The snipers flinch.
Neither of them fall.
It didn’t work. Sweet Lord, it didn’t work.
They look at each other, then turn their guns on me.
11:44 P.M.
PHIN
WHEN ALEX RAN OUT the back door, Phin knew where she was heading.
To find a gun.
Phin takes two seconds to decide that Alex with a sniper rifle poses a bigger threat than the two guys with their Desert Eagles, and he rushes out after her.
He tears through the kitchen, out the patio door, into the backyard. Phin looks right, then left, sees Alex dart around the corner of the house. He vaults a lawn chair and pursues.
She only has a twenty-yard head start, but she can run like a rabbit. Phin, though lean and muscular, is not in good shape. He’s been in remission for a while, but it’s more a stay of execution than a full pardon. The pancreatic cancer is still there. It’s shrinking, bit by bit, thanks to chemotherapy. But the pain hasn’t gone away, and the chemo comes with a slew of symptoms that rival those caused by the disease.
Phin supplements his prescription drugs with many that you can’t find at your local Walgreens, and these have also taken their toll on his body. He can pace Alex, but he can’t catch her.
She reaches the street, then cuts left, heading toward the Bronco. All of the running Phin did earlier to night has pretty much tapped his reserves, and he falls farther behind, his breath ragged, his muscles crying out. The night air is cold, tingly, on his bare chest. He chances a quick check over his shoulder, sees the two men at Jack’s front door, trying to kick it in, and hopes Alex’s electricity booby trap is legit, not bullshit.
Alex gets to the Bronco, tries the driver’s-side door. Locked. She runs around to the back, and Phin closes the distance, hands out in front of him, leaning on the truck’s hood when he gets there, taking big gulps of air so he doesn’t throw up.
The rear door must be locked as well, because Alex sprints away without getting inside, running across the lawn and blending into the night. Phin is too wiped out to follow.
Gunshots. From Jack’s house. Phin sees the two men bust in the front entrance. He watches them walk inside, sees the lights go on.
Sees nothing happen.
Alex’s trap is bullshit after all.
Phin puts his face up to the tinted glass of the front window, tries to get a look inside the truck. There’s a rifle in the front seat, a big one with a scope. He does a quick 180, scanning the ground for a brick or rock or something to break the windshield. There’s nothing but grass.
Phin puts his back against the driver’s door, clenches his hands, and fires his left elbow backward against the glass, like a piston. He does it once, twice, three times, hard as he can.
The window remains intact.
He wants to try it again, but he can’t—he’s pretty sure he just broke his elbow.
11:46 P.M.
KORK
THE FRESH AIR FEELS GOOD. Liberating. The rhythmic slap of my feet hitting the ground, the stretch of my muscles, the wind on my cheeks. I bet I could run five miles without breaking a sweat.
Phin is behind me, but he gives up when he reaches the truck. Wimp. I should have beaten him to death while we were in the garage.
No biggie. There’s still time.
I’m running so fast I almost miss the rifle. It’s on a grassy hill, only a few yards off the road. I sprint to it, slide alongside like I’m stealing second base, and snatch it up in my hands.
It’s a beauty. Bolt action, suppressor, bipod, night-vision scope, cheek pad, palm support, padded butt plate. A better weapon than the M40A1 rifle I trained with in the corps. I get behind it, assume the position, load a round, and point it back at the Bronco. Phin is crouching next to the side door. An easy target. I consider putting a round through his leg, but notice he’s cradling his elbow, already hurt.
I’ll get to him in a minute.
I swing the barrel around, aiming at Jack’s house. I can see Harry through the front bay window, sitting on the floor and clutching his hose. Those two sniper idiots, standing there, pointing their guns. The trap must have tripped the circuit breaker. I figured it might do that. They should have held the breaker button in and kept it there; then the current would have kept flowing. But I saw no reason to share that little tip.
I nudge the rifle. There’s Jack. She actually has her hands up over her head. Like she’s surrendering.
