"Worst case?"
"Eight."
"Doors?"
"Front is reinforced. Back is reinforced. The bathroom window is too small. The bedroom window is reinforced glass, but the frame is not. They'll come through the bedroom window."
"How long?"
"Three minutes if they are good. Five if they are not."
He looks at me. The cop pushed all the way back behind the man leaning against my kitchen window with a bullet hole in his side, asking me how I know the architecture of my own siege.
"You've thought about this."
"I built this place."
I hand him a magazine. He takes it without checking it. He trusts me to load magazines. I do not know exactly when he decided to trust me to load magazines.
Stronzo, asshole. Lovely stronzo.
"Bedroom team breaches first. Two on point. Two flanking. Whoever is left comes through the front once the bedroom team is inside."
"Bedroom or front?"
"You take the front. You are bleeding, and the front door is closer to the kitchen island. You can shoot from cover. The bedroom requires moving."
"I can move."
"Not as well as I can."
He almost smiles. He does not smile. The thing I have learned about Sean Donovan is that he comes within a quarter inch ofsmiling and then chooses not to. The choosing is hotter than the smile would be.
He racks the slide and moves to the kitchen island, low, behind it.
I move to the bedroom.
They comethrough the window at 7:03 p.m.
A charge on the frame. The frame goes. The glass goes with it. The first man is through the gap before the second has finished landing.
I shoot him through the throat.
The second is faster. He clears the window before the first has finished going down and comes up shooting. One of his rounds takes a piece of the doorframe a quarter inch from my head.
Cazzo, fuck.
I shoot him in the chest. Twice. He folds.
The third does not come through the window. I hear him recalculate. Two men in five seconds. He retreats to the perimeter.
The front door comes off its hinges.
I am out of the bedroom and into the hallway before the second shot from the kitchen.
Sean is behind the kitchen island.
One man on the floor. Another crumpled in the doorframe. A third storms in with his rifle up. Sean shoots him. Center mass, one round. The man drops.
