by Jack Lively
Hank was standing there in the middle of the room looking confused. He had a glass of milk in his hand. His upper lip was coated with the white liquid, caught in the fuzzy hairs of a hopeful attempt at a mustache. “Normal like what?”
“Like standing normally at the window looking at it.”
I swung the window inward a tad, so that I could see the reflection. I only saw a brief blur, but I heard it well enough. The drone came in close, buzzing past in a loud high-pitched whine. It veered off above the trees, then came in again, slower. Hank stood at the window looking at it. The drone hovered over the driveway, oriented at him, the rotors screaming. I could see the reflection well. The thing was silhouette against the sky. Quad rotors, a wedge-shaped brain, and something hanging pendulously below the main brain. Maybe it was armed somehow. After half a minute, the thing veered away and went over the house. We heard it on the other side, scanning laterally across the pitch of the structure, looking in windows. It was doing reconnaissance. The pilot was unconcerned about being obvious.
In the back of my mind I was thinking about weapons and sensors. Maybe it had infrared. Maybe not. Maybe it was wired to explode, like a kamikaze. Maybe not. I was leaning on the side of not.
Hank was still standing there, looking highly uncertain.
I said, “Now’s the time to tell me about any weapons you might have in the house, Hank.”
“Oh.” He said, “I’ve got the bear gun and the squirrel gun. Mom’s got the Glock.”
I said, “Bear gun and the Glock, Hank. With whatever ammo you’ve got.”
Hank left the room wordlessly. The drone on the other side of the house suddenly whizzed up over the roof again, careened into the front yard and spun around to look into the living room once more. I stayed down, glancing hopefully in the window reflection, but unable to see the drone. Then it was closer, buzzing madly, right in front of the open window.
I realized that the drone was coming inside.
I stayed very still. The noise of the quad rotors was intense and getting louder. The drone was inching in through the window, directly over my head. I could feel the rotor wash. Like standing under four madly rotating fans. I slowly tilted my head up. The thing was right over me, moving forward in jerky increments. One tiny twitch at a time, as the controller flicked the joystick. The thing hanging from the main brain was a high end camera unit. The camera had its own motor, and probably its own controller. It was swiveling on a gimbal, tiny servo motors wheezing. A modular system of interchangeable lenses, like what they use for movies. I revised my estimate up to fifteen or twenty grand, maybe more.
What I also revised was my image of the operators, the people behind it. There were two of them. One for the drone, the other for the camera. They’d be sitting somewhere relatively safe and secluded. Maybe a car, parked off road. It would be somewhere close, that was for damn sure. They would be discussing what they saw, calculating their approach, figuring out what they’d need to get the job done.
The drone drifted further in. Soon it was going to be too far for me to reach. All the controller would need to do was swivel the camera around and see me, crouched under the window. So I did the only thing that there was to do, reached up to take hold of it.
But the drone suddenly buzzed back the way it had come, a straight path out of the window. I managed to remove my hand in time, hoping that the roving camera unit hadn’t caught it. The drone was buzzing away from the house and up into the sky. Ten seconds later it was out of sight. A minute later, the sounds of the forest returned.
Hank was not back yet. I counted two minutes. Nothing happened. I stood up and went toward the back of the house, where I figured Hank was looking for his weapons. I ran into him coming the other way. He said, “Sorry, I forgot the combination and had to ask Mom.”
I said, “No problem. Did you get her Glock?”
“Shit.” He started to backtrack toward Helen’s office.
I stopped him. “Just focus on the bear gun, Hank. I’ll go see your mom. Show me where her office is.”
Hank pointed down the corridor. “It’s there. She went to the bathroom. Maybe she’s back at her desk now.”
I went to Helen’s door and knocked. No response. I opened the door. Nobody in there. An empty office chair facing a large computer screen filled with information. The other side of the room looked like an art studio. Paint brushes and paints, charcoal sticks and foam implements. The wall was covered in sketches and paintings. I walked out of there and back toward the living room. A toilet flushed behind me, and down the corridor. Helen, no doubt.
