Clay snorted. “No,” he said flatly. “But his back is against the wall, and he’s more use with a gun in his hand than hogtied and underfoot.”
“And you?” Grade asked. “What are you going to do?”
Clay braced the shotgun against his hip. “I’m going to go out there and kill them when they aren’t looking,” he said. “You got that?”
“I don’t know if that counts as a plan,” Grade said.
“It’s what we’ve got,” Clay said. He cupped his hand around the back of Grade’s neck and stroked his cheek with a calloused thumb. “What would you do if I said I loved you, City Boy?”
Grade pulled away. He ignored the dumb little sigh that trembled just behind his heart. It was drunk.
“Tell you I don’t do that,” he said. “Love. Relationships. I’m not wired like that.”
Clay winked at him as he backed away. “And I didn’t say it,” he said. “Don’t get killed. I do want to fuck you later.”
He turned and jogged away toward the back of the store.
They had about fifteen seconds to get ready if the count Grade had kept in his mind was accurate.
§
It turned out he was two seconds slow.
The heavy metal cylinders of the grenades smashed through windows and bounced off the floors. Grade wrapped his arm around Dory’s head, over her ears, and squeezed his own eyes shut. He felt the heat against his back as they went off, and the bang rattled his skull and jabbed hot nails into his ears. It hurt enough to make him gag and the back of his throat sour with bile.
Dory screamed. He could see it, but he couldn’t hear it over the staticky whine that bounced from ear to ear. Grade had been nearby when one went off before, but not this close. Near the door, Buchanan had dropped his shotgun and was slapping frantically at his chest and shoulders as the cheap fabric of his hoodie smoldered.
It didn’t matter. Grade worked his jaw from one side to the other to make his ears pop—it didn’t help—and reminded himself of the stakes. Better deaf than dead. He grabbed a gun from the case and nearly fumbled it as his hand swam, but he managed to hang onto it.
“Just pull the trigger,” he yelled at Dory as he shoved a rifle into her hands. “Make them jump.”
Dory shook her head and blinked at Grade with watery eyes. “What if I shoot him?” she mouthed. “Clay’s out there.”
“Try not to,” Grade said.
He grabbed a pistol and a couple of magazines, then crawled in a more or less straight line to the window. Sloane stood in front of the car, waiting expectantly, while the rest of his men leaned against hoods and joked with each other. When no one came out, Sloane’s expression soured, and he waved his arm to get everyone's attention.
Grade rested his hands on the broad scarred window ledge—decades of paint scored into the wood—and squinted through the sights at Sloane’s head. Clay said it didn’t matter what they hit, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t try.
He squeezed his eyes shut as he pulled the trigger. The bang as the gun fired felt like someone had jabbed nails into his abused eardrums. He clenched his jaw and fired again, and bullets sprayed over the ground, the men, and the cars. When the gun clicked on empty, he grabbed for one of the magazines he’d shoved in his pocket.
Next to him, Dory was slightly more restrained. She squinted and fired with patient, machine-like regularity, bullets stitched in a row of divots along the ground. Neither of them hit much else as the men instinctively scattered for cover.
Buchanan, shirt singed and scarred, grabbed the grenades as they spewed smoke and lobbed them back outside. The area in front of the store filled with smoke and movement, the flash of gunfire bright through the gray layers as the Catfish Mafia remembered they were also armed.
In the middle of it, Sloane yelled in frustration as he grabbed a man by the straps of his bulletproof vest and shoved him toward the store.
“G-t—th—e!” he yelled. His voice crackled in and out of muffled audibility. “There’s—two of—m.”
In the whited-out corner of Grade’s peripheral vision—still compromised by the stun grenade—he saw Clay ghost out of the smoke and smash the butt of his shotgun into the back of the man’s head. The man pitched forward like someone had cut his strings. Another of Sloane’s men turned and raised his gun. Clay stepped forward and shoved the gun to the side with his forearm, so the stutter of bullets shattered the windows of the nearby cars. He pressed the shotgun flush against the man’s shoulder and fired. Blood and bone fragments sprayed out as the man’s shoulder blade was pulverized. While the man folded at the knees, one hand clutched to his shoulder, Clay grabbed him by the collar and spun him around to use as a shield.
“Grade!” Dory whispered. She shoved at his arm for his attention and mouthed her question exaggeratedly. “Why did you stop shooting?”
“Shit,” Grade muttered. “Sorry.”
He pulled the trigger on an empty magazine. Habit made him try it again, as if it was a remote with a half-dead battery. Then he dropped it and crouched down to scrabble for another on the floor, still half-obscured by the acrid chemical smoke from the grenade.
Dory screamed suddenly and scrambled back from the window just before one of the cars slammed into it and halfway through. The front of the car was smashed, the hood crumpled, and windshield shattered inwards from impact. Broken chunks of old mountain stone fouled the wheels and jammed it in place as the engine screamed and leaked steam.
