T. Parker: Black Water

"I'll call paramedics," said Zamorra.

"Versa-Terra."

"What?"

"Used by Foot Rite."

She lowered her gun and looked at Zamorra blankly.

"Take five, Merci. He isn't going anywhere."

"In their popular Comfort Strider."

She half listened as Zamorra made the call. She couldn't take her eyes off of Vorapin. His bulk was obscene, absolutely. But he was majestic, too, like Ahab's whale or a Tsavo man-eater.

Her own phone rang three times before she flipped open the mouthpiece and spoke from her heart:

"Who are you and what do you want? "

"Hi. It's Archie."

A sudden reentry for Merci, swift and complete, all of her attention now focused on the voice in her ear. "Where are you?"

"I'll be at the top of Santiago Peak in about ten minutes. I'm going to get Gwen. Meet me and we can clear some things up."

"You blinded Sonny and murdered Vorapin."

"Hurry up, Sergeant. I'm kind of eager to get going."

He got the wings out of the back of the Durango and carried them to the edge. There was a natural platform of sandstone to on, warning signs all over the place, and above him a fenced bristling with radio and communications antennae and more was windy and hot, and when he looked out he could see County spread out in front of him, the blue houses creeping purple hillside below like soldiers storming a fort. According to the map the peak was 5,687 feet above sea level, the highest point county.

"It's beautiful," he said.

"It really is."

At the sound of her voice he swung around, but she wasn't there.

"Sweetie, I'm sorry you had to see all that. But they made me do it. They started all of this."

"I know," she said quietly. "They deserved it."

"I didn't feel anything while I was doing it."

"It's the bullet."

"What a thing to happen."

He sat at the edge of the sandstone, legs dangling in air. He watched the wind work the manzanita, shifting the branches in terse unison. He looked down at the beautiful yellow tarp of his wings. Checked the fittings and the fasteners into which the Canadian crutches were locked."

What I'm going to do is head off toward the ocean, then turn south. The wind coming up the peak is strong, and I'll ride it up and back toward you. Then, well, it's just us. Hold on to my shoulders. It'll be nothing but blue skies."

"I'm ready, Arch. I'll be here. You look terrific."

Archie had used the hotel iron and board to press his uniform, getting the seams crisp and the difficult pleats of his shirt pockets flat before reattaching his badge and nameplate. Concerned about weight, he stripped his duty belt down to the essentials: holster, handgun and plastic wrist restraints; no extra clips of ammunition, no flashlight or radio, no spray and no stick. He'd polished his boots with a miniature shoeshine kit from a drugstore. Shaved his face, of course, and affixed a fresh bandage over his wound, which, in the stress of Sonny and the giant, began emitting a steady flow of pink fluid. Since the giant, it had been getting worse.

"I called Rayborn, Gwen."

She didn't answer right away. "Why?"

"I want to see something."

"Her?"

"Not her, Gwen. Me. I want to see something about me."

"Be careful."

"I think I got into a fight because of her. I can't quite remember."

He felt the warm trickle down his neck and knew the bandage pad was full again. He fished a fresh square out of his shirt pocket and peeled away the old one, which he flicked sideways off the cliff. It spun out and caught the updraft, then downward out of sight.

"Better," he said.

He gathered up the wings and lay them across his lap. He could feel the sun on the back of his uniform and the sharp breeze drying his sweat. Below him, the colors of the county had changed: now the foliage was red and the houses were a pale turquoise that reminded him of a Baja village he'd visited with Gwen once, years ago, driving the old pickup truck slowly over the pitted asphalt and looking for a lobster restaurant to eat in.

Archie sighed and looked out at the sky in which he would soon be reconnected to his wife. In the awful confusion after his shooting he had clung to two hopes: that he would see Gwen soon, and that he would kill the men brutalized her. To him these seemed to be reasonable and just desires. True, he'd spared Sonny, because it had been the right thing to do. Sonny had driven, not shot. Sonny would never drive again, though, how unsatisfying it all had been. Archie remembered saying to the giant this is for Gwen, though it caused none of the exhilaration he was expecting. All he really felt as he did these things he'd done his job fairly well, taking a rational satisfaction in details: apprehending Mr. Charles without struggle; jumping the giant's gate in the early-morning darkness and landing without a sound; performance of the noise suppression device. This crude silencer, which he had painstakingly created from two PVC pipes of differing diameters, steel wool and duct tape-all fixed to the barrel of his forty-five with a powerful epoxy cement billed as Squeeze-a-Bolt- had turned out almost comically large. But it had worked well. After five shots, only a small part of the end had melted. So that Sonny and the Giant were accounted for. But his liberation from numbness had failed.

And now, with half of his desires fulfilled, Archie felt pinioned and exhausted and alone and he missed his wife even more terribly than before. He thought about his faraway life because he could still feel the moments, though just barely: walking Julia to school with that lump in his heart, and the Little League years when he first understood that he had a gift for the game, and high school ball when he set all the county records; then Gwen and college ball and later the months she put him through the academy and the skinny first years when he worked the jail at odd hours and she built her schedule around his and they lived only to love each other. Then later the friends on the department and the regular shifts and the feeling that he was getting good at his job; even the dizzying spiral into wealth, all the worry and scrounging of money to invest, not knowing if it was going to pay off or no house and the new cars and he and Gwen still in love and it seemed like life couldn't get better. These were true memories, not the neutered snapshots that the Russians had left him with. But the emotions accompanying even these were harder and harder to recall. He remembered now, slowly and with a grim resolve, how it felt the first time he saw Gwen Kuerner in the multiplex out in Riverside.

Suddenly the tears were rushing out of him as a great spasm of loss cracked through him like a whip. It felt like his soul was caving in upon itself. He could hear his scream, feeble in the wind, but inside him it was deafening as the roar he'd heard standing by the tracks near Willits, when he was a boy with Kevin and they'd seen how close they could get to the train as it howled clattering past, inhaling their thin boys' bodies toward the fatal rails.

"We shouldn't have messed with the snake stuff," he sobbed.

"It was a terrible mistake, Arch. But I was trying to make things go our way. Really go our way."

The tears kept pouring down his face and he stared through them at the sky and wondered why his life had come down to empty air.

"It's okay, Archie," she whispered. "Come on, now. Come get me."

He turned and saw Rayborn climbing up the crest of the peak toward him. Zamorra was behind her ten yards, carrying a shotgun.

Merci slipped on the loose rocks, steadied herself by grabbing the branch of a low manzanita. She was breathing hard with the elevation and the heat and the uncertainty of what Deputy Wildcraft was doing up here.

She could see him out at the edge, looking back at her. Two large blue curves dangled where his arms should have been, like wings. She recognized the shape instantly: the swordlike piece of tarp from the hotel trash can was a model version of what Archie now wore at his sides. The cemented joints she had found were prototypes of what must be holding those things together.