The window was still open, I walked toward it. I was a couple of feet away when I heard the sound of gravel crunching under boots. Four boots. Two guys coming up the drive. I ducked down under the window again.
A voice shouted out, “Hello, anyone home?”
The footsteps came closer. Then one set of feet departed from the first. The second set crunched gravel toward me, then directly outside the window under which I was crouched. The second set of feet kept on going to the right of the window. The first set took up again left of the window, near the kitchen door.
The same voice shouted again. “Hello, anyone home? It’s Alaskan Broadband.”
I was calculating the distance between myself and the kitchen, on the other side of the living room from me. There would be knives, hopefully big and sharp ones. Maybe a hammer if I was lucky. I figured, hammer in one hand, carving knife in the other. I’d be invincible. I was also thinking that I didn’t have much time to find out. Maybe ten seconds. But then Helen came into the living room, wiping wet hands on her jeans. She glanced at me innocently and shouted out, “Hello. Yes, we’re home. We got it working now.”
Then she looked at me strangely, because I was crouched under the window. She mouthed, “What are you doing?” I was waving at her madly, trying to get her to stop walking in that direction. But she was already moving. Helen turned and looked at me, puzzled. Then she turned again, framed in the open doorway, seeing someone who I couldn’t see.
I was going to explain it to her, the danger and the issues at hand. But before I could say anything, I heard the double cough of a silenced, small caliber semi-automatic weapon being triggered twice in quick succession. Both of Helen’s eyes were shot out and she collapsed soundlessly to the ground, like a tea cloth fluttering off the hook. It was like a trick shot, a show off gag. She fell at about the same time as the glass from the kitchen door window. A tinkling on to the doorstep and the gravel. The weapon coughed again, once. I figured the third shot would be between her eyes, to keep things symmetrical. The shooter was showing off his skill, making a joke, which made me very angry. I couldn’t see Helen’s body at that point, but I knew that the shooter could see it through the door.
Which meant that I knew where the shooter was.
It was the shooter from the Beaver Falls Lodge, where the killings had also been done with morbid panache. No doubt whatsoever in my mind. But I also remembered how over at Beaver Falls, there had been no shell casings to find. Which meant that the shooter was hunting down brass right now.
So, it was my turn. Right now.
The first two shots had come from outside. The third, I didn’t know. I hadn’t heard the door opening, but then again, I didn’t know if it would have made any noise if it had been opened. In the back of my mind I thought the shooter was still outside, because it was how I would have done it. Outside there was less chance of the brass being lost in some nook and cranny of the house. Maybe in a shoe, or in a plant pot, you never know. Outside, the rounds would eject right there on the gravel, easier to find.
If I was lucky, there would be fractions of seconds to play with, perhaps no margin at all. I rolled over the window sill, out into the chill air. Boots hit the ground and I was sprinting. The shooter was crouched, both knees bent, head down and looking the other direction. He was reaching for a brass casing with his right hand. The left hand was flattened on top of a pistol, b
alanced between the palm of his hand, and his knee. The way I read the situation, he was a right-handed shooter who had shifted the weapon to his left in order to pick up the shell casings with his dominant hand.
Which was one point in my favor. Another was that the pistol was pointing the other direction, across his body, away from me. The guy’s head swiveled to me. He was a man in his fifties. Close-cropped silver hair with a solid hairline above experienced blue eyes that watched me as I came in. I registered the green tattoo lines coming up from the collar line and crawling around the ears. His hands were also covered in ink, and busy doing the complicated shuffle that would be necessary to stop me.
