Derek Haas - Dark men

I can feel the advantage shifting between us, or is that adrenaline in my system? I have to decide how to make a move and what move to make, goddam him.

The taxi driver gets out of the car, a middle-easterner with a tight turban and a full beard, and he’s yelling at the driver of the Tercel, and what the hell play can this be in the small amount of time I’ve given him? What am I walking into?

The door to the Tercel somehow swings open and a man climbs out but he isn’t Spilatro, at least he doesn’t look like Spilatro, not exactly, he looks too young from this angle, but can I be sure? He’s dangling a gun at his side, and as the taxi driver registers this and starts to wave his hands and turn around saying “no, no, no, no, no,” the driver shoots him in the back, BAM, dropping him in the road, just another piece of debris from the accident. Through the open door of the Tercel, I can see a figure slumped in the backseat, a dark figure, maybe it’s Archie, fuck, this is not what I was expecting. The fire from the hood starts to vomit clouds of black smoke, whipped into a frenzy by the wind and someone nearby, some security guard or late-leaving lunch-bucket union douchebag must’ve heard the collision or is going to spot the smoke and dial 9-1-1 and then everything I’ve put into this moment is going to spoil like weeks-old bread. I’m going to have to bite, now.

When I kill, I don’t like dropping anyone collaterally, anyone besides my target, because things get messy, but this isn’t a target, not really, they targeted me, and if he enlisted some of these dark men, some other hitters the way he did Deckman with his wife’s gambit, then they’re going to join him lying on the pavement. What’s real and what’s not is what has had me on my heels this whole time but I have to move in and shift the advantage back to my favor.

I walk quickly from the shrubs and make my way toward the accident, toward the shooter who might be Spilatro but doesn’t look like the man I saw two times, and he spots me coming.

“Where’s Decker?” he says in a voice I don’t recognize-he’s not Spilatro-this only takes a moment to register, but he raises his weapon like a Western gunslinger and I already have mine up and fire from thirty yards away, catch him in the forehead and spin him like a top.

I step past the dead cab driver and the dead Tercel driver and head to the sedan, and the guy in the backseat, the one I thought was Archie blows a hole out the window. A bullet whizzes close enough to my ear to make my lobe flap like laundry drying in the wind, and I duck behind the car, lucky the bullet didn’t rip my head off.

The man squirms in his seat as he tries to find me and when he turns to the back windshield, I’m already there, in his blind spot. I fire and the back windshield shatters along with half the man’s face. He didn’t adjust for the fraction of an inch the glass between us would make on his shot. I didn’t make the same mistake.

“We have her!” says a voice to my right, and when I wheel, the cab driver is up off the pavement, up and alive and glaring at me, a pistol aimed my way. And now I see it. The beard is fake and the turban is covering a bald head and the bullet he took in the back was staged and the voice is that same prissy “I’m smarter than you” whine I’ve heard before except there’s a desperation anchoring it down to the pavement like an albatross around his neck.

I didn’t give him time to prepare and the best he could come up with on the fly was a faux wreck attached to a shell game and his hitters were dealt the dummy hand and are dead before they even knew what game they were playing. I imagine Bando is one of them, the clown who broke Archie’s nose for having the audacity to put up a fight in his own bedroom and now he’s either the one dead on the pavement or the one dead in the backseat of the Tercel. Spilatro thought I’d walk up and talk and he could plug me from behind but he didn’t count on my Glock speaking for me.

His words stop me though. His plan had a wild card, a joker. “We have her” and I look up the street and sure enough, Risina is out of the driver’s side with a gun to her head.

Holding the pistol is Carla.

Carla, who I listened to for hours as she poured her heart out regarding her husband’s betrayal, whom I believed whole-heartedly, whose story I swallowed like a spoonful of fucking ice cream and maybe that’s the part I misjudged the most about my rust, my diminished abilities. I thought my killing skills had dropped, the physical skills, but it’s the mental part that has to be exercised to stay finely tuned… the ability to read faces, gestures, voices, lies. I thought I was in shape, but I’m faced with my failure now; I was played like a fool and my sand castle crashed down, stomped on by the ugly woman with the hound-dog face and the black heart.

She’s too far away to attempt a shot and Spilatro sneers as he aims his gun in my direction.

“What say we all get in the car and take a trip?”

He gestures toward the taxi.

“I thought you didn’t like confrontation up close and personal.”

“You shouldn’t believe everything you hear from hostile witnesses.”

I nod, the Glock heavy in my hand.

Spilatro smiles, his voice hitting that fingernails-on-a-chalkboard pitch. “I told you I was smarter than-“

I shoot him in the head, the bullet slamming into his right eye.

His gun goes off, a finger spasm, but I don’t hear it, don’t even wait to see Spilatro drop. My mental game may be lagging but my ability to hit a man at fifteen feet will never flag, and I sprint directly at Carla, my focus on only her, as everything else fades away. I don’t feel the pavement under my feet, don’t feel the wind in my face, don’t feel the wetness searing the edges of my eyes. She’s far away, too far away, why did I park so fucking far? Why did I bring Risina? Why didn’t I-

Carla blanches, then shoves Risina into the car and is behind the wheel and I see her cold-cock Risina with the butt of her gun, one, two, three times, wham, wham, wham, a blur, a whipsaw, and Risina’s face is bloody and out and she’s slumped and the engine cranks and I shoot into the windshield which spiders but the car launches into a left turn, tires screaming, engine thundering.

Only then do I realize I’m bleeding, shot in the chest by Spilatro’s involuntary finger jerk.

I don’t know how to… won’t know how to find her if she escapes with Risina.

Wheeling on a dime, I sprint back to the taxi with the damaged front end, the old Crown Vic that Spilatro drove into the Tercel, and I’m in the driver’s seat and behind the wheel and the engine is still running. My breath is a bit shallow like I’m trying to suck air in through a straw but I’ll be damned if I’m going to drop. I will not drop. Not now. Not when someone put a plug in me with a lucky shot after he was already dead.

I catch a flash of beige streaking through a gap in warehouses a block away and hear the bass blast of a big rig’s horn followed by a screech of brakes and tires locking up as they cling to asphalt. Whatever happened slowed Carla’s escape and may be my only hope because I don’t have a plan anymore, certainly don’t have one for Carla, and as soon as she shakes me she’ll kill Risina, I know it, and I won’t let that happen, can’t let that happen. She might’ve thought better of holding a hostage and already finished the job, but fuck if I’m going to think about that…

I throw the taxi into a hard right to chase the sound of the semi’s horn and as I whip behind the industrial plant, I just have time to see my rental car untangle itself from the left bumper of a cannery big rig.

I don’t know what parts of Carla’s story were bunk but I’m guessing she hasn’t spent a lot of time as hunted rather than hunter, because she’s panicking at the exact moment when she should have calmly made her getaway, disappeared around a corner and then I would have been lost.