The Force and the Falcon

There is something indefinitely ironic, ignominiously refined, about a man wearing formal clothing in a sloppy, casual way. The man I was watching was wandering through the parking lot, under the velour texture of the sodium lights that guarded the perimeter of the asphalt spit. His white, French cuffed shirt was open from throat to navel, revealing the undershirt below. His jacket displayed a massive tear that ran from one shoulder to the mother of pearl buttons that hung from the hem, cutting a mouth in the black fabric. His partially untucked shirt cloaked half of his scuffed belt. He was smiling, Terence saw: a wide, guileless smile. I had seen that kind of smile before; emanating from the faces of bloodied skateboarders after failing “epically” to land a particular trick, radiating from a teenager after getting dropped in a contest of strength, or from a snowboarder that had given it his all and still failed. The knowledge that one had tried—tried and failed maybe, but tried all the same—would be uncontainable. If anyone had a right to wear this smile, this man did. He alone was responsible for the destruction of two hotels and a mob-owned casino, sinking a million dollar yacht and the pursuing coast guard ship, exploding a nationally owned museum, hijacking a truck belonging to a Mexican drug cartel carrying fifty kilos of cocaine and forty million dollars in cash, stowing away on a Russian submarine and running a bulldozer through the CIA’s front office. This man had caused more destruction in his wake as a refugee than any I had ever tracked, and he was still uncatchable. Here I lay in the bushes of the Las Vegas Hilton, burned, shaking from the shock of the evening, without my bulletproof vest, my walkie-talkie, my sidearm, my backup, my squad. I watched as he pulled an Uzi from an invisible holster beneath his left arm and smilingly checked the magazine before replacing it. He wandered, partially silhouetted by the sky that faded from the black of the sky above to the reddish orange of the burning casinos, serenaded by the sirens of emergency vehicles. I watched as the man that had done everything every man in the world wanted to do, wanted by every police station and woman in the world, opened the scissor door on a glossy black Lamborghini Diablo and stepped in. He didn’t start it immediately, another of the traits that had made this man so hard to catch. Here I lay powerless to collect him, unable to move from my bed among the shrubs and mulch. Truth be told, I almost didn’t want to catch him, to end the free life of a fugitive, the storybook sheen that surrounded this. I didn’t want to tell the world that the big guy always won, that in the end the free spirit was punished and the rest of the world applauded, that betting against the odds was a losing proposition. I didn’t want to end the purpose of my fifteen year career and move on to another case, another fugitive. I didn’t want to catch my best friend, my worst enemy, my antichrist. And instead, I watched him drive away, the fat tires on his car, or maybe someone else’s car, gripping the asphalt with a heavy efficiency, before pulling out into the night, the glare of the red taillights and a waft of faintly expensive cologne all that’s left to me.