Killing Down the Roman Line (31 page)

Boom.

A muzzle flash hot on the report from the shotgun blast. The back of Hitchens’ head blew off. Brains and bone splinter sprayed over the porch.

Every man dropped to the grass.

Except Hitchens. Still on his feet with the top of his head gone, wet drapes of scalp flapping loose. Blood pulsed up over shattered teeth and spilled down the jawbone swinging loose on a webbing of tissue. It didn’t look real.

The legs folded. The body dropped to a sitting position and keeled over like a felled tree. The Molotov clunked over the steps and rolled onto the lawn. Flames sputtered in the wet grass but didn’t extinguish.

Jim tasted dirt on his tongue, he’d hit the ground that hard. Someone was screaming his head off, alternately cursing God and begging for his help in the same breath. Puddy? He couldn’t tell who.

Where the hell was Corrigan?

Sliding the gun out from under his ribs, he swung it around and propped his elbows in the grass. Drew a bead on the door and fired. The front door splintered. The screaming stopped, the screamer holding his breath.

No movement at the door. Nothing in the windows—

A flash in an upper window. Blue steel in the fire light. Gun barrels.

Jim flattened, heard the crack of gunfire. Something hot bit his calf. He didn’t stop crawling and clawing until he rolled up behind the rusting hulk of an oil tank. The sting in his leg burned hot and salty.

Something nudged his arm. Bill, hunkered into a foetal ball beside him, back hard against the tank. “Jesusfuckingchrist,” he hissed.

He gripped Bill’s arm. “Easy. You’re okay.”

“The fuck? The sonofabitch is shooting at us!” He yanked his arm from Jim’s grip. “It wasn’t supposed to go like this!”

Jim would have agreed if the sting in his calf wasn’t sizzling. He pulled up his pant leg, the calf slick with blood. Too much blood to see ho w bad it was. His heart banged away and he couldn’t slow it down, knowing too well that the faster his heart pumped, the sooner his heart pumped blood to the buckshot spray in his leg.

Berryhill was right. It wasn’t supposed to go like this. Hitchens with his head blown clean off, himself with a leg shot to hell. What the fuck were they supposed to do now?

You kill the son of a bitch. That’s what you came here for.

Jim craned his neck, inching an eye out past the shield of the tanker. Scoping the house. Nothing. The lantern still on the porch, peaceful looking. Hitchens sprawled down the steps, twisted at the waist in an unnatural way. Still and quiet. Nothing so still as the dead. The bottle nearby, its rag popping and roiling but still alight. How long before it blew?

Jim scoped the house again. “Goddamnit. Where is he?”

Berryhill snapped his head up and around, looking for the chicken-door in a spookhouse ride. He uncoiled his legs and rolled into a sprinter’s crouch. “We gotta get outta here. He’s gonna shoot us all.”

“Easy, Bill.” Jim grabbed Bill’s belt to stop him from rabbiting.

“Fuck this!”

Bill slapped his hand away. Shot up and sprinted for the road. Feet pounding loud on the earth, arms pumping. His back as wide as a bullseye.

“Bill!”

Berryhill didn’t look back, putting yards away fast. Cover him, Jim thought. That’s what they did in old war movies, didn’t they? Lay down fire on the enemy to cover Bill’s escape. He edged out from the end of the tank to favour his gunhand. Swung the shotgun up and—

Corrigan straddled the porch, bold and exposed. Rifle shouldered and aimed.

Boom.

Twelve gauge buckshot shredded Berrhill’s back, rippled up his legs. The big man pitched forward, hurtling into the witchgrass where he vanished from sight.

Jim pressed hard up against the tank, blinking madly at what his eyes just saw. Some thought buzzing around his head. Two shots. Corrigan’s weapon was double-barrelled. He had to reload, meaning he was vulnerable.

He swung around the tank and fired without even aiming. Nothing to hit but the house. Corrigan was long gone. Leaving himself open. He flattened back up against the tank and looked to his right. Hissed into the dark. “Puddy! Where are you?”

“Jim?” Puddy’s voice was shrill and disembodied in the night air. The pub owner, out there in the dark somewhere.

“Get over here.”

“Are you crazy?”

“Goddamnit Puddy, On the count of three, you come running!”

