Light It Up

by Nick Petrie

“Agreed,” Peter said. “No police.” His only hope was to make this as smooth and clean as possible.

  Lewis kept the shotgun locked onto his shoulder, the barrel unmoving, but Peter could see his posture shift just slightly. Resigned, but still ready.

  “All right,” Lewis called. “How we going to do this without anybody getting killed?”

  Peter said, “I’ll start toward the parking lot. Leonard, you circle back to keep the car between us. Dixon?”

  “You, with the shotgun,” Dixon said, “step backward, nice and slow. You’ll still have me, I’ll shift to the girl. Peter, you start moving toward the Jeep. Leonard will get in the car and cover the girl in the trunk from there. Peter and I will get in the Jeep and pull out after Leonard. Lewis will stay here and do nothing.”

  “Works for me,” Leonard said.

  Peter did the choreography in his mind. “Okay,” he said. “Lewis?”

  “This is a bad idea, Peter. How are you still alive at the end of this? Or June?”

  “Dixon guarantees it,” Peter said. “If he gets the packet of seeds, June is free and safe. On his honor as a Marine.”

  Dixon looked at Peter. “I was dishonorably discharged.”

  “I don’t care about that,” Peter said. “You give me your word? On your honor?”

  Dixon nodded, his face composed. “Yes.”

  That was when Peter knew Dixon’s part of it would work.

  “What about Leonard?” he asked.

  “Leonard will follow orders,” Dixon said. “Won’t you, Leonard?”

  Peter said, “I want to hear it from him.”

  “Shit, yeah,” Leonard said. “I’ll do whatever. I just want to finish this thing and get my ass out of here in one piece.”

  Which was when Peter knew that Leonard would be a problem.

  Maybe in the next few moments. If not soon, definitely later.

  “Okay,” Peter said. “Let’s take it slow. Everybody ready? I’m going to start.”

  He stepped down to the parking lot beside the Kia and walked toward Lewis. The rain fell cold and hard. His T-shirt was soaked instantly.

  Dixon stepped back eight or ten feet to split Lewis’s fire and give Leonard room to move. Peter kept the Winchester aimed at the visible part of Leonard’s head as he ducked low around the far side of the car, the muzzle of the MAC-10 still trained on the trunk.

  Dixon shifted his aim to the trunk while Leonard opened the passenger door and scrambled across, partially obscured now by the water running across the glass.

  Lewis stood like a bronze statue turned dark with patina, rain pouring from the folds of his jacket and the hard planes of his face, utterly devoid of emotion.

  Leonard cracked a window. Peter could see the dark shape of the machine pistol pointed back between the seats. “Okay,” he called, and the car’s engine started with a soft chuckle.

  If it was going to happen, it would happen now, Peter thought.

  Lewis had thought the same thing, because he’d stepped back between two parked cars so Leonard couldn’t just reverse right over him.

  But the reverse lights didn’t come on.

  Dixon shifted his aim to Lewis again. “Let’s keep moving.”

  “Listen,” Peter said. “The place we’re going, it’s not far. But it backs up onto the train tracks, and the area is kind of enclosed by the freeways. So there’s no direct route. The directions are going to be roundabout, but it’s the shortest way I know to get there.”

  “Roger that,” Dixon said. “I think we all have the same motives here.”

  Peter sidestepped around the Kia, his back to Lewis’s position. In the moment when he blocked Dixon’s view of Lewis, he heard his friend’s voice, soft but clear. “I’ll get there.”

  Then Peter was facing Dixon and the Jeep was twenty yards away, just around the corner of the building. They left Lewis and Leonard behind and walked three paces apart, their weapons now leveled at each other.

  Hard for either of them to miss at that range, Peter thought. Then wondered how the antique Winchester would do in the rain. If it would even fire. The Colt pistol in the back of his belt was wet now, too, and just as old.

  Had any of them seen the Colt? He’d always kept his back to Dixon and Leonard.

  Could he get into the driver’s seat with the pistol still there, unseen?

  They approached the Jeep from the passenger side. Peter circled ahead, still facing Dixon with the lever gun ready.

