—

The corner coffee shop made for a good safe harbor.

I was relieved that Leary and I were the only customers. From our booth near the window, we gazed at the wet street outside. The rain had just let up. Passers-by cautiously closed their umbrellas. Eaves and awnings dripped. The occasional police car or fire truck screamed past on its way to the scene of the crime not five blocks away; I felt both invulnerable and hollow sitting there, watching them go by.

“Want something to put in that?” Leary said, very hushed, pointing at the untouched cup of coffee in front of me. He patted the left breast of his coat. I waved him off.

“One of us should have a few drops,” he said. I looked at him and saw those old guy eyes fixed on me.

“Be my guest,” I said.

“I don’t need it.”

I smirked and lifted my cup to my lips. My hand was shaking. Even though I managed a sip, the shaking irritated me. I decided not to try again and set the cup down.

Just ’cause we call a tail a leg doesn’t mean it is a leg.

My mind felt wrung dry. Anne-Marie had to die–I knew that, somehow. But why, after years of marriage, did I realize it only about an hour ago–when Leary used that bit about the five-legged dog on me? As soon as he said it, I knew what had to be done. My marriage didn’t matter anymore. It just dissolved, and all that was left was the job I had to do.

Leary said, “I know your probably a little confused.”

“Yes and no.”

“For what it’s worth,” he said, “I tried to get Command to pull you out before the final act. They wanted you in until the very end, though. I don’t know why. They’re the brains, I guess—they have their reasons. Far be it from us mortals to argue with their divine word. But I could have finished it myself…” His voice trailed off, and he waved away the rest of the sentence.

I rubbed my eyes, then stared at him. “Tell me something, Leary. Did I just dream the past few years? Happy marriage, overweight cat, apartment – all that shit?”

Leary shook his head. “No. It wasn’t a dream – at least, not the kind you’re thinking of.”

“What kind, then?”

“Look, maybe this isn’t the best time,” Leary said with a sigh. “You performed admirably, just like Command expected you to. You exposed Englethorpe’s identity, and we eliminated her. Mission accomplished. The rest can wait for debrief–”

“Damnit,” I said, slamming my fist on the table hard enough to make the coffee cups and spoons jump and clatter. I felt flushed and ready to wrap my hands around that thin neck of his. “Talk, asshole. Or someone else might get eliminated.”

Leary didn’t flinch. He threw a couple of glances around to see whether the waitress had noticed my outburst, then nodded slightly — not to me, but to himself. As if he were telling himself, OK, slight faux pas on my part there, lesson learned. At the same moment, he plucked a napkin out of the holder near his left hand and mopped up the small puddles of coffee I’d left on the table.

“Take it easy,” he said, his voice even more hushed than it had been. “I’ll tell you.”

I tapped a finger on the table and waited.

“You were selected special for this job, the Englethorpe angle,” Leary began, shifting in its seat. “You may not remember that right now, but your memory should start to come back soon. Anyway, Command was looking for someone with a specific psychological profile for the job. The shrinks ran tests and locked onto you. They said you were a rarity.”

“What do you mean, ‘a rarity’?”

Leary clasped his hands in front of him on the table “Honestly, I don’t remember all the psychological jargon they used. Over my head, you know? But the gist of it is that you have a chameleon-like ability to assume an undercover role. You’re so adept at it that you literally lose yourself in the role – you start to believe that your cover is your real life.”

As crazy as it sounded, I knew he wasn’t shitting me. I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear more, but I took a chance. “Go on,” I said.

“Command decided what type of personality they needed for the job: the sarcastic yet lovable slob with questionable self-esteem, the type who puts women on a pedestal,” Leary said. “That was Englethorpe’s type, and they trained you accordingly. The chances of your cover being blown were almost nil, because you have the ability to lose practically all memory of your undercover status. No slips of the tongue, no suspicious activity. Of course, the problem then becomes: How do we pull you out when the job is done?”

I stopped tapping my finger. “The five-legged dog bit,” I said.

“Right.” Leary allowed himself a cautious chuckle. “Honestly, champ, I didn’t know whether the phrase had worked. When you hung up on me, I panicked a little. Started formulating plans B and C, you know? But when I spotted you walking out of the building, I knew we were golden.”

I squeezed my eyes shut. Again, his words rang true. They just weren’t completely jelling in my mind yet.

“So the phrase–” I said. “How did I know it? Brainwashing? Some kind of hypnosis from this ‘Command’ you keep talking about?”

Leary shrugged. “For mere laymen like us, I guess words like ‘brainwashing’ or ‘hypnosis’ are good enough,” he said. “The shrinks at Command laugh at you if you use those words around them, though. As if those terms are way too simple to describe what they do. That’s all way above our access level, of course. Scary? Hell yes.”

I slumped in my seat and looked out the window again. An ambulance streaked by, sirens blaring. It took a minute or so before I could say it, but the words finally came.

“This is going to sound stupid, but I think … I really did love her.”

Leary nodded. “I don’t doubt it. Command locked onto her weakness. Despite all the stuff she was up to, the shrinks nailed her as someone who would trust a spouse in her life. Hard to imagine, considering everything she was up to. But they knew what she wanted in a guy, and they trained you accordingly. What I mean is, she probably really loved you, too.”

