Haiku (21 page)

“That is a far superior plan to what I had envisioned,” I said. “My plan …” It was then I caught myself, and said, “I
should say, of course,
our
plan—were it not for Target, we never would have realized it was a chute we needed to begin with—is vastly improved. Can we obtain …?”

“Army surplus,” Ranger interrupted. “I know a place. One-man show. All he watches out for is the expensive stuff. Michael can take the guy off to one side—I’ll clue him what to say—and I’ll have what we need in a minute.”

“I can grab the man’s eye, too,” Lamont added. “Michael goes in, starts his rap. Then me, walking around, looking at stuff. Guess who’s gonna be under the evil eye? You can ghost right in then, bro.”

“Diversion. Roger that!” Ranger barked out.

“Brewster, what are your plans for this morning?”

“I was going to see Levi. But if—”

“No, that would be perfect,” I said. “Target, will you accompany Brewster while I attempt to make the arrangements for the use of a van? If you were to be with me, it would make those I must bargain with unwilling to negotiate.”

Target got up and then sat down next to Brewster. But something in his eyes as he regarded me caused me to amplify my last sentence. “It would not be
you
that would disturb these people, Target,” I said. “They are very rigid individuals, and any alteration of protocol would be … unsettling to them. It is not who I bring, it is that I would not be coming alone that they would deem a breach of manners. The meeting must be only between two.”

Nothing showed on Target’s face. I had never before asked him to accompany only one of us, knowing he feared the number two, which I had deliberately just emphasized. His mouth twitched, but no sound emerged.

“Let us all go, then,” I said. “We will meet behind Brewster’s library just before darkness falls. Are we agreed?”

I waited patiently. Hearing no response, I stood up and finally began the walk I had once believed I had started the day I left my old life behind.

“Pull up to the gate,” Levi told me. “Flash the lights on the van twice. Not high-low; on-off.”

“My gratitude—”

“It’s just a few hours more overtime that we can’t bill for,” Earl said, his voice conveying the message that such was not an infrequent occurrence for the ACT Team.

“Is he going to be all worked up?” Gloria asked me.

“I would think the opposite,” I told her. “Brewster will be—”

“Not Brewster,” she said. “Ranger.”

“The mission will be over.”

“Yours, maybe,” she said. “It doesn’t matter—I take him as he comes, and he never makes appointments, anyway.”

I showed the restaurant owner the message I had carefully drawn on the stiff piece of white cardboard he had provided.

“This is a most serious statement.”

“Hai.”

“It cannot be placed on the window glass. That would make it apparent that—”

“This sign states a personal grievance only,” I said.

He sat in silence, occasionally cradling a cup of hot tea between his palms. None had been offered to me—to do so would have been impolite.

“You ask so little,” he finally said.

“One man’s trash, another man’s treasure.”

He bowed.

“Tax collectors may posture before frightened store owners, but they are nothing but servants themselves,” I explained to Lamont. “They will have a specific route they are expected to cover. So they will come tonight. We cannot be certain of the time, but it will be after dark.”

Lamont touched his knee with a length of rebar he had obtained—one end was wrapped in several layers of black tape. “Be easier to just pop them,” he said. “Quicker, too. Too bad you threw away that pimp’s piece, Ho.”

“A bullet’s path cannot be predicted. Nor can its consequences. I have seen men shot and continue on. I have seen bullets pass
through
men, and the bullets themselves continue on.”

“You learned that in war, right?”

“Yes.”

“I been to war, too, Ho. Let me tell you something about hitting a man in the head with a tire iron. Some, they get knocked out. Some, they don’t hardly notice. And some, they get dead.”

“We do not intend to—”

“Look, bro. You some kinda … yeah, I know,
not
a ninja, okay? But you got that … touch thing. Not me. I start whaling on some motherfucker with this, you never know how it’s gonna turn out.”