As if that’s going to help her.
“You are dust,” I say, quoting Scripture. “And to dust you shall return.”
My Bible-thumping father would have been proud I remembered that. I grin, caress the trigger, and fire.
11:46 P.M.
PESSOLANO
“HOLD ON. We’re on the same side.”
The woman cop is standing a few feet away, her hands raised. Pessolano can’t make out her face in the dark, but her voice is strong and sure.
Pessolano doesn’t feel strong or sure. After chasing that blond guy through the woods, he’s exhausted. He’s also cold and wet, having just been squirted with a hose. Part of him knows that he needs to kill everyone in the house, then get out of there. But another part, a bigger part, is having some difficulty. Shooting someone from a few hundred yards away feels detached, kind of like playing a video game. The distance is emotional as well as physical. Shooting someone at point-blank range, someone with her hands up, someone surrendering—that’s more like murder than war.
“You’re called The Urban Hunting Club, right?” she says. “You kill perverts. I’m a cop. I kill perverts too. We’re both fighting for the same cause.”
Munchel isn’t shooting her either. Pessolano wonders if he shares the same doubts. If he thinks this might be wrong too.
“You got nice legs,” Munchel says to the cop. He sounds breathy, excited.
Pessolano stares at Munchel. His friend has a wild look in his eyes. A scary look.
“Thank you,” the cop says. “You’re the one from Ravenswood.”
“Yeah,” Munchel answers. “Did you like that? You almost got me a few times. You ever in the military?”
“No. Just the police.”
Munchel takes a step closer to the cop. “You nailed Swanson right in the heart. He died in a whole mess of pain.”
“You gave me the rifle.”
“I wanted it to be a fair fight.”
“Would killing me now be a fair fight? I don’t have a gun.”
Munchel licks his lips. “Maybe I’m not thinking of killing you right now. Maybe I’m thinking of something else.”
Pessolano stares at the cop. She does have nice legs. And to the victor, the spoils.
Right?
The man on the floor, the one holding the hose, clears his throat. Munchel points his gun at him.
“You got something to say, tough guy?” Munchel demands.
“If you do anything to my sister,” he says, “would you mind if I took a few pictures?”
Munchel begins to laugh. Pessolano starts to laugh too, but instead he starts to choke.
What the hell?
Pessolano cups his hands to his throat, vaguely aware that he just heard a gunshot.
I just got shot. Who shot me?
When Pessolano pulls his hands away, they’re filled with blood. And something else. Something stringy that looks like a peach pit.
It’s my Adam’s apple.
Pessolano drops to his knees. He glances at Munchel, who is looking back at him, mouth hanging open, eyes wide.
Behind Munchel, Pessolano sees the man on the floor lifting up a big board. No—it’s a refrigerator door. The man rams the door into Munchel, driving him across the room and up against a wall.
Pessolano turns, sees the female cop running away, toward the garage.
Pessolano looks down, watches the fountain of blood raining in front of him, aware that it’s coming from his neck.
Pessolano tries to take a breath, but hi
s throat is blocked.
There’s no pain. Only that same sense of detachment, as if this is happening to someone else.
Then, another shot.
Pessolano feels it burn right through his right thigh, snapping the bone in half.
He falls forward.
Now there’s pain.
Soul-searing, unbearable pain.
Pessolano tries to scream. Has to scream. But his clogged throat won’t let him.
Another bullet.
The other leg.
Pessolano writhes on the floor, his brain overloading on unbearable agony. Agony that can’t possibly get worse.
The next bullet blows off a good chunk of his arm.
The agony gets worse.
Pessolano is beyond reason now. Detachment has led to the keenest sense of self-awareness he’s ever experienced. He exists now only as raw, exposed nerve endings, millions of them firing at once.
When his other arm gets shattered by a bullet, his body finally diverts its remaining resources to Pessolano’s brain, giving him a brief moment of lucidity. A flood of thoughts assault him:
Please let me die.
