The Day Before Midnight

by Stephen Hunter

  Beth looked away. Then she said, “No, she quit last year.”

  Herman nodded. His two men looked at him.

  “Get your weapons out,” he said. “I think we’re going to be hit. You go to the kitchen—”

  “Oh, God—” said Beth, “Oh, God, the girls, don’t hurt the girls, I tell you, please—”

  Bean began to cry. She was older than her sister and may have just understood it all that much better. She didn’t like the guns, because they made people dead on television.

  “Herman, I’m scared,” said Poo. “I don’t want to be dead.”

  “Please let us go,” said Beth Hummel. “We didn’t do anything to you. We never did anything to anybody.”

  Herman looked at the woman and her two terrified children. He tried to think what to do. He hadn’t come all this way to make war on children and women. Little Poo came across the room to him and put her arms out, and Herman swept her up.

  “Don’t go away, Herman. Please don’t go away. Don’t let the firemen make you dead.”

  “Nothing’s going to happen to Herman,” he said. “You and your sister, you go upstairs, you stay in your rooms no matter what. No matter what!” he finished savagely. “Now, run. Run, Poo. Take care of your sister.”

  Poo scrambled up the stairs, pulling Bean along. The younger one was the stronger one.

  “You, lady, you’re grown-up. You gotta take your risks with the rest of us.”

  “Who are you? What is this?”

  “Here they are,” said the man at the window. He had an FAL, not a house-to-house weapon, with an utterly worthless Trilux night sight. “Should I fire?”

  “No, no,” said Herman. “Maybe they are just firemen. Get up on the stair landing, get ready to jump in either direction, depending on which way they come. You”—he pointed to the other—“you get to the rear, in the kitchen. If they come—”

  The man cocked his weapon, a Sterling sub-machine gun, in answer.

  “Get to the door, lady,” Herman ordered, his voice taut and ugly. He pressed the silenced Uzi against her back. Then he slid the bolt back, locking it. As he held it tightly he felt the safety in the grip yield to the pressure in his palm.

  Peering through the window, he saw the firemen racing to unlimber hoses, and others heading into the Reed house with axes and oxygen masks on.

  Two firemen in heavy slickers broke from the truck and headed toward the Hummel house.

  He could hear them yelling, “Anybody in there? You’ve got to get out!” They were knocking on the door.

  Uckley’s heart was pumping like crazy; his knees felt like jelly, loose and slippery. He didn’t see how they’d support him on the run to the house. It bounded in his vision as he and Delta Three careened toward it, though, of course, he was the one doing the actual bounding. Delta Three had a slight lead as they clambered up the porch steps and made it to the door. He saw Delta Three’s slicker open and billow like a cape as the muzzle of the sub-machine gun came out.

  “Anybody in there? Goddammit, you’ve got to get out, the flames may spread!” Delta Three screamed, pounding on the door.

  Nothing happened for just a second. Delta Three leaned into the door, dropped his ax, his eyes shooting toward Uckley. Uckley now had the Smith in his hand, though he was surprised to find it there, not having remembered reaching for it.

  “Mark your target,” muttered Delta Three under his breath, then paused for just a second to hit the speaker button on his belt and talk into the radio mike he had pinned to his collar. “Delta units, this is Delta Three, green light, green light, green light!” the words increasing with energy and urgency.

  Delta Three kicked in the door.

  Herman heard a burst of gunfire from the kitchen, things breaking, men screaming, everything mixing together in a welter of confusion. “Attack, attack,” yelled the man in the kitchen, firing again. Herman pulled Mrs. Hummel to him and back as the door before him burst open and the two firemen who were police agents plunged through the door. Though the gunfire rose from the kitchen, he stared for just a second at the bulging eyes and distended faces of the men opposite them. Then he fired, the gun pumping with that terrible noiseless stutter of the silencer, its shells cascading out. He put a burst into them, knocking them back, pushed the woman forward at them, spun, and ran for the steps. A bullet came after him, hit him high in the arm and pushed him down, bloodying his lip. He screamed, spun to see the wretched woman in the crossfire, crawling, her face wild with terror. He fired again, watching the bullets rip up the room. The man upstairs came to the landing to give covering fire, his big FAL jacking out heavy 308s that exploded chairs and set curtains aflame. But Herman could see nothing to fire at, had no idea where the shot had come from that had hit him. He pushed his way up the stairs, slipped once, felt the blood on his arm, and then the pain erupted, freed from its sheath of shock. He’d been hit before, but not like this, in the bone; the pain was awesome, huge, enveloping. He tried to switch the Uzi to his good hand as the blast of covering fire gave him the time, but now he saw shapes in the window. They were firing fast, and the man above him pitched forward and slammed down the steps. Herman turned, dropping his Uzi, and clambered up, clawing for his pistol.

