Chris Mooney - World Without End

"Where's Elliot?"

"Mr. Elliot suffered a heart attack early this morning." Conway's voice is strong and firm.

"He's in critical condition, but stable."

Pretty Boy Blake tilts his head to the side and eyes the case, his lips at full pout, and Conway gets a glimpse of the shoulder holster with the nine millimeter under the suit jacket. Blake is mulling over the situation. Con-way thinks the meeting is about to get canceled when Blake jerks his head toward the inside of the house. Conway enters.

The ceilings are low, the rooms small and packed with old furniture and a worn, tan carpet that smells of mildew and wet dog. Blake opens a door and Conway follows him down the stairs and walks into a basement littered with stacked boxes, Christmas decorations, and the kind of discarded junk that belongs in a dump.

A table with a banker's lamp has been set up near the hot-water heater and furnace. Sitting in a chair in the drowsy yellow light is Armand, late fifties, balding, with a dark-brown mustache and beard that matches his dingy brown suit. His brown eyes stalk Conway.

Conway puts the case on the table. Blake pats Conway down for a weapon, Armand sitting there, his gaze still, unblinking. The man is small but compact and wears High Karate cologne the only guy left in the world who owns the stuff which only intensifies his body odor. His comical appearance is disarming, but Armand's people are too familiar with his violent, unpredictable mood swings that can, like a tornado, wreak havoc at a moment's notice.

Blake explains the situation to Armand. Conway doesn't wait for an invitation; he reaches over the table, unlocks the case, and flips the top open.

Lying inside the case's sculpted foam is a bulky weapon that looks like a movie prop from one of Arnold Schwarzenegger's Terminator movies. The laser rifle can cause a brief period of blindness or, at it's highest setting, can burst the capillaries in the eyes and cause permanent and irreversible blindness.

"Where's the battery pack?" Armand asks in broken English.

"You hand me the money, I transfer it into the case, and then I give you the battery pack and schematics so you can start production,"

Conway says.

"That's how it works."

"How do I know this works? It could be a toy."

"You've seen the test results."

"On video. But I haven't seen it used on a real person. This could be a fake."

Conway smiles.

"Are you suggesting that my boss is trying to cheat you?"

"Go outside and bring me back the battery pack. I want to test it now."

"No."

"What did you say?"

"Mr. Elliot's instructions were very specific. You know how the deal is supposed to go down, so stop trying to jerk me around."

"You stupid " "If you don't like it, I walk out of here with the weapon. Now, do you want to complete the deal or not?"

Armand's face is red. The air feels warm, too close with Armand's body odor and cheap cologne and the smell of the rain on his clothes. Behind the man is a door leading out into the backyard. Through the panes of glass inside the door Conway can see mud puddles dancing with raindrops.

Armand places the rifle back inside the foam, shuts the box, locks it.

Then he reaches down for something on the floor. Blake moves a step closer to the table. Pretty Boy is grinning, acting tough and cocky the way all juice heads do, thinking that muscles and size win the fight. Conway is glad for the close proximity; it will make his job easier if he has to take the guy down or, better yet, use him as a shield.

Conway, his face neutral, watches as Armand's hand comes up. Con-way's body is tense, ready to react.

Armand is holding a green L.L. Bean duffel bag. He places it on the table, unzips it. The bag is full of one hundred dollar bills.

"It's all there," Armand says.

"Count it."

"I trust you."

Armand reaches inside the bag and comes back with a nine-millimeter Clock, raises the weapon to Conivay and pulls the trigger.

The round slams into Conway's left shoulder, right above his heart, the intended target, and Conway is hurled back against the concrete wall, knocking over boxes and falling backward until the floor breaks his fall.

Blake grabs the case and runs up the stairs. Armand should have left with him. He should have taken the money and bolted out the back door.

Instead he walks over to Conway. Armand's deeply tanned face glows in the pale light, his face a blank stare, his eyes so far, far away.

Conway writhes on the floor, his right hand grabbing the wound, his shoulder a throbbing mess of pain and blood; he can feel it pouring through his fingers and spurting on his chin and dropping on his face like red rain. He's losing blood fast.

Armand gets down on one knee and places the gun in the center of Con-way's head and clicks back the hammer. This close Conway knows how to disarm Armand an easy kenpo maneuver. But he can't move. He feels weak and light-headed and it triggers a memory from his childhood: himself at age ten, lying in a fetal position on the freshly mowed grass in the backyard of his foster parents' house with two broken ribs, every breath being drawn into the lungs like air laced with acid.

That doesn't stop Todd Merrill, the fifteen-year-old punk with the thick, rugged build of a bouncer, from kicking. With eyes as lifeless as stone, he winds his foot back, his mouth twisted in an odd, erotic grimace, the expression of a boy relishing the taste of a dark gift that promises to deliver him the most intense orgasm of his life, and kicks the back of Conway's head like it's a football. Todd winds up again and this time kicks him in the spine, wham-wham-wham. Blinding white stars of pain explode behind Conway's eyes like fireworks while Merrill's younger brother Jarrod sits in a lawn chair, eating from a bag of Fritos, Conway helpless and unable to end it.

Armand licks his lips and then smiles, his brown and yellow teeth like a row of crooked tombstones, his breath reeking of rotten eggs and coffee and nicotine.

"You think you can trick me? You don't think I know what you're up to?" Armand says. From upstairs comes the sound of gunfire, bodies dropping to the floor, car doors slamming.

"Fuck you," Armand says and presses the trigger.

The weapon jams.

Armand stares at the gun before he tosses it away. Conway hears it skid across the floor, and from upstairs, he hears men screaming. One of the voices is familiar. Paul Devincent. Hazard Team member. He's hit, he's down, he's… what? Conway can't hear. Everything sounds distant now. He's starting to slide down that black hole, his eyes barely registering Armand as he removes the knife from the sheath tied around his ankle and then raises the weapon in the air.

The back door explodes open. A rush of footsteps followed by the soft puff from a silencer and Armand's head bursts apart like a dropped melon. Gunshots are being fired upstairs, furniture is being overturned; there is shouting, more gunfire, Conway can barely hear it.

He is losing consciousness.

A black-clothed figure dressed in combat gear and dripping wet from the rain kneels down and takes off her head gear. It's Pasha Romanov.

"Man down in the cellar, quick," Pasha says into her chest microphone.

She doesn't shout; her voice is even and focused. But when she leans over him and starts to work the wound, Conway catches the sad expression in her blue eyes, the growing knowledge of a mounting loss that cannot be altered.

I'm dying.

His world is fading. He sees blood his blood splash against the pale skin of her face and mouth. She calls again for help. But he can no longer hear. Conway already has surrendered himself to a darkness that promises to deliver him to a new world that never ends, a place that holds the answers to the questions he has sought his entire life.