19. Daniil
DANIIL
Ihad memorized every exit on that block for exactly this, and it still wasn't enough.
The gun is out of my waistband before their second round leaves the barrel.
I put two through the windshield on the driver's side, not to kill, only to teach the man behind it that he has badly misjudged the evening, and the glass goes to white powder and the car slews sideways at the curb.
It buys me half a second. I spend all of it on her.
I have Margot by the back of her sweater and I take her down behind the brick pier between the two windows, the one stretch of this whole storefront that will stop a bullet, because I stood on this sidewalk for eight months and learned precisely which parts of her shop were lying about their ability to keep her alive.
"Stay down. Do not lift your head." My voice has dropped into the flat working tone she has never once heard, and I feel her go rigid against me as she understands, all at once, that the quiet man who mends her locks has had another man folded up inside his coat the whole time.
"Daniil." Her voice climbs into something thin and airless. "Those men, they have…"
"I know what they have." I steal a look around the edge of the brick. "Stay against the stone, and do exactly what I say, in the order I say it. Can you manage that?"
"I write men who do this," she says, which is not a yes, and is somehow the bravest sentence anyone has handed me in years.
Two of them are out of the car now, and one stays behind the wheel, and the pair on foot move the way men move when someone has promised them a simple night, upright and unhurried, expecting a shopgirl and a soft man who carries poems from one language into another.
Nobody warned them about me. It is the last real edge I have, and I have spent a career making men regret being told a job would be easy.
So I give it to them all at once, before they can revise their picture of the evening.
I come off the brick low, on the side the nearest one has failed to cover, and I put him down in the doorway of the shuttered bakery, and he folds against the glass the way a tired man lowers himself into a chair, and he stays there.
The second is faster and better, and he punches a round into the brick a hand's width from my ear before I drive him behind a parked van and pin him there under the promise of the next one.
"Daniil." She has not left the brick, and her voice arrives small and fiercely level, the sound of a woman spending everything she owns to keep it that way. "There's blood on your sleeve."
"It is not mine." It is true, and it is the wrong thing to say, and it is the only length of sentence I can afford right now.
I do not tell her whose it is. She will do that arithmetic on her own soon enough, and I would spare her the extra second if sparing her seconds were still a thing I knew how to do.
My car waits where it has always waited, thirty feet up the block with its nose to the street, because a man who has spent his whole watch here swearing he would never need an escape mapped every inch of one anyway.
"The gray car, up the block, on your side," I tell her.
"When I move, you move with me. You do not stop for anything.
Not for me, not for your keys, not for the end of a sentence. "
"That's a great many conditions," she says, and she comes up onto legs I can see shaking from where I crouch, and she runs when I run.
We are almost to the car when the driver rounds the hood with a knife, because he has worked out that this close, in the dark, wedged between parked cars, a blade is a faster answer than a gun.
He is quick. I have been quicker for longer than he has been alive, and it is finished in the time it takes her to draw the breath she was saving for a scream and then decide not to spend it.
I will not describe it to her, tonight or ever.
She sees enough of it in the sodium light, the economy of it, the way my hands know a thing hers were never built to know, and I watch the last of the man she believed I was leave her eyes.
There is no time to mourn him. I open the passenger door and put her inside.
I am moving before her door has finished closing, and the block smears away behind us into brake light and broken glass. Luka is already in my ear, because Luka is always already there. "I have you," he says. "I've been shouting into this line since the first shot. Tell me she is alive."
"She is alive."
"And you?"
"Driving."
Headlights swell in the mirror before we reach the corner.
It is the second car, the one that sat on the alley, and its driver would very much like his night back.
"Left at the next street, not this one, the next," Luka says, reading a city off a map only he can see.
"There's construction on Ashland the maps haven't caught up to.
One lane, two barricades, no mercy in it. Give it to them."
The rear window lets go before I hear the shot, safety glass hailing across the back seat, and I put us through a red light and a seam in the cross traffic that has no business fitting a car and somehow fits this one.
"They are still with you," Luka says, which I already know.
Another round buries itself in the trunk with a flat, final sound.
I spend the next corner taking us out of their line, hard enough that the tires shriek their objection and Margot's shoulder finds the door.
