Wild Horses (42 page)

Who was it?
Allison couldn’t stand it any longer. If they killed her too, she would at least make them look her in the eye. She strained her head down, clawing with her free hand until her nails snagged the bag, and tore it stretching from her face like a caul. The air was rank with the smell of gunsmoke and human waste and, now, much blood.

Allison let loose a sob, wondering how she could feel such grief for the person here she’d hardly known at all. She had a flash of Saturday morning, talking with her outside the trailer. Krystal had been the only person she’d ever met who’d looked at her and simply
known
what she had carried with her from this town. Recognized it as only one who carried it herself might.

And look at her now. Oh, just look at her now.

Boyd suspected. He ripped his own bag away, looked with dread to find Krystal limp in her ropes, the bag melted and blackened with powder residue, and the blood pooling into her lap.

“Always another one where she came from, Boyd,” Madeline said flatly. “You just call the escort service.”

A wail ripped from the ruin of his mouth as he surged against the sectioned ropes. They fell away like dead snakes, hung webbed between him and the chair. He thrashed free of those that clung stubbornly, and for a moment Madeline and Gunther could only stare in astonishment.

Boyd would have killed her, Allison had no doubt, had he only gotten close enough. Gunther reacted first, drawing a pistol and firing once. Boyd’s head snapped, some indistinct but solid tatter spinning from the side of his skull and slapping the wall. He tumbled backward over the chair, to land in an unmoving sprawl.

“Twice!” shouted Gunther. “That’s twice he’s got out of a chair on me! I don’t understand how he does that!”

Madeline nudged his foot. “I don’t think he’ll be doing it anymore.”

Constance and Tom had rid themselves as well of the makeshift hoods, ashen as Madeline swung open the Magnum’s cylinder to let the single spent brass casing ping onto the floor.

“Haven’t you had enough yet?” Allison screamed. “Two aren’t enough for you?”

“Allie,” Constance said. “Don’t, Allie. She may have ears but there’s nothing left in there to hear you with. It’s all in this album full of old pictures, that’s where she left it.”

Madeline uprighted the fallen chair and sat after reaching into her pocket for the rest of the bullets. Bright and shiny as new pennies, they clicked in her palm while she stared at the roulette-wheel face of the cylinder.

“Five,” she counted. “Let’s reverse the odds, why don’t we. I know what you’re thinking about me. But you should be thanking me, instead.” She looked back at her palm. “Five. That should work out about right…

“Allison,” she said, and chambered the first.

“Thomas,” she said, and chambered the second.

“Constance,” she said, and chambered the third.

“Burn in hell,” Connie spat.

And when the next two names were spoken, and Gunther voiced no objection, Allison wondered if his earlier defense of the kids hadn’t been part of some scripted drama played out to inspire a misguided faith that if they cooperated he would at least ensure that the most innocent would survive.

“Randy,” she said, and chambered the fourth.

*

It was the worst headache of his life. Boyd came to, amazed that he was still in the room, neither moving nor knowing if he could. He let his eyelid roll open and this boded well for the top end. Flexed both sets of toes to confirm hope for everything else in between. Fabulous.

“Constance,” he heard through the ringing in his ears.

It felt as though a band of fire encircled half his head, with patches of raw cold front and back. Clearly, Derek wasn’t the only Dobbins to possess a skull of uncommon hardness.

“Randy,” Madeline was saying.

Likely the bullet hadn’t hit squarely; had hit instead at an angle, penetrating his scalp and burrowing wormlike beneath, to curve along his skull between bone and flesh until exiting through a second wound. He’d heard of it occurring before.

“Lainie,” Madeline said.

Yet through it all, he’d never lost his grip on that tooth.

His mouse-level view of the room was blurry, but he was close enough to Madeline to discern the backs of both seated legs. He lunged upright onto jellied knees and, while he had the surprise of resurrection still going for him, lurched the rest of the way.

