She let go the strip of metal and it stood up straight, his chest making a perfect Christmas tree stand for what looked like a post-holiday disaster. She bent down and took the fat guy’s arm, which still held the gun he was too panicked to use, and bent his elbow back towards him. That would have hurt enough, but then she wrapped her hand around his and made him fire six rounds, point blank, into his own chest.
I flinched with each pop of the gun. I could feel the heat from the car part which had caught the skinny guy’s clothes on fire.
For the first time, she looked at me. She didn’t speak. I hadn’t fully accepted that she was real. What she did to those guys was real enough, but maybe I’d conjured them too. I wondered if every woman I saw from now on in life would have my face. They’d write medical journal articles about me, like the man who thought his wife was a hat.
The hate came off her hotter than the burning man in front of me. Not hate for me, hate for everything. I felt an odd kinship with her, whoever she was, and not only because she’d saved my life. And not only because my brain was tricking me into thinking we looked the same. There was an unspoken radio connection between us. The moment I felt it and realized what it was, I grew scared of it. The intensity of her anger. The unbridled rage came off her like the flames from the bomb. Then I realized, it was the flames from the bomb. Of course I felt heat, I was surrounded by it. I shook my head to clear the fog, but it did nothing.
Something popped on the car and a new bloom of flame lit the underside of the carport, bathing us both in a white-orange glow. The tiny explosion pushed enough air upward so the tenuous roof gave way and started to fall. I reached out a hand for her to help me up.
She turned her back and began walking away.
I forced my leg to obey and crouch-ran out of the rubble like a Cro-Magnon woman first leaving the cave. Behind me the cinder block and masonry carport collapsed. More cement dust rose, becoming an orange glowing ball in the firelight, as the fatter of my two would-be assassins was buried along with the rest of my car and my gun inside the glove box. Hey, at least it put the fire out on that guy’s hair.
I stumbled forward no more elegantly than the roof had come down. I willed myself to stand upright and I watched her march across the parking lot back to the building we stood outside.
Surely this was all a split second mind trick as I lay dying in the pile of bricks. The falling roof would have crushed me for good and I could stop living this purgatory nightmare and be done with it.
But my body still ached, the fire still burned and she still walked. And I knew exactly where she was going.
That’s gonna take some explaining.
TIME TO EXPLAIN
Any DEA agent worth a damn, meaning they’ve spent some time in the field and not an entire career chained to a desk, has someone in the world gunning for them. Unless you totally suck at your job, I guess. If you’ve put someone away or somehow stood between them and the bundles of cash on the far side of a drug deal, they want you dead.
I get it. Totally understand. If someone was extending a hand to me with, oh, say half a million dollars in it, and then some asshole comes along and snatches it away and tells me not only are they keeping the money but, by the way, I’m going to jail—yeah, I’d be pissed.
Those people are out there, with me in their sights, because I’m damn good at my job.
But that’s not why they wanted me dead that night.
Two years in the army to get my basics and then straight into the academy. I’d been thinking FBI all along but when I met with a DEA recruiter it sounded so much more, I don’t know, front lines I guess. This country’s got a drug problem in case you didn’t know. I’d never in a million years be downsized out of a job. Much more likely to catch a bullet than to retire at sixty-five.
Just the way I like it. (I’m my Daddy’s girl, what can I say?)
So I join at 22 and now it’s six years later and I’m what they call a rising star. An agent with promise. I’ll take it. Getting any kind of praise from your superiors around here is harder than castrating a bull with a butter knife. Did I mention I’m originally from Texas?
Also a given in this job: the pay is shit considering the work we do and you will be offered bribes, deals, kickbacks, payoffs and hush money.
So fine, I took some. Not at lot…at first.
Okay, I’ve done some things I’m not too proud of. My major benefactors are a pair of brothers. Calder and Rizzo. Twins, but they couldn’t be more different. They run a rather large offshoot of a Mexican cartel; Calder and Rizzo in charge of the North-of-the-border operations.
They’re well know in DEA circles and we can never catch them with anything firm enough to prosecute. So, tell me, am I the only one on the payroll? Are you stupid?
They got to me first they way they get to most of us. I went in on a bust, they got the upper hand and before they killed me they offered me a deal.
Before that they offered my partner a deal. Picture both of us strapped to chairs in an under construction hi-rise after hours. Cement floors, stacks of drywall waiting to be installed, sleeping table saws and nail-guns umbilically connected to hydraulic pumps. There we were in what was to be a corner office for some desk jockey middle manager who would never know underneath his industrial carpet were blood stains on his subfloor.
My partner’s name was Jimmy. Notice I said was.
It wasn’t Calder and Rizzo themselves offering up any deal. They never get their hands dirty. I’d be willing to bet they don’t even wipe their own asses the way they’re so paranoid about getting any stink on themselves. It’s two middle managers of a different stripe offering us the chance to save ourselves if we agree to go have a sit down with the two top dogs and see what we can trade for our lives.
Jimmy—team leader, twelve-year vet, Captain America in a Men’s Warehouse suit—says no. I end up with tiny bits of Jimmy on my jacket, a two hundred dollar leather bolero number I loved and made me look badass. Fuck what you’ve heard, sexism is alive and well in our government institutions. I can outshoot, outfight, outfuck and outwit ninety percent of the DEA agents with a dick. Of that ninety percent, a hundred percent think I can’t.
Minus one because of Jimmy.
So my fate is written up the arm of my jacket in flecks of blood and one nasty bit of skull with hair still attached. When they asked again, what was I supposed to do?
I had a meeting. It went well. Sort of like a job interview, sort of like a deal with the devil. Sign here and I’ll make you famous. More like, agree to fuck over your agency and we won’t kill you, but we will pay you more out of our pocket change than you can make in a year with your cute little alphabet job.
So I snitched. Little stuff. I hardly even felt bad at first.
I’d tip them to a raid here, a phone tap there. I’d conveniently lose a file or fingerprint records from time to time. They even threw me a bone or two and gave out a few quid pro quos in the form of guys they wanted to be rid of who I got to bust to keep my record up and who almost always died suddenly while awaiting arraignment.