by Ben Sanders
“Christ, don’t do that.”
Vance didn’t move, just watched him carefully. Eyes going left-right like following a far-off ball game. “Chill, Troy. You look like you just got spooked by a girl.”
“I am. I didn’t. But it’s kinda hard when you’ve got a police detective hostage, and she knows your name.”
Vance a foot away, voice a murmur. “We’ve got it handled. Me’n Dante know how to do this shit. She can say she goes to book club with Mrs. Obama, it don’t mean jack, because she’s not going anywhere. Why you looking all shook up, you’re meant to be Mr. Badass.”
“Yeah. I’m all up for making money, but when you’ve got a cop at gunpoint you sort of kick things into high gear.”
Vance just stood there, and Rojas figured his blood must be cut with antifreeze. Vance said, “It’s called civilian casualties. We do it in Sand Land all the time, don’t worry about it.”
“Someone might know where she is.”
“Dude, look at me. This is what we do. We got trained how to do this. We are the fucking pride and joy of the United States military.”
Rojas rubbed his face, ran his hands through his hair. “Cyrus still hasn’t called in.”
“He’s probably changing his face tape or something, I don’t know. It hasn’t been that long. Just stop fucking twitching and hopping, and chill. We’re under control.” He ran a palm midair, flat line.
Rojas said, “So what’s the plan?”
“The plan is self-evident: boyfriend isn’t here, we can’t drill the bitch in the house, we’ve gotta take her off site. Okay?”
“Back to the house?”
Vance nodded. “Back to the house.”
“This all seems out of control.”
“It’s not. Remember, you rolled out here planning to kill a guy, but now it’s a lady you’ve gone all cold feet. Man up.”
Rojas didn’t answer.
Vance said, “There’s nobody for miles better at this than me’n Dante. So just go with it.”
SEVENTEEN
Marshall
Nobody in the Chrysler.
He walked up the street on the reserve side, keeping to the trees. When he reached the house he could see the white Audi parked farther east. Hopefully it was empty, too. He imagined Bolt had been sent to clear the other side of the river and whoever had been in the cars was now in his home. With the woman either dead or hostage.
He stood in the trees, watching.
Light traffic on the road, maybe a car a minute. Gut feeling said there was no one in the Audi. The dilemma being if he was wrong, he’d be seen as he crossed the street.
Which was probably more than a slim chance, because leaving both cars unoccupied wasn’t a bright move. Home invasion–cum-homicide, you want someone with eyes on the street. The very stupid or very arrogant might neglect it. Or maybe that had been Bolt’s role, covering the approach.
Choices.
The Audi had tinted glass. There was no way to check it without breaking a window. He knew it would trigger the alarm, but he preferred that to being seen crossing the street and getting shot as a consequence.
He stood looking at the car. Plans formulating, tactics of varied bloodshed. He slipped the Colt in his belt and jumped down into the cut of the river and ran crouched back along the road. The weak trace of water just a silver thread in the dark. When he reached the Silverado he scrambled up the bank and unlocked the truck and took the 870 from beneath the blanket on the rear seat and slipped back down into the river.
Rocks and dead branches through the little gulley: it was hard to keep his footing. When he drew abreast of the Audi, he stretched and laid the shotgun up on dry ground and then clambered quietly up the sheer bank.
The car cold and silent.
Marshall in a crouch amidst the brush. He took the Colt from his belt and held it one-handed with the other steadying him, like a runner at the starting block.
Blood in his ears building to a roar again. No traffic.
Count it in:
Three.
Two.
One.
And he was off, up out of the trees, across the road. A silent dash to the Audi and he raised the .45 by the muzzle like a hammer in his left hand and smashed the butt against the rear window, shattering the glass, and as the alarm blared he swapped the gun to his right hand, and in his shooter’s stance swung both ways to cover the whole cabin.
The car was empty.
The turn signals blinking orange in phase with the alarm. These huge shadows leaping away in all directions, and despite the commotion he felt calm standing there next to this empty vehicle. Better than death.
He backed up across the road and into the dark and slipped the pistol in his belt again and found the shotgun and dropped back down into the river. Doors opening and closing as a few people came to investigate the noise. The smashed window was out of sight on the river side, and with the Audi sitting there with no intruder, they must have brushed it off as some malfunction. The car playing cry wolf. He watched them go back inside, one by one.
When he reached the house he climbed back up the side of the cut and waited at the tree line in a crouch with the shotgun across his knees. The alarm clear in the cold night and with each flash the woods looming orange above him.
Two minutes. Three. The crouch burning him, but he didn’t move.
He saw a man in black emerge from the darkness beside his house, like he’d slipped out the side door. Marshall’s size and bearing and in the streetlight he could see the guy’s dyed green hair.
The man looked to his left along the street and saw the Audi sitting there blinking and blaring. He looked back right toward the black Chrysler, and then briefly into the trees, and then he jogged up the road toward the car. From thirty feet away he blipped a remote fob and the alarm quit and he opened the driver’s door and slid in.
Quiet a moment. What’s with that broken window?
The engine started.
The car’s lights came on, twin blue-white flares.