He threw one arm around Madeline’s shoulders, hanging on for support as he slashed the tooth’s filleting edge down the right side of her face. From eyelid to jawline, the flaps of skin peeled wetly apart, splitting like the rind of an orange.

Madeline shrieked — such terror he had never heard — and dropped the gun she’d been loading. He clung tighter, and reached across her face and gouged the tooth under her left eye and held it there.

“Do I do this side too?” Boyd rasped in her ear. “Or does he start cutting them loose?”

The shotgun was just out of reach in the doorway, but Gunther already had the Glock in hand. He jammed its muzzle into Allison’s head. Her eyes drifted shut as though she were dreaming.

“Gunther?” Madeline wailed. “Gunther!”

“I’ll do it!” Gunther shouted. “You know I’ll do it! One more scratch and I’ll leave her like the other one!”

“You’ll do what you’ll do,” Boyd said. “First rule of Vegas is ‘Scared money always loses.’” Madeline’s blood was spilling across his wrist. “I’m not scared anymore.”

“Gunther!” she pleaded. “He’s going to do it! Don’t let him cut my face anymore,
please
, Gunther!”

He stood his ground, ripped with uncertainty. The gun wavered from Allison, was then aimed at Boyd as though Gunther thought he might try slipping one past Madeline’s ear. She pleaded with him not to — what if he missed? Boyd thought of Krystal and slit half an inch down Madeline’s cheek, while Gunther squeezed both eyes shut.

“Aw, Maddy,” he moaned, “what he’s done to you…”

Boyd told him to put the Glock in St. John’s hand, and he did it. Told him to take the razor and cut St. John loose, and Gunther did this too. As St. John shrugged off the coils, Boyd watched to make sure Gunther had no tricks left, thinking no, he couldn’t be this compliant.

Madeline must have regained her wits as soon as she ceased howling about her face, from beneath her shirt pulling the pistol he forgot she’d been carrying earlier. Her arm twisted back and Boyd felt a poke between the slats of the chair. Twice she gutshot him. He toppled backward and, though it wasn’t intentional, still held fast to the tooth and drew it back with him, laying open her face from the left cheek, across her nose, and around and down to her right earlobe. She turned to shoot him again and was instead shot from across the circle by St. John.

Boyd looked to see the extent of the damage he’d wrought, and hoped she wouldn’t die, wishing her a long, healthy life — just her, and her memories, and the thick and shiny scars.

*

Tom hadn’t wanted to take his eyes off Gunther for so much as an instant but couldn’t look two directions at once. He hit the floor after felling Madeline, rolled to his side, and swung the Glock around to discover that Gunther had vanished, the open razor dropped in favor of the shotgun on his way out the door.

Had it not been for Constance’s children, Tom wouldn’t even have considered going after him; would’ve been happy to wait for the police. He recalled from his stint in the Marines that anyone with sense and combat experience ranked houses as dead last in preference. No jungle could conceal as many hazards as a plain, ordinary house; worse when you fought room to room. And matching pistol against shotgun verged on insanity.

Body memory. Unending hours of torturous drills, imprinted into muscle, imbedded into bone. You could almost forget it was all there, until it awoke, and drew the first fiery breath it had taken in years.

He crawled to the doorway so he could peek along the length of the hall at floor level. All clear. Now he had to decide which tactic Gunther might have adopted: if he’d fled outright, if he’d gone straight for the kids’ room, or if he was waiting in between to ambush Tom on the chance he would rush directly there himself.

“Tom,” Constance whispered. “That last time he sent me down to quiet them? I hid them in the back of Lainie’s closet.”

He nodded, saw Boyd doing his best to crab his way across the floor. With his boot Tom slid the razor to him so he could cut the others loose, then thought of the noise those boots would make on the floor and took them off. Socks too, for traction. He ejected the Glock’s clip to count the remaining rounds — thirteen, plus the one in the chamber.

