by Urban Waite
Ray pulled the trigger again. Firing into the clouded room. Firing after the sound of men breathing. The echo of the gun swallowing anything that remained.
When Ray found cover near the broken remnants of the wood bar, they were firing at him out of the settling dust. Splintering up the bar as the bullets dug in. It was impossible to see anything through the brick smoke and the men went on firing blindly while Ray thought about what he needed to do.
He broke the shotgun open and fingered out the two shells, steaming and warm in his hand. He let them fall to the ground. With the Ruger he fired shots into the corners of the room until the magazine was spent and there was just the dull click of the hammer hitting against the empty chamber. The remaining guns opened up on him immediately. With the Ruger left behind him, he moved down around the back of the bar with the shotgun in both hands, keeping low.
Deep in his pocket he found two of the double-aught shells and played them into the barrel. Each one big enough to take down a mule deer.
He tried to steady himself there at the end of the bar with the taste of gun smoke bitter in his mouth and the chalk-dry smell of the brick dust billowing in through his nostrils. Gunfire was still coming from somewhere in front of him. He marked the shooters and rose up and pulled the trigger, releasing both barrels. Ray heard the solid thump of the buck finding human contact. A man called out and then slowly whimpered to a stop.
In the back room of the bar Dario took out the .45 he kept in the drawer of his desk. The sound of gunfire coming in under the door as steady as smoke filling a room in a fire, creeping upward into the room until every bit could be felt crawling down his throat. He stood from the desk, watching the door. Every burst of gunfire rattling at the wood as the walls pulsed inward with every blast.
A crazed smile on his face, half-desperate in its making, thin and sharp as the first crease of skin beneath a knife blade. A shroud thrown over the air like death’s own cloak come down on him. He crossed the room now, watching the door and anticipating every new shot before it came. His expectant gaze caught between where he wanted to be and where he knew he needed to be in the next minute or so. The steady kick of the shotgun outside his door and the jitter it sent rolling through his nerves like some sort of electric shock.
Not a single window in the room, and the door leading out into the main bar his only option. He took the vest from the file cabinet in the corner and strapped it to his chest beneath his suit jacket. Gunfire dying back till there was only the eeriness of the silence that followed.
There was a long pause over the radio as Kelly and Hastings sat in the cruiser, the volume all the way up, and the rush of flame somewhere beyond them in the darkness. No sound but the hiss of the radio, speckled all over with static and the crush of their own breathing.
“Pierce,” Kelly said, calling his name several more times, and then the sound of gunfire once more and the silence that followed.
“He’s so fucking scared he’s got his hand held down on the button and he’s not letting up,” Hastings said.
Kelly swore. She turned the ignition over and slammed the transmission down into reverse. The headlights in front of them still focused on the flames that licked out of the black smoke, popping as they snapped upright and then fell away.
She called Pierce’s name once more before giving the car gas. The wheels spinning in the dust and the cruiser rocketing back over the dirt road leading to the highway.
The town fire truck swerving out of their way as they came off the road, their tires dragging a cloud of dust onto the asphalt.
There was no going back, and Ray went from body to body, looking for any sign of life. Eight men total in the room, Ray turned each of them over as he came to them, searching for Dario. Two of the eight were still alive, one with his arm pinned beneath the truck tire, bone showing and the blood welling from an artery. Another winged by buckshot on his left side. The shallow breathing of a punctured lung, with a smear of blood peppered on his lips as he tried to suck more air than he had the strength to take. Neither of them able to form words when Ray knelt and asked them about Dario, the blood loss already showing in the paleness of their skin and the blue-tinged curves of their lips.
Ray shot both at close range. The sound of those two solitary shots hanging there in the air for a long time as he waited for the dust to clear. Sure at any moment he would hear the sound of sirens.
He dug out the steaming shells and loaded two more. Turning, he saw the door to the office. The door locked when he reached out a hand to try the knob.
Using the shotgun he took the lock out with one shell, then stood back around the cover of the wall. Nothing moved inside the office and he broke the rifle open and thumbed out the empty.
Through the department radio Tom and Tollville were listening to the play-by-play description of what was going on outside the bar. Pierce’s voice heard strong through the speakers. The loud cacophony of gunshots following close behind.
Tom standing close enough to the small four-inch speaker that he heard every gasp and breath the young deputy had made in those few short minutes, relaying the news to Kelly.
“Jesus, fuck, Jesus,” Pierce kept saying, over and over again. Kelly trying to calm him, but the boy not listening. The sound of her sirens heard blaring overhead as she and Hastings rushed back toward town.
From what Tom had been able to glean from the frantic transmission, Pierce was a block up the street from the bar in his cruiser when the truck rolled through the intersection and took out the front wall of the bar.