  Peter couldn’t read the man. He’d never really known Dixon personally, despite what had happened in Iraq. Dixon had always seemed to keep himself hidden, a deliberately closed book. But he seemed even more closed now.

  Peter said, “I’m assuming you want to be in the back, right?” Dixon nodded. “Then I’ll get in the front passenger side and climb over to the driver’s seat. I’ll leave the rifle on the passenger side where you can reach it.”

  Dixon nodded. “That works.”

  “I’m going to move a little faster now,” Peter said. “I’m worried about Leonard.”

  “Roger that,” Dixon said. “Go.”

  Peter backed into the Jeep and shifted himself across the center hump, leaving the Winchester behind with his right hand while his left carefully pulled the big Colt Army pistol from the back of his belt and placed it between the seat and the door.

  Dixon opened the rear passenger door and climbed in, his own pistol steady, pulling the rifle muzzle-first through the gap between the seats with his free hand. Peter hit the Start button, found the lights and windshield wipers, cranked the heat up high, and put the Jeep in gear. “I’m driving now. I don’t want to lose him.”

  “Understood,” Dixon said. He took a phone from his pocket and hit a speed-dial button. “Leonard,” he said. “We’re coming. Move out.”

  Dixon relayed the directions as Peter goosed the big Jeep down the traffic lane, following the Kia, Leonard driving, June in the trunk, toward the access road, headed for the busy street.

  Passing Lewis, Peter glanced at the clock on the dash.

  Lewis stood in the rain and watched them go.

  As soon as they were out of sight, he zipped his wet coat up to his neck and launched himself at a run in the opposite direction, arms pumping hard.

  Shotgun in one hand and the big Colt pistol in the other.

  42

  Leonard wants to know where you’re taking us.” Dixon held his phone to one ear. “This access road leads nowhere.”

  Peter had directed them past the correct turn to Peoria Street. At the next possible turn, they’d only be able to go south onto Peoria, when really they should have crossed the median to drive north at the last intersection.

  “Sorry, I missed our turn,” Peter said. “It’s confusing over here.”

  “You never got confused in your life,” Dixon said flatly. “Don’t fuck with me.”

  Peter was buying time.

  But he was thinking now that he might need less of it than he’d thought. The threatening rain had pulled people out of work early, and the streets were clogged with traffic, windshield wipers on their highest speed, the storm gutters rising with bubbling, leaf-thick water.

  He said, “Just tell Leonard to pull through this parking lot ahead, go back the way we came, and take the next right. We want to be going north on Peoria under the freeway.”

  Dixon relayed the information over the phone. Peter watched as the Kia cut around in front of them and followed behind in its tracks.

  “Nothing better happen to her,” Peter said.

  “Then stay right behind them,” Dixon said. “Your best chance of getting that young woman back is to give me what I want.”

  Peter looked in the rearview mirror. Dixon had the bottom of the phone, including the mouthpiece, resting against his wet suit jacket.

  Quietly, Peter said, “Can you control that cowboy asshole?”

  “Long enough,” said the older man.

  They made it to the six-lane and th
rough the left turn at the light. The Kia was right in front of them, moving slowly. Bad weather and freeway on-ramps. The Jeep’s heater was cranking now, although Peter was still cold and wet.

  “You were a good Marine, Dixon. What happened?”

  Dixon looked back coolly. “You’re really asking me that question?”

  Before the Fallujah incident, First Lieutenant Ash hadn’t had much contact with Major Dixon, the battalion’s executive officer.

  Peter had always figured Dixon for a buttoned-up guy, very by-the-book. Colonel Graham was the battalion commander, well liked by the men. As XO, Dixon was the colonel’s second in command, tasked with the thankless job of chief administrator and enforcer. Dixon wasn’t liked, but he was respected. He seemed like a hard man, a man who held himself to a rigid standard, but a man who knew his job and didn’t miss much.

  There were far worse men to serve under in a combat zone than Colonel Graham and buttoned-down, by-the-book Major Dixon.