Beside me, in the very middle of all of it, Margot drags her seatbelt across her chest and clicks it home. I risk one glance. She is white to the lips, both hands flat against the dash, and she has, at eighty miles an hour with a carful of men trying to end us, buckled her seatbelt.
"You didn't signal," she says.
"I beg your pardon?"
"Back there. You changed lanes twice, and you didn't use your blinker once.
" Her voice shakes so badly the words can hardly keep their shape, and she pushes them out anyway, because some cornered animal part of her has decided that the last thing left inside her control is traffic law.
"People are shooting at us, and you're driving like something that escaped a zoo, and I would simply like it entered into the record that you also did not signal. "
"Noted," I say, and I take the next corner at a speed that folds her into the door, and for one deranged second, underneath the fear, I want to laugh, because she is scolding me over a turn signal, and it is the most alive I have felt in all my years of the work of staying that way.
"He is gaining," Luka says, and the flat has come back into his voice, which is how I know it is bad.
"He drives like a man who wants to die tonight, and he may talk you into obliging him.
That is your one clean move. Do not miss it.
" I take a service alley first, one I drove exactly once a year ago, in daylight, learning it by heart against a night I prayed would never arrive, and it throws the car behind us wide for half a block, which is all half a block has ever needed to be.
Then the mouth of the work zone opens ahead in a throat of orange plastic and dead lamps, and I stop trying to lose him and begin, instead, to set the trap.
The gap is exactly where Luka swore it would be, a funnel of one lane between two barricades no map has yet confessed to, and I take it at the last instant with the mirror tucked in, and the car behind us commits half a heartbeat too late.
There is the long shriek of a man meeting a barricade the hard way, and the sound of metal agreeing to a new shape, and when I check the mirror the headlights have stopped and canted sideways across the road, and we are gone into a street that does not care in the least what just happened on it.
I keep us moving regardless, because a wreck behind you is not safety, only the postponement of the next attempt, and I have buried too many men who confused the one for the other.
I take three turns that will mean nothing to anyone who does not understand that I am making them mean nothing on purpose, and only when the grid has swallowed us whole do I let the speed come down to something a passing patrol would forgive.
For a mile neither of us speaks. The city folds itself back into ordinary night around us, wet asphalt and traffic lights obeying no one in particular, and I run the checks a body runs when the loud part has ended, the mirrors, my own hands, the sound of her breathing, which is far too fast but is there, and is the only sound in the world I am currently prepared to care about.
Once, she opens her mouth as though to speak, and closes it again.
Then, in a voice scraped down to almost nothing, she says, "The man with the knife.
" It is not a question. She is holding a fact up against the world to see whether the world still agrees to carry it.
"Do not," I say, as gently as I am able, which is not gently at all.
"Not yet. Set it down somewhere, and leave it there until you are somewhere you can afford to pick it back up.
" She nods. She does not ask again. That she already knows the difference between a thing you feel now and a thing you survive first and feel later is its own small ruin, and tonight I am the man who taught it to her.
"Where are we going," she says, once the silence has run long enough to become its own kind of noise.
"Somewhere they will not think to look."
"That is not an answer."
"No," I tell her. "It is not." I hear her breathe out, slow and unsteady, the breath of a woman working out that the only person within reach to save her is knotted up somehow with the reason she needs saving at all.
There is no version of after this in which I walk back into that shop as a man who buys poetry.
That man died on the sidewalk tonight, in front of her, beside the men I put down to buy her these few cold breaths in this car.
For thirty years I have been the man no one in a room remembers afterward, and tonight, permanently, and in front of the one person I most needed never to show, I became exactly what I am.
There is no thread that sews that back together.
There is only the road, and the dark at the far end of it, and the world I came out of, which is the last place left where I know how to keep her breathing.
I take us off the main roads and down into a grid of quiet streets where I know which houses stand empty, and I ease the car into the black behind a shuttered repair garage and cut the lights, and the engine ticks itself down into a silence that lands heavier than any of the gunfire did.
She has not moved. Her hands are still braced on the dash, as though the car might start itself again without asking her first. Then she turns her head, slowly, and looks at me the way a person looks at a coat they have worn for years that has just shown them the knife sewn into its lining.
Safe for a breath, she stares at the stranger who just killed to keep her breathing, and she asks the question I can no longer dodge. "Who are you?"