The Sleeper (21 page)

“Listen,” I said. But the driver with the teardrop tattoos wasn't listening. He looked ahead at the traffic on Route 70, as uninterested in what I was saying as he was in the passing cars. “Listen to me,” I said. “You can't handle this shit we're getting unless you've got special equipment. Understand?”

“If we don't get what we want, we're going to kill you and your fucking little girl.”

“You got to be careful with it.”

“Shut up and tell me where we go.”

“This stuff is more dangerous—you have no fucking idea how dangerous, do you?…Straight through the light then make your next right…Do you? There's smallpox virus in the canister I'm giving you,” I lied. “If it gets out, all of us will die. The fever is like burning to death. Your skin bleeds and starts to come off—”

“Shut up!”

Miriam moaned in the back. “
Cállate!”
shouted the son of a bitch holding her down. He slapped her on the back of the head with his free hand. She cried out for a second and was quiet.

Miriam, my little girl, would never forget this. She would never forget the fear, and she would never forget the things she had seen and what she was about to see, and there was nothing I could do to prevent any of what was going to happen—any of what I was going to make happen—right in front of her eyes. “Don't touch her,” I whispered.

“Which
way?
” said the driver.

“Straight ahead until you see the Kmart on the right.”

“Kmart?”

“It's empty. But the stuff is there.”

“That where we're going?”

“It is.”

The driver punched a button on his cell phone.
“Hay un Kmart. Dice que tiene la cosa allí.”
He listened for a second.
“Bueno. Okay.”

“There it is on the right,” I said. The front doors were still covered with plywood and the parking lot was still empty except for the old station wagon sitting on its rims. But a big American flag was flying from the pole.

“Around back,” I said.

He pulled the truck to a stop in front of the shuttered loading platform. “It's in there?”

“Yes.”

“We wait here,” said the driver.

“Why?”

He said nothing, and I heard Miriam groan again in the backseat. “Shut up,” said the man with the barbed-wire tattoos, and he slapped her again. “That's twice,” I whispered. “Give her to me.”

“She's so sweet and soft. Maybe I keep her.”

“Shut the fuck up,” said the driver.

A Chrysler van pulled next to us, followed by another rented Chevy sedan. Five men got out of the van, three from the Chevy. Most looked like gang members, but one had the scraggly beard and short haircut of the Salafis, who think they look like the first followers of Muhammad. They all pulled assault rifles out of the backs of the cars except for one. His dark brown face could have been Mexican and he had a sniper rifle with a telescopic sight. I looked at his black eyes. He might have been the man shooting at me from the cornfield. But he wasn't the man I wanted.

The cell phone in my hand rang out. “Yes.”

“You are there,” said the voice.

“Where are you?”

“The brothers will go with you to get the Sword.”

“I'm not going anywhere without my little girl.”

“You get her when I get the Sword.”

The gunmen were deploying on the loading dock and the corners of the building. One of the Salafis pressed an earphone into his ear. He looked like he was waiting for orders.

“I take her now,” I said.

The line went silent and I couldn't tell from the electric emptiness if it was dead or not. Then the voice came back. “Hand the phone to the brother in the backseat.”

The man with the barbed-wire tattoos listened to the voice. He pulled back the hammer of the .357 and smiled, then raised the barrel and pointed it straight at my face. He handed the phone to me.

“Get out of the car,” said the voice. “Take the girl. But move slow.”

I watched the barrel of the pistol as I got out and opened the rear door of the truck. The son of a bitch with the barbed-wire tattoos grabbed Miriam's hair and jerked her head off the seat. “Go to Daddy,” he said, and I saw for the first time that her face was bruised. I picked her up and held her to me, and it was like I was holding my whole life, the whole future of my world in my arms. She cried softly, breathless, beyond screaming. “Let's go inside,” I said.

One of the Salafis kicked through a piece of plywood over the old entrance and three others went into the opening. They moved like men who'd been trained for urban combat, sure of their footing and their aim. The lead Salafi held up his hand, listening on his earphone, then motioned me to enter. The man with the barbed-wire tattoos came after me.

The inside of the Kmart was dark and hot and the stale air smelled like dust. Some light came in through the hole where we entered and some through cracks around the plywood at the front, but it wasn't much and my eyes adjusted slowly. All the merchandise was gone except for bits and pieces of boxes on the floor. But the high steel shelves were still there in the middle of the store, row after row of them, and at the back and around the side walls the big shelves for heavy merchandise climbed like scaffolding toward the steel rafters beneath the aluminum roof.

The barrel of the .357 pressed up against the base of my skull. I hugged Miriam to me and heard the voice on the phone in my hand. “You are inside the building?”

“Yes.”

“Get us what we want. Now!”

With two gunmen on each side of me and the barbed-wire tattoos just behind, I walked as fast as I could through the dark. The other gunmen came into the building and spread out around the floor, searching for anyone who might be there before them, setting up an ambush for anyone who came after them. The photo section was near the front. The developing machines had been hauled away, but the counters were still there. At the back was a door into a windowless room where the chemicals used to be stored.

“Anybody got a flashlight?” I asked. “It's in here.”

The Salafi pulled a Bic lighter out of his pocket. The large cylinder was upright at the back of the little room with a heavy chain wrapped around it several times that attached it to a vertical water pipe on the wall. On the floor was a mostly empty garbage bag that looked like it had just been tossed there, except there was no dust on it. “The lock's down at the bottom,” I said.

“Unlock it,” said the man with the barbed-wire tattoos and the pistol to my head, the man who had beaten my baby daughter. I knelt down, holding her close, and pushed the garbage bag to one side. I could feel rubber and straps inside and one, maybe two, canisters.

“I need more light. I can't see the combination,” I said.

