Then She Vanished

Forty-One

The Tahoe came slowly toward us and parked next to the first coil of the Serpent, just a hundred feet away. The Yukon swept wide across the flat to our left and parked lengthwise, its left flank facing us. Two men I didn’t recognize braced long guns on the hood, aimed our way. The driver’s window and the window behind it both rolled down and gun barrels glinted in the sun.

Jackie O climbed out of Broadman’s silver Tahoe, her sunglasses just like those in Lark’s video, and a machine pistol in her hands. Unmistakably Jackie O. So unique yet so ordinary. The face that had launched a thousand futile searches.

Natalie Strait dropped to the sand in her desert fatigues and combat boots, landing lightly and throwing her big dark hair back with a shake of her head.

“Jesus,” whispered Dalton.

It was as jarring a change as I’d ever seen in a person in such a short time.

Behind her followed Cassy Weisberg with a little machine gun of her own. A wide-brimmed straw gardening hat with a chin strap. A little piece of my heart fell away when I realized she’d been part of The Chaos Committee all along.

Then Broadman, dressed in white, a white ball cap shading his face, a large black backpack over one shoulder. He had a smartphone in one hand and a pistol in the other.

“Keep those hands up,” he called out. “Otherwise, you can probably guess what.”

He dropped his phone into his pants pocket, slung the black backpack off and handed it to Cassy.

They came toward us slowly — Broadman, Natalie, Cassy, and Jackie O — stopping forty feet from where we stood. Then Cassy continued. Her pale face was shaded by the hat. She dangled the backpack from one hand and kept the machine pistol tucked tight to her side, pointed at us. Stumbled once, slightly. Handed Dalton the pack.

“Put it on,” she said.

“If you put it on, he’ll blow you up,” I said.

Dalton gave me a look of disdain as he worked on the pack and rolled his shoulders.

“Okay, Sarge. I’m all strapped in, so let her go.”

“Not up to me, PFC Strait. It’s up to Natalie. She knows her own mind now, and has the strength to speak it. Chaos has set her free.”

In the shimmering distant mirage I saw two vehicles moving slowly across the desert toward us. Tiny things with puffs of dust settling behind them. My confederates, answering the call of the Vigilant, I hoped.

“What do you want from me?” asked Dalton.

“I want what Natalie wants, Dalton. I’ve been a fan of hers since you showed me those pictures in Fallujah and called her a schizoid sexpot. Step closer to us. Halfway but no more.”

Dalton stopped halfway.

“Tell him what you want, Natalie,” said Broadman.

“First I want you to apologize for belittling me and cheating on me and blaming me and trying to send me to prison for something that was your idea.”

“I’d drop to one knee,” he said. “But…”

Instead, he sat heavily on his good leg well clear of a patch of cholla cactus, and extended the other leg in front of him. Looking up at her he clasped and pumped his hands as if in emphatic prayer.

“I, Dalton Strait, do apologize to you, Natalie, my one and only true love from the beginning, for all the terrible, cowardly, dishonest, and genuinely shitty things I’ve done. I owe you everything that is good in my life. I have squandered much. Please forgive me. I will never let you down again. Give me a second chance.”

I watched the emotions play across Natalie’s face, from contempt to anger to doubt.

“Tell her about the whore in Germany and the lobbyist in Newport Beach,” said Broadman.

“They meant nothing.”

“You chose nothing over me?”

“And tell her about the IRA you cashed out for Terrell’s college but spent on golf junkets for you and your buddies,” Broadman added.

I saw a bitter ripple of surprise pass over her. A change in her breathing. Then some deep inner retreat.

“So much betrayal, Dalton,” she said, her voice distant. “I just really don’t know what to do with you.”

Broadman pointed his phone at Strait. “Let me tell you what Natalie did when she saw you in the press conference in her own home, suggesting that she was responsible for the misspent campaign money. She became ill in her apartment — the one in the hills behind the Bighorn. She cursed and vomited and tried to slash her wrist with the small pink razor I allowed her. Unsuccessfully. That was her low point. The point at which all of the past stopped and the future started. After that, your wife began to see you for who you really are. And to see me for who I really am.”

“Who’s that?” asked Dalton.

“A simple man trying to save a nation from itself.”

“You blow up innocent people and get nuts to shoot cops. Get all the angry losers to burn cars in the streets. You’re not saving anybody from anything.”

“I’m not finished with my mission, Private. Of course there’s work to do. Much to rebuild. My compound, my factory, my organization.”

“Come on, Natalie,” said Dalton, bending his bad knee with one hand and pushing off with the other for the long task of standing up. “Sarge has lost it. Let’s get out of here.”

“You owe him an apology, too,” she said.

“For what? For trying to save his life while half of Fallujah was shooting at me?”

The distant desert cars had come closer. I recognized the dull body of the old pickup truck I keep in the barn for occasions like this. The other vehicle I’d never seen: a shining metallic green-on-white ’57 Chevy convertible, top off, with enormous white-sidewall tires and a gleaming chrome roll cage overhead.