Across the office Tollville had his jacket off. He was rummaging through one of the closets and when he found the sheriff’s department’s vests, he strapped one down over his shoulders. The gun butt at his hip exposed against his white dress shirt. “How far away are we?” Tollville asked, the sound of gunfire snapping his head around as he tried to locate the source.
“Three blocks.”
“How long will it take Edna to get back to town?”
Tom hesitated to answer. “Twenty, twenty-five minutes,” he said, watching Tollville kneel and remove a nine-millimeter Baby Eagle from the strap at his ankle.
“Are you up for this?” Tollville asked.
Again, Pierce’s voice cut through them in a rush, his voice catching in the static.
“Stay there,” Kelly said.
Pierce was talking so fast it was hard to hear him, saying something about a man and a shotgun, and the blasts of light that were appearing out of what was left of the bar.
“Stay in the car,” Kelly said. “Just stay put.”
Tollville tossed the Baby Eagle to Tom and told him to grab one of the vests. “You’ve been helping Kelly,” he said, “and now I need you to help me.”
Tom looked down at the nine-millimeter in his hand. He had come here to turn Ray in, he’d come here because it was the only thing he could do. The only hope Ray had for some sort of salvation, but Tom could see even Ray was beyond salvation now. He knew already it was Ray who had crossed the street with a shotgun in his hands, walking straight on toward Dario’s bar. No hope in the world for the men inside, for Ray, or even for the man Tom had always thought himself to be. He looked down at the gun in his hand, thinking about all that lay waiting for them three blocks away. And when he looked up, he said, “We’re going to need more than just the two of us.”
Tollville smiled now, looking at Tom as if something funny had
been said and Tollville had known the punch line all along. “For what?” Tollville asked. “You know something I don’t know?”
“I’ll do my duty on this,” Tom said. “I’ll put on the vest and go down there with you, but I’ve got no clearance for the support you need right now. This whole department isn’t enough for what’s going on down there.”
Tollville stared at him for only a moment before picking up the phone. A few seconds later he was on the line with the state police. Tom waited only long enough to see it was done before he pushed past Tollville and went up the stairs toward Main Street, Pierce, and the bar ahead. A sick feeling all the way through him.
With each step he felt himself moving faster and faster, until he was running. The vest heavy against his body as he moved, his lungs fighting the material with every breath and the thick weight of the straps as they shifted on his shoulders. Looking back, he couldn’t see Tollville yet and he thought he’d bought himself a little time. To do what? He didn’t know, and he focused again on the street ahead and the bar, and all that lay before him.
When he came to the cruiser he saw Pierce where he sat, his hands held tight in front of him on the dash, with his service weapon closed in his palms. A husk of fear papered thin across his face.
Down the block the truck sat buried halfway through the front wall of the bar. Even without the plates he knew it instantly. Bent and scraped, dinged and punched in all along its sides, the truck was Gus’s.
Tom knocked at the passenger side of Pierce’s cruiser, cautious not to startle him any further as he waited for the window to come down and Pierce’s eyes to meet his own. “Tollville asked me to help out,” Tom said. “I’m going to go around back and watch the lot there. You stay here and watch the front. Tollville is calling in the state police and we’ll hold tight on this building for the time being.”
Pierce looked shaken, his eyes skittering and coming up short as they rose and tried to focus.
“I need you on this, Pierce.” The Baby Eagle grown slick in Tom’s hand. Sweat felt hot in the creases of his palm. The first time he’d held a gun in almost ten years.
Pierce nodded. Down the street the sound of a single shotgun blast fell out of the bar and rolled past them. Both men ducked at the sound. No sign of Tollville or Kelly anywhere as Tom settled himself for the run across Main, his eyes already picking out the path he would take as he made his way toward the lot behind Dario’s bar.
The shotgun blast had played Dario’s office door back on its hinges. The lock completely gone from the wood and the door hanging open a foot into the small room. All around Dario the smell of cordite was suspended in the air, haunting him where he crouched with his back to the corner.
Dario held the .45 with two hands, his shoulders pressed tight together between the file cabinet and the wall. His skin gone clammy beneath the weight of the vest and a trail of sweat down the small of his back.
Outside he heard the shotgun shell fall to the ground and then the hollow sound of another sliding into place. He was watching the door and his shoulders were beginning to cramp. The ache of his muscles tense beneath the skin and a raw excitement as he pulled the slide back on the pistol and waited.
The shotgun barrel came through the door first, swinging wide to either side of the frame, pushing out the door on its hinges till the wood played back all the way to the wall. The shotgun searching the room like a snake, tasting the air.
Dario marked a point two feet above where the barrel of the shotgun showed, waiting for the singular tell of flesh. He held the gun straight out now. Sweat brimming his brow before falling into his eyes, where he blinked it away.
