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“If you weren’t my best friend, I’d tell you to get bent.” She sighs loudly. “All right. Let’s do this. But if I get shot, I’m blaming you.”
“Seems fair.”
We wait for a lull in the shooting. “Now,” I say when it finally stops. We grab Leo and drag him out to the boat. It’s only a couple of yards but it feels like a marathon. He’s heavier than I thought possible and any moment I’m expecting a bullet through my brain to end everything in an instant.
Shots fire but they’re too far up to aim accurately. I can see tiny figures up there, sticking out from the open doorway, aiming guns down at us. Only so many people can fit in the broken doorway at once which helps us more than it helps them.
We shove Leo over the side of the boat, using the last of our strength to do it. Once he’s in, we stagger over together, collapsing to the deck. “Fuck, he’s heavy,” Fleur says. “Couldn’t you have married a jockey?”
“I’ll bear that in mind for next time.”
“Next time?” Leo growls. “Who says there’s going to be a next time?”
He blinks his eyes open, staring up at me. “Where are we?”
“On the boat. We need to go.”
A bullet hits the deck in front of us, spurring Leo upright. He’s gone from out cold to driving the boat in seconds. We motor away from the beach, the guns still firing after us.
He glances through a monocular, smiling to himself. “It’s Amato doing most of the shooting. He looks pissed.”
He hands me the monocular. I look up at the house. Amato, or George Bulla as I know him, is in the doorway of the basement, shooting at us with a pistol.
“What’s that?” I ask, handing the monocular back to Leo.
He glances through it. “He’s got a rocket launcher. No way of missing with that.”
“He’ll hit us for sure,” I say. “We’re done for.”
“No, we’re not,” he says.
“Are you insane? We’re going to die, Leo.”
“You need to listen to me,” he replies. “We’re going to be fine.”
“How can you know that?”
“Because of this.” He presses a button on his watch.
I’m looking at him so I don’t see the explosion but I hear it. Whipping my head around, I look up in time to see the entire house is no more.
The pieces of it are rising into the air, body parts flying with it. Smoke is rising, flames too, licking the sky until gravity kicks in. Debris starts to rain down toward the beach and the lake.
“What the hell just happened?” Fleur asks, staring up at the house.
“I blew it up,” Leo says.
I punch his side. “You bastard.”
“What was that for?” he asks.
“The Gorgosaurus was up there. We spent months getting that out of the ground and now it’s gone. Blown into a million pieces. You didn’t need to blow up the house. We could have got it back.”
“You’d rather Amato was left alive?” he asks. “Rather we got shot in the middle of the lake when we’re an inch from freedom?”
I glare at him, realizing he’s right. “Okay,” I say. “But I’m allowed to be pissed. We worked for months to get that dinosaur free and now it’s gone forever.”
“No it isn’t.”
