When the Devil Comes to Call (A Lars and Shaine Novel Book 2) (17 page)

Lars remembered clearly the last time he walked up these steps with a gun in his hand. After all, it was only a few days ago. He wasn’t that old yet.

He tried to step around the larger pieces of gore and squishier spots on the carpet, the unknown fluid like some combination of stomach acid and skunk spray. He felt grateful he’d been halfway out the window before the body blew apart the way it apparently did.

He gave one last look over his shoulder and saw Shaine hunkered down behind the couch with the rifle to her shoulder, ready for Bruno or a 10-point buck to come down the stairs.

He spoke to her in a low voice, trying not to be heard by Bruno upstairs.

“Don’t get too trigger-happy with that thing. Wait to see who it is coming down the steps before you start shooting.”

Shaine nodded. Lars continued up.

Bruno hiding out upstairs seemed strange. He lured Lars here, then hid out while his henchmen possibly put the kill shot in him? Then again, he was the last one to get out of the car on the side of the road. Lars guessed anyone who hired muscle wasn’t going to be leading the charge into battle.

Lars tried to remember the layout of the second floor. Four bedrooms, one bathroom off the hall. A linen closet. All places Bruno could hide or lay in wait. Good news was, he left a trail.

When Lars dragged Leo’s body out of the bedroom it was in sad shape, but when Bruno dragged it back to the bedroom, it was leaking. More like pouring. A dark smear of Leo juice stained the carpet and twin streaks from his feet ran down the hall like rubber marks from a burnout.

Lars stepped gently around the juice, gun at the ready. He came to the master bedroom door. It stood slightly ajar. Lars pushed it open, trying to see around the edge of the door.

He stopped, couldn’t quite believe what he saw. He hesitated.

The first shot did not come from Lars’s gun. He felt a sharp sting in his side like his appendix had burst with no warning. Lars looked down and saw the first leak of blood stain his shirt. He was hit. He dropped his gun to the carpet and fell to one knee.

Bruno stood by his parent’s bed, gun at his hip, a small curl of smoke quickly dissipated once it left the barrel. Lars couldn’t help it, he was still mesmerized by the sight.

Bruno had lifted Leo’s body back into bed. He stood over his father’s hollowed out corpse like he was waiting for the old man to say something. The shot he fired into Lars hadn’t even registered with Bruno’s body language. He hovered over the sloppy dead body on the silk sheets. Leo’s gut had burst open, the insides a hollow cavity. Bruno’s sleeves were stained up to his elbows from dragging Leo up the steps. He seemed in some sort of trance or state of shock. He left Lars to grip at his gut in the doorway and returned to delivering his speech to a corpse.

“You solved problems for me my whole life,” Bruno said to his dad. “But Lenore was a problem that didn’t need solving. You didn’t ask me. You didn’t tell me. I had to find out, what, fifteen years later?”

Lars could hear the emotion in Bruno’s voice, see the quaver in his lip as he spoke. The pain Bruno felt in his soul cut through the pain Lars felt in his abdomen. He knew he needed to get up and get moving, to find his gun where he dropped it, to get back downstairs. Lars needed more time though. Time to let the first wave of pain, always the worst, work its way through his body.

“And I have to hear it from a fucking guy working for Nikki?” Bruno shouted at his dad. “I have to hear it from the guy who killed you?” Tears came down Bruno’s face. He looked Leo in his milky grey eyes, searching for an explanation. “Who the hell were you to decide if I wanted to be a father or not? Who the hell were you?”

Bruno lifted his gun to Leo’s temple. “Who the hell were you?” He fired. The already broken skull shattered. Lars went down to both knees and one hand, the other clutching at his gut, trying to hold everything in. He crawled toward his gun, only a few feet away but feeling like it rested at the bottom of the ocean.

Bruno fired again, the remnants of his father’s skull splintering into pieces and the pillow beneath him spitting feathers. “Who the hell were you?” he repeated again and again. Angry, then sad, then angry again he said the words hoping the more he said them an answer might come.

