Houses on both sides. Families asleep behind those walls. That stayed in me even then, cold and clear under everything—every round I sent had to go into the dark where the bad men were and nowhere else. You don't get to be careless in a place full of sleeping people. Not even now. Especially not now.
I kicked my door. Jammed from the crash, sprung in the frame, and it took two hard drives of my boot before it tore open. I rolled out low onto the street with the parked sedan between me and the muzzles, and I came up in the dark with a gun in my hand.
And the thing happened that always happens.
The noise went out of me.
The static that runs under everything I do, every minute of every day—the low, constant grind I've only ever found one way to shut off—it went quiet. The world got simple and slow and clean. There was the wreck, and the other car, and at least two men who'd decided tonight was the night they'd kill me, and there was me, and that was the whole of creation. Inside it, I was steady as a held breath. I didn't feel fear. I didn't feel much of anything except that terrible, familiar calm settling over me like a coat I'd worn a thousand times.
I let it take the wheel. I always do.
Half the incoming fire was coming from the driver's side of the attacking car. I traced it, breathed, waited. A head came up over the hood to find me—a careless inch too far, the way men get when they think they've got you pinned.
I put one round through it.
Spray off the back of him, dark in the streetlight, and he dropped where he stood. One down.
At least one more. The fire from the right side of their car kept up, wild now, less sure of itself.
I dropped the mag into my palm and checked it by feel. Eight left. Not enough for a drawn-out thing. I'd left a shotgun on the floorboard ten feet behind me.
So, I went back in the way I'd come.
Folded low through my sprung door, reached over the seat into the back, and got my hand on the shotgun on the mat. Came out doubly armed, pistol in my right, scattergun across my body, and crouched against the cover of the wreck with cordite flooding my nostrils and Darren breathing wet and shallow in the footwell beside my knee.
I took a breath. Settled into it. Let the calm finish coming.
I duck-walked around to the front of the SUV, putting the engine block between us, all that good dense steel an engine gives a man. And I waited for the lull. There's always a lull—a man has to think, has to reposition, has to wonder where you went.
When it came, I rose and went to work.
I put all eight remaining rounds into the back end of their car in a slow, even rhythm, walking forward as I fired, closing the distance with every step, herding him, making his world small and loud and full of metal. Somewhere in there, I felt one of mine find him—you learn to feel it, a hitch in the way the return fire stutters—and his gun went quiet.
Then, the figure broke. Bolted up out of cover and ran, low and scrambling, going for the dark between two houses.
I didn't hesitate.
I came up out of my crouch, shotgun braced at my hip, and I pumped three loads into the running man. The first foldedhim. The other two made sure. He went down in a heap on somebody's strip of lawn and didn't move and wasn't going to.
That was all she wrote.
Quiet came back. The real quiet, the after-quiet, ears ringing, the street smelling of burnt powder and hot metal and blood. I stood in it a second, and God help me, I felt level. Right. The calm a man like me only ever gets standing over what he's just done.
Then, I went to work the scene the way the work requires.
I cleared their car first—came up on it from the rear, muzzle leading, checked the seats and the floor. Empty. Just the two. I crouched over each of them and got my new phone out and photographed their faces, careful, both of them. Two men I'd never seen. Rough. Lean and bad-used, hard country faces, the kind of men you'd pass at a gas station three hundred miles from anywhere. I went through their pockets fast. No wallets. No phones. No paper. Nothing at all, which told me something all by itself—men don't go clean like that by accident. Somebody had sent them sterile.
Then the sirens started up, still a few streets off, but coming.
One play was to stand here in the wreckage with two dead men and wait for the law and explain myself. Badges, statements, a name in a system, hours in a room with people who'd want to know who I was and what I was doing in their pretty city.
That was no play at all. Not for me. Not with the Bureau already circling my family.
Their car still ran—rough, knocking, but the engine had caught and held through all of it, an ugly Frankenstein thing somebody'd kept alive past its time. I got in the driver's seat of it and reversed it off the wrecked SUV, backed it up the lane just far enough to bring the passenger side level with where Darren lay folded in the SUV. Then, I was out and around and liftinghim—dead weight, all of it, blood slicking my hands and arms—hauling him up out of the footwell and across into the jalopy's passenger seat as gentle as fast would allow. He groaned. Still with me. Good.
I dropped behind the wheel and put it in gear and pulled off down the dark lane just as the first wash of red and blue lit up the cross street behind me, and I left the SUV and the two bodies and a residential block full of waking people in the mirror.
I drove three turns, checked I was clean, then dug out my phone and called my brother, my hands leaving red on the screen.