I sighed. “Is my name really even Mark Holloway?”

“Yes,” he said with a slight smile. “Someone with your talent doesn’t need an alias.”

“Is your name really Leary?”

“No.”

I lifted my coffee cup again, then thought of something and set it back down.

“There’s only one other thing I want to know, for the moment,” I said.

“Sure. What is it?”

“Are we the good guys in all this?”

Leary scratched his cheek and raised an eyebrow. “That’s always the question, isn’t it?”

I nodded and pointed at my coffee cup. “I think I’ll have a few drops of that stuff you’ve got in your pocket.”

I left the hotel in a state of flux. It was one of those hotels– a “motel” really– with a couple of buildings each two stories tall and surrounded by a concrete walkway all the way around on both floors. You know the type. It always seems to be cold when you’re staying at one of these places. Today it was both cold and rainy. Not as bad as it had been recently, but it had yet to let up completely.

I had a bit of time, so I ambled. Zipping my coat, I ambled down the hall, down the stairs, paused to buy a coke from the machine, and strolled out onto the sidewalk, staying under the overhang to keep from getting rained on. Enough of that crap, y’know? I planned to stay dry for a while.

Our room was in the second building, around the back. The front office was in the first building, around the other side, and I strolled over there like a guy with nowhere to be. As I sauntered up to the little piece of building with the linoleum counter, ringy-bell, last year’s calendar, and bored bored bored attendant, a car pulled into the entrance and under the carport. Standard black sedan, tinted windows, a couple years old. It stopped right in front of me, and I got in.

“Nice car.”

“It’s a rental.” said Jake Leary.

“Still.”

“Thanks.”

Leary pulled out from under the carport, and drove slowly around the back of the hotel to the second building. He pulled to a stop and handed me a little metal box, about the size of a deck of cards. We looked at the hotel, at the second floor, at the room where my wife had probably gone back to bed for a few more hours after a couple of hard days. I pulled out the antenna on one end of the box, pushed the red button on the center of one side of the little box, and we watched the building explode.

“Pretty.”

I handed the receiver back to Anne-Marie, who was still staring at me expectantly, and let out a huge sigh as I stared up at the popcorn ceiling. Leary was crazy if he thought I was getting back on this roller coaster for another ride. I had my life. I had my girl. Nothing else really mattered.

If only she had felt the same way.

“Mark.”

I lowered my gaze and tried not to let on that I knew what was coming.

“So…detective who?”

I was tired of cat and mouse, too tired for any games as a matter of fact, so I went for the direct route. “It was Leary, the guy who was investigating your ‘abduction.’” I skipped the air quotes. That tells you how tired I was. But I did give appropriate emphasis to “abduction,” and she responded by again raising her eyebrows. “Says Jessica’s dangerous. Wants me to ditch you to meet up with him.”

“Me?” she puzzled convincingly.

“Yep. Apparently you are a tail posing as a leg.”

I expected a “what?” or some other sign that I was talking nonsense, but instead she seemed challenged…she said nothing for a second, and then her eyes narrowed, and then all I got for my trouble was a weak “huh?”

She was calculating. The last thing I wanted right then was more drama, but it was too obvious to ignore. I wanted the two of us to walk off into the sunset, and here she was acting like a teenager who’d been caught under the bleechers.

“Nothing,” I replied, trying to shake it off. She seemed relieved. She leaned in and slid her hand up my thigh. This game again. I felt an excitement in my loins. Yes, I mean “loins,” not “in my pants” or anything suave like that, because there was something really Samson and Delilah about this, and I suddenly recalled the emptiness in my gut when I woke up without her. I stopped her hand and reached for my jacket.

“Um…raincheck, okay? I really do need to get to work today. Deadlines, you know.”

And I kissed her. It was sweet. It was soft. And it felt like our last.

“Anyway, what else did he say, Mark? Jesus, you shouldn’t have used that phone.”

“Why not?”

She opened her mouth, but apparently the question was so idiotic that she couldn’t figure out how to answer it. She just shook her head in tiny little turns and flapped her arms a couple of times. It was as though I’d asked what babies were made of, or why feet have legs attached.

I didn’t wait long. “Relax, it was a short conversation, all about how you have “obligations” and “responsibilities” to consider.”

And yes, I did make little quotation marks with my fingers when I said obligations and responsibilities.

“Which brings me to my many questions. I mean, I believe every word you’ve told me” – and I really did – “but I’m just still confused about a lot of this stuff, and I need to be not confused. And- CRAP. I’m supposed to be at work in about an hour and a half.”

Through a small smile, she said, “that’s obviously not going to happen.”

“Ok. So let’s get comfortable and I’ll ask my seventeen thousand questions, then we can figure out where to go from here. I mean, first of all, I’d like to know whether there’s going to be anyone shooting at me for the next short period of my life.”

“That’s not a question, Sweetie.”

But I pretty much wasn’t in that kind of a mood, if you know what I mean. Usually I’m game for a fun evening of wordplay, but really.

“Let’s just leave kidding aside for at least eight hours after I’ve faced machine-gun fire. Ok?”

She sat up in the bed and let her face get serious. And the words were serious, too. “I don’t know if the shooting is finished.”

