“Evidently,” Helene Mayes says.
I take one last look down at the body at my feet.
“You said it was going to be a war,” I say.
“Shooting war,” she says, “especially after what they did to Burt Webb.”
I jerk my head in the direction of the house. “My grandmother call you?”
Now Helene nods.
“I told her I was on my way, and to stay inside the house until I got here unless she wanted to get arrested,” she says.
“For once in her life,” I say, “she did what she was told.”
Then I say, “You need my gun, right?”
“Not tonight,” she says. “A decision that only breaks several state and local regulations. But you hold on to it, even though I’m going to leave a car out front for the time being.”
She walks back up the road to the first body, comes back to the truck, looks down again, then says, “How’d you get to be such a good shot?”
“The way I got good at everything else I was ever good at,” I say. “Practice.”
I feel my phone buzzing in the front pocket of my jeans.
Taylor
Before I can say anything about what had just happened out here, Taylor says, “Silas, you need to get over to my house.Now!”
She sounds exactly the way she did, her voice loud and scared, when she’d called the night she lost her eyesight. I’ve got the phone far enough away from me that Helene can hear, too.
“What’s wrong?”
“Somebody just shot out the front windows of my house,” she says.
“Where are they now?”
“They drove off after I shot back.”
I tell her I’m on my way.
“I’ll drive,” Helene Mayes says.
NINETY-FIVE
HELENE KEEPS THE lights flashing and has the siren back on all the way to Taylor’s house.
We see the damage when we come screeching and skidding into her driveway. The windows on either side of her front door are gone, front lawn littered with glass reflecting the light from the front porch.
Taylor is standing on the top step, SIG Sauer in her hand.
“Don’t shoot,” I say.
When we’re inside, all of us sitting around her living room, I tell her my story first. When I finish, Taylor says, “Oh my God, Silas. And I thought I was the one in danger.”
“You were,” I say. “Helene’s right. It’s a shooting war now.”
Then she says, “You really think it was him, Silas? The one who killed Burt?”
