‘I dunno,’ Henry says. ‘But I don’t like it.’
That’s when he sees the driver’s seat slide forward and tilt toward the steering wheel.
He sees movement behind it-an arm reaching into the back seat, he thinks. It’s hard to tell for certain. But it is movement.
Inhale. Hold the breath. Take aim. Steady.
The world is a storm but he is its eye.
Exhale.
Squeeze the trigger.
Ian hears the bullet slam into his car and flinches, but Diego does not. Diego simply reaches into the back seat and comes out first with the rifled Remington 11–87 and the sawed-off Remington 870, and then with the.308 and the duffel bag in which the boxes of ammunition are stored. Ian pulls the duffel bag toward him and unzips it. He tosses Diego the shells for the.308. Then pulls out shells for himself and gets to loading the two shotguns.
Once they’re loaded he slides to the front of the car and looks around the bumper trying to spot Henry, trying to spot movement of any kind. He knows the shots are coming from across the wide street, and from the north, and from a good distance, by the sound of it.
‘Where are you, you son of a-’
He pulls his head back quickly and a moment later there is the sound of a gunshot and the dirt three feet behind the place where his face was kicks up a cloud of dust, and a few pebbles from the ground throw themselves against the right leg of his Levis.
‘They’re on the roof of the school,’ he says. ‘About fifty, sixty yards away.’
Diego nods. ‘What do you want to do?’
Ian closes his eyes a moment, thinking. He did not want to get Diego involved in this way. He did not want to ask of him what he is about to ask of him. Even now he wishes he had talked Diego into heading back to Bulls Mouth. If Diego was not here he would have to think of something else. But Diego is here. He opens his eyes and looks at his friend. This will change him. What he is about to ask of his friend will change him forever.
‘How’s your long-distance shooting?’ he says.
Ian sits on his haunches behind the Mustang. To his right Diego is readying himself for a run toward what once was a hardware store. If he can get behind it, he can make his way in relative safety to the top floor of a three-storey hotel called the Jackrabbit Inn about three hundred yards further on. From that vantage point he should have clear shots at Henry Dean and his brother on the roof of the school.
‘You ready?’ he says.
Diego nods.
Ian exhales and his exhalation turns into a deep cough. Liquid gags up from his lungs like muddy water from a well-pump and he spits it to the asphalt between his feet. Tears stream down his face. He leans his head against the car fender before him and spits once more. His chest is throbbing with pain. Last time he tried to do this he was shot. What is it they say about doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results?
‘One,’ he says, looking toward Diego.
‘You sure you’re-’
‘Two,’ he says, cutting off the question.
Diego nods briefly. The nod tells Ian that he accepts that as an answer.
‘Three.’
Diego takes off running.
Ian jumps to his feet, swinging the shotgun up and into the crook of his shoulder, and he fires at the roof of the schoolhouse. The pain is incredible. Concrete explodes less than a foot below the place where Henry is crouched. A white shell flies from the shotgun, arcs in a blur through the air, and hits the asphalt to his right. He fires again and again and again. Both Henry and his brother drop down, becoming invisible from this angle.
But Ian remains standing, squinting toward the school, watching the flat line of the roof and waiting.
Blood runs down his sweaty belly from the hole in his chest, which is throbbing with pain. His breaths are quick and shallow, as he can manage nothing but shallow breaths any longer. Any time he tries to breathe deep it turns into a painful coughing fit. He knows what is happening. With the tube removed from his lung he is drowning in his own blood. It is beyond a feeling of drowning now; it is the actual thing.
A flash of movement from the roof of the school. He fires. Concrete explodes.
The movement ceases.
Ian glances behind him.
Diego is out of sight.
Good. Black dots are swimming before Ian’s eyes and he doesn’t think he’ll be able to remain standing much longer.
He fires off the last three rounds in the 11–87’s magazine, listening to the shells clink to the asphalt to his right between shots, and then allows himself to sink to the ground behind the car, out of breath and in pain. Every shot sent a terrible force through his right shoulder and his wounds are now screaming. Sweat runs down his face and drips from the end of his nose. He blinks several times, and then looks for Diego.