Fuck. On the one hand, at least this didn’t sound like misdirection. But on the other, well, I mean, fuck. Couldn’t she have just said, “yeah, baby, sleep tight ’cause it’s all over now”?

Not that I would have believed her.

“Ok, well, we’ll get to that later, I guess.” And then, counting on my fingers, I rushed through the list.

“One, what was actually in the cat food bag and how long was it there?”

Short breath

“Two, right, as I just mentioned, what “obligations” and “responsibilities” was the cigar-chomping boss-man on the other end of the cell phone talking about?”

Quotation marks again. I’m addicted.

Short breath.

“And three, while we’re on the subject of what people are talking about, what was Holly talking about when she left that message about saving the world, or whatever?”

Deep breath. And a matching one from Anne-Marie.

“Oh, yeah!” I almost yelled, making her jump a little, “and what happened at Lipshot Way? And you’ve got a gun?”

The numbered list had broken down a bit, and I’m sure there were more things I was wondering, but I wasn’t exactly thinking straight. I’d say that I was thinking pretty damn curvy at the moment.

Anne-Marie opened her mouth about half an inch and the phone rang. In another frame of mind, I might have joked that the sound actually came from her, since it coincided so perfectly with her lips parting.

Instead, I just sat there and looked dumbly at her while she reached for the phone. She said hello, nodded, and held the receiver out to me. I looked at her incredulously. What is it with the 7:30 am phone calls? She shrugged and raised her eyebrows. Hell if she knows.

I picked up the extension on the desk near the recliner and Anne-Marie hung hers up.

“Hello.” I stated it as though I were answering a question.

“Holloway. It’s Detective Leary. How ya doin’.” Also answering a question. Two deadpan guys on a phone. Nothing to see here.

“On the shitty side, Detective. How’d you find me here?”

“Shut up,” he explained. “You didn’t return my call from yesterday, but I need you to listen to me very carefully, and I need you to do what I say. You hear me?”

I hung up. The thing is, I was getting sick of listening to people who were rude to me, or shot at me, or generally treated me badly when my wife turned out not to be kidnapped. I figured it was time to be rude right back. I enjoyed it, in fact, but almost immediately felt guilty and stupid. Rude, Leary was, but he was a cop, and he had never actually tried to hurt me.

Phone rang again before Anne-Marie could even start to ask me what was going on. I picked it up halfway through the first ring.

“We got disconnected,” I said. “That seems to happen when people tell me to shut up.”

“Pretty fucking please, Mr. fucking Holloway, listen to what I say or you’ll be fucking dead before you can think of a witty rejoinder.”

Holy shit. Leary said “witty rejoinder.” I may have underestimated the guy.

“The woman you mentioned, Holly Go-whats-her-name. She’s seriously bad news. I’m not even calling you from the office, you understand? I can’t even make this call from the office, because she’s tuned in? You understand?”

“Yeah, I understand.” I yawned. “Thanks for the call, Leary.”

“Hey. I’m not screwing around,” he said quietly. It was his quiet that got me. He really was just trying to help, of course, and maybe he realized that he was too quick to leave me to the wolves last time.

“She’s a friend of my wife’s,” I said, “I mean, she may be dangerous, but I don’t think she’s after me.”

“No, Holloway, I don’t think she’s after you, but she’s not too worried about protecting you, either, is she? How’s that rooftop helipad at your place? Pretty roomy?”

“I see your point.”

Once Anne-Marie had heard the word “detective,” she was no longer nonchalant about the phone call. She’d been making all manner of questioning gestures, and at the mention of “a friend of my wife’s,” she hoisted her eyebrows nice and high. In return, I guess I was supposed to deliver a facial expression that summed up the conversation, but I didn’t even try. I waved a vague hand at her as Leary spoke again.

“Listen, Holloway, I assume that you don’t want to wind up a dolphin in her tuna net, and I think I may be able to help you avoid it. But the first thing you need to do is separate yourself from your wife for a few hours. Do you think you can manage that?”

“Not really, no. We’re a little shaken up right now, you know? I think we need to stick together.”

Back to deadpan, he said, “I think she’ll be all right.”

“Leary, I’m not leaving my wife alone while I brush my teeth, let alone to roam around for a few hours. No way.”

Anne-Marie’s eyebrows hit the troposphere.

Leary sighed, then spoke. He sounded tired. “You know, when I was a kid, my dad asked me to tell him how many legs the dog had. I said four. Then Dad said, ‘let’s say we call the tail a leg. Then how many legs would he have?’”

He paused, and I rolled my eyes at Anne-Marie. Just what I need, homespun wisdom.

Leary continued. “I said that if we called the tail a leg, then that dog would have five legs. But Dad said no. He’d still just have four.

“‘Son,’ Dad said, ‘just ’cause we call a tail a leg doesn’t mean it is a leg.’”

“Uh huh. What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“It means be careful. I’ll be in touch.” And he hung up.

I peeked over the roof of the car just in time to see her lower her gun and take a wobbly step in my direction. Her face was dirty and streaked with tears. There was a lot of white showing in her eyes, and her mouth had formed into a gaping frown.

It looked like surprise. But what type, I couldn’t be sure. Was it the relieved kind of surprise? Or something else?

Anne-Marie took another shaky step, then a third — this one making her stumble — but her eyes remained fixed on me the whole time.

