Brody made his way through the first few men before they assumed where he was and their accuracy increased. He sought cover behind a massive reel wrapped in chains, feeling the tremble of bullets striking against its opposite side. Once there was a lull of silence, he immediately fired back and continued forward, shooting at them individually. Each shot expertly placed between their eyes, the sonar and his gun arm coordinated harmoniously.
But they began to understand what was happening and trailed back to the hall to find more secure cover.
Brody fired once more, missing the last one as he sprinted around the corner. He got to the entrance of the long corridor and saw they had thrown themselves into the doorways lining the passage. Brody could still see them, crouched boxy figures holding boxy guns standing within other, larger boxy shapes.
Titian shouted, “He’s using sonar. Close it up. Close it up.”
They heeded the command and one by one the men vanished behind closed doors to kill the sonar’s ping.
Brody hunched down behind a tree trunk-sized mass of cables and let the sonar feel what it could. Despite the shipyard factory being rusty and dilapidated, the walls were in good shape and he could detect not a single man. He could hear panicked shouts and weapons reloading. He ejected the clip of his own gun and let the sonar feel down inside. Three bullets remained. He pressed a boot against the shoulder of a nearby thug to roll him over. Beneath the corpse was a gun, sticky wet with blood. Inside the magazine remained ten rounds.
He waited not a second more. He rose from behind the crushed car and fired through the wall of the closest room.
The sonar’s ping filtered in through the hole, and the men inside could be seen ducking in what looked like a coordinated reaction.
Squaring up his aim, Brody fired through the wall again. The man fell and his companions in the room with him stared in awe. He fired two more times, taking them out as well. None inside had time to fire back.
He advanced down the hall to the room where the first pack of men had been hiding. Entering, he surveyed them there, with their guns still gripped in their dead hands. He took up the closest one’s weapon, a combat shotgun with a snub-nosed barrel. As he turned it over, the shotgun’s inside lit up in his mind’s eye. The interior of the load was full—the previous owner had never gotten a single shot off.
Wasting no time, he stepped into the hallway, estimated where the men were with the sonar, and fired into them before they could make it to the door.
He fired into the opposite wall, found that room empty. He listened, everything still and silent.
Down at the end of the hall, Titian came into view but out of range for the shotgun to do any sort of serious damage. Regardless, Brody brought the shotgun up and fired, Titian slamming aside to dodge the spray of buckshot. He pumped and fired again, moving forward. Titian raised his pistol, and Brody ducked into a doorway to avoid the fire. The shots rang off and came through the steel wall, one muffled thwap after another of the silenced pistol being hastily emptied.
Both men took pause in cover.
“Fucking Hubert,” Titian said as he reloaded. “What a spectacular mess this has turned out to be. Course, I can’t really be that surprised. If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. One day with enough adjusting, I could’ve been an upstanding citizen with a new name, placed somewhere else. That idea had its appeal. Just imagine. You and me, walking side by side on the street, a couple of regular joes going to work, practically living like a goddamn Artie. Normal folks with all our desires put away—submissive and on the leash.”
Brody leaned the barrel of the shotgun out the door and fired.
Silence a moment. Then Titian continued. “Even though Ward had a pretty good argument, I always doubted there was a way, outside of a well-placed bullet, to fix bastards like us. We’re dyed in the wool. Our daddies beat us, we grew up on Tom and Jerry blowing each other up with sticks of dynamite, and he thinks he can take all the bad shit out as easy as unloading a dishwasher—”
Brody jumped out, attempting to catch him off guard. He fired, dropped to one knee, pumped, fired again. The shots ripped through the steel wall of the room where Titian was hiding.
The sonar slowly mapped the room Titian stood inside. His gnarled head of hair matted down from melted snow, his heavy belt of blades. Titian stood motionless, the pistol pointed upward.
Brody remained crouched, holding the shotgun, ready to fire from the hip once the sonar settled. He had to be standing completely still for it to get an absolutely perfect fix on everything. He could miss with a gun just as easily as sometimes he missed his chair when sitting down too quickly.
Titian stepped out with a machete in hand, pitched it outward, the blade turning end over end in the air, reducing the space between the two men with deep, plunging cuts.
Reaction forced his hand, and Brody pulled the trigger on the shotgun and blasted the space before him. The machete was kicked back, where it hit the wall and slapped to the dirt floor, the blade perforated end to end. Brody pumped the next shell out and lunged forward, striking while Titian was choosing his next weapon from among his generous collection.
The killer bounded out of the room and slapped the shotgun barrel aside just as Brody pulled the trigger, but it wasn’t fast enough. Although not a direct hit, the close proximity to such a sound and blast gave Titian an immediate burn across the side of his face, the flesh rendered red and black. Howling, he took the second of disorientating carnage to remove another blade from his belt and bring it down at his target.
