with ash and blood. The words have run out. It’s finished. I don’t need it anymore.

I don’t need the book, or the slips of paper, those bearer bonds, that mark my place in it. A place I’ve read, a place I’ve been, too many times.

I hold the book for a long moment, remembering, never forgetting, and then I put it into Fiona’s hands.

You saved me, I tell her.

No, Fiona says. You did, Burdon. You did about the only thing a person can do in this world. You saved yourself.

I let the book go.

And I begin to walk.

No book is written alone. Although some of my sources must remain nameless, I am grateful for the technical advice of Lieutenant Steven Mason, Alexandria Police Department; Special Agent Tom Walczykowski, Federal Bureau of Investigation (retired); and Andy Stanford, Options for Personal Security. Special thanks are owed to my editor, Jordan Pavlin, for her enthusiasm, honesty, and insight; to my agent, Howard Morhaim, for waiting out that final draft; and to my wife, Lynne, for being my best critic and best friend.