  “My babies, my babies,” the woman was screaming, “Oh, God, don’t hurt my babies.”

  “Go after him,” wheezed Delta Three. “I don’t think I can move anymore.”

  Uckley was all right. He’d been hit three times in the first burst, but the Kevlar, combined with the subsonic velocities of the silenced 9-millimeter ammunition of the Uzi, had saved him. He felt as though he’d had the shit beat out of him, which, in effect, he had, for the vests, which will stop a pistol bullet, won’t absorb its impact entirely, and the strikes had been like well-delivered punches to the midriff. Delta Three, on the other hand, was much unluckier. One of the bullets had hit him high in the leg. He was bleeding badly, even though he’d been able to fire a magazine, hitting the big one once as he ran up the steps and completely taking out the small one at the landing where he’d stood firing randomly into the room.

  “You okay?” asked Uckley. He wasn’t sure he wanted to go after the vanished big guy.

  “Go after him, goddammit,” said Delta Three, busy trying to get a tourniquet around his leg. “Go, go now, man. I’ll be okay.”

  Uckley knelt, thumbed the cylinder free on the now empty Smith, and ejected the shells. Then he dropped a speedloader into the cylinder, the six slugs held in a metal disk. He spun the release knob on the device, depositing the six 125-grain Federal Magnums in their chambers. He snapped the cylinder shut, shucked off the rain slicker.

  “Here,” wheezed the Delta operative. “Take this too.” He held out what appeared to be some kind of customized .45 automatic, with a fancy wraparound rubber grip. Uckley took the new gun, wedging it into his belt in the small of his back. It was cocked and locked.

  Breathing hard, he said, “Okay, I’ll go get him.”

  He lurched by, but Delta Three grabbed him.

  “Be careful, Uckley. There’s kids in there.”

  Beth Hummel saw one of them with a big pistol like a cowboy dip gingerly through the door and peer around, his eyes wide with excitement. She could hear his ragged breathing. He seemed to pause, gather himself up. Nimbly he dashed past her, stooped to the man on the floor, satisfied himself that he was dead, kicked his rifle away, then ducked back.

  “Are you hit?” he whispered hoarsely.

  “My children! God, please, my chil—”

  “Are you hit?”

  “No. I—I don’t think so. My children are upstairs. Please don’t let them get hurt.”

  “Listen, you crawl to the door and out. There’s medical personnel outside.”

  “My children. Please—”

  “Your kids will be all right. I’m FBI, Special Agent. I can handle this.” But she didn’t think he could. He seemed very young and frightened. She watched him go to the foot of the stairs.<
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  “Uckley!” The call came from outside.

  The man paused. “Yes?”

  “The guy’s dead in the kitchen, but so’s Delta Two; Delta One is hit. You’re on your own.”

  “Check,” said Uckley. “Get the goddamn state cops here.”

  She had the terrible sense of a man not wanting to do what he had to do but doing it anyway. With the gun as a kind of magic device, as if he could draw his strength and power from it, he threw himself up the first flight of steps to the landing, whirled up the second flight, pointing with his big silver gun.

  Oh, Jesus, she thought, oh, Jesus, let my babies be all right.

  Uckley reached the top of the stairway and looked very quickly down the hall. Using the two-handed grip, he thrust the Smith in front of him, searching for a target. He just saw doorways, some opened, some closed, all more or less dark.