Brody turned the shotgun to try to block the blade, catching Titian’s wrist. The blade, a long curved knife intended for cleaning fish, sank into Brody’s shoulder. He shoved back, but the blade had already sunk in deep, nearly to the handle. Titian came forward low and grabbed at Brody’s middle to pull him to the floor. Brody kept his balance, and the two were rushed back to the wall, Titian grabbing the handle of the knife and driving the remaining length of the blade in. With the shotgun pinned between their bodies, Brody scrambled to grab a hold of anything he could.
Titian’s black-and-white face, mapped for shape and minor calculable detail, showing his rotten teeth protruding from the gums. Their faces so close together, Titian’s breath, the smell of blood and cordite and violence.
“I know that I am what I am, and if it means I don’t get to do shit like this to people like you anymore, I don’t ever want to change. I don’t know why I ever wanted to give it up, honestly. But with Ward dead, I guess it doesn’t really matter. That right there is enough proof that God wants me to be a putrid bottom-feeder forever. And I will not argue. I can accept it. I will happily be what I am, play my part, do what I do, with a new skip in my step till the day I die.”
Brody brought up a knee and managed to get the snub-nosed shotgun freed. He yanked it away, pumped in the next shell, and swung it, jamming it hard under Titian’s chin.
Titian caught the barrel before the trigger could be pulled, pushed it aside, and simultaneously plucked the blade out and drove it again, this time into Brody’s abdomen. There was a distant pop when the tip broke flesh. Brody’s body came alive with pain, and a gasp escaped him. Along with it, his grasp faltered on the shotgun. Titian, with a quick sideways wrench, freed it from his hand and drew in close, pushing the blade in a fraction deeper. It was hitting bone, the blade grinding against a rib—the tip seeking something inside, thirsty to puncture more.
“This is the part in the movies when my guy would say, ‘We’re just alike, you and I.’ And your guy says, ‘We’re nothing alike.’ But we both know that’s bullshit. In this case, we both know my guy’s right. The twoheaded Jack, connected in the middle, one end up and the other down. Flip us around and it looks the same. Just a matter of perspective, where you’re standing.”
The agony flared as the knife dug in another inch, then was angled up, where the hand driving it sought to find the bottom of a lung or something else vital, soft, and waiting. Brody tried backing up to get free of it, but his back was firmly against the wall, the length of Titian’s forearm pressed against his throat.
“I could be you. I know a guy who can rewrite jigsaws. Take a dab of my blood, wipe your information off, and just like that, I could be you. Easy as that. And this is better”—Titian nodded at his knife—”because if you do get out of this and you’re no longer getting what you need to be the upward Jack, well, that card would flip around pretty damn quick. And before long, your rap sheet would resemble mine.”
Brody could barely take a breath. He wasn’t even present enough to think about a retort, the pain in his belly so immense that it felt like he might break apart entirely, and left in his stead would be a Brody-shaped mass of nothing but agony.
“Nobody wants to see the hero go bad. So, let’s take our little eraser here.” Titian swiveled the knife. “And rub you, the mistake, out before it becomes too much of a sob story.”
A shot rang out—and Titian’s chin evaporated from his face in a burst of red. The knife withdrew and he stumbled back, clutching his partly broken face.
Brody threw a hand over the wound in his stomach, the blood hot against his palm.
Up the hall Thorp advanced, pistol in two hands. He moved into position over Titian, sitting up with the geyser of red pouring from the rat’s nest of his beard. Thorp aimed down at him. His mouth hardened, his lips tightening and then flattening over and over. He said he’d never kill again, and Brody wasn’t about to have him break that promise yet again.
Brody peeled his hand off his wound and struggled to his feet. He reached for the weapon.
Thorp glanced at Brody now standing next to him. “I can do it.”
“Give it to me.”
“I’ll do it. Just let me do it.”
Titian looked at the two men arguing over who was going to kill him. He seemed indifferent to what they decided. He closed his eyes, the realization that he’d been bested settling on his features. It was a bad wound—his bottom lip was gone and with it a few of his teeth—but he’d survive. Everyone present knew that.
A dry scuffle, bare feet on dirt. Nectar stood at the end of the hallway, draped in her soiled sheet, pulled tight and held at the neck. Nectar’s voice, bouncing off the metal walls, came like a song, so soft and delicate, barely a voice at all. “Thorp.”
Thorp glanced at his sister, then at Brody, then at Titian. The gun was handed over.
Brody took it in his hands, drew back the hammer, and extended the barrel down at Titian, who struggled to breathe, sputtering. When the barrel was on him, he didn’t close his eyes. Brody and Titian gazed at one another wordlessly for a few moments, the killing implement between them.
