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A strip through which the muzzle of a 1911 appeared, as indistinct as the haunted eye itself.
He saw the muzzle flash but never heard the bang.
Evan emerged from the side of the towering water feature. There was nothing to see except for Rath rasping his way across the floor. And given the tumbling sheet of liquid, there was nothing to hear.Keeping his back to the wall, Evan moved away from the waterfall to see what noises he might pick up. Joey would have moved on to phase two by now, flooding local PD with false alarms, impelling them this way and that across Southampton, but even so, time was of the essence. Easing down a back corridor, keeping a low silhouette, he heard the clacking of pool balls.
Leading with his ARES, he vectored into the billiard room. A boudoir lampshade had been knocked askew. The three ball was still rolling on the felt.
The billiard room branched off to two different halls.
He picked the one indicated by the lampshade and kept on. Wide corridor, lots of doors. He checked the rooms as he went—study, guest room, library, gym. The sprawling house was disorienting, a confusion of passages and doors, the spaces bleeding into one another.
Squeezing through a slender doorway, he went down three stone steps into a slimmer corridor, the walls cluttered with Mirós and Rothkos and a creepy Chagall of a goat playing a violin. Despite the minimal descent, the temperature seemed to have risen by ten degrees. He felt sweat beading at his hairline.
Footfall came audible, but given the hard surfaces Evan couldn’t source its direction. Aside from the art, the hall was bare. He slipped through the next doorway, finding himself inside a powder room.
A candle guttered on a gold-plated dish, casting a wobbly glow. Beigey-pink marble surfaces veined with quartz. The faucets were two shiny brass Cupids, one playing a harp, the other armed with a tambourine. Angel wings formed the backplate of the toilet-paper holder. Three of the walls had mirrors, reflections of Evan compounding into an infinity of X’s.
He pressed his ear to the closed door, heard the vibration of approaching steps. Readying his gun, he backed to the mirrored wall by the toilet, and it suddenly gave way, swinging around.
He stumbled back onto a metal landing, struggling to keep his balance. His heel slipped into nothingness, and then he was tumbling painfully down a steep, narrow flight of stairs. Slamming onto oil-stained concrete, he felt a throbbing in his hip and wonderedfor a moment if his left shoulder had popped out of the socket. He started to raise his arm, felt a bone-on-bone grind, and buried a shout in his closed mouth.
He preferred his left hand for shooting and could not have it out of commission. Hesitating, he took a series of fast deep breaths and then forced his arm higher yet. The ball rolled screamingly through tendon and muscle and popped back into the socket.
If he had more time, he might’ve cried.
The rusty steps towering up before him were serrated with perforated raised buttons and debossed holes designed to make them annoyingly antislip. He turned his head to look around, a nerve sending fire through his jaw and down his left side.
A defunct boiler room. Rusted valve bonnets and pipes, metal hand wheels snapped jaggedly in two. In the rear behind a crumbled masonry wall rose the twenty-foot behemoth itself, soot memorializing where it had once belched fire. A rustedFITZGIBBONSbrand plate lay on the floor at Evan’s side. His ARES must have landed nearby, but he didn’t know where.
He told himself to sit up, but his body wasn’t having it.
It seemed impossible that the ringing inside his skull didn’t exist outside his body as well.
He rolled onto his side, groping in the darkness, forcing his way through the pain in his shoulder. Metal bits and old screws poked at his fingertips, drawing blood. His held breath burned beneath the intercostals of his left side. When he rolled onto his back and told himself to exhale, the effort left him shuddering.
As if in a nightmare, he heard a creak above, the secret mirrored wall opening once more.
Through the mesh of the landing, two large spots of greater darkness telegraphed someone’s approach. The metal bowed.
And then Gordo’s round, shiny head peeked into view.
Sweat dripped from his forehead. In his fat boxing-glove hands, the service pistol aimed down at Evan looked like a toy gun. Evan felt like he was staring up from the bottom of a well.
Weakly, he reached some more, his shoulder protesting, hishand grazing shattered bricks and old nails. His 1911 couldn’t have tumbled far.
Gordo cocked his head, that broomlike mustache curling with a smile. “I’ve fallen,” he said, “and I can’t get up.”
Santos appeared now at his back, barely visible behind Gordo’s mass. “I got him,” he said. “Let me get him.”
“Back off, lil’ man,” Gordo said. “He gutshot Rath. I want him for me.”
He set a sturdy leg down to test the rusted top step, which complained but held. That smile grew wider. He kept the gun pointed down at Evan. Peering helplessly up the dozen steep steps had a dizzying effect on Evan, the distance stretching like taffy.
Tilting his expansive hips, Gordo sidled down another step. And then another. His elbows splayed out to the sides with each step to help him hold balance, the effect ridiculously avian. Santos was all but hopping behind him, but there was no way to get around the big man to the waiting prize; in fact, he was barely visible behind Gordo’s girth. Moving cautiously, Gordo neared the halfway point.
Evan strained to reach behind him, fire spreading through his injured shoulder.
A nail pricked him. A splinter dug at his wrist. And then—his thumb brushed the familiar aluminum frame.