  They told you never, absolutely never, go down a hall or room to room against an armed man. Wait for backup. Always wait for backup, the guy has such an advantage over you, he can hear you coming, he can drop you anytime. Action always beats reaction.

  But Uckley didn’t have much choice, he figured. The whole thing had teetered out of control in that first crazy second of gunfire, and now the only thing was to stay alive and not to kill anybody wrong. He didn’t really think he had the grit for this. This was supposed to be a Delta thing, all these special operators, and where were they? Out on the porch.

  “Hey!” he called. “This is Special Agent James Uckley of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The house is surrounded. Give yourself up.” He heard his voice bang around the empty walls of the old house.

  He thumbed back the hammer on the Smith.

  Herman was hardly conscious. He kept slipping in and out, as if the gears weren’t holding in his mind. He cowered in the lee of the doorway in Jack and Beth Hummel’s bedroom. He was trying to keep a tight grip on the pistol, a Czech CZ-75, with his weak left hand. His right was useless; the bullet had smashed into the shoulder. He was sitting in a pool of blood. His head ached; he was very sad but not especially frightened.

  “Give yourself up,” the call came again.

  Now, that was a laugh. He knew what he had to do. It was very simple what you did in enemy territory to save yourself the horror of interrogation and the danger of compromising yourself. You always knew.

  But Herman thought, why not one more? After so many, why not one more, why not this blundering policeman who shot my men. He edged his way up until he was on his feet. He cocked the CZ. All right, he thought, all right, Mr. Policeman.

  He slid to the doorway. He thought he could make out the man at the end of the hall, low. How many others would there be? There’d be hundreds, hundreds and hundreds. So many. But just one more for now. Then he heard cars pull up in front of the house, sirens blaring. Red and blue light pulsed through the windows.

  He lifted the pistol with the weak hand at what might have been the man but might also, in his blurry eyesight, have been a shadow. He fired.

  Uckley panicked as the bullet came plowing his way. It smashed against the wall behind him, showering him with dust. Two more shots came and he drew back. Then he plunged forward, firing wildly, insanely, six fast blasts with the Smith until he’d reached a doorway across the hall. He got out a speed loader, popped open his cylinder, ejected six shells, set the nose of the new rounds in their chamber, twisted it to free them, then snapped the cylinder shut. He got out the .45 from his belt and thumbed off what he took to be the oversize safety. It was a new gun to him; he wasn’t especially sure how it worked, and so it scared him. He peeked down the hall, saw only darkness.

  “Mommy,” somebody called. “Mommy, help me.”

  Oh, shit, Uckley thought. Then in his peripheral vision something flashed and he flinched, ducked back, aware from the buck and the blast that he’d fired the .45, one reflex shot (it had been so easy).

  It was the mother. She’d come up the steps. He hadn’t heard her, it wasn’t his fault! He’d told her to get out. He looked at her. She’d sat down against the wall, her legs weirdly akimbo. Her head hung forward in a way no living person’s would hang. There was a lot of blood on her.

  Oh, no, goddammit, goddammit, oh, shit, I shot the woman!

  He stared at her, ashamed and disgusted. The gunsmoke reached his nose, acrid and dense.

  I told you not to come up, he felt himself screaming. I didn’t hear you! I didn’t hear you!

  Footsteps clambered at him.

  Uckley spun, dropped to a knee, found the target picture and—

  It was a child on churning legs, just a small shape in the darkness, screaming “Mommy” and coming at him.

  “Get back,” he shouted, because behind the child now he saw another shape from another dark doorway, leaning out with a pistol.

  Uckley dived.

  He hit the little girl.

  “Get down, get down, get down,” he screamed, louder than she did. He hit his head on the wall, a stunning blow. His weapons dropped away. He felt the girl squirming under him. He heard footsteps.

  The man stood over him.

  The little girl was screaming, “Mommy, Mommy, my mommy is dead!”

  Uckley held her tight to him.

  He looked up.

  The man, bleeding badly, stood over him. He was a heavy blond guy with a crew cut and a thick face.

  “Let the kid go, for Christ’s sake, let the kid go,” Uckley begged.

  The man turned and walked away. Uckley said to the girl, “Run downstairs. Run, now!”