Titian’s hand fell away from the wreckage of his face. He drew a breath to say something, but it was cut short. The shot rang out, the flash, the bullet was propelled, and Titian was silent. The gun was thrown aside, and the hand holding it returned to tend the wound.
Every few miles Thorp asked Brody how Nectar was doing since the roads were too bad for him to steal a glance. Hubert Ward’s vehicle had a full tank, and once the engine warmed up, the heat was a blessed thing.
Groaning with the pain still screwed in deep in his belly, Brody put his arm over the seat and looked into the back, seeing Nectar sound asleep, coiled up on her side, knees pulled to her chest. The ping sent across her cheek displayed a peaked look about her, the sockets surrounding her heavy-lidded eyes concave, her wrists spindly. Her hair looked lifeless and hung in one greasy banner from her head. She had her brother’s nylon jacket folded and balled up under her head. The ribs, showing even through the thick material of her sweatshirt, rose and fell evenly.
He reached into the backseat and carefully adjusted the stretched out, billowing neck of her sweatshirt, looping it onto her bony shoulder. “She’s good,” Brody answered Thorp each time.
They drove out of Chicago and onto the highway toward the farmhouse.
Thorp swore under his breath.
Brody didn’t need to be able to see through the windshield to know what was going on; he could hear the gentle thrum of the police Darter hovering over the farmhouse.
They didn’t evade what was waiting for them, didn’t punch the gas and tear off farther into the frozen night. They were all hurt, and even if it meant going to the hospital and lying in bed cuffed to one of the rails, it was better than bleeding out in a field somewhere. Thorp parked in the driveway behind the collection of police cruisers. Brody noticed Thorp looking out the passenger window.
The passenger door was yanked open, and Brody’s sonar felt the person’s face and body standing there—and saw it to be wearing a duster and a fedora.
“Nathan,” Brody said, even managing a tired smile. “I guess you got my e-mail.”
“As well as an anonymous tip.” Nathan Pierce gestured to the side yard. The Fairlane and the Zäh were being towed out of the bog by chains, both letting loose a flood of water from their interiors. “Why don’t you do me a favor and step out? Let’s take a minute to get this all squared away. What do you say?”
Brody obliged and watched as paramedics rushed over to the vehicle, shoving Thorp aside, and helped Nectar onto a stretcher. Thorp went into the ambulance with them but not before looking back at Brody and searching his face.
Brody nodded.
The vehicle turned across the lawn, its shrieking siren sounding to the world ahead to make way, and began its charge toward the nearest emergency room.
When Brody turned around, Nathan had his cuffs out.
“Really?” Brody said.
“It isn’t me doing this.”
Brody smirked. “Chiffon.”
Nathan nodded. “When I started making calls about this thing you sent me, apparently word spread and she threatened to bring me up on charges if I didn’t arrest you. You missed your appointment.”
Brody watched the ambulance speed along the country road until the sonar could no longer detect it, the pixels jumping away, the ambulance seemingly dematerializing.
“She won’t come all the way out here to bust your balls. She’d likely miss choir practice. So, what do you say? Couple of days in Chicago’s lockup instead of in Minneapolis? A week behind bars in a jail that’s not so loaded with friends of yours? Call it even? Given the circumstances, it’s honestly the very best I can do.”
“Sure. But no cuffs this time, okay?” Brody said.
“Deal.” Nathan put the cuffs into the pouch on his belt. He guided Brody to his unmarked Lincoln parked at the edge of the property and opened the back door. Brody got in and let Nathan close the door.
Once inside, Nathan adjusted the mirror to get a look at his new passenger. “There’s going to be a lot of red tape to sort through, one big rigmarole.”
“Yeah,” Brody said. “Should I mark anything off my calendar for the rest of the month? Ask my landlord to call Goodwill to empty my apartment?”
Nathan removed a pack of cigarettes from his khaki duster and pushed one through the plastic-coated mesh dividing the front from the back. “For the road?”
Brody took the cigarette and cracked the back window as far as it would go: two inches. It was far enough to allow not only the smoke out but the signal of his sonar. It felt all around the property of Thorp’s farmstead. The barn where they had put the Darter back together, the craters left in the dirt from when they had been pulled back into unorthodox service, the house itself, where so much of the desperate search and planning, including the sleepless nights, for Nectar had been done.
And above all of it, even over the roof of Nathan’s Lincoln, the wires—thick as wrists—still hanging there. The low drone, detectable even beyond the hovering Darter’s gentle din—the wires still coursing with the frequency, searching for a host to sink its influence into.
Brody dropped his cigarette out the window and pressed the button to roll the window back up, shutting out all the noise. He sat back and listened instead to the electric engine of Nathan’s car hum as they tooled along the country road, a few miles behind the ambulance, back to Chicago.