  Like Peter’s new captain, Ken Swenkie. An overpromoted politically connected careerist asshole looking to boost his combat résumé by clocking the most dangerous missions for his platoons without adequate planning or safeguards, and winning brownie points with the brass by conserving battalion resources, like decent overwatch or armor backup.

  Fallujah was a disaster.

  Marines died on the cracked and dusty streets.

  They died in the mud-brick and cinder-block buildings, and on the baking rooftops, their blood black in the bright white sun.

  Peter’s men. Good men, capable men. Men with families.

  Peter spoke to Captain Swenkie several times about better planning, more support. Keeping his people safe so they could keep fighting. Win the fucking battle and get some rest. Win the fucking war and go home.

  Swenkie’s mission orders continued, unchanged.

  Peter found five minutes to talk alone with the XO, Major Dixon, who said he’d put in a word.

  Captain Swenkie’s missions continued.

  If anything, they got more dangerous.

  Like maybe Swenkie was hoping Peter might not make it back to lodge a formal complaint.

  Peter shrugged. “I had no choice,” he told Dixon now. “That asshole was getting my guys killed. You know I went through channels. I went to him, I went to you. It got me nowhere. So I did exactly what the Marine Corps taught me to do. I made a moral decision. I improvised in a combat situation. I solved a fucking problem.”

  Dixon regarded Peter calmly from the back seat. “You murdered your superior officer.”

  Peter nodded.

  Dixon was completely correct.

  Peter had left his platoon in the capable care of his sergeants and used a dead man’s call sign to locate Captain Swenkie, waiting safely in a cleared area. Peter had made his way alone through the ruined city, climbed up half-collapsed stairs to the crumbled fourth floor of a shelled office building, and put a captured rocket-propelled grenade into the man’s Humvee.

  Then, knowing Swenkie to be the special kind of cockroach who could survive a stomping and still find a way to devise his revenge, Peter took an extra thirty seconds to reload the tube and put another RPG into the wreckage.

  He watched it burn with great satisfaction.

  Then went down the rope he’d slung out the far side of the building and made his way back to his platoon.

  “What I thought was admirable,” Dixon said from the back seat, “was that you didn’t try to hide it.”

  “Hell yes I did,” Peter said. “I took all kinds of precautions. I didn’t want to get the death penalty for killing a dangerous asshole. You just figured it out.”

  “I couldn’t prove it,” Dixon said. “But when I called you in, you didn’t deny it.”

  “No,” Peter said. “I did what I did. It was the right thing to do. I’d do it again.”

  “That’s why I let it go,” Dixon said. “Why I never called the colonel. Because you were right and we both knew it.”

  A faint, fleeting smile slipped across Dixon’s face, like a butterfly in the rearview mirror.

  The smile came and went so quickly Peter wasn’t sure he’d actually seen anything. Dixon’s face was locked down as tight as ever.

  Peter thought of the static forever rising in him, that had taken up some kind of electric permanent residence at the back of his brain since that morning. The rushing frantic fear, the flooding adrenaline joy, the endless immediacy of the pure moment.

  He’d thought he wanted to rid himself of the static. To try to be normal.

  But maybe he didn’t, not if the price was to be locked away inside himself, like Dixon.

  It was worth thinking about.

  But first, he had to get June free.

  After that, nothing else mattered.

  The Kia still right in front of him, bumping slowly down the wet, traffic-flooded street.

  He glanced at the clock on the dash. The heat was cranked up high, his clothes still cold and wet on his skin.

  He said, “Tell Leonard to turn left on Forty-fifth Avenue.”

  43

  Big Dog drove the shitty white sedan through the wide wet streets, rainwater pouring through the deep runoff troughs, watching ahead for traps, checking his mirrors for the Jeep behind.

  Dixon kept feeding him directions over the phone.

  Left on Forty-fifth. Right on Havana.

  He was watching for a telltale dark spray of blood on the Jeep’s windows. He wouldn’t be surprised if the boyfriend managed to put one into Dixon. The Dog had seen a lot of combat and a lot of shit in training, but he didn’t think he’d ever seen a man as focused as the Marine was today.

