Quicksilver(12)

Pinned between the car and the wall, the disarmed gunman opened his mouth as though to protest, but spewed a mortal gout of blood instead of words.

I threw open the driver’s door and clambered out of the car and doubled over, seized by the urge to vomit. John Wick could kill ten guys in two minutes and not even grimace with regret. Of course, he was a professional assassin, and I was a staff writer for a magazine about which the most exciting thing was the exclamation point in its name.

Never before had I killed anyone. Although I’d acted in self-defense, I felt cold to the bone, as if some essential spark in me had been snuffed.

After all, I didn’t throw up, in part because I remembered the first guy I’d hit when the car fishtailed, the one who shot out a passenger-side window. He was down, but that didn’t mean he was no longer a threat. Shaking, vision pulsing with the hammer blows of my heart, bewildered and alarmed by what happened, I went looking for him and found him lying facedown, head turned to one side, bloodied but maybe alive. His gun was nearby. I confiscated it just in case he regained consciousness and felt he had a score to settle. Then I knelt and felt for his pulse. Wasn’t one. On closer inspection, I saw that his neck was broken.

I had trouble getting to my feet, and I wasn’t steady when I got there. I stood over the corpse, wondering at the compulsion that had brought me here. Was strange magnetism a power I possessed—or was I a puppet on a string?

Only then did it register with me that both these men were wearing black suits, white shirts, and black ties. They seemed to have the same tailor as the men who braced me in Beane’s Diner.

I was about to search the guy’s pockets for ID when a clink and rattle drew my attention. I took the pistol in both hands, the way I had seen these well-dressed thugs do, and I surveyed the barn.

Late-afternoon eastern light ventured tentatively through the place where the door had been, and bolder shafts of direct sunshine dazzled through holes in the roof, but most of the barn lay in shadows. I needed a few seconds to find the source of the rattling. She was sitting on the barn floor, her back to the metal ladder that led to the hayloft, both arms raised above her head and zip tied to a rung. The ladder was rickety, and when she mumbled and moved in her sleep, the loose rung worked noisily in the side rails.

In the gloom, I couldn’t see the woman clearly. Considering the Toyota’s explosive entrance and the subsequent gunfire, I assumed that she wasn’t merely taking a nap before dinner but must have been drugged.

I hurried to the Toyota, opened the trunk, discarded the gun, opened my suitcase, and retrieved the small pair of scissors from my shaving kit. When I returned to the woman, her head hung low, chin on her chest, as over and over she muttered, “Gotta get, gotta go, gotta be there,” as if she was late for the same appointment as the White Rabbit.

I cut one zip tie, and her left arm dropped into her lap. As I cut the second tie, her head snapped up, and her eyes opened wide. She seized my face with her right hand, digging her fingernails into my left cheek. “What’ve you done? What’ve you done with him?”

With her hand clamped tightly over my chin and mouth, I wasn’t able to answer her with more than a muffled “Done with whom?” Even I couldn’t understand what I said.

Her eyes shone in the shadows as she demanded more fiercely, “Tell me what you’ve done with him, you freakin’ Nazi zombie!”

She let go of me and thrust to her feet and staggered and almost fell but kept her footing. She looked at the gap where the barn door used to be, at the Toyota, at the guy dead on the floor. Then she looked at me again, her face wrenched with emotion. “What have you done with him? Where is Sparky?”

If she was distressed and a little crazy, I was no less so. “I didn’t see a dog.”

“Dog? Dog? Dog?” She regarded me as if I’d just claimed that I myself was a dog. “What’re you talking about? What dog?”

“Sparky. The noise, things crashing, all the gunfire—he must have been scared and ran away.”

This woman wasn’t merely angry. She wasn’t just enraged. She was infuriated. She stepped closer and punched me hard in the chest. “Don’t jerk my chain, you worthless piece of garbage. Dog? Dog? You know he’s not a dog.”

“All I know is they shot at me, both of them, and I’d never been shot at before. Nuns don’t prepare you for being shot at, even though you were beaten up after a spelling bee. So I had to do what I had to do, which is I ran them down.”

Given my talk of gunfire and considering her situation, she ought to have been afraid, but instead my babble seemed to further incense the lady. Her fury became so hot that I thought maybe I was about to witness one of those cases of spontaneous human combustion that you read about in those stranger-than-fiction books that detail weird but true occurrences. She punched me in the chest again. “Sparky Rainking, my grandfather. What’ve you done with Sparky Rainking?”

“I didn’t do anything to him. I never met Sparky Rainking. I don’t want to meet him. Seems like it’s dangerous to know Sparky.”

In silence, she seethed at me for a moment. She scanned the barn again, and then she looked me up and down. “Where’s your suit?”

“I don’t own a suit.”

“Then you’re not one of them?”

“They’re all about the suit. How could I be one of them if I don’t have a suit? You do know who they are, don’t you?”