“Kill them all,” the woman said. “No witnesses.”
Three guns began firing.
Somehow, he would never be able to explain how, Farid ended up on his elbows behind the counter, crawling and whimpering as BANG BANG BANG BANGBANGBANG! The glass display case full of croissants and pre-made sandwiches shattered. People screamed. People yelled nonsense like, “Hey, what are you doing?” Tables were overturned. Smoke filled the air.
“Stop it, stop it!”
Steam was venting from the espresso machine through a bullet hole.
The woman, still with a cigarette in her mouth, was around the counter now and BANG! shot the cringing barista and BANG! fired at Farid and missed as he jumped up and ran, screaming into the stacks, grabbing at handfuls of books and slinging them over his shoulder.
BANG! and the bullet hit a thick political text and blew it apart in midair, making confetti of the pages.
The shots and screams from the café were dying down, and now there were sirens too late, way too late, as Farid tripped, fell against a table loaded with books, slipped to the floor, and saw himself staring up at the muzzle of a gun.
He said, “No!”
BANG!
His head jerked. Stabbing pain in his mouth.
Smoke drifted.
She was looking right at him, the muzzle no more than two feet away. Ash fell from her cigarette. He could see the way her finger tightened on the trigger. All slow motion now.
Snap.
Instantly the ETA agent reached for a new magazine, but Farid was up and scrambling, leaping, sobbing, tasting the blood that filled his mouth, not knowing what had happened just knowing: run. RUN!
The store had a second entrance, out on Nineteenth Street. He was on the street before he knew it, nearly ran into a passing taxi, raced north up the street and the taxi, amazingly, miraculously, thought he needed a ride, thought he was chasing it.
The cabdriver stopped.
Farid ripped open the door and collapsed into the seat. “Go! Just go!”
The driver looked skeptical until he heard the gunshot from behind. The driver had not survived the waves of war in Sudan just to die here in Washington, DC.
He floored it.
The cab sped away. It was then that Farid realized the bullet had gone in his mouth and out through his cheek. It had taken the top off a molar in the process, but he was alive.
Jessica gazed longingly out of the window at the city, Washington, DC, as she sat astride Bug Man and rubbed his narrow back with long, steady strokes.
The sun had gone down and painted the Washington monument orange. Then the rain came, and the landscape disappeared in gloom. It was depressing. Surely over there, somewhere, was a club, a night spot. Something.
It was right there, across the river. All that history. And probably shopping as well. Restaurants. Boutiques. And the White House and all that.
It was a curiously squat city, more like Brooklyn, where both Jessica and Bug Man—she knew him as Anthony—lived, than like Manhattan. It didn’t look to be such an important place.
“Can’t we go out tonight?” she asked. To ask the question she leaned down, flattening herself against him, and tickled the back of his neck with her lips.
“We can’t go out,” he muttered. “I’ve told you that about nine times.”
She pouted. He failed to notice.
“Couldn’t we at least go downstairs to one of the restaurants?” No answer.
She had known Anthony for much longer than she had loved him. At first he’d been nothing to her, just a boy two years her junior, not especially handsome, definitely not tough or rich or exciting.
But over a very short time she had come to first notice him, and then to like him, and then to want and need him almost desperately. She would do anything for him.
And yet he still wasn’t objectively attractive in any way.
It puzzled her sometimes. She puzzled herself sometimes. She still remembered what she had found attractive in other boys and men. She still found hard muscles—which Anthony lacked—and long muscular legs—which he also lacked—and a quick wit—ditto—to be the things that turned her on.
Yet Anthony—too short, too weak, too sullen—had a devastating effect on her. She worshipped him. What he asked for he got, and if he failed to ask, she gave it anyway.
Well, Jessica thought, life is a mystery, isn’t it?
“It’s boring here,” Jessica said, resuming the massage. He was always tense. But more so since yesterday. He was so tight, it was almost as if he worked out and had muscle tone.
“It’s a boring place,” he agreed.
“At least you get to go out,” she said.
“I go to work.”
“How long is this so-called temporary assignment? We had more fun in New York,” she said. She knew the answer, but he hadn’t told her to shut up, yet. When he did she would, of course, shut up. But he hadn’t said it yet, so she asked.
“Don’t know,” he said into the mattress.
“I can’t just stay in a hotel room forever,” she protested.
He reached back blindly, fumbling with one hand until he touched her thigh. “Hey, you’ve got me, right?”
“Mmm. Yes, I do.”
“Okay, then shut up.”
And she did.
But as she pressed her lips together she remembered a dream. She almost told him about it, but he had told her to shut up.
In the dream she had been somehow buried up to her neck. Just her head stuck up above the ground. She couldn’t move. She had wanted to put her hands to her head, had wanted to press her palms against the side of her head and squeeze, really hard. She didn’t know why.