I think there is a clock in all of us that most choose not to see or heed. The clock has a date and an hour and minute and a second on it that are not subject to change. I knew my hour had come, but I couldn’t accept it. The thought made my mouth go dry, my colon constrict, my throat back up with bile, my vision go out of focus. I felt like my blood had been fouled. The person I thought of as Aaron Holland Broussard seemed to have taken flight from my breast, and I wondered if the real me was indeed a coward, a pathetic creature whose only accomplishments in life were to ride a dumb animal for eight seconds and to swim terrified through a school of jellyfish.
Vick pulled open the door. All the other houses on the street were without power. Rain was sweeping across the Harrelson lawn and the live oaks and the swimming pool and blowing into the foyer. Grady struggled to get Saber to his feet. Saber tripped and fell and pulled Valerie down with him.
“Get him up,” Grady said.
“Let them go. It’s me Vick wants,” I said.
“It’s over. Accept it, Broussard,” Grady said.
I lifted Saber to his feet. He kept his weight on one leg, holding on to me, his face buried in my shoulder. “Two guys in a woody,” he whispered. “One block south. Greaseballs.”
I didn’t know how the information could help. But I knew that somehow the two assassins were related to our mutual fate, that their presence was part of the design, that somehow there was a doorway out of the black box we were in.
“Grady?” Valerie said.
“Yes?”
“Look at me.”
“There’s no point talking about it, Val.”
“Look at me, Grady.”
“What is it?”
“When you’re done with us, you’ll always be Vick Atlas’s tool. He’ll take everything you have. You’re weak. You need him, but he doesn’t need you. Why do you let him do this to you?”
“Shut your mouth,” Grady said.
“That’s it,” Vick said. He pushed Valerie and Saber out the door. Then he looked at the rain swirling in the trees. He picked up my hat from the floor and put it on. “Okay, you two, let’s take a ride. See you in a minute, Grady.”
I watched the three of them walk through the puddles in the driveway toward my heap. Saber was holding on to Valerie, his left leg almost collapsing with each step. Grady shoved me between the shoulder blades onto the porch. “We’ll cut through the side yard to the carriage house.”
A long ragged bolt of lightning split the clouds, and I saw the reflection glimmer on a station wagon parked one block south, just as Saber had said. We were about to enter the gate that gave on to the side yard and the swimming pool and the carriage house and Vick’s parked car. I was supposed to climb into the trunk and let Grady lock me inside. Down the street I heard the station wagon start up, backfiring once, like a wet firecracker. Then I knew what was going to happen. I was not prescient; I didn’t have an epiphany; it was the opposite.
I was at the side of my father the first time he went over the top. I was in a wheat field golden with heat and misty with blood, and among the martyrs like Felicity and Perpetua who died in a Carthaginian arena, and at the limestone wall among the farm boys from Ohio who charged into Confederate artillery with empty muskets. I knew that death wasn’t that bad after all, that it freed me from the earth and united me with brothers and sisters who were among the finest in the family of man.
I began running toward Valerie and Saber, waiting for Grady to take aim and fire at my back. But it didn’t happen. Instead, the driver of the station wagon pulled to the center of the asphalt and accelerated toward us, the car’s wake rippling over both curbs onto the lawns along the street. There was only one passenger. He was in the backseat, rolling down the window.
As he positioned himself and fitted the automatic rifle to his shoulder, I could see his white shirt, the bloodless pallor of his face, the delicacy of his hands, the flawless sweep of his hair over his tiny ears, the ease with which he sighted on his target and prepared to pull the trigger.
The weapon he held was known formally as the Browning automatic rifle and informally as the BAR. Its effect was devastating. As the station wagon closed on us, the line of fire was perfect. Probably two bursts would kill the four of us.
The driver clicked on his headlights, then hit the high beams, silhouetting Vick, my cowboy hat slanted on his head, his bandaged cheek as white as snow. I piled into Saber and Valerie and knocked them both to the ground and covered them with my body. The shooter opened up. There must have been at least one tracer round in the magazine. It streaked away into the darkness, maybe hitting the bathhouse in the side yard. The other rounds chewed Vick Atlas into pieces. His flesh, his hair, his clothing seemed to dissolve in the headlights, as though he were caught on wires. I could hear the ejected shells pinging against the station wagon’s window frame, the bullets thudding into a tree behind us. Then the station wagon drove away slowly, the profile of the shooter as sculpted and serene and immobile as a statue’s.
Vick had fallen into the water. I got up and pulled his body onto the swale and found the handcuff key in his pocket. I unlocked the cuffs from Valerie’s and Saber’s wrists and put Saber into the passenger seat of my heap. My hands would not stop shaking. I thought Valerie was crying. Or maybe laughing. Saber was grinning. I was sure about that.
Behind me I saw Grady running down the sidewalk, staring back at us like a frightened child.
Epilogue
THE POWER WENT back on, and one house after another filled with light, as though the Angel of Death held no dominion in this green-gray, moss-hung urban forest on the rim of the industrial world. I went back into the house and called the police. Then I made a second call, one I have never told anyone about until now.
“Hello?” she said.
“Hi, Miss Cisco.”
“Aaron? What kind of mess are you in now?”