“Stay low along the floor,” he told them. “I don’t know how solid these walls are. Bullets might go ripping right through.”

He slipped out the door to glide flush against the wall.

Every tactic they’d trained into him for a house fight required things he didn’t have. A grenade to lob into each room before rushing in to finish the job? Fresh out. Stupidity would have to suffice.

The master bedroom came first, on his left; across and down was the bathroom, and across from this was a guest bedroom. Tom was betting against the bathroom — too confining, not enough cover.

He streaked low past the master bedroom doorway, tensed for reflex fire that didn’t come. He doubled back and swung in his gun hand, swept it across the room, then bounded through the doorway toward the bed. He rolled off the mattress onto the floor, then saw the doors of a ransacked closet standing open along the wall shared with the guest bedroom.

A pair of Jeff’s shoes strayed from beneath the bed, and he grabbed them, hurling one after the other at the closet wall. They struck with heavy thuds, and a heartbeat later two shotgun blasts came ripping back through. Heavy-gauge buckshot fragmented a lamp and glass picture frames behind him, and with a burst of confetti shredded through a case of comic books sitting on the dresser.

From the floor, Tom snapped off three shots back through the perforated wall in hopes of getting luckier than Gunther. From the steady footsteps pounding toward the hall, he didn’t think he had.

Eleven,
he told himself. Easiest thing in the world, losing count of how many shots were left.

Hearing Gunther’s mad rush down the hall, Tom hopped over the fractured glass, and when he came through the doorway dropped low again, spotting Gunther from behind. Gunther swung around and fired, while Tom hugged the floor to let the charge pass overhead.

When Gunther rammed through the door with the poster of the unicorn and the rainbow, Tom held his fire just as they both knew he would. Tom prayed for the kids’ unswerving obedience, that they hadn’t left the closet, and that on rushing in, Gunther could react only with indecision.

Gunther slammed the door shut behind him, and the blast he fired back into the hall punched a hole through the door as big around as a dinner plate, showering splinters and tearing through poster to gut the unicorn.

Tom scrambled forward, hugging the hall baseboard, wondering how much he should gamble on having heard nothing out of the kids. One would think, if they’d left the closet and seen Gunther charge in on top of them, they would at least cry. That’s what children did when the bogeyman came to call.

These two hadn’t made a sound.

A clear field of fire. It had to be.
I think…

He dropped on the run and slid to the floor, on his butt, as though to straddle the doorjamb, half aligned with the doorway, half shielded by the wall, and kicked out with his bare foot. The sprung door shuddered open to reveal a widening slice of young girl’s room. Gunther fired again to rain down more chunks from the blasted door. In silhouette against the curtained window, he ran for it as if to leap through the glass, heedless of the fall. Tom knew with all his heart that Gunther was the only thing moving.

He tracked the shape, squeezing careful shots; could tell he was missing every time more glass shattered. He counted down each until he had four rounds left, and dared waste no more.

Gunther staggered and ripped aside curtains and newsprint to flood the room with sunlight, then began, for no reason Tom could fathom, to whirl in a mad and contorted frenzy. He slapped at his hip, bellowing like a bull, waving the shotgun but only because he hadn’t thought to drop it.

“Shit! Shit!
Shit!
” he cried, then fell against the wall, tearing furiously at the side pocket of his sport coat, the bulge within. He flung aside the perforated can of Drano in a shower of blood and crystals, and slapped again at his steaming hip.

When Tom shot him the next four times it seemed almost the humane thing to do.

He got to his feet and crossed the room, filled with frills and tomboyish touches alike. Although he would later undoubtedly shake until his joints rattled, he felt steady now as he plucked the shotgun from Gunther’s lap. He waited for those still-open eyes to turn upon him, but they didn’t, and the blood-speckled neck gave no hint of pulse. Gunther was as dead as men ever got, just not soon enough. Tom stripped a sheet from the unmade bed and draped it over him to spare others the sight.