Something told me to stay put.

“Honey!” I yelled.

“Mark?” she said again, with another sob.

“Sweetheart, the gun,” I said, using the forced, calm tone of a hostage negotiator. “I need you to drop it. OK?”

—

Our familiar little hotel never felt so safe. It was our sanctuary, the first place we thought of going to escape the horror show and gather our wits.

I sat in the recliner, wrapped in a blanket I’d stolen from the bed, taking deep breaths. Anne-Marie lay curled up on the bed in her hotel-issue bathrobe, staring at me. She had had a shower, and her wet hair was wrapped up in a towel.

The way she looked at that moment — tired, scared, and unsure about the next step– sort of melted me, as wound up as I was. But this was no time to get soft. It was time to get some answers. I didn’t quite know where to begin. “What are you doing with a gun?” seemed like a decent starting point, though, so I went with that.

“It was Jessica’s idea,” Anne-Marie said, shaking her head and sighing. “I didn’t want to take it. But she forced it on me. She said I might need it.”

“Need it? For what?”

“She never said. ‘Trust me,’ that was all she said.”

I scratched my chin. “I didn’t think I could like Jessica any less than I already did. But now–”

“Don’t, Mark,” she said. “She’s … just doing her job.”

“Her job? What the hell?”

Anne-Marie stood up and went to the window. She ran her fingers over the drapes as she stared at the street outside.

“I don’t know exactly what she does,” she said. “Just that it’s government-related. She says she can’t tell me more than that.”

“And you believe her?” My head was already starting to hurt, and this seemed like just the beginning of all the headache-inducing stuff I was about to hear.

Anne-Marie turned and fixed me with the most serious look I could ever remember seeing on her face. “Yes, I do,” she said.

I shook my head and rubbed my eyes. Then I opened them. Nope, it wasn’t a dream. Damnit.

“OK, OK,” I said, waving my hands in front of my face. “Let me get this straight..”

But before I could think of a good way forward, she turned back to the window and said, “I’m doing all of this for her. As a personal favor.”

“Doing what, exactly?”

She turned from the window again, slowly walking across the room, back to the bed, and sitting down. Whatever was on her mind made her head hang down, like a losing boxer slouched in his corner, waiting for the next round’s bell. She toyed with the belt of her bathrobe and didn’t look at me.

“She popped up out of nowhere about six months ago,” Anne-Marie said. “I bumped into her at the grocery store. ‘Oh my god, what a coincidence!’ All that stuff. I hadn’t seen her in years, almost since college. But I don’t think it was a coincidence now. I think she’d been looking for me.”

“That sly bitch,” I said.

Anne-Marie ignored my outburst and kept talking. “So I met her for lunch a couple days later, and that’s when she told me she worked for the government. Some secret agency, intelligence or something. She was really vague. But even back in our school days, I knew that she’d been doing something hush-hush for the government.

“Anyway, she told me that her ‘people’ were watching a guy who lived in our apartment building. They said he was involved in something illegal. Again, no details. She said it was better that I didn’t know the details.”

“Howie?” I said. For the first time in this whole nightmare, something suddenly seemed to click into place in my tired, distraught brain. “They were watching that loser?”

“Yeah, that was my reaction, too” she said. “Jessica said all I had to do was be friendly to him, chat with him, listen to what he said. Then report everything he told me. She made it sound so easy.”

I shook my head. “Babe, how could you let yourself get involved in something like that?”

“Like I said, it was a favor to her. I owed her.”

“For what?”

Anne-Marie breathed a sigh again and slowly resumed her lying-down position on the bed. She brought her knees to her chest and hugged them, then closed her eyes as she spoke.

“Back in college, we weren’t good friends or anything,” she said. “She was a friend of a friend, that sort of thing. This was around the time when the stuff at home with Dad was getting bad. He was hitting Mom a couple times a week — belts, old curtain rods, beer bottles, stuff like that. Threatening to kill her. He was at the point where I remember thinking, ‘Shit, he might actually do it.’”

I nodded. She didn’t talk about those days with her family much, so whenever he did, I tried to keep my big mouth shut and listen.

“One day, Jessica and I were talking at school — just small talk, nothing important,” she went on. “And out of nowhere, I broke down crying, thinking about all the bullshit going on at home. It was like a flood. She sat me down and put an arm around me. She listened to me for, like, half an hour as I told her about it. I poured it all out to this person who was virtually a stranger.

“When I got to the part about Dad threatening to Mom, Jessica got really quiet. I could tell she was really thinking about it. Then she said, ‘I might be able to help you with that.’”

I could barely believe what I was hearing. The story was getting more and more eerie as it went along. “Help you?” I said. “How?”

“That’s exactly what I said. ‘How?’ And she told me she knew some people who might be able to — how did she put it? — ‘reason’ with Dad.”

“And you agreed?”

Anne-Marie shrugged. “I was desperate at that point. I’ve told you that much before. I was messed up myself, not wanting to call the cops and reveal the whole situation to the world. Not wanting Dad to go to jail, no matter how bad he was getting. I would have tried anything to avoid that. Major denial. I asked her if Dad would get hurt. She said no. So I told her, ‘OK.’”

“So what did she do?”

