IT WAS STILL DARK WHEN PARK RETURNED TO CULVER CITY. The horizon had not lightened; in fact, the sky had dimmed as many fires had burned themselves out. Just one major blaze seemed to remain, what looked like several blocks burning in Hollywood where the Guard sergeant had said the NAJi church had been destroyed.
The drive from Bel Air had taken him through four checkpoints. At one he’d had to get out of his car and lie facedown on the ground while the Guardsmen ran his badge. They searched his car but did not find the hiding place in the spare tire.
Sitting in front of his house, he wrote in his journal. There was no order to his thoughts. He knew this but could do nothing but let himself be tumbled about by what he had been told. He’d been raised to an ordered mind. His ideas, values, emotions, often felt fitted together like brickwork. Or had until Rose had come into his life. But even then order had been the rule rather than the exception. It just took more effort to maintain that order. And the walls of his interior had become more eccentric. Odd modifications had been made to what had previously been a squared structure. Windows where one did not expect them, bits of ornament, an extra door.
It was all a jumble now. Only the keystone was in his hands. The thought that something could be done. That something could always be done. That the world could always be made better. It required only that one act. Do the things one believed in.
He opened the car door and climbed out slowly. In the house were his dying wife and his baby. There was something he had to do. But he had no way of knowing what it was. It was hidden from him. Concealed by its perfect enormity.
Coming through the front door into the lighted house, he was absently pleased to hear nothing. Registering the silence as an indication that his daughter was sleeping or in some similar state that gave her peace. He stood just inside the door and looked at the hall that led past her nursery to the master bedroom at the back of the house. He thought for a moment about peeking in, but feared that he would wake her from whatever kind of rest she had. His mouth and throat were dry. He went through the living room, scattered with foam blocks, a stack of laundered burp cloths, a spilled basket of stuffed animals, through the adjoining dining room where a playpen sat in place of a table, and into the kitchen.
In the past the sink might have been filled with dirty plates and glasses, testaments to Rose’s intense dislike for housework. Not that Park minded. He was a compulsive straightener of things. Until quite recently he had been accustomed to coming home from work and spending a peaceful thirty minutes picking up odds and ends of dirty laundry, cleaning the dishes, wiping a small spill from the floor, closing cabinet doors left open. The slight mess had been a trail of clues he had learned to read, indications of how his wife’s day had been. Had she indulged her sweet tooth? If so, she was probably displeased with her work. Was there only one plate in the sink? She had probably been very happy in her work and forgotten to eat. Sweaty socks and sports bra on the couch? She’d been restless, needed to go for a run. CDs left out of their cases on top of the stereo? She’d been listening to old favorites, seeking inspiration. The photo album pulled from the bottom shelf of the bookcase? She’d been nostalgic, looking at pictures of their comically small wedding and Yosemite honeymoon.
These days any mess was left by the baby and Francine. Toys and blankies, bottles rinsed and drying in the rack, an unfamiliar black slipper at the mouth of the hallway, a rubber ducky tucked inside. Signs he could not read.
He took a clean glass from the dish rack and filled it from the filter screwed into the taps. The water was nearly flavorless; neither refreshingly clean nor carrying an urban tang, it seemed to pass through his mouth and down his throat without wetting. He refilled the glass and drank again, feeling some relief this time. Still, he filled the glass once more and drank again, eyes closed. He lowered the glass and opened his eyes. He was reflected in the window over the sink and did not like what he saw. Someone stretched thin with worry and exhaustion and indecision. He could see quite clearly why Cager had suspected he was sleepless.
He filled the glass a last time and took it with him, passing back through the dining and living rooms, into the hall, past the room where his daughter was silent if not asleep, pausing for a moment to consider again if he could peek in, moving on without doing so, and stopping when he reached the open doorway of the bedroom he shared with his wife.
The man sitting on the three-legged milking stool Rose kept next to her side of the bed as a nightstand seemed to have been waiting for him, looking at the door when Park appeared there.
He rose. Thinning silver hair brushed straight back from a forehead and face that were hardly young but could have been anywhere between a healthy forty and an excellently maintained sixty. His build was athletic, but not oppressively so. His movement, rising from the stool, suggested grace hobbled somehow. Dark slacks and a dark, collared shirt, thin black socks, silk no doubt, that showed a sheen of pale skin beneath. Seeing those stocking feet, Park finally registered that the slipper with the ducky inside had actually been a black leather loafer.
