From Cape Town with Love (46 page)

Paki pulled me out of the way of a bullet that singed my ear as it passed. When I stumbled, Paki kept me on my feet. When I didn't know which way to run, he steered me. I just held on to Nandi and kept quiet during the pain; and that took every drop of strength that remained to me.

Paki is the last person I want to credit for saving my life, or Nandi's. But he did.

The shooting stopped, replaced by cursing and fevered consultations. The voices fell farther and farther behind us. Paki kept me on my feet.

Still not dead.

I pulled my arm away from Paki and staggered a step on my own. Pain hammered me, but I stayed on my feet. “Northwest,” I whispered. “I parked a car. Through the fence.”

“Too far. There is a car in the barn,” Paki said. “A service road behind the vineyard.”

The barn seemed an impossible distance away, at least forty yards up the hill. Barely visible in the dark.

Headlights approached from our left, bigger and brighter with every heartbeat.

A voice behind us barked orders in angry Chinese. We were fucked in every language.

We crouched low. I took a painful step, avoiding the headlights. Stakes and plants churned beneath the truck's undercarriage as it bounced toward us. The headlights followed us.

A large flashlight switched on from the barn, as bright and final as gunfire at close range.

We were cut off. Life narrowed down to single breaths. The truck's roar was loud now.

I covered Nandi's eyes so she wouldn't see the monster truck, and she didn't fight me. She seemed to be falling asleep on my shoulder, lulled by the jouncing.

Excited calls approached behind us. The truck was close enough to show its white paint.

“We will die here!” Paki said.

I tried to stand, but stillness had stolen what remained of my strength. Nandi pressed herself against me. There was a strange peace to seeing what the end looked like, knowing I had done more than I had known was possible. Nothing left undone.

Fate trumps everything. Everything that begins must end. Even Nandi understood that. I wondered what all the struggle, all the fear and striving, had been about.

Flashlight beams bobbled through the vineyard, blinding me.

“‘
Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream . . .”
I sang for Nandi.

“I didn't know!” Paki whispered, talking to God. “She wasn't supposed to be harmed!”

Nandi's breathing slowed. She was near sleep. I wasn't far behind. We would sleep together. Both of us had earned our rest.

“‘Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily . . .'”

The truck's engine was a lion's roar.

“‘Life is but a dream . . .'”

Nandi lay on my shoulder, warm and quiet despite the noise. The grape leaves rustled around me, and it seemed I could see every vein, every imperfection, every budding grape. Each breath was a sip of wine. The moon and stars were glowing embers in a cloudless sky.

Beautiful. Perfect.

The winds came with a mighty beating fury, as if to carry us all into the sky. Light poured down, brilliant beyond daylight.

Until I saw the helicopters, I thought I had died.

THE VINEYARD SWARMED
with activity as the night got darker.

I recognized some of the alphabet soup on the windbreakers—FBI and ATF—but most of the men who had rescued me were in street clothes, without letters to announce them. I hadn't seen Nandi since a gleaming gold badge pulled her from my arms.

Nandi cried for too long after that, but she had been quiet for an hour. I hoped the helicopter had hurried her back home. I would have called Maitlin to tell her that Nandi was safe, but my cell phone was long gone. I'd watched a perp walk of fifteen people parade past, but it was hard to feel satisfied when the wheels of justice were rolling over me.

“I work for Sofia Maitlin!” I said, hoarse from trying to explain myself. The knife wounds were an agony, but pain was better than prison.

I was handcuffed to a gurney, so I didn't have a choice about being loaded into the ambulance. Maybe I was being arrested, but I wasn't sure. I didn't know who was taking me into custody, or where I was going. I thought I'd recognized a sunburned face—he'd been wearing a Hawaiian shirt the first time I saw him—but I was too disoriented to place him.

These are Marsha's people,
I thought. If so, the cavalry came with a price—but maybe that meant Marsha wasn't hurt. If I knew that, the rest might be easier to take.

