House on Fire

76

I was fairly sure we were safe as long as we remained within the resort, which had its own security. They wouldn’t come after me as long as I was there. And I had no doubt that Sukie was not a target. But she was, of course, shaken up.

I wondered at first why Black Parallel had hired these subpar operatives to go after me. They must have been alerted to my presence in Anguilla and scrambled to find local talent.

I got some bandages from the front desk and spoke briefly in the elevator, which seemed safer than talking in the room.

“I need to get back to Boston,” I said. “Now.”

I called a local taxi company directly instead of asking the concierge — I didn’t want the hotel to know I was leaving. I didn’t know how plugged-in Black Parallel was, but I assumed someone at the hotel, or several people, had been paid to keep track of my whereabouts.

My cell phone rang. It was Natalya Aksyonova, Conrad Kimball’s fiancée. In New York I’d given her my number.

I took the call on the balcony. I had a favor to ask her.

I had a dilemma over what to do with the pistol I’d confiscated. The SIG Sauer P226 was an excellent weapon, extremely accurate. Nine millimeter. It was loaded, which meant sixteen rounds, if it was full — one in the chamber and fifteen in the magazine.

I decided I’d throw it into the ocean on the way to the airport. So I had it with me, stuck in the waistband of my pants and concealed by my untucked shirt, when my cab arrived: a dented, rusty-looking Hyundai.

Sukie hugged me tight. “Are you going to be okay?”

“Don’t worry about me,” I said. But she looked awfully worried. I kissed her and told her I’d see her again in two days.

The driver, an affable islander, had on some kind of talk radio, a call-in show. A young woman was complaining about her boyfriend. The road was deserted. I watched the countryside go by. The island had been badly damaged by Hurricane Irma a few years before, and here and there you could still see wreckage on either side of the road, broken buildings and bent palm trees.

I was about to ask the driver to pull over so I could toss the gun into the ocean, when suddenly he shouted and slammed on the brakes, which squealed loudly. “Shit!” he screamed. The cab swerved to the left and then to the right and then fishtailed before slamming to a stop.

“Look on the road,” the driver croaked, pointing. “Bastards!”

Someone had placed a spike strip across the narrow road, a portable tire-deflation device that folded out, baring rows of spikes. Despite the driver’s quick reaction, the tires had been punctured and were hissing.

Then a bullet blew a hole in the cab’s windshield.

And then a second shot.

The cabdriver opened his door and leaped onto the road, screaming in terror. He ran back in the direction from which we’d come. I was sitting in the back seat on the passenger’s side, and I immediately ducked down, lowering my head. I was being fired at from the right side of the road. Keeping my head down, I opened the driver’s-side door and climbed out, using the door as a shield. I needed to get down behind the wheel well of the front left tire, because I remembered from my training that the best protection would come from the engine block. Bullets could go through the windows or even the trunk of the car, but nothing would penetrate the engine block. I had to stay near the hood.

Now I yanked the SIG Sauer out of my waistband and raised my head just enough to see a couple of shooters across the street. I recognized the bulky mercenary from before, the one whose weapon I’d confiscated.

He was probably even angrier and now determined to kill me. It was like when I was a kid and accidentally kicked an underground yellow-jacket nest and they emerged in a terrifying cloud coming at me.

Or maybe the Afrikaners’ orders had changed. Maybe they were instructed to take me out.

Now he was back, with someone else. He fired a shot, which went high and wide, hitting an abandoned building across the street behind me.

At the same time another round hit the right side of the car, spiderwebbing the right-hand window. There were at least two of them, I knew, maybe three. I couldn’t be sure. Because they were using handguns, they had to be relatively close. Handguns are only accurate up to around fifty yards; beyond that the aim degrades significantly.

Two or three of them against me, with one handgun and sixteen rounds, if the magazine was full. I had to make each of my shots count.

Trained police hit their targets less than half the time. A fifty percent hit rate is considered good. So sixteen rounds wasn’t much when you’re outnumbered that badly.

I squeezed off three shots, aiming directly at where I’d seen the assailants seconds before. I heard a scream, and I was fairly certain I had taken one down.

Then I saw one of the men cross the street toward me, toward my side of the taxi. He was coming up on my flank, and when I tried to stick my head up and take aim, a volley of shots came at me, preventing me from moving.

