“Yes, in the New Testament, it’s cured,” I said.
“We could sure use a few miracles now,” Morton said.
The man has a gun in his car. So he’s the suspicious type to start with. But why would a suspicious person offer a stranger a ride during an infectious outbreak, and risk contagion? I bet Robert Morton’s fingerprints are on these cassettes.
I shrugged, and said, “You said it! The lepers appear before Jesus. Jesus touches them, and they’re cured! I wish we had something like that now.”
“He didn’t cure all the lepers,” Morton said. “Just the ones who deserved it.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, look at those windows in the cathedral. The men he cured were believers. It’s not like Jesus cured bad people. You had to have the right things in your heart.”
The friendly curiosity in the eyes was back.
I need to get some sleep, I thought, and said, “You’re right. I had not thought of it that way.”
“What else did the dean say?” he said.
The gun oil smell seemed stronger. We warn ourselves of danger in different ways. I wished I could remember more of the song that I’d heard in Somalia, and which also may have been sung in Nevada, where the outbreak had started. I couldn’t remember more. Anyway, I was a poor singer. I couldn’t carry a tune. But I recalled the cadence of the music, even if I could not summon specific notes. Four low notes followed by two high.
Hell, try it.
I looked out the window, as if bored or tired. I tried to reproduce the musical notes in my off-pitch voice.
“Mmmm, mmmm, mmmm, mmmm, MMMM MMMM!”
“That a song?” he asked.
“Was I humming? Sorry! My girlfriend says I do that all the time. Drives her crazy. I don’t realize I do it. The tune? Just something I heard recently. Catchy.”
“Heard? Heard where?”
“Overseas and out West,” I said, a bland enough answer if he didn’t know what I was talking about, but a threateningly specific one if he did.
“Overseas?”
“In Africa. I was stationed there.”
We were less than a mile from the hospital, crawling along on a deserted street in the dark. If he was going to try something, he needed to do it fast. When we reached the hospital, I’d try to get the guards to somehow detain him. Then we could question him, and if he was simply Good Samaritan Robert Morton, he’d be allowed to leave.
On 37th Street, we passed row townhouses and parked cars and bare trees and an empty block-sized park. He made a right turn onto a smaller side street. There was no reason to do this. The hospital lay dead ahead on the straightaway. But the side street was darker, and narrower, and more private.
Go for it, I thought.
I clicked out of my seat belt to give me more room to move. He didn’t seem to notice it, but if he was a professional, he’d noticed it all right.
“Who is the Sixth Prophet?” I said.
“Excuse me?” His voice was lower. “The sick what?”
“Not ‘sick’. Sixth. The Sixth Prophet.”
“What are you talking about… Hey! Those are the same kids who hit your car!”
My gaze flicked right and I caught his blur of speed. He was fast, but he’d moved a fraction of a second too soon. His left hand was up, drawing the pistol crosswise from the hiding space between door and seat, bringing it up between belly and steering wheel. It had never been in the glove compartment. He would have blown my face off if he’d waited that extra fraction of a second. But the fraction gave me a chance to react.
BOOM… BOOM…
I parried his wrist and the pistol fired twice. A Glock 9 sounds like a firecracker in open air, like a bomb when detonating inside a car. The decibel level of the shot is actually higher than many shotguns and rifles. There was a hot, searing pain along my jaw. A fraction of an inch closer… My eardrums seemed to cave in. I could barely hear except for firing. Or maybe I didn’t hear it, maybe I just felt shock waves.
The car was straying sideways as our hands rose and fell; parry, hit, parry, parry. Holes appeared in the windshield, fringed with white. The laminated glass didn’t shatter but each shot webbed the areas around the holes. The Honda bounced off a parked car and kept going. His foot was off the accelerator, but the car remained in gear.
BOOM…
An ejected shell bounced off my forehead.
I parried again.
His face seemed huge, inches away, all yellow teeth and onion breath. He was screaming something. I smelled urine. I could barely hear and then I heard one word, virus… A flash of headlights swept past and something big rumbled by. Our front grille bumped into a parked Smartcar. Its alarm went off. The Honda pushed the tiny vehicle against the curb as we fought.
BOOM…
Eddie and I had spent a week at Quantico once, taking an Israeli Krav Maga course, focused on combat in enclosed spaces. We’d fought with an instructor named Gilboa inside a Volkswagen Passat, in a broom closet, in a roach-filled crawl space, in a rocking cabin cruiser off Virginia in a storm.
Counterattack as quickly as possible. Neutralize and counterattack! Gilboa had screamed in his Israeli accent.
Who are you? I shouted in my head, but got no answer. The gun was not in his hand anymore. He must have dropped it. Or I’d knocked it away. This man was ten years younger than me, and very fast. He went for my eyes with a two-finger strike. He tried under the chin and bridge of nose hits with the heel of his palm. I went for his throat with my elbow. The back of my neck slammed the dashboard. The whole car smelled like a campfire now.
I thought, Bring him in to Burke!
Probably only a few seconds had gone by. An extra surge of adrenaline hit us as high beams raked the car, and somehow my side door was open, and as we tumbled out, locked together, a new voice, enraged, was screaming, “You hit my car. Fuck you! You rammed my car!”
Out of the corner of my eye I saw, across the small, shadowed lawn, the golden rectangle of an open front door and a woman standing there with a phone in her hand. BOOMBOOMclickclickclick. Robert Morton must have retrieved his gun and now it was empty. The car owner’s face — the guy above us — had exploded in red and he fell away. I could hear the woman in the doorway screaming. I was going for Robert Morton’s eye sockets. I was trying to blind him with my thumbs.
The police and Marines had extra patrols out around the hospital. I didn’t realize they’d arrived until the loud hailer warned us to stop fighting and stand up and put our hands in the air. Two pairs of headlights up the block had stopped, set low, so they were cop cars, not Humvees.
The police behind those cars would see two floodlit men at each other’s throats, a third on the ground, shot, a wife in a doorway screaming. I had no ID. It had been taken away. I had no weapon. Burke knew I was AWOL and had threatened to put me in Leavenworth. The police were taking suspects to holding areas, locking them up for days. No lawyers during the emergency, Galli had said. No phone calls. Normal arrest procedure on hold. Everyone making up process as they went along, not as in the unit’s already useless war games.
Robert Morton was getting up, standing. Was he giving up? No, he was running off, pointing back at me. Why didn’t the cops just shoot? I heard him shouting, “He tried to hijack me! Help! He has a gun!”
I tried to stand but my knees buckled. I groped and the gun was in my hand. It will have his fingerprints on it, I thought. Snow was falling upward suddenly. Little puffs blew into the air from the ground. The police had seen the gun and misinterpreted.