He was some kind of murder artist, but the question this time was about speed and efficiency more than aim. He had made a big mistake when he decided to switch over the gun from right to left. Now his left hand was trying to spin the gun around and present the butt to the right hand, like an old friend. The shooting hand was delicate, like the hands of a pianist. I could see the slender trigger finger seeking out the trigger guard, eager to get in there. I could see special tattooed symbols on the fingers, but I wasn’t interpreting them just yet. Guys like that shy away from the experimental. They don’t really want to get off a shot with the wrong hand, because their right hand is so perfect.
Which was one advantage I had at that moment.
The man was looking at me blankly while his hands were busy. But then, the busy hands got confused. The left hand was spinning the gun for the right hand to take, but I was coming at him fast and the mental pressure was piling up. In Air Force special tactics training we had learned about decision-making loops. Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. The OODA doctrine is straight out of fighter plane dog fights in the Korean War.
The point is to get inside the other guy’s OODA loop. I had already observed, oriented, and decided. Now I was in the middle of the last phase, action, already at the end of my loop by the time the guy started his up. He made a deadly error by switching tactics suddenly and abandoned the plan of getting his good shooting hand inside that trigger guard. The shooter picked up the gun clumsily with his left hand and tried to get the barrel up.
I was way ahead of him. Already deep inside a second decision-making loop, cognizant of the other guy who had come with him, probably around the side of the house, creeping in the back. Maybe already in the house. What I didn’t want was this shooter to make a sound. So, I came at him full speed and put a knee into the side of his head.
Something came loose in there, like a clicking sound and a soft thunk as his skull whipped sideways with the impact. The killer crumpled and the pistol fell with him, clinking onto the gravel. I spun around and was controlling him before he had a chance to regain his bearings. I took his head in my hands from behind. Chin grasped in my left palm, my fingers dug into the side of his mouth. My right arm was wrapped around his crown gripping his left ear between fingers and thumb. My forefinger was embedded in his ear canal for a better grip. I twisted hard and fast and in a slight diagonal, pulling up. His neck broke with a sharp crack and that was it.
By the time the guy hit the gravel and started convulsing, I had his pistol in my hand and was moving into the kitchen. The door hinges squeaked. Helen’s body lay at an awkward angle, her face made blank with holes where the eyes should have been. The third shot had entered under her nose, above the mouth. Like a third nostril.
Twenty-Seven
I moved from the kitchen into the living room. The gun was a Browning Buck Mark .22 caliber. Semi-automatic. The gasses released by the third shot into Helen had chambered a round, sitting there waiting to be fired. Small and unassuming, but deadly in the right hands.
Which got me thinking about Hank. I was not sure which room he was in. And there was another shooter at large, possibly in the house now. I was in the hallway, going toward Hank’s room on the other side of the house. There was a bedroom off to the right, which I figured would have been Helen’s bedroom. The door was open, and on the other side of a neatly made bed was a double window looking out to the woods in back.
I moved inside the room, around the bed to the side of the window. I peered one way. Ducked under the window, peered the other way. Nothing and nobody. I went back out to the hallway. Dark and unlit. Another room up ahead to the right again, this time the door was closed. I toed the door open.
A utility room, tools and cleaning items neatly organized on shelves. To the right side, a worktable with a grinder and a clamp. The left side, a gun cabinet with Hank standing looking into it. He didn’t notice me. He was leaning inside, fiddling with the combination lock of a safe. I figured he was trying to get to the ammunition, kept sensibly locked away. Sensibly that is, if you didn’t expect to actually need a weapon to defend against a home invasion.
On the other side of Hank was the window. Hank sensed me entering the room. He took a step backward, framing himself perfectly in the window. At the same time, I saw movement outside, behind him. He looked at me and started to speak. But I spoke first. I said, “Step to your right. Now.”
Hank swallowed and stepped to his right, my left, and back to the gun cabinet. The second guy was outside, behind Hank, with a pistol up obscuring his face. I didn’t know why he hadn’t fired yet. I suppose he was caught in a decision loop.