“That’s the thing,” she said. “I never found out. Jessica wouldn’t tell me. All I saw was the effect. From that point on, Dad never laid a hand on Mom again. He was still an abusive asshole — verbally, I mean. But even that wasn’t as bad as it was before Jessica got involved.”

My head was throbbing. “Holy …”

“Yeah, I know. Whatever she did, it worked. I asked her about it afterward, but she just said it was best I didn’t know. She wouldn’t tell me. I never found out.”

“That’s … insane.”

“Tell me about it,” Anne-Marie said, rising from the bed. “But what a favor, right? So when she came to me with this Howie thing, it sounded like such an easy way to pay her back. So I agreed.”

There was another little click in my brain. “So that’s why you were riding me to apologize to Howie the other morning. I was messing up Jessica’s little operation.”

“It was stupid,” she said. “You guys were both drunk at the party, and you called him ‘Ginger Kid’ or something like that, and he stormed out.”

Finally, my great offense had been revealed. “I called him that?” Despite all the gravity in the room at that moment — and despite Howie’s gory end — I couldn’t help but chuckle.

She shot me a classic Anne-Marie look of disapproval. “I was supposed to be keeping up a neighborly sort of friendship with him. Make him feel comfortable enough to tell me things. You were messing things up, as usual, dear.” She managed a weak smile. “Anyway, now you know.”

“Well, now I know part of the story,” I said. “I still have a few questions, though.” I stood up and started pacing. I started counting off each question using my fingers.

“Like the cat food bag that wasn’t holding cat food, for example. Like where you were this morning when things went all Jerry Bruckheimer at our apartment building. Like who you called on the that throwaway cell phone — the guy who called you Englethorpe. Like–”

“You … used that cell phone? Mark, I–”

“Englethorpe?” I repeated.

“Yeah, Englethorpe,” she said, sort of blushing. “That’s sort of my … codename, I guess you could call it.”

I sighed. Somehow, I knew she was going to say that.

It didn’t take me long to come to that decision. A second, maybe. Sometimes they come easy.

Grabbing the gun, I looked for feet. The guy I’d hit with the brick was wheezing a bit, but struggling to his knees. The other guy was helping him. Their jogging suits had these little logos on them that I couldn’t quite make out. They looked like targets. I aimed and squeezed. You’re supposed to squeeze, y’know.

*click*

Fucking safety. All that TV and I still forgot the fucking safety. How was that goon going to shoot me with the safety on? I struggled with the thing. It was tiny and black and had lots of protrusions, and how the hell anybody could tell which was the safety was a mystery. I pulled at a protusion and it moved with a satisfying clicky sound. I aimed and squeezed again.

*BRRRRRRAP*

AGH! Holy Jesus Mother of God that was loud. Note to self, do not ever fire a gun while huddled under a car, EVER. I didn’t remember the shots having any noise before, did they take their silencers off before coming after me down the alley? Christ. I didn’t even hit anything. Well, I did hit the broad side of the back of my apartment building. The goons were scrambling. I shook my head. Fuck it. Aimed and squeezed.

*BRRRRAP*

A shorter burst leapt out of the stubby muzzle, and when I pulled the trigger a third time it just clicked. An uzi’s clip holds 40 bullets, and the thing shoots 600 rounds a minute. I looked it up. No wonder I only got off two short bursts. But wonder of wonders, brick-to-the-chest goon was on the ground, writhing, as blood seeped from a big old hole in his jogging pants. Eat it! I thought, uncharitably, smiling through the squal of incipient tinnitus. Ok goon number 2, show your face.

He did, just then, by grabbing my foot and dragging me out from under the car, back into the rain. Would this storm never end? It was stinging my eyes as I peered up at him wondering if I was going to shit my pants. I couldn’t quite make out his face, but I clearly heard his voice as he aimed, and started to pull, not squeeze.

“That’s it, dick. I’ve had enough.”

Me too. I thought, and kicked him in the nuts, rolling to the side as best I could, knowing, just knowing I was going to get shot in the ass even if this worked perfectly.

I didn’t get shot in the ass, and I did dodge the *BRRRRRAP* of the goon’s uzi although it wasn’t by more than the outside molecule of my polyester/cotton blend sweatpants. Should’ve squeezed. After his *BRRRRRAP* the goon collapsed, groaning, on top of me. I kicked his gun away, and struggled to get him off. He was a bit of a fat bastard, for a goon in a jogging suit. Good for punching, and I wailed away as I pushed at his bulk. I got in a couple good shots too, one to his jaw that made an audible crack and knocked him right out.

That sort of thing doesn’t last for long, I hear, so with one last heave I rolled Donut Don over and away and scrambled to my feet, looking around and trying to figure out what the hell to do next. That turned out to be dive for cover, as shots rang out from the dark alleyway, accompanied by the frantic, beautiful, angry, hysterical voice of Anne-Marie. I guess not everyone had run away when they heard the shooting start.

“GOD DAMN MOTHERFUCKING SHIT COCK GOD DAMN FUCKING MOTHERFUCKER GOD DAMN”

She never was very good at swearing.

I crouched behind the car, or what there was of it, as it took a couple hits to the passenger window and a tire. Cars were having a bad time of it today, man. Goon #1 with the hole in his leg was scraping his way to cover, and Goon #2, Big Gulp Joe, was still unconscious. How about that! I didn’t know my own strength! My ego trip was cut short by a close call with a metal slug ricocheting off the roof of the car. How did she even fire at that angle? Weird.