Lars reached his gun but when he tried to push up to his knees with it, the strain on his abdominal muscles electrocuted him with pain. He doubled over again, feeling a fresh flow of blood on his left hand pressed against his midsection.

Bruno turned. Lars wished he’d been counting shots.

“So you were the one to hear his last words,” Bruno said.

Lars didn’t answer, only tried to force his muscles to straighten his body. He thought about calling for Shaine. He knew he doubted her for the last time. He needed a partner. He needed her by his side if he expected to make it out.

“What were they?” Bruno asked.

Lars grunted something approximating, “I don’t know.”

“Bullshit.” Bruno stepped away from the bed, came closer to Lars on the floor. If Lars could only get himself turned right he could shoot. “You’ve killed so many people you don’t even know their last words anymore, is that it? One blends into the next. What they have to say doesn’t matter to you? Well, maybe it matters to someone else.”

Lars tilted the gun, turned it flat on the carpet and fired. The wild shot went under the bed, off to kill maybe a slipper or a lost sock.

“Tell you what,” Bruno said. “I’ll show you how easy it is. I’ll tell you exactly what she says.”

Bruno fired again. Lars’s shooting arm burst with pain. The meat in his forearm took the hit, a jagged gash across the skin and muscle facing fresh air for the first time. Lars swallowed a scream.

Bruno walked past him, headed for the hall and the stairs.

Shaine kept hearing shots. They were so far apart and they kept coming. How had Lars not hit him in such a confined space? Each successive shot was more bad news.

A new smell rose above the Mrs. Ramoni scent—shit. One of the guys, either Mark or Luke or both, had shit themselves when they died. Crouched only a few feet from them both, Shaine had to move. She tucked in the rifle and shuffled on her knees down to the far end of the couch. Her view of the steps was not as good.

She lifted the rifle again, tried out the scope. She saw the spindles of the railing at the top of the steps so close up she could make out the wood grain. The powerful scope was made for outdoor spaces, hundreds of yards. Inside it did her no good.

A dark shape moved over the zoomed-in image. Shaine jerked the scope away from her eye. The shape was gone, disappeared around the wall at the top of the steps. She could hear movement. Slow footsteps coming down, but she didn’t know whose they were.

She steadied the rifle on her shoulder, ignoring the scope in favor of the tiny sight marker at the far end of the barrel. Before she forgot, she turned the gun a half turn and checked her safety. Off. Better safe than sorry.

She gripped the stock again, trying to fill her mind with the feeling and smells of the beach and her coconut practice, blocking out the shit and rotting body smell.

She saw a shoe, a pant leg. She tried to remember what Lars was wearing. Jeans. He always wore jeans.
Don’t get trigger happy
, she thought.

There was a shot. Shaine flinched, but it wasn’t directed at her. It came from upstairs.

Bruno stumbled down the rest of the steps, barely getting his footing on the tile of the entryway. “Goddammit!” he roared. Shaine saw a bloom of red on his shoulder. She looked up to see Lars on the landing, crawling on his belly with his gun in his left hand pointing through the spindles down at Bruno.

Bruno turned and lifted his gun to Lars.

Shaine stood on firm feet. She fired. The rifle bucked in her hand, but she remained steady.

The bullet hit at the base of Bruno’s neck, right at the top of his spine. His head pitched forward, nearly cut off his body and the rest of him went limp, the power cords all severed at once. He fell to the floor adding his own fluids to the mess of his father’s.

Shaine dropped the rifle and ran to the stairs. To Lars.

Lars watched her bull’s-eye shot with pride. The doubts were over. Shaine was a pro.

He didn’t feel half bad with his own left-handed shot. At least it hit something. Watching Bruno pitch forward and hit the floor, Lars let his body ease. He sank into the carpet, the gun fell from his slack fingers. He heard footsteps.

Shaine reached him and put a hand on his back.
Probably checking if the old fool is still alive
, thought Lars.