Broadman turned to look, then back at me. “Tell them to stop or I’ll kill both of you and them.”

I dialed Burt and a moment later saw the vehicles come to a stop, overtaken by advancing clouds of dust.

Dalton finally staggered upright and got his balance. The backpack was still snugly in place. I wondered how powerful a charge Broadman had created.

“I’ll give you one last chance to beg my forgiveness, Dalton,” said Broadman. “I was hoping you’d do that the day you visited me in bungalow nineteen. When you saw what your cowardice had done to me. That’s why I wanted to see you. But you refused to even remember that day in Fallujah.”

“I remember how hard I tried to get you out, the flames and the heat and the harness that I couldn’t cut through. Then the bullets snapping past. Christ, Sarge — I was terrified… Made some bad decisions…”

“You didn’t try to get me out. You didn’t get me into the road. I got myself there. You were behind the K-rails the whole time. I know from Axel and Donald. Others who saw it. They were the ones who helped. You were hiding the whole time. Crying and peeing your pants.”

Dalton held both arms out, palms up and fingers spread as he limped toward his wife and his sergeant. He stopped twenty feet from them, no more.

“I’ve been trying to make up for that day ever since! Can’t you see that? Natalie? Sarge?”

Broadman offered Natalie his phone. Whispered in her ear. She looked up into his ruined face for a moment before taking it.

Then stepped slowly toward Dalton, the eager, rough-cut boy she’d fallen in love with twenty-five years, two sons, and a war ago. She stopped ten feet short of him. I’m not sure what I saw on her face. Hope. Surrender. Resolve.

I stood in the shade of the dragon’s head. I was three seconds from my pistol and ninety feet away from four gunmen in a black Yukon.

Natalie studied her husband with a doubtful squint then turned back to Broadman.

“I can’t do this, Harris.”

“You can and you will, Natalie. You are free and brave.”

Dalton took a step toward her, swinging his plastic limb in clumsy determination and unslinging the pack from his back. Another patch of cholla stopped him.

“Natalie!” Broadman called out in his calm clear voice. “Everything we talked about. Everything you are and everything we need to do.”

She turned to him again. Then back to Dalton, trying to pick his way through the cactus as the needled balls broke off and clung to his legs.

She looked down at the phone in her hand again, as if surprised to find it there.

Now entangled in the cactus patch, Dalton swept frantically with his bad leg, then tried to windmill the bomb at Broadman. But the heavy pack caught the cholla on its way up, blooped into the air and landed between him and Natalie.

Natalie froze in confusion.

Jackie O and Cassy ran.

Broadman lifted a second phone and worked it with his thumb.

“Run, Natalie!” he yelled.

Dalton lurched from the cactus patch and dove onto the pack.

I backed against the Serpent’s neck, drew my gun and shot Broadman in the chest. I didn’t hear the .45 go off. Only the sharp explosion that lifted Dalton off the ground in a bloody shrug and sent a cloud of red and white sand into the air.

Bullets banged wildly off the Serpent as the Yukon tore off into the desert toward Cassy and Jackie O. I rose to one knee, led the vehicle and shot fast. Dalton lay heaped and shredded, Natalie on her knees beside him, screaming, her hands on his back as the flesh and blood and sand rained down. “You’re okay, Dalton. You’re okay. Honey, you’re okay!”

I approached low in a shooter’s stance and found white-clad Broadman dead in the sand, heart-shot, one leg buckled under the other, the phone still in his hand.

In the middle distance I saw the black Yukon sliding to a stop near Cassy and Jackie O, as my old pickup truck and the Mad Max ’57 Chevy sped across the desert to engage them.

Natalie bent over Dalton, head on his back, sobbing.

I listened to the wind and the diminishing whine of the engines and the tremendous pounding of my heart. Stood there for a long while, gun dangling in one hand as my old pickup and the crazy-looking ’57 Chevy pinned down the black Yukon in a crossfire. Heard the pop-pop of battle I knew too well, watched Burt and Tola take cover behind my old truck, heard the twang of bullets through metal. Watched as Virgil Strait and three of his confederates fired down from a roll-caged platform on the crudely armored, huge-tired green-and-white convertible. Saw Cassy and Jackie O go down near the Yukon, followed by two Chaos Committee gunmen, the bullets passing through them to kick up sand as they fell. The two remaining soldiers ran haphazardly away, one of them limping, as Virgil and his men ran them down in the Chevy and killed them in an extravagant fusillade.

After which the Mad Max war wagon and the old pickup truck tore up the desert in victorious circles around the Yukon and the dead, dust rose into the darkening sky.

The sun lowered into purple mountains, painting the vast white desert and the tiny vehicles upon it a luminous gold.

While through the golden glow, the man-made Serpent looked down at the carnage with his starved and violent grimace.

I helped Natalie stand.