I tried to make eye contact with the shaven-headed brother loading me into the ambulance, human to human. He looked more like a soldier
than a paramedic. “This was a rescue, man,” I explained calmly. “I tailed Paki here with a sister named Marsha Willis. I haven't seen her since I left her standing outside the kitchen door. I just want to know if she's all right.”

Marsha might have vanished after calling in the troops, or been injured before they arrived. She might be dying in the vineyard somewhere. I couldn't stand not knowing.

The medic shrugged with a curt shake of his head.
Tell it to somebody else, man.

And slammed the ambulance door.

All I know is that it wasn't Cedars-Sinai.

Tight-lipped doctors and nurses examined me—including X-rays—decided I didn't need surgery, gave me a blood transfusion, and patched me up. No one offered me painkillers, but I would have refused anyway. I wasn't sure my mind was sharp enough to keep me out of prison.

I didn't know how much time had passed, or if it was night or day. The vineyard seemed like a dream with a happy ending for Nandi, but a different one for me.

While the medical staff swabbed and stitched me like a NASCAR pit crew, I sat under the harsh fluorescent lights and remembered Marsha telling me that the deal I made to free Nandi might be prison. She'd told me in plain English.

So that's the next thing,
I thought, with no particular feeling. All I wanted was sleep.

If someone had offered me a bed, I might have signed my name to anything.

But I was far from sleepy. The pain, and the wondering, kept me wide awake.

After the doctors finished their work, I was brought to a conference room furnished with a small square table and a single iron chair. My hands were cuffed in front of me, which was hell on my bandaged wrist. I had been handcuffed for hours.

And sitting, period, wasn't fun. Considering.

The room was too cold, with no clock and a reflective picture window
that was obviously a two-way mirror. There was nowhere to lie down, so I tried to rest my head on the table. I learned pretty quickly that it was better to sit upright. I didn't try to pose for anyone. Despite my discomfort, I was glad for the quiet.

Maybe I slept. I'm not sure. I was alone in the room for at least two hours. Longer.

Three agents—two men and a woman—finally opened the door and came inside. I didn't expect good news, but I was glad to see them. If I was going to prison, I wanted to know.

They stood over me, one on either side, the third straight in front.

The man facing me had wild eyes and a beard that needed trimming. He definitely wasn't FBI. The second man looked Latino, gray-flecked hair cut stylishly, wearing a plain navy blue sweat suit. The woman, big boned and in her thirties, looked more officious in a schoolmarm's skirt without a wrinkle.

All of them were dressed to disappear in a crowd, unremarkable.

“You can call me R.J.,” the bearded man said. “We're gonna hang out for a while.”

“My name is Tennyson Hardwick,” I said, my mantra. “I work for Sofia Maitlin.”

R.J. held up his hand, but politely:
no need.
He slipped his hand into his pocket and pulled out handcuff keys. A practiced turn and my wrists were free. I hadn't realized how uncomfortable they were until they were gone.

R.J. went on: “This is Reiter, and this is Ramirez. The three R's.”

He smile was tame, but his eyes stayed wild.

I was tired, so my eyes might have been a little wild, too. I'd needed to take a piss for hours, but I didn't give them the satisfaction of asking. I didn't trust R.J. removing my handcuffs.

“I need to make a call,” I said.

R.J.'s smile widened, suddenly looking sincere. But he shook his head. “Don't think so.”

“You're saying I can't call my lawyer?” I said.

Still smiling, R.J. nodded slowly, as he would to a child. “Get that out of your system?”

“I don't talk without my lawyer.”

“Good thing that chair's comfortable,” R.J. said.

After two hours, the chair was far from comfortable, handcuffs or not. I needed to be in a bed, probably a hospital. I hurt.
Sonofabitch.
It was going to be a long night. Or day.

R.J. lit a cigarillo that smelled foul, far too close to my nose. “There's a dead man back there, Hardwick. And your fingerprints are all over that cellar.”

Too many fingerprints for denial. I gambled on the truth.

“A kidnapper,” I corrected him. “On his way to murder Nandi. He attacked me with a knife, so it was self-defense. I'd do it again.” The memory of Spider in the basement was hazy, as if I had watched it on a movie screen. In memory, I watched another man, a lethal man without hesitation or doubt. I'd waited my whole life to meet him.

