Fuzzy Navel

by J. A. Konrath

  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 his 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.

  The blow knocks the wind out of Munchel, ramming him into the wall, sandwiching him against it. Like a true soldier he manages to hold on to the Desert Eagle. Unfortunately, Munchel’s arm is at his side, immobile, the door pinning his wrist. He can’t raise the gun, and has no leverage to push away from the wall.

  A second shot whizzes through the window. Munchel jerks at the sound, but he isn’t the one who gets hit. Munchel stares at Pessolano writhing on the ground — the man’s leg looks like it has sprouted another knee in the middle of the thigh.

  Another shot does the same thing to the opposite leg. Pessolano clutches at his throat, making a face like he’s screaming, but no sound is coming out. Munchel is horrified. It’s too much to watch, too much to bear. He squeezes his eyes closed and wiggles, trying to twist away from the refrigerator door. With a grunt and some hip action, Munchel frees up enough room to get his gun arm loose. He brings the gun around, shoots behind the refrigerator door where he guesses his attacker to be, the Desert Eagle sounding like cannon fire.

  The one-armed man pinning him to the wall backpedals. Munchel fires at him twice more, his bullets pinging into the door as the man falls. Munchel has no idea if he hit the guy or not, but he takes a quick last look at Pessolano, sees his friend’s remaining good limb get turned into cube steak by more sniper fire, and decides he doesn’t want to be in this room any longer.

  He sprints away from the big bay window, out of the living room, following the path of the chick cop through the kitchen and to a doorway. Munchel finds her in the garage, her back to him, rummaging through a large stack of boxes.

  James Michael Munchel raises the big Desert Eagle. It’s time to end this.

  11:53 P.M.

  JACK

  NOISE, FROM BEHIND ME. The Ravenswood sniper charges into the garage, and when he raises his pistol I throw myself forward.

  Two shots in quick succession, both missing. The sound is painfully loud in the enclosed garage, echoing off the concrete floor. I tumble over a container of books, roll, and land on my butt, my body forcing a trench between two stacks of boxes. The single bare bulb hanging from the ceiling isn’t strong enough to penetrate the crevice I’m in, so I can’t see a thing.

  I cover my head and wait for the sniper to start firing again.

  He doesn’t. Instead, he starts kicking boxes, knocking them over, swearing and yelling. A crack opens up between crates, and I see he’s brandishing a knife now. One of those survival models, long and unwieldy, with a serrated blade. His face is a picture of anger and frustration.

  “Come out of there, you split-tail bitch!”

  I get on all fours, back away. There’s a breeze coming from my left — the broken window. Maybe I can make it outside. I crawl toward it, keeping low.

  He pushes through ahead of me, cutting off my escape. He’s only a few feet away. He grins, baring yellow teeth.

  “There’s my girl. Stay down. I like that position.”

  If I got scared by creeps talking trash, I would have quit the Job after a week. Threats don’t bother me much. Knives, however, do.

  “Where’s your friend?” I ask. I hold out a hand, touch the wall, keeping an eye on the blade.

  “Casualty of war.”

  I keep my voice even, keep the fear out of it. He seems like a guy who would be turned on by fear. “You don’t seem too upset about him dying.”

  The man smiles. “He knew the risks.”

  I stretch up onto my knees.

  “Is that was this is?” I ask. “A war?”

  “Life is a war. We have to fight for every little bit we get.”

  “War is for soldiers,” I say. I shift my weight back onto my toes. “You’re not a soldier.”

  He points the tip of the knife at me. “I AM a soldier!”

  I lean back into a squatting position. “Soldiers don’t kill innocent people. They don’t threaten girls with knives. What’s your real job? Construction worker? Assembly line at a factory?”

  I see that hits a nerve. The sniper snarls and rushes forward, slashing. I leap at him rather than away, getting inside the swing of the blade, throwing a hard right into his stomach and then driving him backward with my shoulder. We get tangled up, push through some boxes and up against the workbench.

  I latch both hands on to his wrist, keeping the knife away. The Ravenswood sniper fights against my grip, then suddenly seems to realize he has more than one hand, and uses his free one to punch me in the face.

  I hold on tight, tucking my chin into my chest. He hits me on the side of the head — in the ear — and my legs give out. Then he connects with my cheek and I release his knife hand, falling backward, my consciousness slipping away.

  “I don’t work in no goddamn factory, bitch!” he screams. “I’m the best goddamn soldier you ever met!”

  He switches his hold on the knife so it angles down, raising it up over my head.

  I’m in no condition to stop him.

  11:53 P.M.

  KORK

  I’VE GOT HARRY in my sights. He engaged in a brief tussle with the remaining sniper, the sniper shot at him, and Harry fell onto his back, right on top of Mom. I can’t tell if either of them got hit or not. He’s still moving, but doesn’t seem to be in any particular hurry, which might indicate an injury.

  Let’s make it worse.

  I consider where the first bullet should go. Foot? Knee? Balls.

  No. His other hand.

  I’m such a little stinker.

  I aim, adjusting for the wind, visualizing the shot like I learned in basic training.

  Then a patch of grass explodes just a few feet to my left, accompanied by a BANG!

  Phin found himself a rifle.

  He obviously can’t shoot for shit. I’m less
than a hundred yards away. Hell, with these guns a blind preschooler could shoot the shine off a penny from three quarters of a mile. I switch position, sight his blond head in the rear window of the Bronco, and squeeze the trigger a fraction of a second after I see him ducking down.

  Crap. Miss.

  No problem. He got lucky. And luck doesn’t last forever. Jack has learned that particular lesson well to night. Phin will learn it too.

  I eject the round, seek out the backpack full of clips that the snipers have so graciously left me. Without taking my eyes off of Phin I select one, my fingers feeling to make sure it’s loaded. It’s empty. I try another. Also empty.

  The whole bag is filled with empty clips.

  Phin fires again, and it kicks up a clod of dirt only a few inches from my hip.

  Rather than dwell on the misfortune of unfolding events, I decide to get proactive. I detach the night scope and stick it in my pocket. Staying on my elbows and toes, I inch backward down the slope of the small hill I’m perched on, stopping periodically to tuck down and roll left or right. Phin keeps shooting at me, keeps missing, and then I’m out of his line of fire, on my feet, and sprinting toward the woods adjacent to the road.

  Shooting isn’t the only thing the marines taught me. I can also sneak like a cat.

  I cut right, make my way through a hundred yards of trees, then circle back and head for the Bronco, slow and low, silent as death.

  11:53 P.M.

  MARY

  MARY OPENS HER EYES.

  She’s lying on the floor, and there’s tremendous pressure on her leg, accompanied by a dull ache.

  A bullet wound?

  “I need a fucking vacation.”

  “Harry?”

  That’s the pressure. Harry’s fallen on top of her.

  “Mom? You got those codeine pills on you? Gimme about ten.”