It’s only about five steps around the corner to the alley and her momentum brings Cheng along without any hindrance. But as they turn into the alley, there’s Loke seated on the hood of her Mustang with Hannah’s Magnum in his hands, arms extended out from the line of his body, drawing down on them. Loke has taken at least one hit in his left thigh and his pants leg is saturated. The kid’s eyes look glassy and after a second his arms start to waver a bit. Hannah takes sight on him, center chest, but as she squeezes the trigger, Cheng bucks suddenly and brings his shoulder up into her shooting arm. Her bullet sails high and impacts off brick. She loses her balance, goes down on a knee. It happens in an instant: she tries to step around Cheng and resight the gun, but Loke opens his mouth, lets out a yell, and squeezes off rounds, a run of discharge, four shots. Four bullets from Hannah’s own Magnum. And she watches the old man knocked onto his back by the blast, his black gown spurting red, a hole exploding in his neck.
She jerks her head back toward Loke, swings her gun up as two more shots sound, but this time from behind her. The upper half of Loke’s head explodes, the body lifts and flies backward onto the car, then slides off the hood and crumbles downward.
Hannah turns to see Nabo, Iguaran’s son, still posed in a weird, profile shooter’s stance with his right arm fully extended and his hand gripping a customized sawed-off.
Behind him, where the alley empties back to the street, a half dozen pools of fire have erupted and the combined glow backlights the shooter. It takes a second for Hannah’s eyes to adjust and by the time she can get a bead on him, she knows there’s no need to. If he wanted to kill her she’d be dead already.
She watches him slowly lower the stub of a shotgun until it rests against his leg. He’s wearing a dark oilcloth raincoat and it gives him the look of some silent and foreign cowboy sucked out of his time frame, transported from the pampas to Bangkok Park for the sole purpose of a mass bloodletting.
Hannah tenses as Nabo reaches to his belt and pulls out a fat buck knife. He brings the knife to his mouth and opens out the blade with his teeth. Then he begins to walk down the alley, sawed-off still next to his leg. Hannah keeps her weapon up, ready to fire. But he moves past her and kneels down next to the half-headless body of Loke. He lifts the slack right arm by the wrist and for an instant Hannah thinks he’s actually feeling for a pulse. Then his intentions are vividly clear: he takes a grip on Loke’s dead hand, brings down the buck knife, and cleaves away the thumb. He puts the thumb in a pocket of his raincoat. The proof and the reward. The Park equivalent of the scalp. The ear of the bull.
As he wipes his blade on Loke’s pants, he stares at Hannah and from this new angle she can make out his features. He’s even younger than she’d thought and there’s almost a softness around his eyes.
“The Hyenas,” she says, and flinches at her own voice. “Are they all dead?”
He pauses for a second, and she thinks he’s unsure of whether or not he should speak with her. Then he gives a single nod and says, “Just about.”
She looks away from him, down to Cheng. She reaches out and pulls his head into her lap, can’t think of what more to do, and so simply covers the blackening hole in his neck with her hand.
Nabo stands up and angles himself away from Loke’s body. He says, “You’re free to go.”
Hannah sits still for a minute, continues to stare down at Cheng’s head, uses her free hand to fully close his eyes. Without looking up, she says, “The old man knew it was coming. He saw everything about to give way. A lifetime of work.”
Nabo walks to her and extends a hand to help her up. She ignores it.
She says, “Save your strength, boy. All fucking hell is about to break loose. Everybody splinters now. Everyone’s on their own. Every shithead with a gun or a bomb makes his move now—”
Nabo clears his throat, spits on the ground, and says, “Once Cortez left, war was inevitable—”
And Hannah cuts him off without raising her voice. “This isn’t war, dickhead. This is chaos. This is regression.”
Nabo reaches down, grabs her arm roughly, and pulls her to her feet. Cheng’s body rolls to the ground, lands facedown, displaying the gaps of his exit wounds. Hannah breaks the grip and gives Nabo a hard shove. He bounces back a step, lifts both his hands to shoulder height, lets a smile come over his face. In a low voice he says, “Easy, chica. I know who you are. Everything’s all right here.”
Hannah spits in his face, but he continues to smile. He brings a sleeve of his coat across his cheek and says, “You come down to the abattoir in a month. The Park will be back in order. Iguaran will put things right.”
Hannah shrugs out of her jacket and places it over Cheng’s head and back, covering up the wounds. She comes upright and says, “His people will want the body. You make sure it’s here for them.”
His smile fades and he swings his sawed-off up onto a shoulder. Hannah thinks he looks like some old cigarette advertisement, an image from a fading billboard. A static picture from some forgotten fable of the West.
She turns away from him and starts walking out of the alley, toward the smoky gleam of the street fires and the stench of gasoline and freshly slaughtered Hyenas.
42
Gabe takes Flynn’s keys and locks up the Anarchy Museum, then leads the way downstairs to Wireless. The place is in darkness. Ferrie and Most have gone home for the night. Gabe steers Flynn into a side booth, turns on a single blue-tinged light, grabs a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and two water glasses from the bar, plants a twenty in the register keys, and moves back to his friend.
The booth is a big wooden monster with a black, worndown gloss and what looks like fifty years’ worth of names and numbers carved into the table. Gabe pours some bourbon and watches Flynn work a small maroon penknife. Flynn goes about inscribing with the care of a diamond splitter. He’s hunched over the table, his face close, down near the wood, his free hand pressed flat for balance and his writing hand moving deliberately with steady pressure, the blade cutting in deeper than the average carving. The problem is, he’s too drunk for the task. The knife keeps slipping out of the working ridge. Gabe sees this as a little dangerous, but he knows that suggesting Flynn stop would only prod him to bear down more.
Gabe doesn’t know what Flynn is writing. He doesn’t want to ask. If Flynn wants to reveal the inscription on his own, then fine. Otherwise, Gabe will stay in the dark. He’s never seen Flynn drank before and it disturbs him more than he would have expected. He’s seen him a little relaxed, a little loose, making his way through a weekend Wireless crowd, buying rounds and tossing back a few himself. But in those instances there was always a feeling that Flynn was holding more control than he let on, that his conviviality was planned, something close to a method, a practiced technique for putting others at ease, for creating a clannish, bonded atmosphere.
Flynn lets the penknife fall from his hand as if he’s instantly grown bored. He sits back in the booth with a little too much force and his head bangs against wood. He doesn’t seem to notice. His eyes are fixed upward staring at the old tin ceiling. He goes a long time without blinking, then, when the eyes finally do close, they stay that way and he begins to talk.
“When I was in the Galilee Home. When I was a kid. Long goddamn time back, like, twenty-five years now, okay? Twenty-five years. Quarter century, right?”
“Long ta-ta-time,” Gabe says.