He does not see him, nor does he hear him.
The air is silent and still but for the sound of his own breathing.
And then he does hear him. He hears the rapid rhythm of his boots. He hears running. He is far away and getting farther.
Ian nods. Good.
He grabs the box of deer slugs and starts reloading.
Maggie slides the handcuffs down the length of the arm of the desk, being careful they don’t rattle too much. She slides them beneath the wooden desktop, now detached from the frame, and then she is loose. The cuff slides off and dangles from her wrist. It is strange: a tightness in her chest seems to uncoil with the simple knowledge that her arm is free.
Her arm is free.
She looks up at Beatrice.
Beatrice does not look back.
The gun sits on the floor next to a pile of chips and candy bars.
Maggie slides out of the desk, eyes on Beatrice, and makes her way silently across the room. She is barefoot, so it is not difficult to be silent. But Beatrice must see her movements out of the corner of her eye, in her periphery, because she turns to look at her and says, ‘Sarah, what are you doing? Henry said to stay here.’
Maggie runs to the gun and picks it up.
Beatrice walks toward her, but stops when Maggie points the gun at her.
‘I don’t want to shoot you,’ she says with a shaky voice. ‘But I will.’
Beatrice is silent. She simply stares at Maggie with her wide, glistening eyes. Tears once more roll down her round face. Her chin trembles. Her shoulders sag with defeat.
‘We’re never gonna be a family again, are we?’
‘We never were,’ Maggie says.
Beatrice leans back against the wall and slides down it to a sitting position, with her knees up and her arms on her knees. She looks down at her lap. Maggie can see her cotton panties. Somehow that makes her seem very much like a little girl. Tears drip off her face and splash against her dress.
‘We never were,’ Beatrice says, eyes focused on nothing, and it seems as if she is speaking a foreign phrase for the first time. A foreign phrase whose meaning she does not quite understand.
She looks up at Maggie as Maggie backs her way out of the room.
‘We never were,’ Beatrice says again. Then: ‘But I loved you.’
‘I didn’t love you,’ Maggie says.
Then she turns around and runs out into the corridor, looking for a way out.
The first shot from above thwacks into the roof just to the left of Henry’s legs. He can feel the displaced air ripple outward and press itself against his body and he hears the bullet connect with the roof, an almost wet crack like a bone breaking open and spilling its marrow, and several splinters are thrown against his Levis.
‘Where the fuck did that come from?’
Ron behind him scanning the surrounding buildings, looking for the source of the gunshot whose bang still echoes through the empty streets of the town.
‘I don’t know,’ Henry says. ‘It had to come from above. The angle is wrong for-’
The second shot hits less than a foot shy of the place where Ron is crouched, and splinter
s fly from the roof and into his face. He falls backwards with a curse, blinking as tears stream down his face, about a dozen bleeding pin-prick holes in his cheeks.
Henry looks back toward the street. The shooter, which has to be Peña because Hunt is still trapped behind his now bullet-riddled car, has to be in the Jackrabbit Inn, it’s the only building taller than the schoolhouse, but Henry can’t see him anywhere. He doesn’t see him on the roof, and while several of the windows on the third floor are open, all he can see behind those windows is darkness. The sun is setting behind the building, lighting Henry and his brother while keeping the east side of the Jackrabbit Inn in shadows. And it’s the east side of the hotel he and Ron are facing.
‘We have to get off the roof,’ he says. ‘Ron, we gotta get off the-’
Ron is sitting up, rubbing his eyes, when a third shot is fired. A red dot presses itself into the center of Ron’s left hand. He pulls it away from his face and looks at it.
But the bullet continued through the hand, and there is another dot in his left cheekbone and his left eye is filling with blood and a slow trickle runs from his right nostril, down onto his lip, and then along the top of his lip, drawing a red mustache there before dripping from his face.
‘Ron?’
Ron looks up from his hand to Henry.
