Performance Anomalies (30 page)

“The safety’s off, so be careful.”

Bulat took it, and, for the first time, Cono saw the plodding man move swiftly.

16

Cono stepped into the blaze of the morning sun. He squinted against the light, keeping his gaze on the three figures atop the granite block. Xiao Li’s body became rigid as he marched into plain view on the ledge next to the crusher. She seemed to be making signals with one of her tied hands, but the harshness of the glare and the distance made them impossible to read. Zheng held his arm firmly around Xiao Li, and grabbed Dimira by the waist when he saw Cono emerge. His smile was a bright slash of white against the mottled brown backdrop of the mountainside.

Cono walked along the curving terrace of cut earth. The movement helped clear his mind. Zheng wanted Cono. He wanted him alive, to have the pleasure of killing him up close. Before the execution, he lusted for another chance to prove his supremacy, both to himself and to his assistants, who would propagate the story of the revenge Zheng had exacted on the insulting stranger. Cono imagined the unbecoming stories that had been seeded through the whispers of the two thugs who had been at the bank, before they were condemned to the lake by Zheng, and he understood that he was Zheng’s only ticket to self-rehabilitation.

Xiao Li and Dimira
. For Zheng, they were just honey for the flytrap. Once he had Cono, he would extinguish them no matter what. The only question was how.

Cono saw Zheng slap Xiao Li on the face. She was struggling, trying to pull the gag out of her mouth. Dimira was tugging at the rope around her neck, as if she couldn’t breathe. Cono started running, planting his feet in the old grooves left by heavy machinery. Rounding the wide curve of the quarry pit, he looked up and saw the fury in Zheng’s eyes as he tried to restrain Xiao Li. Cono stopped. He was about fifty yards away and well below them. His gaze rested on the woman who had sung with such carefree abandon when they’d first met. Xiao Li stopped struggling and stood straight. She looked toward Cono, then, without moving her head, looked down at her hands. With her right index finger she marked her thigh in Chinese characters; Zheng, standing slightly behind her, did not see the signal. Xiao Li’s finger was moving quickly, but Cono’s eyes tracked it in millimeter steps.
Bomb on me. Bomb on me.

Cono felt his heart contract in three powerful, anguished strokes.
Zheng wants me to watch her die
. Zheng jerked his head, and a rifle barrel on the slope above their perch caught the light with an eel-like gleam. There was a loud smacking and thudding sound, and another. Two clouds of dust rose a few inches in front of Cono’s toes.

“Don’t stop so far away,” Zheng barked. “I’ll strain my voice.”

Cono advanced at a quick pace. With each step along the curving ledge, Xiao Li, on the far side of Zheng, became more occluded by the arcing top of the great specimen of granite. Zheng had his arms around the necks of both women, who stood rigidly.

Cono stopped again. Looking up, he could see most of Dimira, the top half of Zheng, and Xiao Li’s head.

“Master Zheng,” Cono shouted, loud enough to be sure the rifleman also heard him, “I am your servant. I give myself up to you. I’m sure you and your comrades don’t want to harm innocent women, one of whom is of your own glorious race. Let them go, and I’ll come up on the rope.”

“Hahaha!” Zheng swayed exuberantly on his roost, his arms locked on the two women. He kissed each of them on the head and laughed again—a bounding, histrionic laugh that filled the crater and echoed off its walls of cleaved stone.

Zheng’s face turned downward to stare directly at Cono. The pearly teeth had disappeared behind taut lips.

“Innocent?
Who
is innocent?”

Zheng swung his arms forward, pushing both women onto the downward slant of the granite. Xiao Li and Dimira fell until the ropes tensed, stopping their bodies only three yards from Zheng. They were still on the hump of the rounded block, where the surface prevented gravity from taking them into the freefall of a lynching. Clutching the nooses with their bound hands, Xiao Li and Dimira were halfway to being hanged. Their attempts to scream were stifled by the choking.

“Grab onto the rope, my dear Cono.” Zheng’s voice was half-growl, half-command. “We’ll pull you up at the same time we pull the women to safety. Have you heard of linked destinies?” Zheng shrieked with laughter.

“I’ll take the rope,” Cono shouted back. He ran to the base of the granite block where the rope was slung. In this position, shielded by the arc of granite, Zheng couldn’t see him. Cono looped the rope around his chest and tugged. “Okay, pull me up!” He could just make out the sounds of strangulation above him.

“Pull me up!”

“Relax, my friend.” Zheng’s voice from above was riddled with happiness. “They have a little more time. Let’s enjoy it.”

Wedging himself into the vertical crease between the granite and the quarry wall, Cono withdrew the mobile phone from his pocket and called Bulat.

“Are you close?” Cono whispered.

“Close enough to throw a grenade at the sniper.”

Cono saw that the phone’s battery warning light was blinking. He quickly calculated the time it would take for Bulat’s grenade to do its job—two seconds to prime it and throw, then a four-to-five-second delay. An eternity.

“Time is now. Throw it.”

Cono began counting.
One
. He unwound the rope from his chest and took one of the pistols from his waistband.
Tw
o. He scanned the route around the broad base of the granite block to Xiao Li’s side, where he could get a better shot at her rope.
Three. Three? Was he misjudging the duration of a second?
He saw that there was no protection for a run to the other side; he would be fully exposed to the sniper. Both women must be nearing asphyxiation, but he would have to choose.
Three? Four?
Time was being distended in his mind, making him wholly uncertain of his count. He tried to link the counting to his pounding heartbeat, something real.
Four
. He knew he’d be able to see Dimira and immediately have a shot if he backed away from the wall, but the sniper was just above. In his mind he saw the nooses tightening on the women’s necks.
Where’s Bulat’s grenade?
Cono wondered if only two seconds had passed, or if twenty had gone by.
Five, maybe six.
He abandoned the count and jacked his legs three steps backward from the base of the granite, far enough to see Dimira’s limp body and the top of Zheng’s head, rotating in search of Cono. Xiao Li was hidden by the bulge of granite. Higher up, Cono caught an instantaneous glimpse of the sniper lining up his sights.