Puddycombe refused and cursed his name. Jim racked the slide, spinning out the dead hull and counted off loud and clear. One two three. He stepped out from behind the tank and fired but the trigger locked up. The gun didn’t fire.

Jim blanched. He pumped the slide to clear the jam and blasted the house without aiming.

Puddy bolted into the open and dove for cover behind the rusting tank just as Jim withdrew to safety. The barkeep’s eyes saucered in a desperate hope. “Did you get him?”

“No.”

He pumped the slide again, emptying the smoking shell. He pumped the slide one more time but all that spun out was one unfired round. Just one.

Puddycombe trembled so hard the tank rattled. “Tell me you have more ammo for that thing.”

Jim wiped the last shell against his shirt, drying it off. He slid it up the breach, landing it into the ammo tube. One pump on the forearm and the round snapped into the chamber.

One round. Make it count.

He looked down at Puddy’s hands. Empty. No gun, not even the tire iron. “Where’s the other rifle?”

“God knows. Hitch had it.”

Hitchens lay in the wet grass, his feet propped on the bottom step. Lit up in the flames of the burning vehicle.

There, next to the body lay the rifle. Out in the open, in full view of the house, the bolt action smack in the middle of no man’s land. It may as well have been on the moon.

“We have to get it.”

“Screw that,” Puddycombe said. “We need to get the hell out of here.” He flipped onto his belly and crawled away, keeping the tank between himself and the house.

The shotgun roared. Buckshot rippling the grass before his hands, Puddycombe scuttled back to safety. “Oh Jesus.”

Jim cast his eyes into the dark, seeing nothing. “Where’s Kyle?”

“No idea. Probably dead.”

“Kyle!” Jim hollered the name over and over. No answer came. Was he expecting one? The man never spoke.

Puddycombe snatched him by the arm. “Quiet. Do you hear that?”

Jim cocked his ears. A cold vacuum. “I don’t hear anything.”

Then he heard it. Corrigan’s voice calling from the darkness. Calling out Jim’s name.

He edged an eye past the corner of the tank, seeing only a bit of the house. Didn’t dare stick his neck out any further. “Where is he?”

The pub owner listened, trying to triangulate the voice in the dark. “I can’t tell.”

“Jimmy!” Corrigan’s voice bellowed again. “Throw out your weapon and we’ll talk!”

Jim felt his balls shrivel. They were trapped and Corrigan knew it. How fucking stupid were they? Was he? They had walked right into this mess.
He
had led them all into this.

Puddy was shivering. “We gotta make a run for the truck. There’s no other way.”

Corrigan kept calling to them, his voice anywhere and everywhere. “Put down your arms,” he hollered. “Let’s talk about this like civilized men!”

Jim felt his legs cramp up from squatting so long. He shifted positions, working the blood back into them. It only made the stinging in his calf worse. The shredded leg of his jeans was black with blood and clinging to the skin.

Their position was beyond bad, pinned down behind a rusting tank. Waiting to be picked off.

Their position!
Listen to him. Jesus! Clichés from a hundred movies rattling around his brain. Whatever. Use it. What did soldiers do when they pinned down like this? They used a distraction to cover their run. Lobbed a grenade and ran for higher ground when the thing exploded.

They had no grenade. He looked at Puddycombe, shivering and close to tears. They weren’t soldiers. Just two soft, middle-aged morons who deserved to die for being so fucking stupid.

Puddy nudged his ribs. “Jim. The Molotov.”

The wick was still burning but the bottle lay out of reach. Ten, twelve paces away, near the useless bolt action. There was no way he could make it in time. Run out into no man’s land, hurl the bottle at the house? How long had it been burning? It would blow up in his hand.

“Come out, Jim!”

The voice was closer this time. For all he could tell, Corrigan was on the other side of the oil tank. “Come out, Jimmy, and I’ll reserve some clemency for you! I know your heart wasn’t in this! You were led astray by the petty bastards of this town!”

Jim couldn’t help himself. “Go to hell!”

Puddycombe snatched Jim by the collar and shook him. “Shut up. You’ll lead him straight here.”

He pushed him away and stared at the burning bottle. He could make it.

It’s not that far.

Do it.

When Corrigan sounded again, the voice rang from somewhere else. “Didn’t go as planned, did it? You cocksuckers come for the kill but this time the Corrigans were ready for you!”