  He’d been plenty focused up on that mountain highway, too.

  Just yesterday. It seemed like a long time ago now.

  Big Dog knew how things would have gone if he’d been in the back of that decommissioned ambulance himself, instead of driving ahead in that doctored-up state car.

  The Dog would have kicked that Marine’s ass. Gutted him like a fish.

  Shit, it had been a great plan, hadn’t it? With the wrecker and the ambulance and the mocked-up cruiser, it had gone like clockwork. Until it didn’t.

  The problem was the guys Big Dog had brought in to help. They hadn’t been strong enough. Ruthless enough. Other people’s weakness was always the problem.

  It was the Marine’s problem, for damn sure. If he didn’t give a shit about the girl in the trunk, he and his buddy could have put an end to Big Dog right there at that motel, the Dog and Dixon both.

  The Dog had a theory about other people. A helpful theory.

  They didn’t really exist.

  Not the way the Dog did, anyway.

  He knew other people were alive. He could read their thoughts, their intentions, through their faces and bodies. He knew the right things to say to motivate them, to make them like him, almost.

  He could see right through them. Like ghosts.

  But he couldn’t feel other people, not the way he felt himself. The power of his desires. Other people were like animals to him. Maybe not even that. More like puppets, made of meat.

  The Dog liked doing bad things. He always had. Simple as that.

  But he didn’t want to get captured, put in a box.

  Self-preservation came first.

  So the Dog had learned to control his desires, at least to a certain extent.

  It was so damn tiresome, keeping himself on the leash.

  There were so many things he wanted to do.

  More directions from Dixon. Left on Forty-seventh to Quebec Street. He’d driven part of this before, chasing the Marine that morning. Shit, they could have taken the freeway, it was only three exits. But the freeway was probably a parking lot. And it didn’t matter anyway.

  The Dog had a girl in the trunk, all wrapped up like a birthday present.

  He hated this little white sedan. It was too small, too low to the ground, and didn’t take up anywhere near enough space
on the road. With his old Dodge, he could bully the other drivers, move them aside to slide through traffic. The sedan was a pussy car.

  But he did like the trunk.

  He really liked it.

  He didn’t know why he’d never figured that out before.

  The trunk was a great place to keep something hidden and contained until you were ready to use it.

  Leonard smiled. He was getting close now.

  He was wondering about those seeds, though. About how the hell he’d know if they were the right ones. He figured he’d just take everything he could get, sort it out later.

  His phone buzzed on the console. Not Dixon this time. A text message.

  It was Dixon’s boss again, that Palmer guy. The one who’d told him to take out Jordan on his little bicycle.

  He’d texted the Dog earlier in the day, while he was driving the Mustang, wanting to give the Dog a promotion. And a bonus.

  How nice.

  All the Dog had to do was terminate Dixon’s employment. Permanently.

  Palmer didn’t spell it out. He didn’t have to, the Dog knew what he meant.

  Hell, he was gonna do it anyway. Dixon was getting on his nerves.

  But maybe Palmer could do a little something extra for the Dog.

  He’d texted back about Dixon’s lawyer with Leonard’s Army records. He wanted all copies destroyed. If Palmer could make that happen, the Dog was ready to bite.

  And now here he was, texting again.

  The guy had attached a video. The Dog’s records in close-up, sliding through a big office shredder. Did they have an agreement?

  Big Dog sent Palmer the big thumbs-up.

  Damn, wasn’t technology cool?

  It was time to end this thing.

  The Dog was hungry.

  The girl in the trunk would only last so long.

  44

  June felt the car speed and slow, speed and slow.

  Flexed her strong legs, then her arms, then her core. Trunk yoga, keeping her muscles warm and ready.

  Peter wasn’t going to trade himself for her.

  June Cassidy wasn’t going to be anybody’s fucking hostage, and she wasn’t going to let Peter be, either. She was going to fucking fight, goddamn it.

  The question was, did she pop the trunk herself, or let the rodeo rider do it?