"Last chance to be smart about it." Calloway again, the reasonable gone a half-shade thinner. And there, half-screened by the cruiser's front fender, the deputy has his service pistol out and low, and he's not waiting for aninvitation — he's drifting it up by degrees, tracking the windows, hunting a shape to put it on. Itching for it. Voss crouches at the trunk, low and still. Calloway hasn't even drawn yet. Calloway's still selling.
Then the deputy sees something — or thinks he does, a shift behind the glass, Mick's silver head, my shoulder, who knows — and every ounce of discipline goes out of him at once.
"THERE—"
The shot comes on the word, before the word's even finished. The round punches through the front window above Mick's head and buries itself in the back wall, and for the first time all morning Calloway's voice cracks, the reasonable gone entirely: "Goddammit —no—" Because his idiot just turned the clean disappearance into a firefight, and a firefight is the one thing he didn't want, and now he's got it whether he wanted it or not.
Then everything goes loud at once.
Mick fires — not at a man, at the porch light, the bare bulb still burning over the front step, weak and yellow and useless against the daylight but throwing just enough to mark the window edges for a shooter in the lot. The bulb bursts. Glass falls, and one more sightline goes with it. He works the bolt, chambers, swings the barrel back to the cruiser.
Out in the lot they break for cover the way that first round was always going to drive them — the deputy dropping to the front wheel well, Voss scrambling behind the trunk, Calloway folding down behind the engine block with a pump shotgun he brought for a job that wasn't this one, his pale shirt gathering road dust, the reasonable voicegone for good now, replaced by a flat bark of orders nobody out there is organized enough to follow.
"Down—" I get it half out before the windows start coming in.
The deputy empties toward the house, fast and wild, and the front windows blow inward in sheets, glass chewing the air, rounds stitching the far wall, the lamp, the crooked deer head whose glass eyes finally shatter out and leave it staring blind over a room full of men trying to kill each other. We drop. All three of us, below the sills, behind what little cover cheap walls give — then come up firing through the empty frames, trading rounds with three men tucked behind two tons of Pennsylvania steel.
My ribs scream on every recoil. The concussion pulses behind my eyes in time with the shots, tilting the room left and correcting, left and correcting. Mick's the only one of us worth a damn at this range and he knows it — measured shots, one and one and one, the cruiser's windshield webbing, a headlight bursting, the men behind it staying down, because a shooter who doesn't miss is the most expensive thing in any fight.
A lull. Three seconds. The silence rushes into the space the gunfire left. No new engine on the road. No sirens climbing it. Wherever Wiseman is, he still isn't here, and the not-here sits in my chest beside the cracked ribs and the cylinder going light in my hand.
Cole's eyes find mine across the front room. One beat. Then his hand cuts flat toward the back of the house, points at me, then at the stairs where Hannah's folded into the dark. The plan's clear without a word — somebody peels off the front and gets her out the back, away from the lotand the guns. Some languages don't need training, just two people who've read each other since before they understood what reading was.
I tip my head toward the hall.Go. I've got the window.
Cole breaks from the wall to cross to the back — three steps through the open middle of the room, past the blown-out left window, and in those three steps he's exposed, a clear shape against the gray light coming in off the lot.
It's enough. Voss comes up from behind the trunk and fires through the empty window frame, and the shot crosses the whole width of the room from outside and takes Cole in the left side. I hear it before I see it — the wet, wrong sound of a body taking something it wasn't built to take. The hit carries him the last stride into the mouth of the hall, and he goes down hard against the wall there, back first, one hand already to his ribs, and when it comes away it's red, and the red is spreading too fast.
Mick's rifle barks twice more — the cruiser's windshield webs again, and the three of them stay down, scrambling, the volume of return fire dropping as they reckon with a man who doesn't miss. It buys the hall, and the hall is out of the window line, and out of the window line is the only place I can do anything.
Cole slides down the wall, leaves a dark streak on beige, his knees coming up, one hand jammed against his side with the blood already through his fingers and onto the carpet — too much of it, and immediately too much, and the only sound under the ringing in my ears is his breathing, short shallow pulls, a body trying to work out why the rest of it is emptying onto the floor.
I'm on my knees before he finishes going down. Bothhands over his, the blood hot and slick through my palms, wrong-warm, the heat of something meant to stay inside and currently very much outside. His face has gone bone-white.
"Mick — ambulance, now! And where the hell is Wiseman?"
"Don't know." Mick doesn't turn from the window. He fires again, then his free hand goes for his phone, thumb on the screen, eyes never leaving the lot. "Calling it in myself. Hold on him." He means hold on Cole. Hold him here.
I press down, both hands, my full weight behind them. I can feel his pulse through the pressure — fast, thready, a heart working too hard for too little return.
"Stay still." My voice comes out steadier than it has any business being. "Through-and-through — I can see both holes, the round's not in you. That's good. That's survivable. Shut up and let me work."
He doesn't shut up. His hand comes up off the floor and finds my wrist, grips — cold fingers, peripheral shutdown, his blood routing to the core, and the grip is too strong, a man spending everything he's got left on one point of contact.
"I'm sorry." Low. Wrecked. The voice of a man certain he's dying, and certainty doesn't waste words.
"Don't." I press harder. "Don't you do that. Don't say it like a goodbye."
But he's already going, and he knows it, and he's not going to be talked out of the one thing he's never let himself say.
"I sent you off." Each word costs. I watch it cost him. "You left because of me — because of what was between us,and I knew it, and I let you walk." His jaw clenches, releases. "When the word came back you'd been shot, I hated myself every day after. Every day. I put a bottle in my hand and didn't set it down for months."
The blood's a widening dark pool under his hip, spreading faster than I can compress it, and compression is the only card I'm holding, so I lean into it, and he flinches, and the flinch is almost a mercy — he can still feel, feeling is the nervous system still in the fight, and the fight is everything.
"I have loved you my whole life." It comes out clean. No preamble, no hedge — just the thing itself, set down between us on a hallway floor that stinks of gun smoke and blood. "Should've said it years ago. Before the Marines. Before ten years of nothing."
His pupils swell and shrink and swell, a brain guessing at how much oxygen it's getting and guessing wrong. His grip slacks, tightens, slacks.