Shoot me in the head.
Make the pain stop.
And then he thinks of something odd. Incongruous.
If they made a plastic green army man toy that looked like I do now, maybe I would have followed a different path.
That’s the thought bouncing around in his skull as his life blessedly fades away.
11:47 P.M.
MARY
IT DOESN’T WORK, as Mary expected. As soon as she presses the circuit breaker, it pops right back out. Mary presses it several times, with the same results.
No ZAP. No cries of men being electrocuted.
Which means Harry and Jacqueline are completely vulnerable.
Voices, coming from the living room. Jacqueline’s voice. Then a man she doesn’t recognize.
Mary has no weapon, and even if she had one she wouldn’t be able to hold it. The OxyContin has made her lightheaded, and it’s dampened some of the pain, but she still can’t open her hands.
Mary heads down the hall anyway.
As horrible as the last few hours have been, Mary has learned something about herself. Old and useless are not synonyms. Age does not equal feeble. And even though Mary is beaten, bowed, and has been around for a long time, she’s far from helpless. Her daughter needs help. And dammit, she’s going to get some.
Mary slips past the refrigerator, moves quietly to the edge of the living room, pausing next to the wall. She sees two men in army fatigues, holding very large handguns.
They’re pointing these guns at Jacqueline.
Mary gets ready to call to them, to draw their attention, and then the taller man gets shot in the throat.
Jacqueline doesn’t waste the opportunity. She runs into the garage.
Get away, Mary thinks. Bring help.
But knowing her daughter, Jacqueline won’t leave until everyone is safe.
I should have raised her to be less considerate.
Then Harry rushes the other man, and there’s a scuffle. Though Harry McGlade is—what’s a good word? flawed—Mary has grown fond of the guy. She hurries into the living room to lend a gnarled hand. Mary abandoned him once, and won’t follow that particular path again.
More sniper fire. The man who was hit in the throat gets shot several more times, not in any vital spots. It’s so appalling that Mary knows Alex must be behind it. While Alex is preoccupied with that, Mary gets close to Harry, to push against him and keep the man pinned to the wall. But then the sniper gets a hand free, and he fires at both of them.
Mary gets knocked backward, Harry smacking into her.
She has no idea if she’s been shot, or if Harry’s been shot, or perhaps even both of them.
11:49 P.M.
PHIN
ALEX HAS FOUND A RIFLE.
She’s fifty, maybe seventy-five yards from Phin. He can’t see her body in the dark, but he can pinpoint her muzzle flash. Phin watches her fire at the house. Watches one of the gunmen fall. Watches Alex take the guy apart, limb by limb. Deliberately. Cruelly.
It’s a sneak preview of what’s going to happen to him, to Jack, to everyone in the house.
Phin shuffles along the asphalt to the front of the truck, out of Alex’s direct line of sight. He can’t bend his arm at all. His elbow is busted, or something in it is torn.
The pain is bad.
He seriously considers digging into his pocket, taking out the pot he stole from that Wrigleyville banger, and eating as much as he can. Marijuana is a marvelously effective analgesic. Phin is an expert when it comes to analgesics. The past few years of his life have been dedicated to a singular purpose: the numbing of pain. Physical, mental, and emotional.
After his terminal diagnosis, Phin dropped out of society. He left his job, because it was meaningless to work when you’ve been given a death sentence. He left his fiancée, because he wanted to spare her the torture of watching him die.
Since he had no hope for the future, he began to live day by day.
Sort of like a dog.
That’s not a negative comparison. Dogs live in the moment. They don’t think. They don’t dwell on the future. They exist to meet their base needs. Eating. Sleeping. Breeding. Surviving. No worries. No regrets. Minimize effort, maximize pleasure.
Phin tried to do the same. He lost himself in drugs, liquor, and whores. When the money ran out, he robbed dealers, gangbangers, pimps, and criminals. That led to hiring himself out as a rent-a-thug, solving problems for people who didn’t want to go to the police.
