Hummingbird Salamander(92)

While I tried only one thing. I braced myself and half rose with Langer in my grasp, and as he flailed, I brought him down on his side with such an impact the air left his lungs. Went for a choke hold from behind. Held Langer tight, his back against me, his throat pulsing, trying to shout but gasping instead. My legs were wrapped tight around his legs, to keep him motionless. I hoped my bad leg would hold. Langer began to concentrate on breathing, trying to pull my arm away.

I thought I had him. I had him.

But he managed to reach his arm around and get to the knife and stab me in the bad shoulder just as the bad leg gave way. I could feel my choke hold shift. Another second and I’d lose that position. Langer would be on top of me or straddling my side. Stabbing and stabbing until I was dead.

I bought some time clubbing him with Bog. Opened a cut on his head before he managed to smash it from my grip. My treacherous fingers.

But there was the slope. Literal last ditch. The leverage of one good leg. I used my weight to roll and let gravity do the rest, keeping the choke hold, loosened, as we rolled and rolled back down the gravel slope, bruised and torn by the sharp black pebbles and our own momentum. Dizzy with it.

Knife gone flying. I saw it kick back up slope. A glittering glint lost in the haze.

Langer shouting now. Incoherent, bucking, trying to get free, even as the slope pummeled us.

The difference between us: I didn’t give a fuck what came next so long as I kept my weight on him, kept my arm around his neck.

There came a crack and smack that knocked me half unconscious and I lost my grip on Langer. He’d landed up against another dead tree, me facing him. Washed up on this strange shore of moss in the moonlight. I could smell only the fresh, rich smell of the cedar trees. Blood in my mouth. Felt like a brick had been thrown through the back of my skull.

I heard a weird sound. Langer.

“Don’t destroy it,” Langer was mumbling through the gash in his mouth. “Don’t destroy it.”

I lay there too tired to reply or to move. Drifting in and out of consciousness. Getting colder and numb, but not caring. In the end, it was too much. I had limits. I wanted an end, but I couldn’t get to my feet to get to the end. Something essential to standing knocked out of me.

The stars above blurred, came back into focus, moved in odd acrobatic orbits. Thought I saw the knife still spinning, falling toward me. The thick black hilt. The silver, shining blade.

I struggled to my knees, stared at Langer. He gave me a weak smile. He was delirious. His eyes weren’t right. Or his expression wasn’t right.

“I loved her,” he said. “I loved her. I love her.”

I wanted to tell him that was pathetic. That he was delusional. I meant to tell him that when I should’ve said “I know.” Because what was he in that moment but stripped down to the truth?

But we didn’t have time left to talk, anyway.

Langer’s head split open. The blood spatter slapped against my boots, my pants. Whatever was left hung down lopsided. So that’s what happens next I remember thinking. A bullet in the brain. A bullet to the brain. The recoil from the gun burned in my ears. Made me fall to the side. I winced, waiting for me next.

But my time didn’t come.

Above me, Hellmouth Jack loomed up out of the shadows, looking just as he had in the bar centuries ago in New York. A peculiar anticipation on his face. Something akin to excitement. Or greed.

He had a Glock trained on me.

“No slacking, slacker,” he said. “Time to rise and shine. Jack and Jill have to go—up a hill.”





[96]


We waited until early morning. The fog had turned to drizzle. The bullet had just grazed my arm. I didn’t even bother to stop the bleeding. My shirt would stanch it in time. My head felt better. A dull ache. A dull ache, too, that I was a prisoner.

“He always talked too much,” Hellmouth Jack said. But I didn’t much care that he’d ended the man who’d tried to kill me.

“How did you find me?” I asked.

He was squatting on a tree stump a good ten feet away. Wary. The way I’d brought Langer low wouldn’t happen to him. Smoking a cigarette, Glock in the other hand, vaguely trained in my direction. Not as bad as my husband, but in the new light he didn’t look great. Either he’d been dyeing his hair before or the gray had just begun to come out around the temples. Subject to current events. Smelled the alcohol on him even from the ten feet. Rum, not whisky.

Langer’s remains lay among meadow grasses thirty feet farther down the slope. Neither of us had suggested burial.

“Called in a last favor with Homeland Security. I knew you weren’t going home home. Drone triangulation on your car when you parked at the cabin to talk to your beloved husband.”

A trap, then, and I’d walked into and through it, and here we were.

“Homeland Security still exists?”

“Not by that name. Just their drones. Do you know how many secret drones lacerate the sky these days? They’ll outlast us all. Form their own civilization.”

“Thanks for saving me,” I said.

He smiled at that at least, even if grim-faced. His voice had such a flat certainty to it. A clipped certainty. So unlike the flirt at the bar or even him over the phone.

“You did me a favor, bringing all the bad actors out of the woodwork so I could get at them. But, in the end, it didn’t much matter to me who took care of who. So why get involved.”