His left hand is dangling at his side. It grips a large white plastic microphone with an enormous red-foam head, a domed top like a clown’s nose. The microphone looks like a child’s toy or a forgotten prop from a cheap old movie farce, some slapstick where people are constantly colliding and falling down stairs.
The man’s right arm is bent and resting on Ronnie’s shoulder. His right hand grips a gun that’s pushed against Ronnie’s throat. She seems wet, her clothes dripping, saturated, as if she’d been caught far from shelter, in some expansive field, as the sky opened and a torrent of water poured down. But Flynn knows it’s not water. From ten, fifteen feet away, he can smell the fumes of gasoline.
Between them, in the center of the roof, there’s a full puddle of oily liquid, a minature shiny lake glinting slightly in the moonlight. Flynn looks up from the puddle to Ronnie, watches as the man chucks Ronnie under the chin with the gun barrel a few times. There’s a minute of silence except for the sound of wind cutting across the roof, broken by chimneys and a smokestack.
“You’re Speer,” Flynn shouts.
Speer gives an exaggerated nod. “Thanks for joining us, Mr. Flynn. We won’t be needing this anymore,” and he throws the white microphone off the roof.
“So take me,” Flynn says. “Let her go.”
Speer ignores the suggestion with a mock-amused turn of his head.
“Move out of the doorway,” Speer yells, and points with the gun to the edge of the roof.
Flynn keeps his eyes on Ronnie and moves toward the small parapet of brick and capstones.
Speer starts to poke around in his windbreaker pocket with his newly freed hand. Ronnie squirms a bit, gets jabbed in the neck with the gun barrel, and goes quiet again. Speer pivots and pushes Ronnie down to her knees. He’s holding her by a clump of her wet hair balled in his fist and he uses his grip to start pushing and prodding her toward the gas puddle. Ronnie starts to scream and Speer releases her hair and shoves her forward into the puddle. He plants a foot on the small of her back, stares across the roof to Flynn and pulls from his pocket a small silver cigarette lighter that he proceeds to hold up, out in the air, away from his body.
“Terrible about the midget. Or, I’m sorry, the dwarf. Browning was a dwarf, right? They’re so sensitive about those things. You all are. That semantic shit.”
Ronnie stares out at Flynn but doesn’t say a word.
“I hope I’ll be able to bring the news to the widow,” Speer says. “You know, once she’s out of that hospital, she’ll need some consoling. Don’t you think, Mr. Flynn?”
“What do you want me to do?” Flynn asks.
Speer seems to ignore him. He gives a tug on Ronnie’s hair and says, “Going to put an end to all this jamming nonsense today, Mr. Flynn.”
Ronnie’s head jerks with the movement of Speer’s hand. He rolls her skull in a slow circle, manipulating her like a puppet and seemingly enjoying the action to the point where Flynn can see him biting off a huge grin.
“You know how we’re going to do that, Mr. Flynn? Same way you kill a snake. You cut off the head. You separate the head from the body, that snake is dead. I know. I’ve killed a good many snakes, Mr. Flynn. How ’bout you, now? You ever kill a snake, Mr. Flynn?”
“You want this to be a one-sided conversation, son? That’s not like you, is it? You’re known for your way with words, aren’t you there, son?”
Speer’s voice has taken on this strange southern accent, almost a bad Lyndon Johnson imitation. He goes on without waiting for an answer. “I want to mention again what a beautiful office you got there, Mr. Flynn. I got a look at it the other day when the midget and I got together. Really something. I’d think a man like you, with your beautiful office and your beautiful suits and your beautiful girlfriend, I’d think you’d have enough to keep you busy.”
They stare at each other and for a long moment the only sound is the wind cutting across the rooftop.
“But I guess the fact is,” says Speer, the voice now void of any play, all edgy and horribly slow, “you’re just one more stupid little prick. One more insolent little fucker who thinks he can screw with the natural order of things. What a fucking ego you must have, Flynn. You little anarchist scumbag”—the voice in full yell now—“you filthy little subversive.” And now a scream. “You pathetic little son of a bitch, thinking you can fuck around with the law, with the natural order of things,” and he throws Ronnie down to the asphalt and plants a foot on her back.
“Ronnie,” Flynn yells, absolutely helpless, the back of his throat burning. “For Christ sake, let her go. She hasn’t done anything.”
Speer bites in on his bottom lip, snorts air through a clogged nose, brings his voice back down a bit.
“Hasn’t done anything? First of all, Mr. Flynn, she’s got a filthy goddamned mouth. And second, she’s got your stench all over her.”
“Ronnie,” Flynn says, the word detached from anything but panic.
“You know, Wallace and the others, your friend Hazel there and the rest, when you take a good look, they’re really pretty pathetic creatures. Look at those lives. You know what I’m saying. Even Wallace, who tried so damn hard to fit in and get with the program. I mean he couldn’t change his stature, could he? In the end he was always going to be this low-to-the-ground dwarf. And the rest of them barely even tried to be normal. They just cashed it in at the start. Lived for this goddamn place. But you, you’re not pathetic, Mr. Flynn. You’re not pitiable. No, sir. You’re despicable. There’s a huge difference. The reason you’re despicable is that it didn’t have to be this way for you. You made it this way. You chose this way. You weren’t a dwarf. You weren’t some goddamn punk woman. I’ll bet your little friend Wallace would have given anything to be like you. But there’s no way to ask him now.”
He stops for a second to rub a hand over the bristle of his skull. “You’re a real piece of work, Flynn. Classic smart-ass troublemaker. Guys like you”—there’s movement, some pressure is applied to Ronnie’s back and she yelps and squirms—“you’re not stupid. That’s never the trouble with assholes like you. You’re just deviant. You use your goddamn, God-given intelligence for aberrant behavior. And you always rope other people in.”
Speer flips the hinged cover of the lighter open with a toss and uses his thumb to strike up a flame. Flynn flinches badly and his heart punches inside his chest.
“And now it’s time to put things right. First you’re going to watch this filthy bitch burn, Flynn. And then I’m going to tear you in half.”
Then there’s gunfire. Two shots. One knocks Speer backward and Ronnie, screaming, starts to crawl, kicking out legs, pulling with her arms, hysterical noises barking from her throat. Flynn runs to her, goes to the ground, pulls her into him, touching her back and head, unsure if she’s hit.
Speer rolls on one side and fires toward the doorway. Flynn looks to see Hannah Shaw squatting down, her arms extended in a shooter’s stance, returning fire. Speer takes a hit in the chest, another in the neck. He heaves and rolls on his back and his arm jerks upward but falls back on top of himself. Blood starts to erupt from the neck wound. Flynn watches his mouth go into spasm, jerking open and closed but emitting no sound.
He turns to see Hannah running toward him, her gun still trained on Speer. She looks odd, like some younger version of a face Flynn used to know. She gives a quick look at him, turns her attention back to Speer, and brings the gun down again, sighting in on the head. Speer is making horrible gurgling sounds now, dying too slowly. Hannah walks forward, a slow arcing line, side steps. She goes in slowly, brings a knee down on Speer’s darkening chest, releases one hand from the gun grip, still pointing the gun to the forehead. She reaches in delicately to the throat, extends fingers looking for a sign of pulse, waits several beats, then rises up off the chest and pulls the gun from the dying hands.