For the moment, crouched out of the way, he’d been forgotten.
He looked back the way he’d come, into that last light. This was his chance to run.
But then that radio station in Eddy’s head suddenly got a good, strong signal—his Spidey sense firing away—and he remembered those weird circles cut into the camper shell of Danny’s Bronco.
A Bronco just sitting there in the middle of everything . . . ignored.
A hunting blind.
Another kind of trap.
Danny was right in the goddamn thick of it, like Eddy knew he would be.
One foot in front of the other . . . one foot in front of the other . . .
Eddy Rabbit took a deep breath and started running . . .
SEVENTY
TWELVE SECONDS BEFORE . . .
Danny was trying to pay attention to what was going on outside the Bronco, but his phone inside kept buzzing.
He thought it was Marco, maybe warning him about a second vehicle, but he didn’t want to take the time to look down at it.
He had the man in the red shirt scoped, and although he didn’t have a good angle on the opposite side of the van, he could tell by everyone’s reaction that something was happening over there.
His guess was someone else had gotten out on that side.
That made two bad guys, at least.
And Amé coming down the porch, getting in the middle of it.
Things were moving fast, too fast—spiraling out of control—and that damn phone kept buzzing.
But if there was another vehicle, or Marco had seen something, Danny needed to know for sure. It was the whole reason he was out here.
He reluctantly risked a glance downward.
It took him longer than a second to read the few words, trying desperately to make sense out of them, since they weren’t what he was expecting. But when they came into focus, he knew exactly what they meant.
A warning. And there was only one person in the world who could have sent it.
Danny pulled away from the man in the red shirt and started to scan the area behind him, checking each direction with sweat streaming down his face and his eye flickering in and out, until he finally saw a second group of men, all heavily armed, moving silently toward the house from the southwest.
They were still far away, but coming up fast.
He counted several muzzle flashes, as they began shooting at Fox Uno and Chris and Amé.
The van had been a goddamn distraction.
Danny keyed his mic and started to tell the sheriff and Amé to get back inside, when he spied another man running like hell across the desert, directly toward the Bronco.
He was waving his arms and running like his life depended on it, and it absolutely did.
Eddy Rabbit.
SEVENTY-ONE
EIGHT SECONDS BEFORE . . .
Eddy ran like he hadn’t run in twenty years, and it was goddamn good to run.
For once, he wasn’t running in a fucking circle, just running in place. He was free and running as fast and as far as he could go, his thin hair flying behind him. He was fifteen years old again; his entire life stretched out there right in front of him, every shitty decision ready to be done over, every mistake and fuck-up about to be made right.
He was running forward and the world was spinning backward and the sun was going down behind him into an endless blue and black, but he was heading right into a light so bright that he’d never stop running again.
One foot in front of the other.
One goddamn step at a time.
It was like being as high as he’d ever been, but he’d never been so stone-cold sober.
The Bronco kept getting closer, closer, and he was going to make it.
He couldn’t wait to tell Charity about this thing he’d done. To tell her he was sorry.
She wouldn’t believe it, not a word of it.
So goddamn sorry.
And that was Eddy Rabbit’s last thought on earth, as Johnnie Macho blew his heart out.
SEVENTY-TWO
SIX SECONDS BEFORE . . .
Danny watched Eddy go down.
Blood exploded all over the front of his shirt, and he dropped face-first to the ground without even breaking his fall.
One second he was up and running, and then he wasn’t.
That’s when Danny realized that it was Deputy Johnnie Machado from Terrell County who’d just shot him.
The last time Danny had seen him was in a parking lot in Crockett.
Before Danny could sight the M110 on him, Johnnie Macho dropped down, too, out of sight. But the other shooters with him were still up and moving. Through the narrow view of the scope, he recognized some of them—other members of the Tejas unit—and they were armed and armored like they were about to swoop down on a drug raid, and maybe in a way they were. They were still focused on Fox Uno and the sheriff and Amé, and they had all three of them dead to rights.
He pushed the muzzle of the M110 out of one of his murder holes and took aim at one of them, a thin guy with a flattop. Danny remembered him from Crockett—he’d been the one who’d backed away from the confrontation in the parking lot. Ortiz? Something like that. Ortiz and most of the Tejas unit were wearing full tactical rigs, at least Level III with or without extra plates, which would normally have been enough to slow down the regular 7.62x51mm armor-piercing NATO rounds the M110 fired, except Danny had loaded his with the armor-piercing steel-core specials that West had bought him.
He put the reticle on Ortiz’s face. It was clear enough that Danny could see the sweat on the man’s skin and the fear in his eyes.
Ortiz, or whoever he was, wanted to be anywhere but here.
Danny didn’t blame him, and just before his own vision went black, he pulled the trigger and obliged him.
SEVENTY-THREE
FOUR SECONDS BEFORE . . .
Five things happened, more or less all at once.
First, Johnnie saw Eddy Rabbit go down. Since he was the one who’d just put a bullet in that motherfucker, that was to be expected. On pure instinct, Johnnie dropped down, too, since he’d exposed himself with that shot.