“Whoa, whoa.” R.J. laughed, and the others chuckled. “He's still dead. Chill out. Chill out—get it? The ME said that the tissue damage to his face and eye looked like extreme cold. There was a liquid nitrogen container on the floor. Wonder if that had anything to do with it.”

“You're kidding,” Reiter said. She sounded impressed.

“Liquid nitro?” Ramirez said, peering down at me. “Classic.”

At any moment, they might all start slapping my back and inviting me out for whiskey shots. I wondered what was waiting at the end of the bullshit.

The room was gray with smoke. My throat wanted to cough, but I refused.

“We like you, Tennyson,” R.J. said. “We like you a
lot.”

The others agreed. Reiter patted my back firmly, an old buddy. The impact sent a bolt of pain through my right leg, already stretched in a painful position. My teeth gritted. I made no sound.

“There's just a couple of problems with your story,” R.J. went on, his voice sober. “Actually, they're pretty damn big problems. So we're gonna take some time and clarify.”

“Shouldn't take more than a few hours,” Ramirez said.

“A few days at most,” finished Reiter.

They said it like they were joking.

“The Marsha thing, for starters,” R.J. said. He consulted a file folder. “Marsha . . . ?”

“Marsha Willis.”

“Yeah, Marsha Yvonne Willis, Hollywood High School?” R.J. said.

“Yeah,” I said.

“She lives in Canyon Country. We just talked to her on the phone. Nice lady.” I didn't like where the tone of his voice was going. “The Marsha thing is bullshit, Tennyson. Marsha Willis didn't go with you to Paso on a covert op. She wasn't helping you rescue an abducted child. Tonight's soccer night.”

He gave me the folder.

A sharp color printout of a driver's license photo of a woman named Marsha Willis Henderson stared up at me. The years had filled out her cheeks, but her nose was exactly as I'd remembered from
A Raisin in the Sun.
I didn't have to look at the rest in the file, although I saw a headline in a story where she was named her school's teacher of the year.

The woman I had known as Marsha shared her complexion and height, enough to be her sister, but it wasn't her. I knew right away.
Shit.
I hadn't checked her out because I'd thought I knew who she was. Since
I'd
proposed the name to
her,
I'd never been suspicious.

I could have been pissed off, or sad, but I still had a little of that odd sensation of floating outside myself. I tried, but I couldn't feel anything.

“She played me,” I said. “She lied.”

“Someone's lying,” Ramirez said. His eyes were sober, too.

“This is our entire conundrum,” R.J. said. “We talk to Marsha, who turns out to be a junior high school drama teacher of the year—and then we've got you. You, by the way, have broken a pretty alarming number of federal laws. I don't know how well you've been briefed, but you are in a shitload of trouble.”

“I haven't been briefed, actually,” I said.

“The FBI is writing a book on you as we speak,” R.J. said. “Usually that's the bad news. But in your case, that's the good news.”

I couldn't resist. “Then what's the bad news?”

“You seen that TV show . . . ? What's the name?” R.J. asked Ramirez and Reiter.

“What show?” Reiter said.

At first, I thought he was talking about my old series,
Homeland.
I'd played an FBI agent working with the Department of Homeland Security.

R.J. snapped his fingers.
“Without a Trace,”
he said. “It's about people who've disappeared, right? One day they're here, then
bam,
they're gone. That's a fascinating show.”

He was looking at me again, the wildness back in his eyes.

“You ever heard of the Patriot Act?” R.J. asked me.

“For fighting terrorists,” I said.

“For example,” R.J. said.

I suddenly realized how hungry I was. I wondered again if it was day or night.

“That's got nothing to do with me,” I said. I wanted to force him to say what he was hinting at. “I'm not a terrorist.”

“But you're an
interesting
guy,” R.J. said.

“Fascinating guy,” Ramirez agreed in a singsong voice.

R.J. went on. “And if we decide we want to talk to you for a while, get to know you better, we can keep you around as long as we need to. But nobody wants that,” R.J. said.