Marshall stood up, the shotgun in one hand, down along his leg. Across the street someone in his darkened garage raised the door.
The Audi pulled out into the lane and cruised toward him, heading for the house.
Marshall raised the shotgun. He jacked a round. Eerie and full of promise, and in the quiet it might have been heard across the street.
The car a hundred feet away.
Fifty.
Marshall moved out of the trees and onto the road. To the right the glare of the car, and to the left his shadow reaching long and thin for the dark, like he’d been stretched from the void.
One step. Two, three, four.
Gun to shoulder.
The driver anonymous behind the black tint and the white paint gleaming and Marshall sighted quickly and squeezed the trigger just as the driver saw him and jerked the wheel. The massive boom of the shot and the radial kiss of gun smoke as the stock kicked him and the pellets blitzed the door pillar and shattered the front window. The roar of it still dispersing through the quiet evening as Marshall corrected and jacked his next shell and with the car still in motion he fired again through the driver’s door.
The Audi lost control and bounced up onto the sidewalk and ripped to a halt, straddling the curb. Marshall was gone. Moving backward at a jog to the safety of the reserve. The guy from the garage was caught in the headlights, and he could see it was Troy Rojas. Gun in hand, shuffle-stepping left and right, unsure of the next play.
Witnesses now, just glances between blinds. Gunfire bringing them out. The green-haired guy from the Audi popped his door and practically fell on the road. His left side was bloodied, arm hanging limp. Twin swathes of rubber in the car’s wake, broken glass winking sharply.
Marshall lay prone, sighting the .45 two-handed, the shotgun beside him. He knew they’d seen him drop back into the trees. He waited, the gun on the green-haired guy. Every instinct said drop them right there, cold blood or not, bu
t with an audience he didn’t want to see his escapades on a sworn statement.
So he just lay there.
Five seconds. The 911s would be going out. The green-haired guy circled to the other side of the car. Rojas, as they say, between a rock and a hard place:
Come across the street, or bail out.
He chose the latter.
He ran out into the road, heading for the Chrysler, calling behind him as he went: “I’ll get Cyrus, you get the girl.”
Someone at a window, phone to ear. Another guy came out the open garage door onto the driveway. Marshall tracked him with the gun. The guy saw the green-haired man hunkered down all bloodied beside the Audi, the car itself wearing a nice spread of buckshot. Rojas’s form receding into the distance.
The guy glanced into the trees, and his mouth opened a fraction, like in that instant he could see the whole debacle.
He said, “Shit. Get in, get in.”
The green-haired man opened the passenger door and clambered into the car, and the new guy circled round and got in the driver’s side and they roared away.
Marshall gave it another few seconds, gun on the open garage, and then he got to his feet and picked up the shotgun and sprinted across the street. Colt in his belt, 870 raised as he went through the front door.
That shortness of breath.
Every sense hyper-tuned.
The roaring adrenaline.
Shit, it had been a while. And never in his own house.
Clear in the entry.
Clear in the kitchen.
Into the living room and there she was, bound on the floor. Cable ties at wrist and ankle. She raised her head to look at him and let it tip back gently to the floor.
She let her breath out. “God. Get me out of here.”
* * *
He went to the kitchen and took a knife from the block on the counter and walked through to the living room and cut her cable ties.
The cuffs had bit deep. She rubbed each wrist in turn and sat up and got slowly to her feet. Her hands were shaking and she’d lost some color, but she was keeping it together. He wouldn’t have blamed her for being less composed.
Two minutes. Don’t hang around.
He bent and picked up the curved scraps of plastic. “What are you doing in my house?”
She kissed blood off a wrist. “I thought you might say, ‘Are you all right?’”
“I can see you’re all right. Anything else will need some explaining.”
She followed him into the kitchen. He returned the knife to its slot and opened the cupboard under the sink and stood on the bin pedal and dropped the cuffs in the trash. He said, “This is the second time I’ve saved your life. If you were banking on me showing up, you must be damn good at wishing.”
He looked at the 870. “Or maybe you’ve got the patron saint of the NRA as your guardian angel. Wouldn’t that be good.”
She didn’t answer.
Marshall said, “Well. We’ll call it luck, then.”
She said, “I wanted to ask you about your meeting this morning.”
He glanced at her. “Which meeting was that?”
She laughed quietly but didn’t answer.
He leaned across the counter and looked out the window. He said, “I don’t know what your plans are, but I need to get out of here in about ninety seconds.”
“This is a crime scene. You can’t leave.”
“I think it’s more that I’m not supposed to. But permitted or not I can definitely pull it off.”
She didn’t answer.
He said, “Maybe you didn’t hear, but there was a bit of a ruckus out there a moment ago, and I don’t want any trigger-happy lawmen showing up and finding me with this.” He raised the shotgun briefly. “Also, I plan on finding those other three. You can join if you want.”
He went and cracked the side door and listened. No sirens yet. He waited, seeing if she would follow. Getting up around the four-minute mark.
No time to wait around—
Footsteps behind him. He glanced back. She said, “I’ll drive.”