The blast from Bulat’s grenade clapped and echoed just as Cono braced the handgun and triggered twice. The rope behind Dimira’s neck became a braid of just a few filaments. It snapped under her weight.

Cono’s legs took control of him. He lunged to the base of the rock to break her fall. As he raised his arms and ducked his head, he heard the skidding sound of Dimira’s jeans. Then he felt the crush of her weight on the back of his neck. It spread over his shoulders and into his spine, and his legs gave way.

They lay in a shocked pile for a second. Cono pulled the rope off her neck and yanked the gag out of her mouth. Dimira was gasping, but she seemed unhurt by the fall. There was no time to cut the cord around her wrists.

“He put a bomb on her!”

Cono pulled the second pistol from the back of his waistband and handed it to Dimira. “Use it if you need to.”

Two gunshots rang from above. Cono edged away from the base of the block. He saw Zheng’s head and arm; Zheng was on his belly atop the bald rock, trying to shoot downward at a target he couldn’t see.

Cono sprinted around the broad base of the granite as one of Zheng’s bullets whizzed over his head. When he got to the far side of the block, he backed away from the wall for an instant. From this angle all he could were see Xiao Li’s legs. One of her feet, still in Asel’s pink sneaker, was slowly kicking, trying to find purchase on the rock surface. Cono saw Zheng, too, just next to her. He had crawled farther down the top slope of the rock, and was close to the point where it became nearly vertical. Zheng saw Cono and fired, but missed as Cono dove back toward the wall.

The phone in Cono’s pocket vibrated. Cono seized it.

“I’m close to the driver,” Bulat said. “He’s getting out. I take him now?”

Another shot from above puffed into the dirt a yard away from Cono’s feet.

“No. Wait! She’ll hang if the car rolls down …”

The phone went dead. Cono didn’t know if Bulat had heard.

Cono pivoted away from the wall, his gun raised, trying to get far enough from the rock to see Xiao Li and the rope around her neck. Zheng slammed his arm across Xiao Li’s legs and poised the pistol for a shot at Cono, who was now in full view. Xiao Li kicked, sending Zheng’s arm upward and his bullet into the air above Almaty.

Then Bulat’s second grenade smacked and boomed.

Xiao Li started to slide, jerkily at first, then more smoothly, toward the drop-off that would snap her neck.

Cono could see the rope now. He saw Xiao Li’s tied hands latch onto Zheng’s suit coat. He saw her contorted face and the wide unblinkingness of her beautiful eyes. Cono fired three times as fast as the trigger could move. The rope above Xiao Li’s head frayed a little more with each slicing bullet, but it stubbornly held her by the neck as her body became nearly vertical. Cono triggered three more times, but there were only two bullets left in the magazine. The last strands of the rope gave way; Xiao Li and Zheng accelerated in gravity’s grip. As they slid, Xiao Li was frantically trying to climb onto Zheng’s back to make his body absorb the fall. Zheng was trying to do the same, wrestling her with one arm as he plunged headfirst. They disappeared from Cono’s view behind the hump of granite.

Cono heard their bodies thudding in unison as he ran around the base of the boulder, then he saw them both struggling to get up. Xiao Li was nearest to him, but still more than ten yards away. One of her legs was broken, the cracked femur making a bulge in her running pants. Zheng had somersaulted and landed on his back.

Zheng still had the gun in his hand. He fired wildly several times at Cono from behind Xiao Li, nearly hitting her. He had something in his other hand. Xiao Li’s eyes passed from the thing in Zheng’s hand to Cono’s stare. She waved an arm to signal him to stay back and shook her still-gagged face to say no, her eyes magnified by her tears.

Cono saw Zheng’s thumb fumbling on the small box in his hand. Xiao Li crawled toward Zheng.

A shot rang out. Dimira was standing farther back on the ledge, beyond Xiao Li and Zheng, wobbling with fright, the gun in her tied hands. Zheng screamed in pain and coughed up blood. He raised his hand to his face, his eyes fixed on the little box. Xiao Li’s eyes were on the box too.

“No, Xiao Li!” Cono lunged toward her. “Come away! Dimira, shoot him again!”

Dimira raised the gun with her shaky hands.

Xiao Li saw there was no time for that. With her one good leg she sprang away from Cono’s approach and dove toward Zheng, her arms outstretched to try to grab the box.

A flash of white light exploded. Cono saw Xiao Li’s body separate at the waist as the shock wave lifted him and sent him flying backward. He kept looking as he flew. The part of Xiao Li that had been in the red sweater was flying too, breaking into smaller parts that rained into the expanse of the crater. The rest of her was smearing against the granite face.

Now all he could see was the sky, and instantly that disappeared too.

“Cono, please. Wake up.
Please
.” The string of words, and the sobs, were barely perceptible through the ringing in his ears. Cono tried to open his eyes, but they wouldn’t budge. The sobbing continued, louder now, and he felt a warm moisture on his cheeks. A hand wedged behind his head, lifting it off the stone he had struck; the shock of pain where a finger pressed the point of impact finally lifted his eyelids.

All was white for a few seconds. Then there was Dimira’s face. Round. The full cheeks. The wide, trembling lips. The dark, hollowed eyes. Red flecks everywhere.