—
Campbell Coyle and Alfie Donnelly had seen each other on the catwalk and had begun moving closer together in the dark, their eyes still on the rooms they could see around them.
A burst of gunfire from the northeast turned their heads, but they saw nothing but glowing in an area, no pinpricks of light indicating flashes, so they had no line of sight on the shooter.
Coyle and Donnelly moved closer together, and then Alfie turned, leading the way slowly and gingerly on loose and, in some places, rotten flooring, always keeping one hand on the rail, his eyes ahead and his gun swinging left and right.
Campbell was close behind, his own weapon up, his own light ready to turn on at the first indication of trouble.
Coyle spoke again to his team over his earpiece, and this time he didn’t get a response from Barry.
The Northern Irishman assumed Barry Nolan had been a victim of the last volley of fire he heard.
Then a near-constant barrage came from nearby, sending both men kneeling, as bullets sparked off the tin roof just above them.
Alfie started to react to the panic of the shooting and the rage of losing his brother. He rose and began to run along the catwalk towards the north, though Coyle thought someone was just letting off some probing fire, and he wanted to just stay where he was. But Coyle believed strength in numbers was of value now, so he himself rose as soon as the shooting stopped, and he hurried to catch up with Alfie Donnelly.
—
Court Gentry came out of the CONNEX box on the catwalk level just as his father ran out of ammunition in his magazine below. He knew his dad would reload, and he hoped his dad would follow his orders and just wait there, but Court knew it was his own responsibility to end this now.
He expected to find someone on the catwalk as soon as he flashed his light, but he was patient; he probed along slowly, putting each foot down carefully, heeding his father’s advice.
He came to a T junction, turned to the left, then began moving south, still in darkness.
The sound of the rain pounding the tin roof was amplified up here, because he was only six feet below the ceiling, so he thought there was little chance he’d hear much of anything, but then the slapping sound of footsteps came from directly in front of him. Someone was running up here; they weren’t close, maybe thirty feet, but they were approaching quickly.
Court aimed the little Smith and Wesson with one hand, then hooked the back of his hand around the back of the other hand, which held a tactical flashlight.
He clicked on the beam and saw a big young man moving along the catwalk with a stainless steel automatic pistol in front of him.
The man seemed surprised to find an enemy up here in front of him; his weapon was oriented towards the rooms down below.
Court fired at the man and hit the gun with his first round, sendingsparks into the air. With his second shot he caught the man in the face, and then with the third the big man’s head snapped to the side, and he began to fall forward, still running.
A fourth shot from the little revolver hit the stumbling man in the shoulder, and Court was about to empty the gun into the body when he realized that a second man was running right behind the first.
Instantly Court recognized Campbell Coyle, just twenty-five feet away from him.
Both men had their guns up; Court had just one round left in the chamber of his revolver.
And then the big running man’s falling body impacted the catwalk floor, right above a support beam that had been quietly rotting away for twenty years.
The beam snapped under the weight.
Court squeezed his trigger.
Coyle squeezed his trigger.
The floor fell out from under them both, and they disappeared in the darkness and the wreckage, their shots flying harmlessly into the trees around the shoot house.
Fifty-One
Jim Gentry heard the blasts of gunfire, the crack of wood, the symphony of a multistage collapse that shattered a catwalk, crumpled staircases, snapped support beams, even pulled a portion of the tin roof down as old and unmaintained support cables popped.
Jim knew his son had been up there, in the fight, when it happened, so he rose from the shipping container he’d been hiding in, then bolted as fast as he could towards the center of the building. He used his flashlight along with his gun to clear the way, but he wasted no time closing on the area.
The crash had happened halfway down and on the western side of the building, and Jim thought about going out an exit and then entering back into the building near to where it happened, but he saw that the hallway down the middle of the shoot house was only partially blocked with fallen debris.
