The other man was making a fair amount of noise now. Dying from blood loss is a wet and gasping affair. There is a great deal of struggling against the inevitable. A man bleeding to death looks very much like a fish drowning on dry land. And he beats out the same messages of distress. Combined with the two gunshots, more than ample commotion.
I bent to pluck the rubber ducky from where Omaha had placed it in in my loafer while she’d played with both earlier, took cover behind a rocking chair, and oriented myself toward the kitchen, waiting for the boot-steps that would tell me the rear support was entering by the back door.
I’d have an excellent shot, made superior if the man was the least bit distracted when I threw the rubber ducky and it bounced squeaking across the floor. I was poised and ready. If only the rear support had not seen me in the backyard, followed me around the side of the house, watched me enter through the window, pursued, and come after me through the well-oiled door.
Granted, he revealed his second-rate nature by not warning his partners by radio that someone had compromised their flank; but, I was still entirely surprised and the shot fired behind me jerked me upright and spun me around.
Hearing gunfire in his home, near at hand to his family, Park had ignored what he had been told and left the bedroom. Opening the door, he’d emerged just as a man at the opposite end of the hall came out of his daughter’s room carrying a very short assault rifle with a trigger assembly mounted ahead of the clip. The man moved silently, the butt of his weapon pressed to his shoulder, tucked to his right earlobe, sighting down the stubby tube of an integral laser sight. Intent on what lay beyond the open doorway leading into the living room, the man was oblivious to Park.
Park’s family was just behind him, lying on the floor of the bedroom closet where he’d left them. The door and a single wall would scarcely reduce the velocity of a round fired from a weapon like the one the man was carrying. And Park could not be certain the man wouldn’t quickly turn and fire at the first sound. Once a bullet became a stray, it could find a home anywhere, in anyone. All the same, there was ample opportunity for Park to take some cover by pressing close to the wall, announce his presence as a law officer, and order the man to disarm.
But Park didn’t think about any of this. It never occurred to him to attempt to disarm and arrest the man. It never occurred to him what risks might be involved in that procedure. He never had a chance to think or consider any of this. Action proceeded without thought.
Because Parker Haas came out of his room, and he saw a man coming out of his daughter’s room, and that man was carrying a gun. So Parker Haas shot him. He fired a single round, the pad of his right index finger squeezing straight back, the man’s face seemingly balanced atop the red dot that marked the front blade sight of Park’s Warthog, framed perfectly by the rear sights. The gun went off, kicked, Park adjusted and re-aimed, but the man’s face was no longer where it had been. Lowering his sights, Park advanced down the hall, close to the wall, lowering the sights farther with every step, until he was over the man, pointing the gun almost straight down, and he pulled the trigger twice more.
I’d not yet picked up the TAR from the man I’d shot in the neck, but I still had the Tomcat in my hand. When Park appeared in the hall doorway, shooting the dead man, I did what came most naturally and took aim.
Park had never killed before. He’d inflicted considerable injury on suspects in the course of an arrest, but he had never discharged his weapon at anything other than a paper target.
I knew this for a certainty. I knew it because he stood over the dead man and looked up and found me turned to the side in a duelist’s pose, legs spread for stability, arm straight out from shoulder, small pistol aimed at his head, and he spoke.
“I never killed anyone.”
To the best of my knowledge, I’d never had my life saved before. Yes, the anonymous bureaucrat who had halted my torture several years earlier had kept me from being killed, but believe me, that is not the same as someone shooting the man about to shoot you. Yet I had been handed similar moments in life. Instances when the suddenness of violence so shocked an adversary that an opening was created through which I could pass and take decisive action. Part of the genius of my self-preservation obsession. The ability to remain calm as those around me lost their heads. Literally. As I’d aged, this advantage had grown. Fed by experience. At sixty, just as I could not remember the last lover I’d had within ten years of my own age, I could not remember the last fight I’d had with anyone in the same range. My profession, however defined, did not foster longevity. I was inevitably the oldest gun in any given firefight. Those years more than compensating for any loss of physical ability.
This great age of mine, it had been earned with ruthlessness. Yes, I had a morality, but it was quite uniquely my own. There was no one I could kill or maim who would cost me a night’s lost sleep. It was, in truth, less a morality than an aesthetic. Who, how, and when I killed were all elements in the composition of my life. Melody and harmonies. One great recurring theme being the seizing of the moment. Beauty all its own.
I was no longer concerned that Park might have passed the hard drive to the Afronzos. Their interrogation of me, and this assault, indicated that matters were different. The drive was nearby, I was certain. Finding it would not be difficult. That being the case, there was no reason not to kill the young man before he recovered from his shock and became an armed threat again.
Clarity in these things is without price.
My finger was on the trigger. Omaha was still crying. The moment filled with dissonance.
I lowered my gun and, at this extremity of life, allowed myself the indulgence of knowing things.
“Officer Haas, who do you work for?”
He looked at his own gun.
“LAPD.”
He looked at me again.
“I’m a cop.”
The truth of it, so simple and bare, unadorned with deceit, that I almost laughed.
“Yes, you are, aren’t you.”
He saw the other dead bodies.
“Why did you lead them here?”
I raised a hand in denial.
“No, these are not mine. I killed mine earlier. These were sent for you. And for your family as well.”
He was shaking his head before I finished.
“They’re Afronzo personal security.”
“Yes, exactly.”
“Your name is Jasper.”
I nodded.
“It is.”
He was looking at his gun, weighing it.
“He said you were dangerous. ‘Someone you don’t want near your family,’ he said.”
I nodded.
“I think he was correct in that. May I ask who?”
“Parsifal K. Afronzo Senior. He thought you were dead.”
I cocked my ear for a moment. I could have been listening to Omaha but was in fact hearing the strange tune produced by the twining of this man’s life with my own. Something I’d never heard before. Dissonance becoming assonance, perhaps.
I nodded again.
“I believe that the world may have become more mysterious these last few days.”
Park had eyes only for his gun.
“More mysterious than a marriage.”
I watched him watching the gun in his hand.
“I was married only very briefly, at a very young age, and still I know you exaggerate.”
He may have smiled.
“Only a little.”
“Yes, that I will agree with.”
His finger had crept nearer the trigger.
“What’s gone wrong? With the world? Why aren’t people trying to fix it?”
My gun was still lowered, but my finger was curled on the trigger.
“I believe it is because they don’t believe there is anything to fix. They have been raised to fatalism and slaughter. A feeling of powerlessness pervades the average person’s interactions with the world at large. They want it comfortable and familiar. But they’ve stopped thinking about tomorrow in any tangible sense. They don’t believe in it any longer. Because they don’t want to think about it. How hard it will be. For the ones left.”