The man tilted his head forward.
“Officer Haas, your wife has been telling me about you.”
Rose was on the bed, back cushioned by several pillows, knees drawn up, laptop at her side, the baby sitting up on her stomach, playing with a small flat rectangle that Park did not recognize but that caused a wave of nausea unsettling the water in his otherwise empty stomach.
Rose breathed in very deeply, inflating her belly, making the baby rise and bobble, then let the air out in a whoosh.
“Elevator going up, elevator coming down.”
The baby cooed, put one end of the rectangle into her mouth, and bit down on it.
Park had a sudden wish for the gun he’d left in the spare tire in his car.
“Who are you?”
Rose made clucking sounds with her tongue, and the baby imitated her.
“Don’t be an asshole, Park.”
The man shook his head.
“No, Rose, your husband isn’t being rude. I have caused some confusion.”
Park tried to see an angle into the room that would put him between the man and his family.
“Who are you?”
Rose was smiling.
“Do you see how happy Omaha is? I haven’t seen her like this in so long. Not since Berkeley.”
Park took a step toward the bed.
“She wasn’t in Berkeley, Rose.”
She stopped bouncing the baby on her belly.
“What are you? Yes she was. We.”
She turned to the man.
“What was I just telling you, Jasper?”
Park thought of the Hurtin’ Man.
His family was in the room. He could not run. He could not attack.
The man nodded at Rose, never quite taking his eyes from Park.
“You told me very many things, Rose, all of which I am grateful for. You are a wonderfully truthful woman. But I’m afraid your husband is correct; you never had a baby in Berkeley. Not unless I missed some part of the story.”
Her eyes stirred. Park saw that his old Rose had been in the room, that now she was being submerged again as her confused double surfaced.
“What? No. Of course not. We didn’t have a baby.”
She looked at Park.
“Where were you? Are you okay?”
A whine came from the baby’s chest.
Park took another step, raising the hand without the water glass, palm out, warding the man from the side of the bed.
“Who are you?”
Rose shook her head.
“He’s Jasper, Park.”
The man did not move away from the bed, but something changed in his stance, a shift in balance that took him from his heels to the balls of his feet, bringing menace nearer.
“The confusion was caused, I’m afraid, by a lie I told. You see, Rose, I am not a detective, and Park did not send me to see that Francine went home early or, for that matter, for me to keep an eye on the house because of all the troubles this evening.”
Park rapped the rim of the glass on the footboard of the bed that had belonged to Rose’s grandmother. It shattered, leaving him with the jagged-edged base cupped in his hand.
“Take three steps directly back from the bed, keeping your hands where I can see them at all times.”
The baby’s whine rose in volume and pitch.
The man indicated her with two long white fingers.
“You’re making the baby cry, Officer Haas.”
Rose was pulling the baby to her chest.
“Park, I don’t like it here. It’s hot and fucking no one gives a shit about anything but the stupid fucking business and I miss the rain and my mom hasn’t met the baby and I hate guns and I remember when it was better and I want it better again.”
Park stepped closer, his arm raised, maneuvering to slip himself between his family and the man who refused to move.
“Back away and keep your hands visible.”
The man displayed his hands.
“Keeping my hands visible will not make anyone in this room safer, I assure you.”
Rose was squeezing the baby and starting to rock.
“I am going home. I have defeated the Clockwork Labyrinth, and I am going home.”
The man nodded.
“It’s true, you know. She did defeat the Labyrinth; I sat here and watched her do it as we spoke.”
Park was clutching the broken glass; he knew that he needed to hold it lightly if it was to be any use as a weapon, but he could not help himself.
“Back up. Please back up.”
The man’s eyes flicked to the window.
“Officer.”
The lights in the converted garage out back blinked quickly on and then off again.
“Officer, do you have houseguests?”
Park’s brain stumbled over the question.
“Do we?”
The man reached for his daughter.
The glass cracked in Park’s hand as he began to raise it.
