Red Right Hand

42.

CAMERON AND HENDRICKS watched Segreti die on the nightly news as they sat holed up in a shitty hotel room. The train’s surveillance cameras captured the whole thing. It was a somber, horrifying affair, traumatic enough that Cameron had to look away. Hendricks watched every second of the footage, though. He felt he owed Segreti that much.

The train was halted soon after. The passengers were forced to hike single file down the tunnel’s narrow service walkway to the nearest station-still Oakland, at that point. The tunnel was shut down for hours afterward so it could be inspected for damage and so the crime-scene techs could do their thing, and BART service between the cities was suspended.

The news identified Segreti by name and peddled a slanted version of the whole sordid tale. A gangster in hiding. A retired federal agent recognizing him and making it his mission to track him down, hell-bent on bringing in the one who got away. A bloody altercation leaving both men dead. One was painted a two-bit lowlife, the other a hero.

If you asked Hendricks, that wasn’t far off-only they had it backward which was which.

Segreti’s death didn’t dominate the news cycle for long. Later that evening, the White House announced that government operatives had raided a body shop in South San Francisco and-after what was described as a protracted gun battle-had killed two members of the True Islamic Caliphate, one of them the man from the video. Inside, they found handguns, assault rifles, and a pair of partially assembled explosive vests, as well as a map of San Francisco on which the Federal Building and several targets in the Castro District were marked.

The statement never mentioned Bellum by name, but come Wall Street’s morning bell, their stock soared nonetheless.

Hendricks’s memories of the next sixteen hours or so were spotty. His wound was in bad shape, and a brutal fever had taken hold of him. He slathered it with antibiotic ointment and popped aspirin like Tic Tacs until his fever broke. Cameron was so worried about him, she refused to get checked out at the nearby urgent care clinic until he threatened to go off his meds. It turned out she needed stitches and a tetanus shot, but thankfully, Yancey and the assholes at the hospital hadn’t broken any bones.

When Hendricks was feeling well enough to move, he and Cameron parted ways. She seemed bummed but didn’t argue. “Guess it was silly of me, thinking I could help you…do what you do,” she said.

“I don’t know,” he said. “You did all right out there. And I may still need a favor from time to time. IDs. Aliases. A little background work, maybe. You know-the kind you can manage from your dorm room, well out of the line of fire.”

“Deal,” she said. “But I’m not going back to college, not until I decide what for.”

“What are you going to do in the meantime?”

She shrugged. “There’s a lot of advocacy groups out there that need volunteers. I think I’ll try to do some good while I figure out what’s next.”

“Something tells me you’ll do plenty.”

They hugged. She squeezed him so tight, his stitches hurt. When she finally let him go, tears brimmed in her eyes. “Do me a favor out there, would you?”

“What’s that?”

“Don’t die.”

Hendricks smiled, but said nothing.

He didn’t want to make a promise he couldn’t keep.