Puddy gave up. Gurgling up dry sobs and a web of drool blowing down his lips. “Oh Jesus. What have we done?”

Corrigan kept calling from the darkness.
Come out! I’ll show mercy!
Jim listened to his name echoing in the night and in a flash, it all clicked together. Puddy’s question and Corrigan’s bellowing. What had they done?

“We walked right into this—”

Puddycombe wiped a fist under his nose. “What?”

“He planned it this way.” Jim felt his heart banging off his ribs. “We walked in here with guns and he kills us in self-defence. He’ll get away with it too.” Jim felt his guts empty out. Outsmarted and played for a fool. Local bumpkins go after city slicker, wind up dead in gun battle.

Puddycombe saw it, as clear as Jim now. His jaw worked up and down stupidly and he was blubbering all over again. Sobbing for what they had become.

Dead men.

30

EMMA MADE TEA. She didn’t know what else to do. Trouble reared up, you put the kettle on. It was how her mother handled a crisis, her grandmother too. Cancer, war, plagues of locusts? Make the tea and then we’ll deal with it.

Her lip was still swollen and hot to the touch. The ice had done nothing to get the swelling down and the thought of anything hot touching it made her wince. She pushed the tea aside and reached into the hutch, pulling down her dad’s response to crises. She poured a lethal dose into a rock glass and knocked the bar off the first finger. It burned, just not the way tea does.

Make it hurt.

Of all the bloody-minded things to say. Her last words to Jim flinging back at her like an angry boomerang. She’d meant it in the moment, pure revenge in her heart, but that moment was over. She had sobered up in the stillness after he left. Those stupid words tumbling through her head. The implications of it. Consequences.

Corrigan was armed too. The gun on the mantle. She’d spotted it there when he tore at her clothes and clawed her skin. If she could have gotten her hands on it, she would have shot him dead herself. But that’s not what had happened. When it was over, she had simply pulled her clothes back into place and walked out the door without even looking at the rifle. It mocked her from its perch, just out of reach.

She had sent her husband off to a gunfight. Given her blessing to blind revenge against a dangerous man. A violent ex-con and killer by his own admission.

Make it hurt
.

She killed the glass and poured again and her eyes latched on the phone in the hall. She scooped it up and dialled his cell. She would tell him to forget what she’d said and come home and everything would be all right. It rang and rang without an answer.

The linoleum creaked. Travis stood in the doorway. His face a drawn disc of white.

Emma put the phone down. “You okay?”

“I heard something,” he said. “I think it was a gunshot.”

“Are you sure?” An instinctive response to allay her child’s fear, assure him that everything was okay. A lie she’d told at least once a day since Travis was two years old. “I’m sure it’s nothing. Just a tree branch falling off. Something.”

As if angry at the dismissal, gunfire cracked through the still air. Bang, bang, bang. All of it downwind from the old house down the road.

Emma’s hand shot to her mouth, bumping the tender lip. Gunfire, without a doubt. Travis sprinted to the door, flung back the lock and ran outside. She barked at him to get back inside and rushed after him.

“Something’s on fire over there,” he shouted.

She followed him onto the porch where he pointed across the field. An orange glow lit up the treeline like a false sunset. Flames wisped up and winked out and rose again. Whatever was burning out there had to be big. The house itself?

“What is it?”

“I don’t know. Come back inside, honey.”

“No.”

She chased him back inside and locked the door and hurried him into the kitchen. Crises spilling all over the place, one went to the kitchen. Why? To brew more tea? Make a sandwich?

She should call the police. They would stop it. But Jim had told her to leave if he called. He meant for her and Travis to be far away when the trouble started.

“We should go over there.” Travis pressed his nose against the dark glass of the window.

“Stay away from the window, honey.”

“What if Dad’s in trouble?” Travis didn’t move, didn’t even turn around.

“Get away from the window!”

Travis spooked like a horse and turned with a nasty look on his face and she immediately regretted it. She was regretting a lot of things tonight. Let this be the last of it.

Travis flopped into a chair and she dialled Jim’s number again.

~

Bill Berryhill was still alive. Out there in the dark, calling for help. For his mother. Pleading with God to make the hurting stop.

Jim couldn’t tell where the voice was coming from. Just out there, somewhere. Puddy stifled his moaning and stilled himself, listening to those awful cries. “Can you see him?”