‘Something happened to my. . hand.’
He holds it up for Henry to see, blinks several times, and falls over sideways.
‘Ron?’
Henry gets to his feet and turns in a full circle, confused somehow-this isn’t how it was supposed to happen. It was supposed to be easy. It was supposed to be easy and quick, a few shots and finished. He glances toward the Jackrabbit Inn and again sees only darkness in the windows there. He turns and runs toward the hatch in the roof as the fourth shot cuts through the air. He drops down the ladder and lands in the janitor’s closet and falls backwards against a shelf full of cleaning supplies.
What the fuck just happened?
He tries to accept what he saw, but his mind keeps rejecting it. He cannot have just seen his brother get killed. That’s impossible. It’s impossible.
It happened.
First his younger brother, then his older brother.
Hunt has to pay for that if for nothing else. He knows Donald would never give him up unless he was forced to. He knows he would never-
He closes his eyes and tries to get his mind right.
He has to finish this.
He opens his eyes and walks out of the janitor’s closet and down a wide flight of stairs to the first floor. He walks down the corridor, and is about to pass the classroom that Beatrice and Sarah are waiting in when Sarah runs out of it, into the corridor. A gun hangs from her right hand, the handcuffs still wrapped around her wrist clinking against its barrel.
She looks left and sees him, and there is a moment of terror in her eyes, but only a moment of it. Then she lifts the pistol in her hand and points it at him.
‘Don’t move,’ she says.
He stops and puts his arms up, still holding his dad’s.30–06 in his right hand. First his younger brother, then his older brother. Now the one in the middle.
‘What are you doing, Sarah? How’d you get out?’
‘Shut up,’ she says. ‘Shut up and put down that gun.’
‘You don’t even know how to use that gun, Sarah. You’re not gonna shoot me.’
‘It’s a semiautomatic and the safety’s off,’ Sarah says. ‘You told Beatrice. All I have to do is aim and pull the trigger.’
He takes a slow step toward her.
‘I said stop!’
He does.
‘Put down your gun.’
‘You’re not gonna shoot me.’
Sarah licks her lips and raises the barrel of the pistol so it’s pointed at his face. He stares into it, and then past it to Sarah, and he sees that she will shoot him. If he isn’t careful she will shoot him. He thinks of Beatrice’s ankle. He never did find out exactly how that happened, but looking into Sarah’s face he thinks he knows. Her eyes tell him that she is very much her father’s daughter. At least in one respect she is: once she begins something, she does not quit.
‘Put down your gun,’ she says again. ‘Right now.’ Her voice trembles with rage.
He thinks of all the times he tied her hands, all the times he hung her from the punishment hook. He thinks of leaving her in the basement. He thinks of hearing her cry when she was younger. He thinks of when the crying stopped.
He nods, then leans down slowly and sets the rifle onto the floor.
‘Did you shoot Beatrice?’
‘No,’ Sarah says. ‘I didn’t have to.’
‘Good,’ he says. With him leaning forward she is almost within arm’s reach. He wonders if he might be able to lunge at her and get the gun away. ‘Good,’ he says again. ‘You don’t want to shoot anybody.’
‘I don’t. But I will.’
‘I know that, Sarah,’ he says. ‘I know th-’
He jumps at her and just manages, barely, to grab her wrist before the gun goes off. The sound rings in his ears, deafening him completely, if only momentarily, and he staggers backwards, hand still wrapped around Sarah’s wrist.
Son of a bitch: she actually shot him. He’s faced off against half a dozen cops in the last few days and come out unscathed, only to be shot by a fourteen-year-old girl.
But he will not die like this. He will not.
He struggles to pull the gun out of Sarah’s hands.
Ian sits on his haunches and waits, the rifled shotgun in his hands and the sawed-off shotgun tucked into the back of his Levis. He heard gunfire echo its way out the front door of the school and now he waits for something human to emerge.
Silence follows silence.
He swallows and can feel his Adam’s apple bob in his throat. His mouth is dry, his lips cracked. His eyes sting.