EIGHTEEN
Rojas
They went east.
Breakneck on the straights, almost skidding through the corners.
“Cyrus, where the fuck are you? We had to bail.”
Digital radio, not even static on the line. Like putting your ear to the void. He keyed it again:
“Vance, how’s Dante doing?”
“He’s shot all down one side. He’s bleeding pretty good.”
“Shit. Is the woman tied down?”
Vance braked hard for a corner. His taillights filled the Chrysler’s windshield. Rojas stomped the brake and the car shuddered with the ABS as he fought the wheel through the turn.
“We don’t have her, man. There wasn’t time.”
“What? What the fuck? You don’t have her?”
“There wasn’t time, Troy.”
He felt this cold seep outward from his gut and fill him that special way bad truths do. He took his foot off the gas and the Audi shrank away ahead of him. The Chrysler drifted to the curb.
Free fall. He couldn’t catch his breath. He felt the blood dropping from his head, heartbeat thundering on nothing. His head tipped against the wheel and he felt himself losing it, Vance in his ear, words that breezed straight through because:
She knows your name.
The cop knows your name.
You held a cop at gunpoint, and she knows your name.
A cruiser flew past in the opposite direction and the blue-and-red light was starry in the mist on his windows, almost beautiful but for the fact he knew what was coming and he turned and looked behind him and saw Bolt lying dead on the backseat with his eyes aimed somewhere distant and the spare keys hanging from his mouth.
* * *
Somehow he made it home. Autopilot. The Audi was in the garage, both front doors open and a trail of blood leading into the house.
She knows your name.
Cyrus dead, Dante a pint short, and the cop was all he could think of. He walked into the living room, saw Dante on his back with his shirt cut open. Black pockmarks on his chest and down his arm where the shot embedded. The whole side of him scarlet and the floor slick with blood. Vance rigging up an IV stand, prepping a line for his arm.
“Troy, help me with this. Shit, he might need the hospital.”
He patted Dante’s cheek. “Stay with me, dude. We got you covered. I’m gonna shoot you up. Troy, help me with this.”
But his phone was ringing.
“Hang on.” Anything to get away from the blood. The color so vivid, and the sweet copper smell filling his head.
He put a finger in his free ear and answered.
“Troy. Why you not ring?” His mother. Only she had such timing.
He walked toward the garage, but saw the mess and turned and headed for the kitchen. “I’ve been working.”
“When we gonna see you? You been gone so long, ages. Your sister’s worse again, Troy, she not good. She’s gotta get the marrow thing to try fix it.”
“I know she’s sick.”
“So why you not here?”
He didn’t answer.
“When I not hear I worry what you’re doing, and I think maybe you’re doing something’s gonna make you go back inside. I can’t live with that again. I can’t have my girl dead and you inside.”
He wiped his mouth and swallowed and waited a moment for it to pass. “She’s not going to die. I’m making money and I can pay for her to get better. It just takes a little while. But I promise.”
“What you promise?”
He sat down with his back against the counter, covered his eyes with a hand. “I want to be there, but I can’t. I want to more than anything, but I need to be here. Did you get the money I sent?”
“What? No. We didn’t get no money. How much you send?”
So much he couldn’t bring himself to say it. “Shit. Are you sure you didn’t get it?”
“No. We had friends of Marco stay and maybe it went with them, I dunno. How much you send?”
He just couldn’t say it.
You took a cop at gunpoint and she knows your name—
“Look, don’t worry about me.”
“How you can say that when I don’t see you. Troy? How you can say that.”
“Soon. I’ll be with you soon. But I just need time to get everything together.”
She didn’t answer.
“And when I do I can fix it. Okay?”
“You been saying your prayers, Troy? You pray you go to heaven?”
“Yes.” Not strictly true: he’d given up years ago. In the hallway, he saw Leon headed for the living room.
“Troy.” God, she was crying. “I love you so much.”
He closed his eyes and eked it out: “I love you, too.”
“And your sister.”
“Yes. So much.”
Shuddering breaths as she composed herself. “People ask where you at, and I say you away living the dream. I say Troy living the American Dream, but I never know if I’m true.”
A gunshot and he jumped. He saw Leon walking back down the hallway.
Shit. He got that panicked lightness again. She was talking, but he left the phone on the floor, scrambled to his feet, ran to the living room even though he could bet his life what he’d find.
Dante on his back in his own blood and a bullet hole in his forehead. Vance kneeling by the drip stand, rocking and cradling him.
NINETEEN
Marshall
He didn’t want to leave the Silverado, so they took separate cars. Marshall told her he’d talk anywhere, provided there was food. She drove lead, which was a good arrangement: tailing close he could see if she was on the phone.
She led him down onto Cerrillos Road heading south and west, and stopped at a diner about fifteen minutes out of town. It was a low brick building with cars nosed in on three sides below the windows, as if peering into the light. The sign on the pole by the turn-in read BIG CHIP AND SMALL FRY’S. In the dark with the mountains obscured the six-lane appeared to stretch forever through the cold and barren world, and the bright diner looked like the last friendly waypoint you’d ever see.