Too late.
My next shot catches him in the middle of the chest, and so does the one after that.
He falls into the road.
Whoever is behind the wheel puts the truck in reverse and starts to back up, ignoring Post Malone as if he’s the dog now.
I take a few steps to my right and then I’m aiming through the open door and hitting the driver once, and then again before he can turn with the gun in his hand, watching as he slumps over the wheel.
The horn begins to blare as the siren gets closer.
I keep the Glock in my hand as I carefully approach the truck, hearing a high, singing noise in my ears that isn’t either the horn or the siren.
I walk toward the tattooed man and want to put one more in him, keep firing until I’ve emptied my gun.
But I look down into dead eyes and realize there’s no point.
I feel the urge to tell him that the score is even now for what he did to my friend.
But I know it’s not.
And never could be.
NINETY-FOUR
I’M STILL STANDING next to the pickup when Helene Mayes jumps out of her car, her gun in her hand.
She walks over to me and looks down at the body of the big man, then pokes her head into the cabin of the truck and sees the body over the steering wheel, head to the side, so we can both see his dead eyes.
She walks up the road about twenty yards to where the first body is.
Walks back to me.
“You do this?”
I nod. My breathing is still coming hard and heavy, adrenaline only now starting to slow down, still trying to process how I feel about shooting three men dead. How Ishouldfeel about that.
All I know for sure is that I don’t feel guilty.
The only thing I’m really feeling is relief.
Helene Mayes says, “At least we know you can still hit what you’re aiming at.”
She looks down at the dead man with the face tattoos, then turns and yells at the cops getting out of the other squad cars that have followed her here.
“Somebody get the coroner’s van over here from Old Mill ASAP,” she says. “Then bag all these guns.”
She turns to face me again. “If we get as lucky as you were,” she says, “that gun next to him will turn out to be the one used to shoot Burt Webb.”
I look at her in the flashing lights from her idling car.
“Luck had nothing to do with it, Helene.”
I see on her face just the hint of a smile.
“Three against one,” she says. “They probably had no idea how outnumbered they were.”
“They didn’t expect that I’d be shooting back.”