“I accept this,” I said, watching surprise flit across Lamont’s face. “There is yet another reason we could not use that weapon you took from the pimp. Bullets can be extracted, not only from a corpse, but from the living. Nor could we use it to threaten—you yourself said that this was not a weapon which would command respect on sight.”

“So we want them to think it was … like, ghosts, right? Hit and run.”

“That’s the way it’s
supposed
to be,” Ranger said.

We both turned to look at him.

“See you at Brewster’s,” Ranger said. And then he was gone.

The two Chinese youths walked past Lamont and I as if we were crumpled pieces of paper on a dirty street. They were laughing between themselves when Lamont whipped his striking instrument at the knee of the one closest to us. Before that one had fallen, I was behind the other. It was over in seconds.

As Lamont and I moved off, the night air was ripped by a vampire’s scream. Ranger descended upon the fallen youths, his matte black knife stabbing as methodically as a piston, over and over. Pedestrians began to scream. Ranger suddenly stopped, scanned the area, and fled in the opposite direction from the one Lamont and I had taken.

“Crazy motherfuc—”

“Not now,” I said to Lamont.

As police sirens sounded, we turned the corner and made our way down behind the row of eating establishments. The delivery van was waiting, “Kabuki” emblazoned on its closed sides. The key was in the ignition.

As Lamont drove off, I prayed that Ranger’s orgy of violence had not destroyed the sign I had placed so carefully on the bodies.

Behind Brewster’s library, Michael was holding the bottom of a length of cargo netting. Lamont expertly maneuvered the van into place. Michael and Target each tied an end of the netting around the rear axle, then threw open the back doors.

Books began to flow.

Lamont, Target, and I loaded them into the van.

As the load increased, Target ran off. Michael took his place beside me. Lamont moved back behind the wheel.

A sharp
“Pssst!”
broke the silence. Michael did not hear it. But Michael had not been listening for it as I had. Perhaps some part of me even expected it.

Lamont’s barely audible warning touched my center, transporting me back to when I first became a creature of dark nights spent in even darker alleys. My senses opened, guiding me to my left. I shifted position without moving, knowing that to alarm Michael could be fatal to our mission.

A police car stood at the mouth of the alley through which
we had entered. It was not moving. As I watched, the window closest to us slid down.

Data was being collected.

Data from which decisions would be made.

If the stream of books resumed with the police car still in place, the new data would become the decision.

Lamont had disabled the overhead light that turned on whenever the van’s doors were opened, and greased the hinges and locks so heavily that they opened without a sound. His warning was also a message—Lamont had chosen to stand his ground.

Michael was too fragile to make such choices. I could not risk speaking, and if his own eyes detected the police car …

I put my hand on the back of Michael’s neck, as if to get his attention. As he turned toward me, smiling, I used my thumb and forefinger to disconnect his brain from his body. I gently lowered him into a welcoming pool of shadow.

I then asked the night for permission to enter, knowing it might be my last such request. When it was granted, I moved toward the police car.

When an adversary has the ability to inflict harm from a distance, that distance itself is an adversary. A rifle that is capable of delivering death at one hundred meters is useless if the target can place himself between the tip of its barrel and the marksman holding it.

That is the essence of fear. Efforts to avoid it only magnify
its power—fear is an enemy that can be killed only at close range.

Fear must always be acknowledged, but never respected. Only when such a state is achieved may fear become an invited visitor.

The closest range of all is intimacy. The deeper the fear is embedded in one’s spirit, the more vulnerable it is.

As I closed the distance to the police car, I walled off everything outside the immediate task. If a single policeman were to walk down the alley, his flashlight would have far greater power than his pistol. He must be allowed to penetrate deeply enough into the darkness for me to disable him before the van was exposed, without alerting his partner. What was the range of his flashlight? Would his partner follow him into the dark … or would he use his radio to summon others?

