I dream about hummingbirds a lot, but that’s probably because I think about them a lot. I take feeding them with the sugar water that I am constantly preparing extremely seriously, like it’s a second job. But then these birds have informed my life, have had me loving them all the way backto when my mother loved them the way she did when I was a little girl.
I am a little girl in the dream tonight, but I’m living here, in this house, and it’s the fall, and I know the hummingbirds are about to leave, fly back to Mexico until they return in the spring.
Hummingbirds make me want to believe in miracles, just the thought of these tiny birds migrating all that way, those thousands of miles, and then making their way back here.
If that’s not a miracle, I don’t know what is.
In my dream tonight, I’m standing on the back deck near my feeder, and I’m wearing a dress that my mother bought me when I was ten, before she got sick with her own cancer, when she’d take Brigid and me shopping, when we’d do a lot of things together.
And I start to cry in this dream, because the ten-year-old me already has cancer. My mother’s fine but I’m the one who’s sick, and I’m afraid I’ll never see the hummingbirds ever again, because I won’t be here when they come back.
When I awaken in the darkness, I can feel the tears on my cheeks and, for once, I don’t want to go back to sleep, because I’m afraid of how the dream might end.
TWENTY-EIGHT
THERE IS A SECURITY camera at either end of the quiet street. Sassoon uses a suppressor and casually shoots out both of them.
He has parked the car a couple of blocks over, taken his new Knight Armament SR-15 Mod 2 out of its case, the thing looking sleek and beautiful, chambered in 5.56 NATO, the rimless bottlenecked cartridge family, but compatible with a .223 Remington.
“You get what you pay for,” the guy who’d sold him the semiautomatic had said after Robby had been the one laying out $4,000 for the gun, “including versatility with ammo.”
Then the guy had said, “You hunt?” and Robby had told him, “With great versatility,” already thinking about getting off forty-five rounds a minute the first chance he got.
Like right here and right now.
He’s tired of amateurs giving killing guns like this a bad name. Assholes. Guns like this one, like pieces of art, really did belong in the hands of professionals.
He is whistling softly to himself as he walks along the side of the street, the gun pressed to his right leg, just in case a car might happen by. But he quickens his step as he gets closer to the house, wanting to get on with it now, knowing he won’t have a lot of time once he opens fire and begins waking the whole neighborhood the fuck up.
But first he’s going to wake the owner of the house the fuck up.
Just one light on upstairs. One lit over the front door.
Sassoon already knows the master bedroom is in the back of the house, second floor.
He is still whistling softly as he raises the gun and starts shooting, strafing the windows of the bottom floor first, shattering the windows, lingering just long enough on the front door to splinter five or six holes in it, top to bottom.
“Yeah,” he says to himself.“Yeah.”
The speed and power of the Knight Armament are as advertised, Robby Sassoon feeling the surge of adrenaline as he keeps the gun on the house before raising it and now blowing out the windows upstairs, the glass raining down from there. When he’s finished, he trains the gun on the weather vane at the top of the house and blows it to bits, like the thing just explodes.
How long has it all taken?
A minute?
Maybe less than that.
He sees the light upstairs go out now. So he didn’t hit him with a stray bullet. But he didn’t come here to hit him. Robby Sassoon has come here to shoot up the man’s house and let him know that there’s a target on him, too.
He wonders what it must have sounded like inside once he started shooting.
Sassoon hears shouting now from the other end of the street, sees lights coming on in one house after another, inside and out. But he’s already on the move, running around the house and through the backyard, the escape route he gamed out the other day.
By the time he reaches the car, he hears the first sirens in the distance.
More music to his ears.
Almost like a show tune.