The man plucked the small dark rectangle from the baby’s mouth, flipping his thumb, causing a small sharp blade to appear at the end of the object.
He stepped back, slapping Park’s hand as it passed in front of him, knocking the glass to the floor, turned his back, and walked toward the window.
“We are under attack, Officer. There will likely be three of them. I can handle that many. There may be six. In which case they will kill me. They will be well armed and trained. I assume you have a firearm. Please don’t shoot me with it. Get it and stay in here with your family.”
He pointed at the bedside lamp.
“Will you turn that off, please, Rose?”
Rose switched the light off. The man slipped the screen from the window frame and pulled himself up and through, a mongoose down a snake’s hole.
Rose nodded her head.
“He’s Jasper.”
Omaha began to cry.
Park went to the safe for his other gun.
I FOUND THREE of them. One team.
An indicative number. Despite my hurried flight across town, my ID broadcasting my course, they apparently were unaware that I’d come to the Haas residence. If they had known, they most certainly would have sent more killers. That they expected a sleepless mother, a baby, a young and inexperienced cop, and perhaps a nanny, was heartening.
It heartened me to know they had no idea I was present. It heartened me to think they might not even know yet that I was alive and unfettered. Or, at least, that the information had not yet been disseminated throughout the Afronzo security apparatus. It heartened me to know they were the kind of mercenaries who rubbed against light switches, announcing their presence. It heartened me to think they were ill informed, appeared more than slightly careless, and were coming to kill a sick woman, her lost husband, and their baby girl. Not that I hadn’t killed the helpless and meek in my own time. Most of all it heartened me to think that this must be their C team, the A and B teams having been dispatched already to my home. Quite honestly, I doubt I’d have been up to anything more.
Still, they were quite capable of capitalizing on my own carelessness.
The first was the light switch rubber. I watched him from the shadows of a moldering stack of firewood that Park must have bought in a fit of romance when they moved into the house. Not quite accounting for the lack of opportunities the environment allowed for burning one’s way through a full cord. Much of it had been chopped in advance to fit the modest fireplace inside. My hand found a wedge that suited my grip.
The man who’d flipped the lights was just inside the screen door of the converted garage, revealed by intermittent adjustments that caused the laser sight on his weapon to shiver over the steel mesh just in front of him. He was meant to be covering the rear. Making sure that no one fled the house as his teammates went in through other access points. Commotion within would draw him from cover as he moved to support. So I ignored him and backed away from the woodpile, down the side of the house where disused bicycles and a lawn mower were gathering ash from the assortment of wildfires, and found Omaha’s bedroom window. I took down the screen, pocketed my knife, dropped the small log onto her crib ma-tress, and boosted myself inside, scraping my legs, biting the pain.
Rearmed with blade and log, I cracked the door slightly and watched as the second mercenary crept across the living room in perfect pistol-combat mode, presenting a minimum target silhouette, weapon raised, held in both hands, fingers overlapped, trigger finger parallel to the barrel to protect against accidental fire.
He began gesturing to someone out of my sight line, the third team member, for whom he appeared to be providing cover as they cleared the house room by room. He was making responsive hand signals, pointing at the hallway without turning his head, indicating that he would take point on the new course. I opened the door a bit more, passed through, and closed it behind me.
The hinges on that door had, until recently, squeaked badly. The squeak had been of little concern when Omaha was sleeping like any other baby, but as her sleep had become increasingly unsettled she had become more sensitive to small sounds. The squeak of those hinges could ruin any chance that she might find slumber. So Rose had given them a liberal squirt of WD-40. The door now swung open with no sound at all. One of the many sleep-related stories she’d told me. Her illness aside, she was in that regard quite like any new parent I’d ever met.
Hunkered in the dark corner where the hallway bent into the living room, I waited until the man with the perfect pistol form stubbed his toe on the stick of firewood I’d left in the middle of the floor. It didn’t trip him, merely made him pause before moving on, relaxing his finger from around the trigger, where he’d placed it when surprised by the small obstacle. Thanks to that moment of relaxation he did not fire a round when he spasmed as I fit the blade into his neck just below the point of his left jawbone, cut a wide crescent across his throat, and left the knife there.