Come on now, he thought, watching the door, the gun held out and his eyes searching the empty space beyond. Come on.
Ray knew someone was inside the office but he couldn’t tell where. He let the shotgun feel around for a moment, looking in through the door at what little he could see.
No way of telling where Dario was unless he stepped through the doorway. The only things he could see a desk at the center of the room with one buckshot brick wall behind and the two corners of the room to either side of the desk. Except for the wall behind, the office was penned in by cheap drywall on a wood frame. Taking a step back from the door, he cracked the shotgun open and looked in on the shells inside. Buckshot all the way through.
With the light leaking out of the office and falling onto the cement floor of the bar, Ray walked a few paces down the hall to where he judged the end of the office to be and pulled the trigger, blasting the wall open. Working quickly he walked back through the light coming from the office and blasted the other wall. Listening as a quick gasp escaped through the perforated holes in the drywall.
Dario lay wounded on the floor inside the office when Ray came in. He had one hand held to his neck, a creasing of red beginning to show between his fingers. His body flat on the office floor as he kicked out a leg, pushing through dust and pieces of wood with the pain of the shot. A tempering of buck all along his jacket, where the lead shot had bit through and caught against the metal plate of the vest. One shot finding Dario’s neck.
Ray bent and picked the .45 from the floor, holding it loose in his hand. “Clever,” Ray said, as he used the nose of the shotgun to open Dario’s suit jacket and look in at the vest and the damage done. The man younger than Ray had expected, a sheen of sweat now glistening on his face, wetting the edges of his hair.
“I hoped for you,” Dario said, his hand to the wound on his neck, his own red blood in the creases of his fingers, and his voice weak.
Dario worked himself up, his head pitched against the bottom of the desk and his chin forced against his sternum, pinching his windpipe and causing his breath to whistle in the silence of the room.
“I could have killed you,” Ray said.
“You should have,” Dario said. He was looking up at Ray from where he lay, the pain showing on his face.
Ray knelt and put the .45 in his waistband where his own Ruger had been. He took Dario’s hand away from the wound, watching as a stream of blood erupted onto the office floor. “You’re not in good shape,” Ray said. “You could live through this but I doubt you will.”
Dario grinned, his lips pulled tight toward their edges with the pain. “Funny how things turn out,” he said. His hand back over the wound, slippery with blood, and his face a chalk-white color that Ray figured there was no returning from. “Nothing ever turns out the way you think it will.”
“No it doesn’t,” Ray said. “But I hear that a lot in this line of work and the more I hear it the less I try to think about the outcome.” Standing now, he toed at Dario’s hand with his boot and watched the blood bubble up between Dario’s fingers. The look in Dario’s eyes like a gut-shot coyote, full of hate, cut down and lying broken in the dirt.
Ray had already been in the bar far too long and he looked around the room with wonderment, amazed he was still alive. The blood on Dario’s hand unbelievably red against the whiteness of his skin.
“You’re going to die,” Ray said. He looked to the door and then he turned to leave.
“You can’t,” Dario said. His voice quickened and his eyes pleading with Ray to stop. “I made a deal with Memo. I deserve more than this. I shouldn’t be the one lying here on this floor.”
Ray stopped at the mention of his boss and looked to Dario.
“I told him where Burnham would be and at what time. I set him and Gil up.
”
Ray stared down at Dario where he lay. The blood now all over Dario’s hand and glistening black and wet from the collar of his jacket.
Dario laughed. His face covered in sweat and a desperate smile across his lips as he looked up at Ray. “Seems like Memo didn’t mention that to you. Seems like there’s a lot Memo didn’t mention.”
Ray looked down, trying to understand. Years ago, Memo had promised Ray everything. He had promised it would all work out, that all would be fine and that if Ray did the work he would be protected. None of that had come true and Ray had lost his wife and abandoned his son, believing somehow the cartel had found him, found his family—all of it unclear in his mind now. All of it turned upside down.
“Memo’s guarantees aren’t worth a thing,” Dario said. “No one was supposed to die and none of what has happened should have happened.” He was watching Ray where he stood, and he tried to push himself up higher on the desk, but he was too weak and his hand flopped loose on the floor, useless against his side. “It was a simple plan that went too far.”
“My father is dead.”
“I know,” Dario said.
“He didn’t know anything.”
Dario kept his eyes focused on Ray’s. “I can help you,” Dario said. “You’re not alone in this. Not anymore. You’ll go after Memo but you’ll never make it. I can help you. I can help you get there.”
Ray laughed, the sound sudden and cruel in the silence of the office. He stared at Dario a moment longer before leaving him there on the floor.
Tom waited behind the bar. Not knowing what to do, thinking that Tollville must by now have met up with Pierce, and even at that moment, was probably making his move on the front of the bar.