—
Campbell Coyle looked at the rain, at the sky, trying to make sense of it all. It had seemed like it would be so easy, at first. Go to an old man’s house, take the old man, force his son to show up to get him.
Then kill the son and let the old man go.
But now…but now it was all such a bloody mess.
Now…now he lay on his back, watching the rain pour down on him, and he wondered how long he’d been knocked unconscious.
He’d looked right at the Gray Man; the killer of his boy, Charlie, had been a half dozen paces distant, no more, when he began to press the trigger on his pistol.
And then the world had turned upside down.
He remembered falling, remembered something hitting his head when he was in the air, and he did not remember anything else, not till now.
He lay on his back, wet and hurting, no doubt injured. He felt around with his right hand, realized his weapon was there, and he grabbed it, and then he recognized that there was something lying across his legs. He lifted his head and saw that it was just a bit of plywood, some rusty tin, a few pieces of rotten support beam.
But then, beyond that, he saw something else.
On the other end of the hall, illuminated from light coming from another hole in the roof, a man stood there, aiming a gun at something on the floor.
Coyle couldn’t make him out in the heavy rain coming down, but when the man fired his pistol, the Northern Irishman rose quickly, pushing debris out of the way.
He extended his gun arm.
Coyle got a sight picture through the window of his optic, put it right on the target in the low light, and then he realized he wasn’t looking at Court Gentry. The killer of his son.
No, he was looking at the old man.
Through his weapon’s optic he saw the father—wet silver hair, eyeglasses, a scowl of a mouth—look up in his direction suddenly, and the eyes behind the thick eyeglasses widened for an instant.
Then they narrowed with resolve.
He raised his pistol towards Campbell.
“No!” Campbell Coyle shouted. It wasn’t supposed to happen this way.
—
Jim Gentry squeezed the trigger on the Smith and Wesson revolver, and the hammer dropped on the one empty cylinder in the weapon.
The gun wentclick.
And then Jim Gentry saw the flash of the barrel of the gun in the other man’s hand.
The seventy-five-year-old felt the blunt, forceful impact dead center in his chest.
Then he was falling, not flying. Down, not back, dropping to the wet ground, amid the trash and the mud of the catwalk.
He folded up, rolled over, and died.
One perfect gunshot through the heart.
—
Court Gentry had swept the area out behind the berm for more enemy, found nothing but the tire tracks of the retreating Suburban. He heard a shot inside the building; it sounded like his dad’s .38, and he took it as his father putting an insurance round into one of the killers.
Another shot came just two seconds later.
