Mas was taking a nap. It was a long ride back from Chantilly Flats into the city, and then the traffic was hell all the way to the Lower Ninth Ward. She plowed through some nasty puddles in the back-country and had to sponge the bayou off her leathers when she got home. They were airing out on the back porch now, draped over the kitchen chairs.
It had been a warm, unusually dry day in the city, and the odor of mildew in her apartment was at a happy minimum. When she came home, a glorious sunset was washing her three oversized rooms in a soft tangerine light that filtered through the lace curtains. It was on days like this that the spacious master bedroom suite of the old house assumed the gracious charm that led her to fall in love with the low-rent hideaway in the first place.
She indulged herself with a hot bath, then lay down to cuddle up with Junior and promptly dozed off as the sun slipped behind the neighbor’s roof. The Bull Terrier contentedly snoozed on the big four-poster bed beside his favorite person. He kept his enormous nose tucked under his front paws, as if he were self-conscious about it and didn’t want anyone making fun of him while he was sleeping.
His torso suddenly twitched as if he was reacting to something in a dog dream. He buried his snout deeper underneath his paws and sighed to restore his tranquility, but it didn’t work. He was feeling more and more uncomfortable, and he couldn’t seem to shake it off.
The problem was that he wasn’t reacting to something in his own dream; it was in his master’s dream. Something was causing her to squirm around, and being pressed up beside her on the bed like he was, her agitation was disturbing his beauty sleep. Mas had been flinching intermittently for the last few minutes.
She did it once again, more violently this time, and it finally woke him up. He lifted his head to glance at her, and saw that her forehead was puckered in distress. Exquisitely attuned to his master’s emotional state, he knew at once that something was wrong. She began to sweat, and he could smell the fear emanating from her body. He rolled onto his feet and stood on the bed, growing more concerned by the second as he watched her struggle with something deep inside.
Mas clung to the railing, soaked in a cold sweat. Her toes were cramped from balancing on the lip of the balcony, high above the crowd. They were a pathetic bunch: an eight-month-old child with a crushed skull, a young boy singed and greasy from having been stuffed inside an oven, a teenager who was found dead in a Dumpster and covered with trash – ten blind and tortured souls in all. They were mad at her, and they wanted her to let go.
They wanted her to fall, to come to them and die, to join them in their misery and pain. Although they were blind, they still could clearly see her high above them, the special agent with the shiny badge and the gun that she never fired in the line of duty. Their branded eyes, seared by a hot poker from hell, stared up at her, boring straight through her heart and deep into her guilty conscience. She made a solemn vow to save them, but for fifteen years she failed at every turn.
“Come to me.”
She looked from the crowd below, to the voice close beside her on the balcony. Fareed Younis was standing in his body bag, the zipper pulled down and his arms outstretched, like a monk cloaked in black, reaching for her.
“Come to me.”
Fareed’s bruised and bloated face and his seared, blinded eyes were so close that Mas could reach out and touch him. All she had to do to comfort Fareed was to let go of the railing.
But something was happening down below. A young man was trapped screaming in a circle of fire. A boy beside him was being sucked into a whirlpool.
Mas wasn’t on the edge of a balcony now; she was clinging to a bridge as the churning hurricane waters below her began to rise.
A man grabbed her arm, trying to save her life. She looked up to see who he was, but his eyes dripped blood into hers, blinding her.
Her scream blended with the cries of the young man and the boy down below, melding into a cacophony of despair. She looked down to them. Their eyes were smoldering. She reached out her free hand, trying to rescue them. They were calling out to her, frantic and dying.
She cried back to them, but it was a silent scream and they were both swept to their doom.
No longer clinging to the bridge, she crumpled to the wet ground screaming, but it was nothing more than a feeble, hoarse whisper.
RRINGGG!!! It was the sound of a cell phone, loud and abrupt, but there was no cell phone around. There was a cordless phone in the condo, lying on the carpet in the living room. The CSI guy was carefully dusting it for prints.
RRINGGG!!! It was definitely a cell phone ringtone, but the CSI guy thought it was the cordless phone he was dusting. He picked it up and got to his feet, and brought it out to the balcony, because Mas was the special agent on the case and she had to answer the phone, because if someone was calling then it must be for her. He stood beside the two cops and smiled at Mas, holding the phone out to her.
RRINGGG!!! Mas knew she had to answer the phone, but she had to let go of the railing to grab it. And if she did, she knew she would fall. Everyone down below wanted her to let go, and she knew she had to do it. She owed it to them after all this time. She was honor-bound; she was a Fed. She reached out to the phone, and as she did she fell from the edge of the balcony.
RRINGGG!!! Mas lurched awake, her heart pounding in her chest. Her iPhone was jangling on the nightstand. Junior was off the bed now, huddled in the corner and watching her, thoroughly spooked. His job was to protect her, but he didn’t know how.
“It’s okay, Junior. Mommy just had a bad dream.”
He moved his tail once, in a tentative gesture of relief. Her voice was soothing, but he was still worried for her. She had an unseen enemy and he was powerless to help.
Mas picked up her phone, saw who it was, and took the call. “Hello?”
Kaddouri was sitting in his car outside, idling at the curb behind her motorcycle. His phone was pressed to his ear and he was peering out the window at her darkened upstairs apartment. It was dusk and there was no one out on the street. The few houses that were still occupied had some lights on, but the neighborhood was mostly in shadow.
He called her an hour earlier, but her bathwater was running and she didn’t hear it, and she didn’t check for messages before she lay down or she would have called him right back. But he didn’t know that.
He wasn’t sure what was up, but he had to get hold of her right away, so he drove over to her place. Before he got out to knock on the door, he decided to give her one more call, and after four rings she finally picked up. She usually picked up after one or two.
“I’ve been calling you. Are you all right?” he asked her.
“I was taking a nap. What’s up?”
“There’s been a massacre.”