Something close to half an hour later we abandoned the reeds at last and collapsed in exhaustion on a bare, muddy lump of exposed ground. The moon looked down with its usual magnificent unconcern as we coughed and spat out water and only the Highest knew what other muck, then spent several more minutes just trying to get air back into our lungs. At last I sat up and made a quick inventory. Wet shoes, wet pants, wet jacket. One gun with three bullets in the pipe and a few more that had stuck in my pockets. The rest had fallen out into the ooze during our escape. It took me long moments to make my cold, slippery fingers work well enough to hand-load these extras, but I now had half a dozen fifteen-dollar silver rounds in my gun (it would have been cheaper to throw bottles of Chivas Regal at them) no other weapons and no cellphone-mine had tumbled out of my pocket with the extra bullets. I turned to Sam. “Do you still have your phone?”
He spat. It didn’t make it off his chin. He finally rubbed it away with his muddy arm, which left him looking like a war-painted otter. “No. Fucking thing popped out somewhere along the parade route. My gun, too. You still have that plastic piece of shit you got from Orban?”
I showed him the Five-Seven.
“Well, that’s something, anyway,” he said. “I got nothing but a flashlight and a headache.”
“Then we’d better start walking. Which way?”
He climbed to his knees, then cautiously lifted himself enough to look around. Other than massive power pylons looming on either side of us and the dark wires that sagged between them like scratches across the face of the moon, there were no landmarks I recognized except the faint, dark outline of Shoreline Park looming out of the bay a short distance south of us. “We’re only a couple of miles from my place,” Sam said. “We can probably get there from here without being spotted, and I’ve got a fuckin’ armory hidden under the floorboards for just this kind of evening’s entertainment.”
“Go.” I didn’t have the energy to wait any longer. I knew if I didn’t get moving soon I’d forget how it all worked. I hadn’t been hit by any bullets, but I felt like someone had taken a piece of pipe to me and shifted a few things around in my torso and head pretty good. “Liked the gaff hook, by the way.”
“I guess the Ralston does fishing charters. Darn nice hotel.”
“Yeah. Well, they won’t be doing any for a while because we just sank both their boats.”
It was a long, slow trek by moonlight over the squelching ground and watery ruts, through pickleweed and salt grass and all kinds of other stuff that naturalists love but which is pure hell to wade through when your body’s covered in bloody scrapes. As we got closer to the end of the nature preserve, I could see a few fluorescents burning in an office complex that backed onto the slough we were currently following. This tiny hint of civilization cheered me, but there was no way I wanted to go near that much light until we were almost at Sam’s front door.
He finally led us over a little bridge that crossed the slough and into a tidy little park. The moonlight picked out picnic tables and a kiddie area with a slide and some swings. “Garcia Park,” Sam said. “We’re close-we won’t even have to go near a main road. There’s a cemetery on the far side of this, then it’s only a hop and a skip across the fields to my place.”
“Do you see me hopping or skipping?” I asked, tired and sore beyond belief, but his mention of the cemetery had reminded me of one of the odder things Fatback had told me about the real Reverend Habari he’d found, and that made me quiet again.
The park was a small one, and before too long we were laboriously climbing over the iron pickets that fenced the cemetery. “I remember this place,” I said as we made our way between the monuments. The graveyard had gone more than a little to seed-it looked like the last time anyone had mowed the grass might have been last fall, and the only flowers were plastic, fake as tinsel, even by moonlight. “You used to hang out here a lot,” I said. “I even came with you a couple of times.”
Sam was silent for a few steps. “Drinking days,” he said at last. “Yeah, I killed a few bottles out here. Helps a man keep things in perspective.”
“Cemeteries or empty bottles?”
“Both.”
I didn’t point out to my buddy that he wasn’t actually a man and hadn’t been one for some time, if ever-none of us earthbound angels likes being reminded. Instead, I was trying to recall exactly what Fatback had told me-southeast corner? As best as I could tell, that seemed to be where we were headed, but it was another reason to miss my phone and all my notes. “Hey, let me have the flashlight, will you?”
Sam gave me a strange look. “What the hell do you want it for? We’re trying to keep a low profile out here.”
“Just something I was thinking about. C’mon, we haven’t heard a whisper of those guys in an hour.”
He reluctantly handed it over. It was a small light and not likely to give us away, but I kept it pointed near the ground anyway, sliding the dim beam across the headstones as we made our way over the untended lawn, much of which was more dirt than grass, a few yellowing strands still holding onto the edges of the bald patches like columns of retreating troops.
“Bobby, the light…you’re worrying me.”
I started to respond but something had caught my eye. I cut left and began walking toward it. Sam called that I was going in the wrong direction, but I wasn’t listening.
He trotted after me. “Bobby? What the hell?”
“Hell is not the location I’m interested in right now.”
“What are you talking about?” he said, but he didn’t sound good. “What-?”
He didn’t get a chance to finish his question because the distant noise that had been building for the last few seconds was now too loud to ignore. “Helicopter!” he said in precisely the way Captain Hook would have said, “Crocodile!” I killed the light, and we both threw ourselves to the ground, huddling face down and hoping, I suppose, that we would look like loose boulders in the middle of the churchyard. The stick-in-the-spokes noise got louder until the thing seemed to be right above our heads. A light stabbed down from it and swept one way across the cemetery grounds, then the other, but it didn’t touch us. I know because I peeked. The helicopter continued on past, and I could see the beam reaching down here and there but farther away each time.
I got up when I couldn’t hear the chopper blades any more and turned the light back on, then found what had caught my eye. After I had been standing there looking at it for long moments without saying anything, Sam clambered to his feet and limped over to stand beside me. “What’s up, Bobby?” he asked, but he sounded like he knew. He sounded like the guy who says, “How long do I have, Doc?” when he already knows the answer is “Not long.”
I let the beam play up and down the headstone. There really wasn’t any need to say anything, or at least I didn’t think so. The words were old and weatherworn but still quite legible, even by the weak beam of Sam’s flashlight.
Moses Isaac Habari
Born January 14, 1928-Departed this earth May 20, 2004
Father, Brother, Pastor, Man of Peace
I turned and looked at Sam, but he just stared at the tombstone. “How did you know?” was all he said.
The sound was faint as a whisper, but because it came in the silence after Sam spoke-a silence in which a hundred different things I might say were swirling in my head-it was loud enough to startle. I turned just in time to see a half dozen figures loping toward us from about a hundred yards away across the cemetery.
Discussion time over.
We ran but we were already exhausted, wet, beaten, and bruised; before we had gone ten steps shots were whipcracking all around us. Our pursuers had lights on their guns this time, and every time I swerved at least a couple of them tracked me. I followed Sam, hoping he knew this place well enough to find us an escape route, or at least a place to make a stand, but although we crested a rise and saw we had almost reached the end of the cemetery, this part didn’t have an iron fence but a high memorial wall made of stone. It looked big and strong enough to stop anything short of a grenade launcher, but we were on the wrong side of it for a standoff. In fact it looked a lot more like the kind of place a firing squad takes you just before they offer you the cigarette.