What’s happened to Rose?
“We’re going to get up now,” the guy said. “Me first. Getting up, I got this piece aimed at your head. You stay flat, dug right into the sand the way you are, just the way you are, until I step back and tell you it’s okay to get up.” For emphasis, he pressed the muzzle of the gun more deeply into Joe’s face, twisting it back and forth; the inside of Joe’s cheek pressed painfully against his teeth. “You understand, Carpenter?”
“Yes.”
“I can waste you and walk away.”
“I’m cool.”
“Nobody can touch me.”
“Not me anyway.”
“I mean, I got a badge.”
“Sure.”
“You want to see it? I’ll pin it to your damn lip.”
Joe said nothing more.
They hadn’t shouted Police, which didn’t prove that they were phony cops, only that they didn’t want to advertise. They hoped to do their business quickly, cleanly — and get out before they were required to explain their presence to the local authorities, which would at least tangle them in inter-jurisdictional paperwork and might result in troubling questions about what legitimate laws they were enforcing. If they weren’t strictly employees of Teknologik, they had some measure of federal power behind them, but they hadn’t shouted FBI or DEA or ATF when they had burst out of the night, so they were probably operatives with a clandestine agency paid for out of those many billions of dollars that the government dispensed off the accounting books, from the infamous Black Budget.
Finally the stranger eased off Joe, onto one knee, then stood and backed away a couple of steps. “Get up.”
Rising from the sand, Joe was relieved to discover that his eyes were rapidly adapting to the darkness. When he had first come out of the banquet room and run north along the beach, hardly two minutes ago, the gloom had seemed deeper than it was now. The longer he remained night blind to any degree, the less likely he would be to see an advantage and to be able to seize it.
Although his rakish Panama hat was gone, and in spite of the darkness, the gunman was clearly recognizable: the storyteller. In his white slacks and white shirt, with his long white hair, he seemed to draw the meager ambient light to himself, glowing softly like an entity at a séance.
Joe glanced back and up at Santa-Fe-by-the-Sea. He saw the silhouettes of diners at their tables, but they probably couldn’t see the action on the dark beach.
Crotch-kicked, face-slammed, the disabled agent still sprawled nearby on the sand, no longer choking but gagging, in pain, and still spitting blood. He was striving to squeeze off his flow of tears by wheezing out obscenities instead of sobs.
Joe shouted, “Rose!”
The white-clad gunman said, “Shut up.”
“Rose!”
“Shut up and turn around.”
Silent in the sand, a new man loomed behind the storyteller and, instead of proving to be another Teknologik drone, said, “I have a Desert Eagle.44 magnum just one inch from the back of your skull.”
The storyteller seemed as surprised as Joe was, and Joe was dizzied by this turn of events.
The man with the Desert Eagle said, “You know how powerful this weapon is? You know what it’ll do to your head?”
Still softly radiant but now also as powerless as a ghost, the astonished storyteller said, “Shit.”
“Pulverize your skull, take your fat head right off your neck, is what it’ll do,” said the new arrival. “It’s a doorbuster. Now toss your gun in the sand in front of Joe.”
The storyteller hesitated.
“Now.”
Managing to surrender with arrogance, the storyteller threw the gun as if disdaining it, and the weapon thudded into the sand at Joe’s feet.
The savior with the.44 said, “Pick it up, Joe.”
As Joe retrieved the pistol, he saw the new arrival use the Desert Eagle as a club. The storyteller dropped to his knees, then to his hands and knees, but did not go all the way out until struck with the pistol a second time, whereupon he plowed the sand with his face, planting his nose like a tuber. The stranger with the.44—a black man dressed entirely in black — stooped to turn the white-maned head gently to one side to ensure that the unconscious thug would not suffocate.
The agent with the knee-smashed face stopped cursing. Now that no witnesses of his own kind were able to hear, he sobbed miserably again.
The black man said, “Come on, Joe.”
More impressed than ever with Mahalia and her odd collection of amateurs, Joe said, “Where’s Rose?”
“This way. We’ve got her.”
With the disabled agent’s sobs purling eerily across the strand behind them, Joe hurried with the black man north, in the direction that he and Rose had been heading when they were assaulted.
He almost stumbled over another unconscious man lying in the sand. This was evidently the first one who had rushed them, the one who had fired a gun.
Rose was on the beach but in the inky shadow of the bluff. Joe could barely see her in the murk, but she seemed to be hugging herself as though she were shivering and cold on this mild summer night.
He was half surprised by the wave of relief that washed through him at the sight of her, not because she was his only link to Nina but because he was genuinely glad that she was alive and safe. For all that she had frustrated and angered and sorely confused him, she was still special, for he recalled, as well, the kindness in her eyes when she had encountered him in the cemetery, the tenderness and pity. Even in the darkness, small as she was, she had an imposing presence, an aura of mystery but also of consequence and prodigious wisdom, probably the same power with which great generals and holy women alike elicited sacrifice from their followers. And here, now, on the shore of the night sea, it was almost possible to believe that she had walked out of the deeps to the west, having breathed water as easily as she now breathed air, come to land with the wonderful secrets of another realm.
With her was a tall man in dark clothes. He was little more than a spectral form — except for masses of curly blond hair that shone faintly like sinuous strands of phosphorate seaweed.
Joe said, “Rose, are you all right?”
“Just got… battered around a little,” she said in a voice taut with pain.
“I heard a shot,” he worried. He wanted to touch her, but he wasn’t sure that he should. Then he found himself with his arms around her, holding her.
She groaned in pain, and Joe started to let go of her, but she put one arm around him for a moment, embracing him to let him know that in spite of her injuries she was grateful for his expression of concern. “I’m fine, Joe. I’ll be okay.”
Shouting rose in the distance, from the bluff top beside the restaurant. And from the beach to the south, the disabled agent replied, calling feebly for help.
“Gotta get out of here,” said the blond guy. “They’re coming.”
“Who are you people?” Rose asked.
Surprised, Joe said, “Aren’t they Mahalia’s crew?”
“No,” Rose said. “Never saw them before.”
“I’m Mark,” said the man with the curly blond hair, “and he’s Joshua.”
The black man — Joshua — said something that sounded like: “We’re both in finna face.”
Rose said, “I’ll be damned.”
“Who, what? You’re in what?” Joe asked.
“It’s all right, Joe,” Rose said. “I’m surprised, but I probably shouldn’t be.”
Joshua said, “We believe we’re fighting on the same side, Dr. Tucker. Anyway, we have the same enemies.”
Out of the distance, at first as soft as the murmur of a heart, but then like the approaching hooves of a headless horseman’s steed, came the whump-whump-whump of helicopter rotors.