And then he sees movement on the other side of the doorway, behind the shadows. His first urge is to stand and shoot, but he does not do that. He waits to see what emerges from the shadows and what emerges from the shadows is Henry. Henry carrying Maggie, holding her around the waist and with a pistol to her head. He is pale and glistening with sweat and there is a hole in the middle of his neck like a tracheotomy and blood is running down the front of his shirt and Maggie is trying to pull his arm away from her waist so she will be let loose.
Behind Henry and Maggie is Beatrice. Her head is low and her shoulders slumped. She barely seems to be there at all.
Ian stands, pointing the 11–87 at Henry and walking around the front of the car. He feels wobbly on his legs, but he does not care and he does not move slowly. He cuts the distance between Henry and himself in half.
‘Let her go,’ he says.
‘So you can shoot me?’ Henry says, his voice little more than a frog’s croak. ‘No chance.’
‘I’m gonna shoot you anyway, you son of a bitch.’
Henry shakes his head. ‘You won’t risk killing your own daughter, Hunt.’
‘I said let her go.’
‘No. You’re not gonna risk shooting her. I know it and you know it. So just drop your gun. We’re walking to Ron’s car and we’re driving away and that’s the end of it. You lose, Hunt. You tried, but you lose.’
Henry takes several slow steps toward the parking lot where a white Toyota sits. His wife Beatrice walks behind him. Her eyes are wet with tears and glistening.
‘Put down your gun, Hunt.’
‘Let her go.’
‘Put it down or I’ll shoot her myself.’
He presses his pistol against Maggie’s temple.
Maggie looks at him with eyes filled not with fear but with anger. ‘No, Daddy! Don’t put it down! Don’t let him get away! Don’t let him take me away again! Please, just don’t let him take me away again!’
‘Shut up, Sarah,’ Henry says. ‘Put it down, Hunt, or she dies.’
Ian’s chest throbs with pain. He thinks he could probabl
y get Henry. He could probably get Henry, but even the small chance of hitting Maggie makes him hesitate. He will not do that. He nods, more to himself than to Henry, and leans down to set the 11–87 on the ground. But as he stands, black dots swim before his eyes and the light seems to fade from the sky, as if night were falling all at once, and there is a brief moment during which he thinks he may pass out, just drop like a corseted lady in an old film, and then will come the gentlemen with fans, and all he can think is two words over and over again: not now not now not now not now.
And he manages, barely, to hold on to consciousness. Light runs back into the dome of the sky like liquid over an upturned glass bowl. He regains his balance.
‘Smart man,’ Henry says.
‘No,’ Maggie says. ‘No!’
And she slams both her elbows back simultaneously into Henry. The left elbow sinks into his gut, and a strange sound explodes from Henry’s mouth, like a large dog letting go a single bark, and Maggie drops to the ground from his loosened grip. She drops to the ground and runs toward Ian. Her face is full of terror and joy.
Henry swings the pistol around toward her, and shouts, ‘Stop, Sarah, or I’ll-’
But that’s all he manages to get out before Ian reaches behind him-with a great tearing pain in his chest and back, as if a hot metal rod were pushed clean through him-and pulls out the sawed-off shotgun and swings it around so it’s pointing at Henry, and fires. It seems to happen in slow motion. First everything quickly-the elbow, the drop, the running-and then he grabs the shotgun and time slows like suddenly they were all moving through honey. Maggie seems to hang in the air between running steps and Henry’s arm is moving slowly-slowly-and his words sound like a seventy-eight playing at thirty-three and a third. The sound of Ian’s shotgun firing is extremely loud, and he can see the buckshot emerge. He can see the last few grains of gunpowder spit from the barrel behind the eight.36 inch pellets before they burn to nothing on the air. He can see smoke blue and thin curl from the barrel. Multiple cracks as the buckshot hits bone and tight groups of holes punch themselves into his face and head, and his skull seems to dent inward like an empty beer can as the contents splatter on the sun-bleached asphalt behind him as well as Beatrice’s face and hair and dress.
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