The barbed-wire tattoos stepped forward to shoot the chain with his .357.

“No!”
I shouted. “You crack the cylinder and we're all dead.”

He stepped back.

I fumbled with the lock, studying the chains, the garbage bag, trying to figure what had been left here for me. The combination on the lock ought to be zeros, or my father's birthday, 8-31-20. Betsy would know that. Zeros didn't work. One of the Salafis behind me was talking in Arabic into his earphone. The birthday didn't work. Maybe the left-right sequence was wrong. Miriam shifted in her exhausted sleep, thinking she was safe now that she was in Daddy's arms.

The phone in my hand rang. “The cylinder is too big,” said the voice.

“That's for extra protection,” I said.

“What have you done with the Sword? This is not it.”

“Yes it is.”

“Step out of the little room,” said the voice on the phone.

“Damn it, where are you?” I shouted, kicking the garbage bag out through the door. “Can you see me? Can you see it?” I was well clear of the room now, holding Miriam, turning as if I was trying to find my persecutor. Two of the Salafis were still inside, fooling with the chain and the canister. “Look at the thing for yourself,” I shouted. “It's a high-pressure cylinder. The Sword is inside.”

The Salafi near me with the earpiece listened intently, looking back and forth between me and the man with the barbed-wire tattoo. Then he made a simple gesture: the pulling of a trigger. I looked into the barrel of the .357.

The pistol exploded, flying out of the tattooed-man's hand, sliding across the floor, and taking some of his fingers with it. He looked at me like I'd done this, too stunned even to cry out in pain.

A fraction of a second later, there was a quick series of shots and metal pinging noises and the gas canister inside the little room exploded. Shrapnel blasted into the guts and faces of the two Salafis still in there. A thick fog of chlorine billowed out through the door. I grabbed for the garbage bag, my eyes closed, my breath held, pushing Miriam's face into my sweat-damp blue-jean jacket. My right hand felt the mask, the straps. I put it on and cleared it with an explosion of breath. I inhaled. The air was clean. There was another canister in the bag about the size of a Coke can—one of the emergency hoods from the waterworks. Miriam was struggling, desperate and terrified in my arms. I shook out the plastic smoke hood and put it over her face, then pulled the drawstring tight around her neck. For a second the plastic smothered her, sticking to her nose and lips, stopping her screaming breath, and she wrenched in my grip, but a second later the little can filled the bag with air. Now she could breathe, too. But she wouldn't and couldn't calm down.

There were other shots, other sounds like exploding tanks of gas. From every corner of the building came the strangled shouts of the gunmen in the thickening cloud. Bursts of gunshots cut through the air, making starlight patterns in the aluminum roof.

I hit the concrete floor with Miriam hugged close. Someone was choking screams right in front of me and making a strange thudding noise against the floor. Still I couldn't see him. Then the barbed-wire tattoo on his bare arm loomed through the chlorine mist. His body twisted and writhed like a snake run over on the road. He beat his head against the floor, trying to smash the pain out of it. His eyes rolled back, his mouth foamed pink with his dissolving lungs and his blown-apart hand oozed red bubbles as the chlorine mixed with blood to make hydrochloric acid in his bare veins.

“There is justice,” I said.

Somewhere the mobile phone rang, but I had dropped it when I was fumbling with the mask, and there was no way I could look for it now.

I figured everyone had headed for the hole in the plywood. Maybe some made it. Maybe they were waiting outside. With Miriam in my arms I didn't want to take that risk, but she was using up the oxygen in her emergency hood real fast. I had to get her out of the poison cloud. Chlorine is heavy. If I could climb into the scaffolding on the walls, I might be able to get above it. My throat and nose were burning and I was coughing from the little bit of gas I inhaled before I got the mask on. Miriam was still struggling, mucus running down her face, tears pouring from her eyes. I had to keep her arms pinned so she wouldn't rip off her hood, holding her tight. So tight.

The scaffolding was right in front of me. I climbed toward clearer air, balancing and grabbing handholds, and about fifteen feet up looked down on the poison like it was mist in a mountain valley. My eyes were used to the shadows now. I could see all the way across the inside of the building. On the top level of the scaffolding near the door somebody was moving. A small figure. A slip of a thing. Betsy. It had to be Betsy. She wore a gas mask and she was prone. Beside her was a high-powered hunting rifle with a telescopic scope, but she had the Ruger shouldered. She was watching for movement in the gas billowing below. She didn't see Miriam and me. Then a tiny tremor shook the scaffolding under my feet. Somebody else was up here.

“Miriam, Sugar, I'm going to put you down. Please, please, don't take this bag off your face. Please, Sugar. Just stay here. Please.”

Her eyes were wide and red, her jaw clenched and her body rigid as she looked at the masked monster in front of her, her father.

I swung up onto the next level of scaffolding, the one just below the roof and in that second saw the Mexican sniper leveling his rifle at Betsy. He was wiping his eyes, trying to focus through his scope, but he was in control of his body. He was steady. He'd have her in a second.

Sirens wailed outside.

The only weapon I had was the knife in my boot, and I couldn't slow down to reach for it. I screamed from deep inside me but heard my voice muffled by the mask. The sniper wiped his eye again, and refocused. I tore off the mask as I ran, letting loose a yell of rage and fear that echoed under that huge metal roof like a banshee wail as I sprinted with everything in me across the top of the scaffolding. The sniper put his eye back to his scope and pulled the trigger. I made a dive for him that nearly carried both of us over the edge. He twisted and tried to break free, but now I had him pinned flat on his belly beneath me, his arms over the edge so he couldn't push up. Now my boot knife was an easy reach. Now I brought it clean through his carotid artery. Now a gush of blood, almost black in the shadows, sprayed down into the gray-green gas.