If the police moved in, Lamont could vanish down the other end of the alley—but that would mean leaving the van in place. It could easily be traced, but the restaurant manager would quite truthfully deny any knowledge of its role in our book-transfer scheme. Without Lamont or Ranger present, the others were in no real danger. The books belonged to Brewster, and he was already “registered.” Target would be judged as insane on the spot.

But the plan was our heartbeat.

With that sudden understanding came the answer to my strategic dilemma. I moved much closer than I had originally planned. Close enough to hear the policemen talking in a jargon I did not fully understand.

“A nose like that, fucking asshole should be working K-9, am I right? He’d make those dogs look like amateurs.”

“Yeah. Only I got a better idea. How about if we put a leash on him and let him work the bomb squad?”

They both laughed, but there was an ugliness to their laughter that would not have comforted whoever they were talking about.

Just as I slithered out of the alley, a stream of expelled cigarette smoke from the opened window decoded their conversation. Apparently, another officer had complained about smoking in that particular car, and they had stopped so that they might enjoy their cigarettes in peace.

I moved to my left, walking in the opposite direction from the way the police car was facing. Once out of what I judged to be their visual range if they were using their mirrors, I crossed the street and worked my way toward them, until I was just across from the driver’s open window.

I drew all doubt deep into my belly, held it for a moment, then released it through my nose, narrowing my focus. If the door closest to the alley opened and one of the policemen got out, I would have to cut the communications link between the police car and their headquarters
before
following the other officer down the alley from behind.

Having no choice but one brings great comfort.

The policeman behind the wheel snapped his cigarette into the street. It sparked briefly as it hit. The driver’s window slid up as the police car pulled away.

Michael was still on the ground when I returned. I brought him back by reconnecting what I had temporarily blocked.

“What the …?”

“You fainted,” I whispered.

“I never—”

“It does not matter …” I began, just as what had earlier been a stream of books suddenly became a raging river. It was all the three of us could do to keep up, but either there were fewer books than Brewster had described or they took up less space than we had envisioned—only a few more minutes passed before the netting was empty.

Michael and I untied it, and watched as it was drawn back up into the building.

There was room in the back of the van for us all.

“Where’s Ranger?” Gloria asked me, wiping sweat from her face. All the books had been transferred to the ACT basement, and we were about to return the van.

“He never appeared,” I told her.

“Right” is all she said.

After that night, we never returned to the restaurant. Unlike the possibly mythical murder of a pimp who owned a white
Rolls-Royce, the newspaper had deemed the butchering of the two Chinese youths worthy of front-page coverage.

Weeks passed without a sign of Ranger. Michael, in particular, seemed to mourn his disappearance. As if in tribute to his friend’s memory, he had entered some sort of “day program,” and was learning computer-programming skills.

Brewster visited his library regularly, nearly always accompanied by Target.

Lamont filled his notebook, working every day, even while we were fishing.

I stood, a part of the darkness. I watched as Earl stepped out of the ACT building and took a position on the sidewalk, arms folded across his broad chest, as if standing guard over the empty building behind him.

Target suddenly appeared. As mysteriously as he had among us the first time. He approached Earl, who clearly had been expecting him. They went inside, together.

Michael, Brewster … and now Target.

As I fought to banish the encroaching smugness from my spirit, I sensed a presence behind me. I did not turn, accepting whatever was to come.

“I nailed the ear to the door of their joint.” Ranger’s voice. “It was easy to find—they got their name right over the door. Shadow Riders, Lamont said they were. I figured they’d know what it meant, the ear.”

“What did it mean?” I asked, still not turning around.

“Some psycho Vietnam vet’s on the loose,” Ranger said, his clipped words as measured as a fire-walker’s steps. “Probably can’t tell one gook from another. Maniac like that’s running around, you don’t want to be going out for a stroll in the wrong neighborhood. Best stay close to home.”

“Hai.”

“That ear thing, I didn’t plan it, Ho. It didn’t come to me until the next morning, when I woke up behind a Dumpster. It was in my pocket. That’s when I figured it out.”