I fired through the window and the glass splintered around a tiny hole, which had the effect of disturbing the transparency of the glass for a fraction of a second before it spidered. I saw a dark blur of movement from the guy. I was not sure if I had hit him or not. But he was moving, so I got moving.
The back of my mind had registered the ammunition capacity of the Buck Mark .22, four rounds fired, six or seven left.
I went through the window after him, exploding through the remaining glass. I felt something sting my left cheek. Thought, maybe a shot, maybe the glass. Whatever, I was through and out behind the house. I heard something crashing loudly through the woods—the guy was trying to get away. Wrong move again. Bad decision, he should have gone to ground immediately and picked me off when I cowboyed out the window. I went after him, fast. I ran hard for about twenty seconds and saw the guy as he broke out of the trees. Running as fast as he could, but not fast enough.
He was a good runner. Younger than his buddy, and in shape. He had long blond hair tied back in a pony tail. Maybe not a murder artist, maybe just backup. The guy had entered a clearing in the woods, with a little pond right in the middle of it. So, he was forced to carve around the pond, like an athlete around the track. As fast as he was, and as slow as a .22 caliber bullet is relative to say, a .45, he wasn’t going to outrun the bullet.
The disadvantages of using a .22 caliber round are equal and opposite to the advantages. On the plus side it’s a small round, not much kick, so you can be accurate enough without putting in too many hours on the range. The bullet tends to stay inside the body, which is useful when you don’t want to blow something to a pulp. Like if you are squirrel hunting, or assassinating people discretely. On the other hand, the .22 caliber is slow, and not very powerful. It doesn’t have much stopping power. The guy wasn’t going to fall down unless I put a bullet into exactly the right spot. Which could be one of his vital organs, or his head. Most vital organs are contained in the thorax, so a body shot would do it. But hitting the right internal target would be a throw of the dice. The wrong part, and he’s out of the clearing and into the woods on the other side, maybe with a broken rib, or maybe just a flesh wound. On the other hand, a head shot would knock him down and probably kill him right off the bat, but the head is a smaller target than the body.
I braced my shooting arm against the trunk of a spruce tree. Slowed my breathing down and tracked him over the sights, leading only slightly. The gun had a suppressor screwed into the barrel. It coughed loudly, twice. The first shot missed completely. After the second, I saw a tiny impact at the top of the guy’s head and he went down.
When I got to him, he was face-down in the dirt, alive. The bull
et had nicked his skull and might have concussed him. I rolled him over with my boot. He was confused, disoriented. I said, “You need a minute?”
The guy’s eyes focused and he brought his hands up defensively. He said, “No, don’t.”
“Why not?” He didn’t have an answer. I said, “Who sent you?”
He said, “Fuck you.”
I shot him twice more in the face. One of the rounds went under his eye, another into his forehead. He had three tattooed tears under the edge of his left eye. The .22 round had made a small hole right beside them, like a fourth teardrop. His expression didn’t change in death, it remained exactly as frightened and sour as it had been in life.
Twenty-Eight
The guy had no ID on him, or anything else for that matter, except for a Glock 19 in his hand and an extra magazine in his pocket. I pried the Glock from his death grip. The gun had a full magazine, plus one in the chamber. I slipped it into my waistband at the back. The extra magazine went into my front pocket.
When I returned to the house, Hank was in the kitchen with his dead mother. I had come around and was standing over the murder artist’s body. The boy was sitting at the little breakfast table, his eyes wet with tears, face red as a plum tomato. A Mossberg 500 was on the table. I figured that was the bear gun. Helen’s body was slumped on the floor between the kitchen and living room. Her face blank with the eyes shot out. I stepped over the dead guy, came through the kitchen door and Hank looked at me without malice.
He said, “Why did they do this?”
I said, “I don’t know exactly. I guess they thought they could get away with it.”
I pulled a light blanket from the sofa and covered Helen’s body.
Hank said, “Who are they?”