“Just you and me now.” He said it softly, but he was sure the other man heard him. “Soon, just me.”
He stepped over Aleksandr Ivanovich and off the boardwalk. His foot sank ankle deep in the soft earth but he kept going. Vladimir fired at him and Hannibal had no idea where the bullet went. The clouds jostled each other again and the moonlight vanished.
He could make out the other man’s form on the ground in front of him now. Vladimir fired again. Pain lanced through Hannibal’s right arm but the bullet didn’t throw him down. That meant it had not encountered bone, but just dug a divot of flesh out of the side of his arm. Too bad for Vladimir that Hannibal was lefthanded.
In the distance he heard a loud hailer asking for whoever was in the park to identify themselves. He kept going. Left foot, right foot, like he remembered his father saying when he was small. That’s how you get where you need to go. Left foot, right foot.
A dozen feet away, Vladimir raised his gun and Hannibal raised his as well. As Hannibal stepped closer, waiting to be in certain one-shot-kill range, the two men looked down their sight posts into each other’s eyes.
A light beam slid between them and Vladimir squeezed his trigger. Hannibal heard the hollow clack of a hammer falling on an empty chamber. It seemed that Vladimir had lost count. Vladimir turned on his back, watching Hannibal between his own feet. Hannibal continued on until he stood inches from Vladimir’s shoes. Now he could see that Vladimir was bleeding from his right side. His face was calm, placid, as Aleksandr’s had almost always been. Did this man understand that Hannibal had to finish his friend’s business?
“He was already mortally wounded you know,” Vladimir said. As if that made any difference.
“You don’t want to shoot me,” Vladimir said. “You are not like us. You are not a killer.”
Hannibal lowered his weapon, took a deep breath, and raised it again.
“You think you know what I am? I’ll tell you what I am.” Hannibal took another deep breath, and heard Ivanovich’s voice in his head. Or Trent Reznor’s.
“Broken. Bruised. Forgotten. Sore. Too fucked up to care anymore.”
Vladimir nodded slightly, indicating that he recognized the lyrics. Hannibal squeezed, but never felt the trigger let off. The slide rocked back and slammed forward, but Hannibal never heard the blast. Vladimir’s forehead offered no resistance to the jacketed hollowpoint on its way into the ground. Then Hannibal dropped to his knees. Some number of seconds later he heard a familiar woman’s voice scream. Then a cluster of light beams flashed around him, illuminating the entire swamp. There was a lot of conversation, but it all seemed muddled to him. A coat fell around his shoulders and he heard Orson Rissik’s voice.
“Hannibal. It’s Orson. I got here as fast as I could.”
“Seemed like all night. Is it midnight yet?”
“Midnight?” Rissik asked. “Son, it’s barely six. We had daylight until we arrived but finding you out here in the dark was a bitch. Are you OK?”
“I’m fine,” Hannibal said as Rissik and another man laid him on a stretcher. “At least, better than anybody else out here except…did you find the girl?”
“Yeah, she’s fine. Not a scratch on her.”
“Yeah, that figures,” Hannibal said, rummaging through his jacket for his phone.
“Hey, we need to get somebody to look at that arm,” Rissik said. “Whoever you’re thinking of calling, it can wait.”
“No,” Hannibal said as they bounced him along the boardwalk toward the parking lot, “no, it can’t.”
Epilogue
There was no way to see in the window at Kinkead’s, just a couple blocks from the White House. Watching snowflakes melt as they hit the restaurant’s fogged-up bay window, Hannibal spared himself a smile, thinking of the conversation he had on his cell phone while sitting in the emergency room.
“It’s your own fault for being in the office so late, Mrs. Abrogast,” he had said. “I’ve already tried her home phone and her BlackBerry. And I’ve got a feeling you know where she is.”
“She left late, Mr. Jones. I believe she had an appointment.”
“And that would be where?”
“I don’t have her appointment book handy.”
“Come on, Mrs. A. You keep it all in your head anyway.”
“I’m surprised she didn’t tell you. Maybe if you hadn’t stood her up for lunch…”
“Look, Mrs. A,” Hannibal said through clenched teeth. “I have had a really shitty day.”
“Excuse me, young man?”
“I haven’t eaten since breakfast, I have huge bruises on my throat from where a guy tried to strangle me, and I’m sitting here watching some guy from Pakistan stitch up a bullet hole in my right arm. The jacket’s ruined too. I just need to talk to her, all right?”
There was a long, hard pause. He heard a deeply drawn breath. He was through. If she didn’t talk she wouldn’t, but he would not ask again.
“She’s meeting him for a late supper,” Mrs. Abrogast said.
“Terrific. Where?”
And that was what brought him to Kinkead’s. He ignored the maitre d’s questions and glanced only briefly at the stairs. No, she wouldn’t want to go up to the formal dining area. She would prefer the more casual feel of the street-level cafe and bar. He brushed past the man telling him how long the wait was. He brushed past the congressional staffers and lobbyists who crowded the tables, talking shop and making deals. Their conversation, and the lady churning out predictable jazz on the piano, made it unlikely anyone would hear him approach. No one even looked up until he was standing beside the table.
Reggie Johnson sat to his left. Cindy sat on his right. Both looked perplexed when they noticed him. Cindy opened her mouth to say something he was sure he didn’t want to hear, so he focused on the man.
“Blow,” Hannibal said, nodding his head toward the door. “We need a little privacy.”
“Hannibal, what the hell?” Cindy said. He had been right. He didn’t want to hear that.
Reggie stared for a second, his brows knit together in confusion.
“You got a hearing problem?” Hannibal said, just a little louder. “Hit the bricks, bud.”
The two men locked eyes. Reggie stood, very slowly, to his full height and looked down into Hannibal’s face. Hannibal never flinched.
“You don’t want none of this, son. Don’t make the mistake of deciding to fuck with me. Not now. Not today.”
“Reggie,” Cindy said. “Please. It’s all right. We do need to…to talk. Let me call you, OK?”
Was it the consoling tone in Cindy’s voice? Did he see something behind Hannibal’s dark lenses that he didn’t want to disturb? Did he notice the bullet hole in the right sleeve of Hannibal’s mud-encrusted suit coat, just above the elbow? Did he guess the significance of the twin bruises on Hannibal’s throat? Whatever the reason, Reggie Johnson turned his face to Cindy, said “Another time,” and walked out of the restaurant. Hannibal let out a long breath and sat in the chair Reggie just emptied. He folded his hands on the table between him and his woman.
“That was rude…”
“Damn straight,” Cindy said.
“… but I couldn’t be away from you another minute.” Then he pulled his glasses off and laid them on the table. Cindy looked closely at his eyes, then looked around the rest of him. He knew his hair was dirty and his jacket was caked with dried mud. He saw her eyes linger on the bullet hole and with the jacket pressed against his arm he knew she could see the white bandage beneath.
Hannibal closed his eyes. He wanted to tell her how much he had missed her in the last week. He wanted to tell her why he had been away. He wanted to ask her what there really was between her and the man who had just left. He wanted to tell her how much he needed her. He wanted to believe she could see all of that in his eyes.