“Holy shit, Lars, what happened?”

“The old reflexes ain’t what they used to be,” he said.

“What can I do?”

“First, I need a minute right here.”

Lars tried to get control of his breathing. His gut hurt like hell, but at worst he’d lose a kidney. He told himself that would be the worst case, anyway. He felt his pant leg soaking up some of the fluid streak left by Leo as he was dragged back to his room. As much as anything, it motivated Lars to get up and get moving, but he wasn’t quite there yet.

“We gotta get you to a hospital,” Shaine said. Lars could hear tears behind her words. He didn’t look up from the floor to see them, would be too hard.

“Hospitals report gunshots. Can’t go there,” he said. There used to be a time when he knew the names and numbers of a half dozen guys for exactly this occasion, but that was a long time ago.

“What then? Where do we go? You’ll die if you stay here.”

“Seems to be what this house is best at.”

Lars tried to tear his brain away from focusing on the pain and think of a solution. He sure as hell never expected to make it past fifty, but he hated getting this close and not crossing the line. Hope I die before I get old was a young man’s mantra. But old timers in this racket were hard to come by. And The Who songs got better with age.

“Lars, please. Tell me what to do.” Shaine was full on crying now, he could hear it. He kept his face turned away, thinking about last words. He hated that Bruno put the idea in his head that what he said would be something important. Now he had to think of a way out or, if not, a good exit line.

“Old timers,” he said and smiled.

“What?”

“Got an idea.” Lars turned his head, saw Shaine hunched over him, tears streaking her face. “First, I’m gonna need to get up. And that ain’t gonna be easy.”

“I’ll help you,” Shaine said.

“I think you’ll need a few more hands. Got your phone on you?” He knew she always had her phone on her.

Shaine dug her iPhone out of her pocket. “Yeah.”

“Dig me up a little Van Halen, will you?”

“What?”

“Henry Rollins once said if you ever need to lift something heavy, put on Van Halen. I need Eddie and the boys.”

Shaine shook her head, but scrolled through her music. Lars knew she had everything on his phone also on hers since she downloaded all his music for him. His plan gave him the strength to roll onto his side. He might actually make it out alive.

“Runnin’ With The Devil,” he said.

Shaine gave him a look. “We’re wasting time.”

“I’m set in my ways,” he said.

Shaine found the track, tapped her screen and set the volume to full. It wasn’t exactly Madison Square Garden in 1981, but it would have to do. Eddie’s guitars began and Lars pushed up with his good arm. Shaine dipped under him to help and as the song continued a steady beat Lars forced his body through the pain and found his feet, his gun still in hand out of instinct.

They walked arm over shoulder down the steps. As they passed by Bruno, Lars said, “Nice shot, by the way.”

“Come on,” Shaine said.

The cold out front came as a welcome relief. Sweat on Lars’s forehead cooled him like an ice pack. Even the blood soaking his shirt went cold. He knew if he looked down he’d see a plume of steam coming off his wound.

Shaine picked up the pace across the front lawn and out to the street. As she set Lars in the passenger seat of the stolen Mercedes, the song ended. He settled into the seat like a melting ice cube. He dropped the gun to the floor. Shaine knew if he let go of his gun, it was a bad sign. Shaine went around to the driver’s seat.

“Where to?” she asked.

“One more. Indulge me,” he said. “Put on Eruption.”

“Jesus fucking Christ, Lars. I’m not playing any more music. Where am I taking you to get fixed?”

“You’re right. If that’s the last song I hear all I’ll think is how dumb I was to never learn guitar.” He coughed, the contractions in his body seizing him like a woman in labor. “Damn,” he said when the pain passed. “Never thought I’d have to think of the perfect song for my last ride.”

Shaine started the car, revving the engine hard. “I’m taking you to the hospital.”

As she dropped the gearshift into drive, Lars put a bloody hand on her arm. “Wait.” He told her where he wanted to go. Then he said, “And I got it. The only choice. Put on Back in Black.”