That was poor technique. Leaving the blade would suppress the flow of blood from the wound. Not to mention essentially putting a weapon in the hands of an enemy. But it was a calculated risk. He had more than enough wound from which to bleed, and I doubted his ability to be any further threat to me, no matter how well armed.
I stepped into the living room, quite surprising the cover man who’d just watched his partner round the corner into the hall. He’d not had time to take his proper cover position, for which he could thank the haste of the man bleeding from his neck on the floor. So ill prepared, how could he be expected to be ready to fend off attack? He could not. And he was not.
I’d taken the Tomcat from my ankle holster when I set down the piece of wood. Now I shot the man twice, once in the neck, once in the groin, targets left exposed by his body armor.
The other man was making a fair amount of noise now. Dying from blood loss is a wet and gasping affair. There is a great deal of struggling against the inevitable. A man bleeding to death looks very much like a fish drowning on dry land. And he beats out the same messages of distress. Combined with the two gunshots, more than ample commotion.
I bent to pluck the rubber ducky from where Omaha had placed it in in my loafer while she’d played with both earlier, took cover behind a rocking chair, and oriented myself toward the kitchen, waiting for the boot-steps that would tell me the rear support was entering by the back door.
I’d have an excellent shot, made superior if the man was the least bit distracted when I threw the rubber ducky and it bounced squeaking across the floor. I was poised and ready. If only the rear support had not seen me in the backyard, followed me around the side of the house, watched me enter through the window, pursued, and come after me through the well-oiled door.
Granted, he revealed his second-rate nature by not warning his partners by radio that someone had compromised their flank; but, I was still entirely surprised and the shot fired behind me jerked me upright and spun me around.
Hearing gunfire in his home, near at hand to his family, Park had ignored what he had been told and left the bedroom. Opening the door, he’d emerged just as a man at the opposite end of the hall came out of his daughter’s room carrying a very short assault rifle with a trigger assembly mounted ahead of the clip. The man moved silently, the butt of his weapon pressed to his shoulder, tucked to his right earlobe, sighting down the stubby tube of an integral laser sight. Intent on what lay beyond the open doorway leading into the living room, the man was oblivious to Park.
Park’s family was just behind him, lying on the floor of the bedroom closet where he’d left them. The door and a single wall would scarcely reduce the velocity of a round fired from a weapon like the one the man was carrying. And Park could not be certain the man wouldn’t quickly turn and fire at the first sound. Once a bullet became a stray, it could find a home anywhere, in anyone. All the same, there was ample opportunity for Park to take some cover by pressing close to the wall, announce his presence as a law officer, and order the man to disarm.
But Park didn’t think about any of this. It never occurred to him to attempt to disarm and arrest the man. It never occurred to him what risks might be involved in that procedure. He never had a chance to think or consider any of this. Action proceeded without thought.
Because Parker Haas came out of his room, and he saw a man coming out of his daughter’s room, and that man was carrying a gun. So Parker Haas shot him. He fired a single round, the pad of his right index finger squeezing straight back, the man’s face seemingly balanced atop the red dot that marked the front blade sight of Park’s Warthog, framed perfectly by the rear sights. The gun went off, kicked, Park adjusted and re-aimed, but the man’s face was no longer where it had been. Lowering his sights, Park advanced down the hall, close to the wall, lowering the sights farther with every step, until he was over the man, pointing the gun almost straight down, and he pulled the trigger twice more.
I’d not yet picked up the TAR from the man I’d shot in the neck, but I still had the Tomcat in my hand. When Park appeared in the hall doorway, shooting the dead man, I did what came most naturally and took aim.
Park had never killed before. He’d inflicted considerable injury on suspects in the course of an arrest, but he had never discharged his weapon at anything other than a paper target.
I knew this for a certainty. I knew it because he stood over the dead man and looked up and found me turned to the side in a duelist’s pose, legs spread for stability, arm straight out from shoulder, small pistol aimed at his head, and he spoke.
“I never killed anyone.”
