“Not sure what this is,” I announce, sliding my badge wallet out of a pocket. “Same thing he has inside his truck. Some of the cartridges have ballistic tips. Some like these don’t.”
Inside my wallet’s credit card slot is a trusty NASA souvenir refrigerator magnet that I never leave home without. Not always the same one, of course, because I give them away as souvenirs on a regular basis if I don’t lose them first. Fortunately, there are always plenty in stock at the Langley exchange outside the cafeteria.
But any small, weak magnet will do, and touching it to the bullet, I feel the attraction through the thin copper cladding. The metal projectile beneath is steel, not lead, and the intention likely was to shoot me inside my vehicle.
“Armor piercing,” I let Carme know what the assassin had in store for me and possibly both of us.
I shine my light over the flat-black-painted carbine, looking for anything that might tell me what kind it is, not finding a single marking. Then I probe for the two cartridge cases ejected when Carme fired her kill shots from her Bullpup. They’re not hard to find, shining like rose gold on the snow-blown concrete, in front and to the right of the ice machine.
Winchester +P+, my sister’s takedown ammo of choice, I note as she instructs me to leave her spent brass alone, not to touch it.
“I’ll take care of it,” she shouts.
“We can’t run the risk of anyone else finding them,” I yell back at her as I pluck up the evidence without proper protection or taking a single photograph.
Without a thought to preservation or procedures, I continue destroying the crime scene and breaking the law.
4
“ANYTHING ELSE you might have left lying around?” I head back in her direction. “Besides the elephant in the middle of the parking lot,” and I mean the dead man inside his big truck.
“Trust me,” Carme walks around the Denali, shutting the doors. “It will be as if we were never here.”
“We’re tampering with evidence, and leaving it all over the place!” I tuck her spent cartridge cases into a pocket.
“We’re fine.”
“Not to mention obstructing justice!”
“Don’t worry about it,” she points the remote key, locking up the big SUV with the dead hitman inside it.
“Don’t worry about it? Because now our DNA is everywhere!” and as if things aren’t insane enough, I remember I’m holding a grenade-launching automatic rifle. “And his DNA and who knows what are all over us!”
“We’re way beyond any of that mattering, Sisto,” she places a hand on her hip, the long-barreled pistol down by her side.
Eye to eye in the wind and cold, we’re unevenly illuminated by my Silverado’s headlights, my flashlight.
“Look, Calli, if you want out, now would be a good time to skedaddle home,” she says with a hint of a taunt. “I’ll take care of things. You don’t have to be part of this crazy-ass scheme anymore.”
It’s the same sort of thing she’d say when setting off illegal fireworks or trying out superhero capes at breakneck speeds on the zip line that stretched from the barn to the dock. In addition to her scary games in spooky places like the pet cemetery at Fort Monroe, and the root cellar on our farm that in the 19th century was part of the Underground Railroad.
Whenever I’d had enough of Carme’s high-octane drama, she’d give me an out. Usually telling me it’s okay to be a chicken while flapping her arms and clucking like one.
“What scheme? And what do you mean, anymore?” I demand to know as we face each other in the motel’s parking lot.
“What scheme?” as if she can’t believe her hood-covered ears. “Just the one we’ve been living our entire lives. But you’re too much of a Pollyanna to see it, especially when it comes to him.”
“No, I’m not!” my eyes are streaming in the pelting snow, my lips almost too frozen to talk.
“You care too much about his approval, always did,” and she’s not referring to our father.
“No, I don’t!”
“The problem is, you’ve always done everything Dick says. Never pushing back with him or anyone, and then you get into one of your spins. That’s what we’re here to fix.”
“You have one heck of a way of fixing things! And the only problem I have is you!” I hurl back at her before I can stop myself, and she stalks off, the cold feeling colder.
Never saying she’s stung, she doesn’t have to for me to know her every feeling. She opens the driver’s door of my police truck, killing the ignition, the lights.
“It doesn’t have to be your problem anymore, Sisto. I’m offering you an exit once and for all. And you can pretend none of this ever happened.”
“Are you crazy? I can’t pretend any such thing!” I pop my cork again, looking around frantically.
I’m expecting a squadron with lights and sirens to appear on the street, to thunder into the parking lot. Any second I’ll find myself facedown on the frozen ground, aggressive hands all over me, searched like I was hours earlier on top of the hangar. And I don’t need that indignity repeated.
“You might be surprised what you can pretend and endure,” Carme announces to the empty morning.
There’s no sign or sound of anybody headed this way to nab us, just biting air blowing and gusting, shaking shrubbery like pompoms, rocking bare trees. My ears are numb, my leather-sheathed hands stiffening into death grips on the carbine and flashlight.
While my sister moves about silently, nimbly in her peculiar formfitting bodysuit that seems to keep her limber, warm, and surprisingly sure footed in slick conditions with bad visibility.
“It’s not too late to turn back,” she steps around to the other side of my truck. “This is some scary crap that wasn’t part of the plan,” she back kicks shut the door I snaked my way out of moments ago. “I’m sure you realize how close you were to being filled with as many holes as Bonnie and Clyde.”