“Anne-Marie! Stop! Anne-Marie!”

“FUCK FUCK FUCK MOTHERFUCK GOD DAMN FUCKING MOTHERFUCK”

She must not have heard me over the stream of her own invective, as another shot clanged into the rear bumper at an angle, scraping off part of a bumper sticker that used to read “My student is at the top of his class”, but with the violent revision said something a little perverse. Why would you put a bumper sticker on your sports car?

I started to wonder whether Anne-Marie had indeed heard me and was bent on my murder after all, when she gasped and let out a tiny “Omygod” and a sob.

“M-Mark?”

Cover, being a highly flexible term, in this case meant the curb-side of some little two-seater car about as big as your average lawn mower. I hunkered down low and tried to see the legs of the guy lacking the brick-sized hole in his chest.

I didn’t see the legs. Not at first. But I did see that little gun, recently dropped, wedged just behind the rear passenger-side wheel. Looking ready for action. At the same time, I realized that I was pressing low into the grating of a sewer drain, which was getting kinda flooded with the rainwater still sheeting down.

Could I get down into that sewer? I wasn’t sure that I couldn’t. Maybe I could.

And so I had a choice, or at least possibly I did, the ramifications of which still follow to me to this day: I could shimmy down that little sewer like a rat, and live to fight another day. Or I could try to grab that gun and show these assholes that even I have a breaking point.

Sometimes, not always, when in a crisis, the mind slows everything down. I’m not saying I had time to write up a Benjamin Franklin list of pros and cons, but I did have time to make a decision.

And what I decided was that rats don’t live to fight another day. They live to run away another day. And another, and another, until something finally kills them anyway. And that’s no kind of life at all. “Cowards die many times before their deaths.” So said Caesar (or Shakespeare’s version of him, anyway).

I was sick of dying.

This was all like some TV show I’d seen, too.

When two thugs come after you and you’re waiting for them around a corner, you always let the first one by and go for the second one, the laggard. I don’t know why. Maybe so that the guy who’s lagging doesn’t come up behind you. They never explain that in the movies. It’s just what smart guys do, they seem to imply.

It didn’t matter, though, because all of that TV and childhood ninja training suddenly went out the freakin’ window. As soon as I saw their shadows, I had a revelation about what an idiot I was being, trying to play tough guy again. I managed to bring up the hand holding the rebar, but it suddenly weighed a ton. To top it all off, the thugs both came out of the alley at the same time, as in side by side–there was no guy lagging behind. What do you do when that happens? All those years in front of the tube hadn’t taught me even that most basic lesson.

I brought the rebar down in spite of myself and caught the guy closest to me on the shoulder. The rebar vibrated and bounced off, flying out of my hand in the process. When he spun around, I saw that he was wearing a dark blue jogging suit. So was his partner. Jogging suits? I thought. Each guy had a hand inside his unzipped jacket. Both didn’t even seem to be breathing hard. The one I hit began to draw his hand from his jacket.

I panicked and heaved the brick at him. It wasn’t a good throw – more like playing hot potato than anything else. I don’t think he was expecting it, though, because I was sure he’d dodge it and maybe even laugh at me. Instead, the brick landed square on his chest at the exact moment we was drawing the gun (which seemed rather small and harmless; I guess I’d imagined something a lot more fearsome looking considering all the damage it had done). There was a sickening THUMP on impact. The gun left his hand as he crumpled to the ground, cursing.

Now, weaponless and still panicked, I still managed to think, OK, now for the other guy – he’s probably already got his gun out. I should probably dive for cover. Which I did.

One ringy-dingy. Two ringy dingies. Pick up, pick up.

“What now.”

It was a male voice. Rough. Husky. Kind of middle-age sounding. I pictured a kind of fat Louie DePalma type, but the kind that’s always busybusybusy and you’re bothering him as he chomps on a stogie, unshaven, unkempt. Basically an asshole, of course. I kept my speculation to myself, willing him to say something else. He obliged.

“If you’re calling to try to back out again… I don’t care what you feel, how long it’s been, who’s dead, who’s alive, if it’s raining snowing sleeting or if there’s a goddam tornado breathing down your neck. There are bigger things in the world than your little life, sweetheart, and you got responsibilities. You made promises. You have obligations. LIVE UP TO THEM. Hello? Englethorpe?”

Englethorpe? What the… ok, I had to stop saying that. I spoke up.

“Who the fuck is Englethorpe?”

*click*

Well, I hadn’t really expected an answer. But fuuuuuuuuck! I was getting pretty god damn fucking sick of all this fucking MYSTERY. I put the phone in my pocket and headed off after Anne-Marie. Anne-Marie Englethorpe? Nah.

I tried to head off after her anyway. I took two steps and something got caught between my feet and sent me sprawling on the wet concrete.

Turns out Howie actually saved my life, because just like in a cheesy movie, as I fell a series of loud THUNKs of various textures smacked against first the cab door, then the concrete by my head, the concrete by my hand, and finally one kind of wet SPLAT sort of thing.

