“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 o
ut 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.
26
OMAHA CRIED. AND ROSE WAS INCREASINGLY UNWELL.
The vibrancy she’d shown in the hours she and I had spent talking before Park came home had faded. She was no longer buoyed by the past but wallowing again in the present. I watched from the bedroom door as Park told her the truth about what had happened moments before. In her condition virtually any lie would have sufficed and perhaps been more merciful. Circumstances that made the honesty shine with greater brightness.
I left them then, for several minutes, long enough to drag the bodies out the back door, across the lawn, and into the converted garage. Animated skeletons danced on three monitors. I watched them for a moment, then returned to my task. I found a bundled tarp and took it into the house, draping it over the largest of the blood puddles in the living room. Not much else could be done. An armful of towels from the bathroom scattered over the floor soaked through from underneath. By the time I went back to the bedroom my burns were seeping similarly into the legs of my slacks.
Park was holding his crying daughter, tucked into the crook of his left arm, while placing a damp cloth on the back of Rose’s neck. Rose was facedown on the bed, muscles jumping in her jaw, the backs of her legs, her upper lip. She made a claw of her right hand and dragged it down the sheets in long strokes, her chewed nails rasping quietly on the weave.
She whispered.
“Up arrow, up arrow, shift, space, space, space, right arrow, tab, tab, up arrow, space.”
Park looked at me.
“They’re keystrokes.”
I nodded.
“Yes. The Clockwork Labyrinth. She told me she’d memorized the sequence that got her through.”
Her chant continued. A whispered incantation, the epic of her achievement.
I pointed at the floor.
“May I sit?”
Park didn’t answer. I remained standing.
He was still now, crying baby in his arms, fading wife wide-eyed on the bed.