Then, quite clearly, Ortiz’s face came apart. A high-velocity round from somewhere drilled straight through the man’s skull, his brains and blood flying about ten feet into the air. Before Ortiz even hit the ground, another bullet went through his chest—right through his badge—and then a third tore his left arm in half. Some of Ortiz’s mess ended up on Chavez, who’d been taking aim on the old Mexican, and it threw him off enough that his first shot went way wide, and his second didn’t prove to be any better, since by then Sheriff Cherry was already pulling the old fucker out of the way.
Chavez’s next shot didn’t even matter, because the third thing Johnnie saw was a bullet tear a fist-sized hole through the man’s armored vest and come out clean on the other side.
Goddamn.
Not a good sign at all.
Fourth, Johnnie finally figured out where all those shots were coming from: the Bronco.
It was glowing inside like a summer storm, one muzzle flash after another, like distant thunder and lightning in low clouds.
That had to be that prick Danny Ford. That was the direction Eddy Rabbit had been running. Johnnie had no idea what the deal was with those two, but Ford was going to chew up and spit out his men one at a time unless Johnnie did something about it. His orders from those goddamn indios across the river had been to shoot everyone, and if Johnnie hadn’t been so sure about that before, he had no reason to argue with it now.
Finally, number five.
Just as Johnnie was getting to his knees and flipping his H&K MP5 to full auto—to put as many bullets as possible into the Bronco, and hopefully motherfucking Danny Ford as well—the young guy in the red shirt who’d been walking toward the
old Mexican and the sheriff blew up.
SEVENTY-FOUR
TEN SECONDS AFTER . . .
Chris wasn’t sure if he’d blacked out or not.
Or for how long.
His eyes were open now, though, and bits of rocks and other debris were falling all around. It was like he’d been caught outside in a heavy, dirty rain, and his ears were still ringing from thunder and lightning that had passed by too close.
They blew the kid Xavier up.
That bag had been packed with explosives, and if Fox Uno had taken it, he would have been blown sky-high, too. Instead, he was about five or six feet from Chris, facedown, still unconscious, or nearly so. Amé had already emptied the Remington, tossed it aside, and was now dragging Fox Uno back by the collar of his shirt, using her body to cover both him and Chris from two shooters—sicarios—she’d been exchanging gunfire with as Chris had fought unconsciousness. The first had slipped out of the van’s front passenger door, and although Chris had no reason to know it, he was the one who’d detonated the explosive, while the second had appeared from the Aerostar’s sliding door, pushing aside the old woman with the taped mouth.
She was stumbling, trying to run.
Both sicarios were using the open front passenger door as cover, firing through the window and the windshield with abandon. Even through the ringing in his ears, Chris could pick out their stray rounds shattering the front windows of his house, tearing through the wooden porch.
He struggled to sit up, tasting dirt and blood. They were exposed, out in the open, and Amé couldn’t shield herself, much less both him and Fox Uno.
He reached for his A5, but it had been blown out of his hands. It was lying too far away to get it, so he unholstered his Colt and started putting rounds downrange, as many as possible, punching the door of the van. He was using his wounded hand, the hand that had been shot clean through when he’d been ambushed the first time out here at the Far Six, so his aim wasn’t great—not as steady as he would have liked, since that hand had never regained its full strength—but from his awkward angle sprawled flat in the dust, he did have a good view of the first sicario’s boots moving back and forth beneath the door frame, and he zeroed in on them.
He was strong enough for that.
One bullet turned an ankle into powdered bone and blood, another blasted through a bended knee as the sicario dropped to the dirt.
But Chris had shot himself dry in the process, and when his slide locked back, he was useless.
Amé was leaning over him, still engaged with the other shooter by the van. The ground around them was erupting with wayward shots, dirt spraying upward and leaving behind deep divots in the caliche, each one making its way haphazardly toward them. It was a horrible, deadly game—one it was only a matter of time they’d lose.
Chris’s earpiece had fallen out, so he couldn’t hear Danny or key his mic, and it wouldn’t have mattered anyway, with the hellacious chatter of guns all around him.
He sat up to use his body to shield America, the only thing he was good for anymore, and wondered if Danny was still alive.
SEVENTY-FIVE
Danny thought . . . imagined . . . dreamed . . . he was under artillery fire.
That’s what it had felt like when the satchel exploded, and the concussion of it rocked the Bronco on its axles.
He never saw it, though, because he’d been entirely focused on Johnnie Macho. But it did force him to turn around to see if the sheriff and Amé were still alive, and that gave Johnnie enough time to recover from Danny’s suppressive fire and start unloading on the Bronco.
Now the truck was coming apart around him, one bullet at a time. Worse, in that one glance, he’d seen that the sheriff and Amé and Fox Uno were piled up near the porch—alive—but out in the open and exposed, and under serious fire as well from other shooters who must have appeared from the side of the van blocked from his view.