To the best of my knowledge, I’d never had my life saved before. Yes, the anonymous bureaucrat who had halted my torture several years earlier had kept me from being killed, but believe me, that is not the same as someone shooting the man about to shoot you. Yet I had been handed similar moments in life. Instances when the suddenness of violence so shocked an adversary that an opening was created through which I could pass and take decisive action. Part of the genius of my self-preservation obsession. The ability to remain calm as those around me lost their heads. Literally. As I’d aged, this advantage had grown. Fed by experience. At sixty, just as I could not remember the last lover I’d had within ten years of my own age, I could not remember the last fight I’d had with anyone in the same range. My profession, however defined, did not foster longevity. I was inevitably the oldest gun in any given firefight. Those years more than compensating for any loss of physical ability.
This great age of mine, it had been earned with ruthlessness. Yes, I had a morality, but it was quite uniquely my own. There was no one I could kill or maim who would cost me a night’s lost sleep. It was, in truth, less a morality than an aesthetic. Who, how, and when I killed were all elements in the composition of my life. Melody and harmonies. One great recurring theme being the seizing of the moment. Beauty all its own.
I was no longer concerned that Park might have passed the hard drive to the Afronzos. Their interrogation of me, and this assault, indicated that matters were different. The drive was nearby, I was certain. Finding it would not be difficult. That being the case, there was no reason not to kill the young man before he recovered from his shock and became an armed threat again.
Clarity in these things is without price.
My finger was on the trigger. Omaha was still crying. The moment filled with dissonance.
I lowered my gun and, at this extremity of life, allowed myself the indulgence of knowing things.
“Officer Haas, who do you work for?”
He looked at his own gun.
“LAPD.”
He looked at me again.
“I’m a cop.”
The truth of it, so simple and bare, unadorned with deceit, that I almost laughed.
“Yes, you are, aren’t you.”
He saw the other dead bodies.
“Why did you lead them here?”
I raised a hand in denial.
“No, these are not mine. I killed mine earlier. These were sent for you. And for your family as well.”
He was shaking his head before I finished.
“They’re Afronzo personal security.”
“Yes, exactly.”
“Your name is Jasper.”
I nodded.
“It is.”
He was looking at his gun, weighing it.
“He said you were dangerous. ‘Someone you don’t want near your family,’ he said.”
I nodded.
“I think he was correct in that. May I ask who?”
“Parsifal K. Afronzo Senior. He thought you were dead.”
I cocked my ear for a moment. I could have been listening to Omaha but was in fact hearing the strange tune produced by the twining of this man’s life with my own. Something I’d never heard before. Dissonance becoming assonance, perhaps.
I nodded again.
“I believe that the world may have become more mysterious these last few days.”
Park had eyes only for his gun.
“More mysterious than a marriage.”
I watched him watching the gun in his hand.
“I was married only very briefly, at a very young age, and still I know you exaggerate.”
He may have smiled.
“Only a little.”
“Yes, that I will agree with.”
His finger had crept nearer the trigger.
“What’s gone wrong? With the world? Why aren’t people trying to fix it?”
My gun was still lowered, but my finger was curled on the trigger.
“I believe it is because they don’t believe there is anything to fix. They have been raised to fatalism and slaughter. A feeling of powerlessness pervades the average person’s interactions with the world at large. They want it comfortable and familiar. But they’ve stopped thinking about tomorrow in any tangible sense. They don’t believe in it any longer. Because they don’t want to think about it. How hard it will be. For the ones left.”
He was still looking at his gun.
“I wouldn’t have a chance, would I?”
I couldn’t be certain what he meant, so I answered the question at hand.
“No. If you try to raise your weapon, I will shoot and kill you. And the long conversation we should have, the mysteries we should unravel, will be lost. Much to my regret.”
He eased the hammer forward on the small pistol, thumbed the safety up, and dropped the gun next to the man he’d killed.
I still held my own pistol.
“I need the travel drive, Officer.”
He turned away.
“You can’t have it.”
He took a step, presenting the back of his head to me.
“It’s evidence in a crime.”
I raised my gun.
“I need it.”
He shook his head.
“No. I have to check on my family now.”
He moved, beginning to pass out of my aim, down the hallway.
“We can talk after I see them.”
Down the hallway, walking to his family, away from the dead, and I did not kill him.
Instead, I whispered a poem to myself, very brief and made up on the spot.
“Parker Haas, crying Omaha, and his sleepless Rose.”
There are other things in this life than killing. I felt a chance to be near them. If only briefly.