Carter waits until Al turns to face him. In combat, this kind of decision, whether to kill a prisoner, was beyond his pay grade. Now he displays the enlisted man’s first instinct, which is to cut through red tape. He puts a bullet into Al’s right knee, then silences the kid’s scream by slamming the Glock into the side of his head.
TWENTY-NINE
Carter was right about everything. Damn him. The minutes are dragging, every second an opportunity for self-torment. Angel’s sitting in the back of the van, in the dark, surrounded by the cop’s useless tracking equipment, her galloping imagination leaping from one catastrophe to another. Just now, her attention has turned to the walkie-talkie, the one strapped to Carter’s belt. Walkie-talkies have a limited range, as Carter explained when he instructed her in their use. If the men inside the warehouse defeat Carter – if they kill him, let’s be honest – the next item on their agenda will be whoever’s on the other end of the walkie-talkie. That would be Angel Tamanaka, thank you.
Angel fishes through her purse, pushing the detritus aside, until she finds the little automatic tucked beneath the dish towel. She takes the weapon out and stares down, the sight of it producing a rueful laugh as she remembers how powerful she felt when she first cradled it in her palm. Now she’s envisioning Carter’s Glock, envisioning his Glock while she imagines the assault rifles and street-sweeper shotguns available to the gangsters inside the warehouse.
Well, she finally decides, the little gun definitely has one practical application. She can put it to her head and pull the trigger before allowing herself to be captured.
Angel’s itching to make a hasty retreat. The van’s key is in the ignition. She need only give it a little twist, need only turn the wheel slightly to avoid the graffiti-covered panel truck in front of her, need only step on the gas and ...
Angel’s train of thought comes to an abrupt stop, as if that train had jumped the tracks to slam into the side of a mountain. Two blocks away, a car turns on to the block, its headlights so bright in the side-view mirror that Angel can’t tell the make or the model. But then the vehicle passes beneath the only working street lamp on the next block and the light bar spanning the roof leaps out at her. Cops.
Angel’s mind kicks back into high gear, the transition between stunned and warp speed too brief to measure. What if Carter shows up right now, a suitcase tucked beneath his arm and who knows how many bodies left behind? What if the cops are responding to a silent alarm inside the warehouse and they catch him off-guard? What if they decide to check out the van? What will she tell them when they find her crouched in the back?
Driver fatigue is responsible for soooooooooooo many accidents. I just had to take a nap.
Yeah, that’d work. Angel can almost feel the cuffs settling around her wrists, almost hear the cops radio for back-up. Which leads her to another question. What if a judge sentenced her to spend the rest of her life in a cage? How would she feel, standing there, listening, her lawyer’s attention already straying to the next defendant on her list? This is a question Carter’s already posed, a question she left unanswered.
Paralyzed by fear, Angel doesn’t move. A good thing, too, because the cops are simply patrolling the sector assigned to them, their mission as innocent as a donut run, and just as routine. Angel hunches down as the patrol car slides past. Now she can see the cops in silhouette, a man and a woman, both on their cellphones. At the corner, they take a right and head toward the Ikea box store on the waterfront.
Angel doesn’t have to check her pulse. Her heart’s thudding against her ribs, the beats coming so fast she’s unable to count them. And the saddest part is that risk is what she signed up for, the great adventure, a walk on a side that’s proving much too wild for the likes of Angel Tamanaka. And still no sign of Carter, no signal from the man who warned her, again and again, that he wasn’t invulnerable, had no super powers, and might not survive his next violent encounter.
Angel extends her wrist into the front seat where there’s enough light to read the hands on her watch. Forty-one minutes. It might as well be forty-one years. She falls back against the seat and methodically surveys her surroundings. All quiet, except for her out-of-control brain, which again poses a series of what-if questions.
What if she panicked when the cops turned on to the street two blocks away? What if she jumped into the front, started the van and tried to flee? What if she signaled Carter and he now believed, wrongly, that the cops presented a threat? What if he aborted the operation? What if he came out shooting?
Enough, enough. Angel covers her ears and shakes her head violently, her hair whipping the sides of her face hard enough to sting. Somehow, a memory surfaces, something a cop boyfriend told her a few months after she arrived in New York. Fight, flight or fright, he’d insisted, are the only possible reactions to a sudden threat. You ran away, or you raised your fists, or you just plain froze. Angel had taken the third path, that was obvious, and she didn’t fault herself. But her cop lover had been wrong. There was a fourth way, a way embodied by Leonard Carter. Fear leads to panic, he’d insisted, and panic is the ultimate enemy. Stay calm, fight well.
Angel’s attention is drawn by movement on the left side of the windshield. Across the street, a wharf rat makes its way along a corrugated fence. The creature slithers a few yards, its back hunched, then stops to raise its snout and sniff the air before dashing forward again. Initially repulsed, Angel watches the animal until it comes upon a small gap in the fence and wriggles through.
Somehow, the rat’s manifest caution serves to calm Angel. Though subject to no imminent threat, it had remained supremely vigilant, nose twitching, head turning, as if surrounded by enemies. Angel checks her watch before settling down. Forty-five minutes. Fifteen lifetimes to go.
In fact, only three lifetimes pass, three minutes, before Bobby Ditto’s armored Ford describes the same left turn made by the cops five minutes before. Angel recognizes the car immediately, but this time she manages to check a rising panic. She signals Carter first, then drops the radio on the seat and tells herself to think carefully. There are two men in the vehicle that slides past the van, its sound system blaring, Bobby Ditto and the other one, the one who grabbed her ass as they walked down the street on the day Carter rescued her. The one who spelled out exactly what sadistic games he intended to play with her in the hours preceding her death.
Angel slides the side door open and gets out before the Explorer comes to a stop in front of the warehouse. Her eyes criss-cross her surroundings, evaluating risk and reward. Crouching, she dashes across the street, exposed for a few seconds, until she finally drops to a knee before the corrugated fence previously traversed by the rat. She raises the little gun and focuses on the end of the block, fifty feet distant. If she was spotted as she crossed the street, Bobby and his buddy – the Blade, that’s his name – will have to come around the corner to stand directly in her line of fire. Not that she’s likely to hit anything from this distance with a poorly manufactured .32, but one thing is clear to her. She didn’t freeze and she didn’t flee. That means Bobby and the Blade have to be incapacitated, at the very least, for her and her partner to survive. Fight being the only option still on the table.