With a very small Beretta .22 caliber pistol in the hip pocket of his jeans, his copy of Skyguide: A Field Guide to the Heavens in his left hand, Hanson was buzzed through both gates into the compound. Tyree opened the door for him.
“Is Felix here?” Hanson asked, holding up the book. The planets orbited the sun, their paths diagramed against a midnight-blue sky. “The stars, Tyree,” Hanson said, “maybe it’s all up there in the stars, simple and clear, if only we could read what they’ve written to us.”
Tyree met his eyes, nodded, pointed down a hallway that led to the bunker. “Talking to Levon,” he said, “he’ll let you in,” watching Hanson turn and walk down the hall. A police scanner was on in the next room, but radio traffic was slow.
At the end of the hall Hanson knocked on the steel-sheathed door. “Hi, Felix,” he said, speaking into the intercom box by the side of the door.
Felix opened the door and Hanson shot him three times, the pistol cracking like small firecrackers, the muzzle almost touching his face. Three black dots appeared across the bridge of his nose, and his forehead speckled with powder burns. Felix fell dead and Hanson stepped around him into the bunker, closing the heavy door behind him. Levon looked up at Hanson from where he was sitting in his La-Z-Boy recliner, waiting to be shot, a book about Costa Rica open in his lap. Choose Costa Rica for Retirement: Retirement, Travel & Business Opportunities for a New Beginning.
Hanson clicked the safety on the little pistol and sat down on the leather couch. He put the astronomy book on the floor. The peppery smell of gunpowder floated in the air between them like smoke from a cigarette.
“I’m sorry, Levon.”
Levon closed his book, set it on the lamp table. Outside in the hall they were pounding on the door, the intercom was chirping.
“If the OPD hasn’t figured out it was Felix already, they will in another day or two. You can’t get away with shooting a police lieutenant no matter how corrupt he might have been. Felix would have been dead soon one way or another,” Hanson said, “but I’m sorry it was me.”
“I’m going to tell them to leave us be for now,” Levon said, asking permission, with his eyes, to stand up. Hanson nodded and Levon got up, walked to the door, and spoke through the intercom. “We’ll be out shortly. Please stop pounding on the door so we can talk in here.”
“What do you want?” he asked Hanson.
“I’m done,” Hanson said, looking down at Felix’s body, dark blood spider-webbing his face, pooling beneath his head, and seeping up into the fabric of his suit coat.
“But what now?”
“That’s as far as I’ve planned,” he said, looking at the little pistol in his hand, only four rounds left in the clip. “I don’t want to shoot anybody else, I really don’t, but I’ll kill as many as I can before you kill me. The OPD will take a couple of days to put together a SWAT team or a task force to come in here and burn the place down.”
“What would you like to do now?”
“Walk out that door and leave this town forever. But there’s no reason for me to leave here alive unless I know that you won’t come looking for us. The police might, but I doubt it. Anything I say will only make things more complicated for them. So I’d like to have your promise that you won’t come after me, or send anyone else after me—or Weegee or his sister—once I’m gone. Otherwise, adios. I may as well shoot you and open the door and get it over with.”
“You won’t have to shoot anyone else.”
Levon kneeled down by the body. “Felix,” he said, as though some part of Felix was alive to hear him. “I’m sorry, son, but you knew time was running out. You were smart and brave and fought who you were as long as you could. Sleep now. I’ll take care of things.” He reached inside the front of Felix’s shirt, snapped the hourglass free from its delicate gold chain, and stood up. He tipped it over and watched the diamond chips roil and hiss their way to the bottom, put it in his own pocket, walked to the door, and pressed the intercom button.
“Tyree,” he said, “Officer Hanson and I are coming out. Things are as they should be. He’s going to leave, and then we have to talk. I promised him he could leave. So when we come out I don’t want to see any guns.”
He unlocked the door and they stepped out into the hall. “Tyree,” he said, “would you please see Officer Hanson out. Then come back here, if you would. I don’t think we have much time to make plans.”
Tyree took him to the door, opened it for him, and walked with him across the compound.
“Thank you, Tyree,” Hanson said, “for calling. I’m sorry…”
“Had to happen,” Tyree said. “Better you than somebody else. Better than him going to prison and getting murdered on the yard.”
Outside the compound they shook hands.
“Good luck, Tyree. Levon too.”
Tyree nodded. “I tell him.”
Sunday morning. Early for Hanson…or late. It was going to be a nice day, he thought as he started up the Travelall and clattered away from the curb, out of The Ville, and onto East 14th Street. Looking into his rearview mirror, he saw that he could turn around in the street—if he did it right now—and drive back into his past, stopping wherever he wished to begin his life again from there. But he didn’t know what he’d do differently, he hadn’t made any notes to himself on what he’d done wrong the first time, so he drove on into East Oakland, the familiar streets crossing and intersecting, the future continuing to invent itself up ahead.