  He picked up the pieces, and with a gun in both hands he started down the hall.

  Then he heard the shot.

  “If you’ve spoken to Peter,” said Megan Wilder, “then you know our relationship became spectacularly deranged at the end. I’m not sure even yet if he did it to me or I did it to him or, out of some kind of crab nebulae of neurotic energy, we did it to each other.” She laughed ironically at the lunacy of it.

  The three agents watched her without cracking so much as a snicker. She thought of them as the Three Dumb Men. They just sat there, their faces slack and dull, listening. They hadn’t even taken their coats off, and it was tropical inside the studio.

  Megan bent forward, trying to find a new angle into her construction. She saw now that she had committed a fundamental design error at the very beginning. She had found the circuit board to a personal computer and loved it: it was so intricate, so cunning, so full of texture and meaning; and she had put it exactly in the center of the piece. Then she had painted it hot pink with a spray can. It was an inescapable fact. It was the absolute, the total, the implacable. But that was all wrong, she saw now. Then you could not discover the image, and meet it on your terms. Rather, it hit you in the face: it was like an ugly truth that would not go away, so obvious and pitiful that it dared you to recognize it, and made you aware of your cowardice for the fact that you could not.

  “This,” she said to the Three Dumb Men, pointing to it, “this has to go. It’s too clever.”

  She pried the board off the backing, ripping her finger on a staple in the process. She began to bleed. She chucked the thing away, and it hit with a clatter in the far reaches of the room. Only the pink-edged silhouette was left where the board had been pulled out, and small specks of furry pink light, where the spray paint had penetrated. She liked it; it was much better that way, suggestive and elliptical rather than pontificating.

  Almost at once she began to feel better about the piece. Maybe she had solved it after all; maybe there was an end to the equation in sight.

  “You see, he lied. I lied too. In the end I lied more than he did. In the end all I did was lie. But Peter lied first and he lied worst. Worse, he was a coward. He didn’t tell me because he couldn’t tell me. He knew I would hold it against him, what he did. And he was right, I would have, and maybe I would have left him. But I didn’t really and truly know until I was in love with him and we were married and the ge
stalt had just gotten too complicated and there were no easy answers.”

  She paused. “He didn’t tell me, you see, because in his heart of hearts, way, way, down, Peter is ashamed. That’s the key to him.”

  The Three Dumb Men just looked at her, with their long, glum, midwestern faces, like Grant Wood’s gothic Americans.

  “So here I am, married to this bombthinker with an IQ of several thousand, whom I love so desperately I think I may die from it. But he always had his mistress. That bitch. He’d never give her up, he was so selfish. To have him, I had to have her. Oh, these brilliant men, I tell you, they can be real motherfuckers. So I—”

  “You mean this Maggie Berlin?” one of them interrupted.

  She laughed. The idiot!

  “No, no, Maggie was just another screwed-up defense genius. No, it was the other bitch. I always thought of her as a woman, you see, and I still think there was sex under it all. He laughed at me, and maybe Freud is both wrong and dead, but I think there was sex under it always, all the time, ever since the start, ever since Harvard, when he couldn’t get laid and his roommate was the big stud for peace. No, her. The bomb. He could never leave her alone. He couldn’t stop thinking about her. She was his Circe, his Alice Through the Looking Glass, his Ginger Lynn. He really did love her, in his way. And so she hurt me and so I chose to hurt him through her. That’s the pathology of it. Surely it’s transparent. I mean, you must see stuff like this all the time?”

  The Three Dumb Men were silent.

  “Well, that’s context, at any rate. It enables you to understand why I was vulnerable to Ari Gottlieb.”

  She bent to the piece again. She began to regret having so summarily dismissed the computer circuit board. It occurred to her that she ought to retrieve it. But she knew to do so would be to stamp herself as an idiot forever in these men’s minds. She looked at her watch. Time was flying, wasn’t it? Getting close to five. We’re all getting older until one day, poof, Peter’s Ginger Lynn goes down on her knees, opens her mouth, and sucks off the world—the ultimate blowjob. She laughed, a little more crazily than she had intended. She felt a little like crying.