I desperately needed to change my position. I was about to be exposed, as soon as the guy came around the hood of the car. I spun around, saw the abandoned building, realized it was probably my best cover. I fired straight ahead, a few shots, and then squeezed off another two to my left, covering myself as I raced to the deserted building. A wood-and-drywall building like that would serve as poor cover from the gunfire, I knew, but it was decent concealment at least.

I needed all I could get. At least half of the magazine was empty now. But I was glad I hadn’t yet tossed it.

Gunfire echoed in the street as they — the two remaining shooters, I guessed — fired at me.

The building was some sort of abandoned restaurant. I raced through the front area, which looked like it had once been the dining room, and then farther in until I found a tiled space that once must have been the kitchen. Most of the major appliances were gone. The front dining room offered only one wall of protection, and that was made of plasterboard. The kitchen offered me three walls of protection. The more walls between me and the shooters, the more walls the bullets had to go through, the more the velocity of the bullets would degrade. The safer I’d be.

But one of them raced into the building just moments after me. I saw him in my peripheral vision as I stood in the abandoned kitchen and fired off a shot. He kept coming at me, firing wildly. I fired off three more rounds in quick succession, right at his chest, and finally he stumbled and fell. I saw in an instant that he was a young, fit guy, wearing a Kevlar vest. So they were professionals. The rounds had hit him in the chest, and he was knocked out, though probably not dead.

I briefly considered stopping to steal his vest, but there really wasn’t time. So I backed up into the kitchen and looked for the exit to the jungle-like vegetation behind the building. Just one shooter remained now, and he was somewhere inside. I weighed my options. I could run out of the building, into the jungle, and be pursued by the remaining attacker, or I could stay in the kitchen and fight.

But I didn’t know where the other one was.

In the adrenaline rush, I’d lost count of how many rounds I had left. I estimated three or four.

Suddenly a couple of bullets punched through the drywall and tile. He was on the other side of the wall.

I aimed at the hole that had just been made, and I heard a scream. I’d got him.

A few more shots came through the tile, and then the shooter came hobbling out of the front dining room, grabbing his leg in agony, firing at me. I ducked behind the metallic hulk of an old stove hood and fired my last couple of shots at him without aiming.

The silence, after the deafening shots, was thick. It vibrated. My ears rang.

I was now as certain as I could be that the three of them were down. I ran out of the rear door and into the underbrush, and no gunfire followed me.

Meanwhile, another car had been caught on the spike strip, its horn sounding. I could see it back there. And I kept on running north.

I got to Anguilla’s airport on foot, after walking and running for about a mile and a half, looking pretty banged up but in fact feeling okay. Mostly enduring that jittery post-adrenaline letdown. Feeling grateful that nothing had gone against me on the roadside. My three attackers, at least one of whom was probably dead, were not nice guys. I didn’t feel bad about what I’d had to do to them. I dumped the SIG Sauer in a drainage ditch outside the airport, and then I bought a ticket on the next flight to St. Maarten.

On the plane I found myself thinking about the last time, before the Conrad Kimball dinner, that I saw Maggie Benson.

We’d met for lunch at a Turkish restaurant she liked a lot on the East Side of Manhattan. I hadn’t seen her for a few years, but out of the blue she’d reached out to me, asking to meet. She was even more beautiful than when we were going out. She’d let her hair grow, and she’d put on a little weight, which looked good on her. She seemed happy.

She had a lot of questions about what I did for a living, and it became clear that she was thinking seriously of becoming a private investigator herself. I remembered her saying, “It’s safe, right?”

“Safe how?”

“I mean your personal safety. Like, I don’t need a weapon, do I?”

“Better if you have one,” I said.

“Oh, really?”

“I’ve used mine a couple of times,” I said. “But I think that’s the exception. It’s mostly safe. Boring, sometimes, but safe. Hey, listen. About what happened—”

“Water. Bridge.”

“Seriously, I didn’t get it at first. I think I do now, and...”

She gave me a long look. There was a lot of sadness in her eyes. “Licensing,” she said. “How does that work, state by state?”

She hadn’t wanted to talk about it, what I’d done with General Moore, but I knew it was still there between us.

I thought back to happier times. When she’d slapped a pile of folders down on my desk. And the words kept echoing in my mind:

I just handed you the baton.

Your only job is to run like hell and bring it home.

And I knew I wasn’t going to let Maggie down. I wasn’t going to let her death be for nothing.

I had to make it right.