It doesn’t take as long as you might think to figure it out when somebody is shooting at you, even if you can’t hear the gunshots. The first spray of concrete in your face, the sight of a new hole appearing in a burst of skull and hair above the left ear of the battered severed head you just tripped over, the screams of the cabbie who just got shot through the door of the cab you were walking by when you tripped. These are clues.

I stayed on the ground, natch, and scooted my ass under that cab, desperately hoping that another movie cliche wouldn’t come true and the cab turn into a fireball when it took some bullets in the gas tank. I saw on TV that that one’s particularly full of shit, but hey I just pulled off the old “Bend To Tie Your Shoe At The Precise Moment The Sniper Pulls The Trigger” trick so you never know.

Except this wasn’t really a sniper, I guess. Do snipers use machine guns? Sure I had dodged the first spray, somehow, my luck holding up, but even huddled under the cab I was pretty much a sitting duck if he figured out he could ricochet the bullets under the car. The poor cabbie was screaming bloody murder in the cab above me, until another spray of bullets came out of the darkness and ended his screaming with a sudden jerk and gurgle. They kept coming, those fucking bullets. Must be two shooters now, I thought. They hit the tires and the cab sank down on one side. I closed my eyes and crept further under the cab, intending to head out the other side and the entrance to my apartment building. The one that was supposedly on fire. OK, forget that idea, let’s aim for the alley. The entrance to the alley, completely out of the cover of the nice friendly cab conveniently keeping the mean old bullets from boring into my tender flesh.

Falling bodies and stuff tend to draw a crowd, but even though this accident scene was strangely unpopulated by passersby or my fellow tenants, the machine gun fire sent anybody standing around screaming into the night by that point. I wondered idly if that guard had ever called the paramedics. I looked over to where he had been standing. He wasn’t standing anymore. If the paramedics were on their way, they had a new patient.

There was a pause. I looked out from my hiding place and was startled by movement in the wheel-well by my head. Ibex peered out from his perch on top of the tire. He looked sleepy. Unaffected. Cool under pressure, my cat.

I couldn’t hear footsteps through the wind and the rain, couldn’t see anybody out there. Were they reloading? Had they gone away? What the hell should I do? Certainly not huddle under that cab waiting to be shot.

When I was 12, I went through a ninja phase. Totally obssessed, I made a ninja costume out of a black t-shirt, black shorts (it was summer), and a black ski mask. Mom wouldn’t let me buy any cool ninja gear, so I made my own nunchucks out of some dowel rods, nylon string, and this hand drill my dad had for some reason. I didn’t know how to use a power drill, plus Mom might have heard me using it. That would have been Bad.

I made throwing stars out of paper, a little origami thing some kid at school had brought to his classmates. For a while there, paper throwing stars were the bane of sixth grade. You’d fold paper into a throwing-star shape, then wrap it in masking tape, sometimes putting a penny on either side to increase the weight. You could make them big, small, whatever. They didn’t fly very straight, but if you got hit with one it really hurt, as Tom Waltman found out one day when he took one in the eye. Dude.

Our highly-developed senses of humor found it really amusing to loudly speculate, just out of his earshot but within hearing range of the Cool Gym Teacher who’d just chuckle and shake his head, that Mr. Peters was a die-hard Alpha Sigma Sigma man. But when the principal brought out his corporal punishment tool– his fraternity bat– the smiles died as fast as the nerve endings enflamed on our reddened little smartasses. That was the end of paper throwing stars in school.

But not at home. I had a large collection of throwing stars, of all sizes and with experimental techniques, none effective in the least. to try to make them fly straight. I loved those paper throwing stars. My Mom found my stash one day, pitched them into the trash, then gave Mr. Peters a run for his money with her own corporal punishment tool– the back of a wooden spoon. This was only the day after Mr. Peters had dealt with us. I swear, I literally didn’t sit for three days. I slept on my stomach, but wasn’t yet convinced of the folly of my ambition.

Part of my ninja quest involved learning the techniques and skills of the ninja. Mostly the stealth skills. Ninjas, so my sources informed me, were nearly invisible. They walked silently. They could be standing right next to you and you’d never know it until you took a poison dart in the… well, in the neck.

I worked on my ninja skills all summer. I did my silent ninja-walk everywhere I went, to the point where my mother threatened to give me the beating of my life if I didn’t “stop that weird goose-stepping you’re embarrassing me what are you John Cleese in black pajamas knock it OFF.” Whoever John Cleese was. I didn’t discover Monty Python until I was fifteen.

That threat, and the discovery of an entire stack of old Playboys in some boxes in the attic, pretty much ended the whole ninja thing. I didn’t really know what to do with the Playboys, but I knew I had to do something. Eventually, with some oh-so-casual, it’s-for-a-friend, hey-have-you-ever advice interrogated from Amy Fitzimmon’s older brother Bart, I figured it out. And then spread the word. And then got the back of the spoon again.

But huddled under that cab, under the judgemental scrutiny of my cat, terrified of feeling a sudden “sting” in my bicep or thigh (I read too many trashy novels), mysterious assailants out there in the darkness under cover of storm trying to fill me fulla lead, it wasn’t the magic of Playboy or the finely-honed powers of self abuse I developed over that Summer vacation that I called upon. It was the spirit of the Ninja. Japanese Warrior Assassin. It had been years, nearly twenty, and they were long-disused and rusty and never really there in the first place, but obviously ninja skills are like riding a bike. I could do this. It would work. I’d ninja my way to that alley and they wouldn’t even know I had escaped until they looked under the cab and were like “whaaaa? where’d he go? he’s like…. some kind of ninja!”