Danny closed his eyes and curled up tight and made himself as small as possible, as the Bronco rattled and shook from Johnnie Macho’s steady assault. He needed to abandon the Bronco and pull back to the sheriff’s truck, recover his AR-15 from where he’d hidden it. He couldn’t see the shooters bearing down on Amé on the opposite side of the van, but at least if he was out on foot, he could swing around and flank them.
Yet his body only curled tighter on itself, that great hand earlier that had been squeezing his chest now holding him back, refusing to let him move.
He’d left the Big Bend behind and was now back in Afghanistan—in Wanat—taking RPG fire again from the Taliban guerrillas who’d crept up on his platoon. A group of them had also commandeered the roof of a nearby hotel, shooting down into his men’s observation post, their AK-47s talking loudly to each other. He’d forever remember that sound, and all the others that came with it: men screaming and the boom of Camp Blessing’s big guns, and the air-bending whup of the AH-64 Apaches circling low above them. It had been dawn instead of dusk, but the light had been the same—that diffuse, improbable glow that heralded the day’s rising and setting sun.
That only existed on the other side of night.
He’d returned fire with his M-249 Minimi then, the spent brass bouncing all around him, too hot to the touch, like the rounds he’d just been firing from the M110—the heavy brass still rolling around his curled-up body—here and now.
Not in Wanat, but right here at the edge of the Far Six.
No matter what his body and his brain were telling him, no matter what his closed eyes were seeing, he wasn’t in Afghanistan anymore. He’d survived that, and if he wanted to survive this, he had to fucking move.
Now.
If he didn’t move, he was going to die and Amé and the sheriff were going to die.
He punched himself in the head with a closed fist. Once, twice, then over and over again until his vision cleared.
He was crying.
But he willed his body to unclench, cursed at it and spit at it and ordered it to just fucking move, soldier, and then pushed down the Bronco’s tailgate.
SEVENTY-SIX
Marco had slowly been rolling up the gravel drive, lights off, trying to make sense of what he was seeing, when the explosion occurred.
It was a flash of hot, white light, which had left the sheriff and an older Mexican male down, and America, too, with thick smoke drifting above them, and the scrub still smoldering, as two men abandoned the van, wildly firing long guns. One of them toppled over quick, but the other was still pouring it on, changing magazines with frightening speed. A woman was also running back in Marco’s direction, appearing like a ghost out of the hazy smoke, weaving back and forth.
He wasn’t sure, but it looked like her mouth was taped shut, and her hands were tied behind her back.
Before she got very far, though, she stumbled and fell, eyes wide, and Marco didn’t know if she’d simply tripped or a stray bullet had caught her.
She probably never even saw him, just as wide-eyed, sitting in Denbrow’s old truck.
Now he caught a glimpse of Danny also on foot, running low and away from his Bronco, which was throwing sparks from a steady rain of bullets bouncing off its hood and camper shell. Danny was shooting into the side panels of the van, trying to get to the cover of the sheriff’s truck parked a few yards away, even as a third armed man was slipping out of the back.
A man neither Danny nor anyone closer to the house could see.
Only Marco could, and if he didn’t do something about him, he’d have a clean shot at Danny. He’d also be able to circle around on America and the sheriff.
It was a matter of seconds.
Marco Lucero had never actually drawn his gun on duty, and he’d never aimed it at another human being. Sitting in his lap, it weighed a thousand pounds. He wanted to turn around and drive back the way he came. For the second time that day, he wanted to be at Earlys sipping a Coke a
nd chatting up Vianey Ruiz, watching her tattoos live and breathe under the Christmas lights.
He’d had his chance.
Instead, Marco flipped on the headlights of Denbrow’s piece-of-shit truck, pinning that third man in a circle of white light—as hot and bright as the earlier explosion—and then rolled out of the driver’s-side door with his gun in his hand.
He hoped he’d remembered to flip the safety off.
He was surprised at how suddenly light it was, as he pulled the trigger again and again.
SEVENTY-SEVEN
America didn’t feel the bullet hit her at first.
She was too focused on the pendejo behind the van door, who she couldn’t get a good angle on. It was next to impossible to shoot at him and shield the sheriff, too . . . and to a lesser extent, Fox Uno, who was groaning and trying to crawl away from her. She also didn’t want to accidentally hit the woman she’d seen—the poor, gray-haired owner of La Tienda they’d tried to offer up as her mama.
She’d emptied the Remington and was now using her AR-15, but couldn’t get to her extra magazines easily, and the air around her was hot to the touch. Not only from the explosion, but from the passing bullets themselves, scorching the sky as they flew by.
Embers swirled around, close enough she could grab them with her hand, and she tasted bitter smoke.
“Tell me how this ends . . .” That’s what Danny had asked her. And although she hadn’t known then, still didn’t know now, she had to believe it wasn’t like this.
She would not allow it to end like this.
She prayed they could hold out for a little longer, as she worked furiously to reload her rifle.
This Side of Night Page 36