It worked. He was able to blot out his pain.
Then he met Jack. She arrested him after a fight with a group of Latin Kings. Later, he and Jack ran into each other at a neighborhood bar, and began to play pool on a semi-regular basis.
Which would have been fine if it didn’t go any further. But, unfortunately, they became friends.
Phin didn’t expect it to happen. He didn’t want it to happen. Friendship involved responsibility. Phin’s only responsibility was to himself, to his indulgences. To avoiding pain.
Yet Jack calls, and he comes running.
Just like a dog.
Phin shivers. His bare chest is gooseflesh, cold to the touch. The smart thing to do is to eat the weed, run into the woods, and try to find a hospital, a bottle of tequila, a few grams of coke, and a clean hooker. Forget Jack. He owes her nothing. He isn’t going to be around long enough to regret the decision.
Run away, he tells himself.
But he doesn’t run. Instead, Phin stands, crawls onto the hood of the Bronco, and gets up to the windshield. He’s wearing gym shoes. The rubber soles aren’t hard enough.
But he knows something that is hard enough. Something that routinely cracks car windows.
Friendship sucks, he thinks.
Then he shuts his eyes, rears back, and slams his forehead into the glass.
It brings out more stars than the ones currently occupying the clear night sky, but he manages to crack the windshield—a spiderweb pattern the size of a dinner plate. He didn’t break through, but it’s a start.
He waits for the dizziness to pass, realizes it isn’t going to, then spins around on his butt and drives his heel against the crack. Again. And again. And again. And again.
The spiderweb gets larger. The window bends, indents. Then his foot busts through.
Phin continues to kick, widening the hole until he can slip inside, avoiding cutting himself on the glass while climbing into the front seat.
His head hurts. So does his arm. And the tumor on his pancreas feels like a piranha trying to eat its way out of his insides.
But when Phin touches the sniper rifle, he can’t help but smile.
“The truce is over, Alex,” he says.
11:49 P.M.
JACK
I GET TO THE GARAGE as fast as I can, which isn’t very fast. The house feels more like a ship
, rocking to and fro in the waves, making it challenging to stand. I stop in the doorway, feel for the light switch, and stumble over to the workbench.
I’m looking for the gun Phin said he dropped.
The light is just a single bare bulb, maybe a sixty-watt, and my loopy vision is further impeded by a black eye that’s puffed halfway closed. There are boxes strewn about the garage floor. Some Christmas decorations. A few books. I don’t want to let go of the bench because I’m afraid I’ll fall over, but I don’t see the gun from where I am. I’ll have to go searching.
I take two steps toward the mess, moving a box aside, peering beneath it. Nothing. The floor is cold, causing me to shiver. From inside the house, more gunshots.
Sniper fire.
I wondered if it was Phin who saved my life, grabbing one of the sniper’s rifles when he ran outside. It might have been Alex, who didn’t want anyone else to kill me because she was saving that particular pleasure for herself. Either way, I caught a break. Now I needed to capitalize upon it.
I kick away a piece of cardboard, almost lose my balance. No revolver underneath. A faint breeze tousles my hair, and I follow it and see the broken window, hidden behind the stacks of unopened boxes. If Phin dropped the gun in that maze I’ll never find it.
More gunfire. But this is from inside the house. It’s loud, even louder than firecrackers.
The Desert Eagle.
I don’t want to think about what that implies, but I do anyway. Even if the refrigerator door is thick enough to block the bullets, at close range the shooter can aim around it.
My last image of Harry McGlade—of, God help me, my brother—was of him charging the Ravenswood sniper, trying to save me.
I hope Harry’s okay.
11:49 P.M.
MUNCHEL
WAR IS HELL.
First Swanson bites it. Then Pessolano gets shot in the neck. The cherry on top is getting whacked full-body with a refrigerator door.
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