Ok, I wasn’t even fooling myself, but to be the part you gotta act the part. I nodded to Ibex, scrabbled out from under the cab and duck-walked ninja-style to the alley beside my apartment building feverishly sending out ninja-no-seeum vibes. I’m not here… I’m not here… I’m not here…

Of course my Dad and sisters had just been generously playing along all that Summer when I managed to sneak up on them or jump out at them from the depths of shadow to their great surprise, because I was so cute and ridiculous in my cobbled-together ninjawear. So it follows, obviously, that my Ninja Power of Invisibility was basically invisible to the dudes with the machine guns out there in the rain. And by invisible I mean they saw me right away.

Bullets came spattering all around me almost as soon as I emerged from the cover of the body of the cab. The duck-walking had worked though, letting me stay out of the open until I was almost in the alley. I didn’t straighten completely, but sort of dove and ran at the same time into the alley, fallling over again as bullets hit the walls, the ground, everywhere but me. Well, one did take a chunk out of my shoe. My good old, comfy Steve Madden shoe! Argh! Somebody was going to pay for that.

Those guys are terrible shots ran through my head for some reason as I got up again and ran down the alley. The idiots land a huge chopper on an unsturdy roof, then Howie doesn’t just shoot me when he has a chance, and now two guys can’t hit the broad side of a barn with what amounts to a firehose spurting bullets. This was not a finely-tuned organization staffed with highly skilled agents.

The alley opened out onto the sidewalk on the next block. I heard a shout behind me, and running. Finally, the shooters had some kind of physical presence. What now, what now…. I looked around. Do I run? Keep going, try to find Anne-Marie maybe at the hotel? I had the cell phone in my pocket, maybe I could trace its origin somehow. I could run somewhere else and hide out, then go back to the apartment building and see what was going on with the wreckage of the helicopter. I could go to the police again…

Or I could fight.

The next block was filled with construction equipment, work being done on a building near mine. Fucking jackhammers all day long on a Saturday. God. For a Long John Silver no less. Just what I need! I’m addicted to Long John Silver, but until then the nearest one had been about five miles of aggravating traffic away. Even had a helicopter not fallen through the roof of our apartment building, and a dude been cut in half and dropped on a cab out front, we probably would have had to move.

But my delicious-battered-seafood crisis would have to wait until I dealt with this here situation. Some worker had forgotten his hard hat and left it lying across two sawhorses. I put it on, smooshing it down on my head. Bit small but not too bad, it would stay on my head at least. I filled a hand with a brick, then spotted a three-foot long piece of rebar to fill the other. Putting my back to the wall next to the alley, I lay in wait. The old Run Down the Alley but Stop To Ambush The Pursuers trick.

If they hadn’t been so incompetent up to that point, I would have just kept running. But this whole squad seemed to be made of fuck-ups, and they had fucking fucked up my fucking life. Among other things, they shot me in the shoe. It wasn’t a new shoe, but I loved it and they don’t make them any more and now there was a big old rip it and water was getting in and where was my cat and where was my wife and who was my wife and I hadn’t had any coffee all day and ARRRRRRRRRRGH!

Enough was enough! I was scared, yeah, terrified even. But my overriding emotion right then was anger. Just pissed-off, cold fury. And I was going to fucking take it out on whoever came out of that fucking alley. I tilted my borrowed hard-hat down over my forehead, re-gripped my brick and length of steel, and waited as two sets of footsteps pelted down the alley. Two of ‘em, OK, like I thought. Good. This was going to be fun. A grim smile etched its way across my face.

Back to the hotel? It seemed logical. It was what I wanted to believe. I wanted to call after her, tell her I was okay. Have another reunion. Try once again to get back to life as usual together. But the memory of the stranger I’d seen before, the feeling of being fucked and then left alone on the couch, the coldness in her eyes as she pronounced my death to another, it left a bitter taste in my mouth.

From within the cab I heard groaning. He was alive, and he was going to tell me what I dared not ask Anne-Marie. I opened the door, and steadied him to keep him from flopping out onto the street. His eyes were closed. I looked around for a paramedic, thinking there must surely be someone on the scene by now…helicopter, fire, and all. No one but a lonely, shell-shocked security guard from the Jewelry store across the street.

I pushed open the driver’s eyelid with my thumb. How the hell was I supposed to know he understood me if I couldn’t see his eyes.

“Where’d you pick her up?” I asked insistently. “The girl…where’d you get her.”

He moaned again, but said nothing. The man was incoherent. I leaned across him, and retrieved a slip of paper. Lipshot Way. Just as I’d suspected. I yelled at the guard to call for help, and earned a “what am I…stupid?” look for my trouble. Then I headed for the alley.

I found a cell phone next to a puddle in the alley. I didn’t recognize the phone, though I knew it had been the one she’d been using. It took me a few minutes to figure out the menus, but I stumbled onto the call history log eventually. The only call listed was outbound. There was a number but no name, so this obviously wasn’t a contact fro her phone book.

I pushed the button to dial.