Finally this second weapon clicked on an empty chamber and he took a moment to just lie there and listen. His ears were battered enough from all the shooting, and the heavy music coming from another part of the house droned on, but he was reasonably sure the incoming fire had stopped. The woman moaned on the floor ten feet away, but he ignored her as he climbed to one knee.
Court dropped the rifle on the floor there next to him and he heaved the sword. He stood back up and headed down the hall, hoping to make it to any more threats in the house before they had a chance to regroup and attack.
When he reached the woman he decided he needed to check her for any weapons. She had nothing on her other than a crack pipe, a thick roll of twenties, and a lighter. He saw her bloody thighs, and determined from the location of the wounds that the arteries in her legs remained intact, and she would probably survive.
He thought she was out of the fight completely, but before he could stand back up she looked up to him, bared her teeth, and tried to scratch at his eyes with her fingernails.
Court punched her in her left temple with the hilt of the sword, dazing her instantly. He then grabbed her by the waistband of her jeans in the small of her back, and he lifted her off the floor. He walked on, carrying her like a rag doll, holding the sword in his right hand as he dragged her along with his left.
He found the stereo in the main living room and turned it off, and as soon as he did so he heard the two men outside, frantically beating on the boarded windows next to the front door, trying to get back in.
He popped the disk out of the property’s security camera system, and he snapped it in his hands and slipped it into his pocket, then he turned and moved down a hall, out of the main living area.
In a large back bedroom his eyes settled on a scene of carnage. An older man, covered in Aryan Brotherhood ink like the others, lay on his back in the middle of the floor. His arms and legs were splayed; his head was split open from a gunshot wound to the eye. Court determined one of the 7.62 rounds he’d fired into the wall had passed all the way through the man’s skull. The dead man’s gore had been splattered across a faux leather recliner behind him that had itself taken half a dozen rounds of hate from Court’s borrowed rifles. Next to the body lay an AK, and next to this Court saw the bald-headed man he’d spoken to through the front door just minutes earlier. The Aryan Brotherhood meth dealer sat on the floor, leaning against the foot of an unmade bed, his eyes glazed but pointing in Court’s direction.
The black polymer Kalashnikov lay in his lap, but his hands were resting on the floor. Court counted three gunshot wounds on the man. One in the right wrist, one in the left elbow, and another in his right hip.
The bald-headed man’s chest heaved up and down rapidly, and he was covered in blood.
Court used the tip of the katana to flick the AK-47 out of the man’s lap and beyond his reach. He then dragged the unconscious woman into the room and dropped her face-first on the bed behind the injured man. The bald-headed man lay there motionless as Court did this, blood pumping from his hip and arms. Court looked the wounds over and didn’t give the man much chance for survival unless the bleeding was controlled and paramedics made the scene in the next fifteen minutes.
Court looked around the room. All the walls, all the furniture — all the people, for that matter — were riddled with bullet holes.
Court pulled a blanket off the bed. It was soiled and stained and covered in cigarette burns. He tossed it to the drug dealer on the floor.
The man pressed it against his hip to stanch the bleeding, groaning with pain as he put pressure on the wound. He held it in place with his injured left arm. “What do you want?”
“What do you think?”
“Drugs?”
“Guess again.”
“Cash?”
“You’re brighter than you look.”
The white supremacist’s voice slurred a little. “You… ain’t… gettin’ shit.”
Court checked his watch. A stray round here and there might not garner too much interest in Ward Eight, but he knew the roar of a thirty-second full-auto firefight would draw out the police, and he sure as hell did not want to be hanging out in this meth den when the cops showed up. “I don’t have time to dick around. I see from all that ink that you are no stranger to superficial wounds from sharp objects, so I’ll have to go deep, won’t I?” Court raised the katana chest-high, holding the hilt with both hands.
“What the fuck are you going to—”
The man stopped speaking suddenly and his focus shifted to a point somewhere over Court’s left shoulder. Court knew the man was looking at the doorway behind him. Without hesitation Court flipped the sword around in his left hand and brought it underhanded back behind him, and he fired it back like a piston, launching it through the air blade-first without looking. Immediately he heard the steel strike flesh, and he turned around, saw a bearded man in the doorway ten feet away, armed with a massive Desert Eagle pistol. The katana had caught him in the solar plexus, driven through his lungs, and the tip now rested against the backside of the man’s rib cage.
The big handgun fell from the man’s hand and he reached up for the sword for a short time, his wide eyes on it, his face a mask of confusion. After a moment, however, he folded down onto the floor, ending up with his back propped on the doorframe, wheezing and grunting with the movement of his chest. His eyes went unfixed and glassy as he drifted away.
Court knew the look of the dying. It didn’t sadden him; he felt little other than operational concerns. He knelt over the dying man, rummaged through his pockets, pushed the man’s weakening hands away when they reached out to stop him.
Court found nothing of interest on the man, so he left him alone to die, and he turned back to the wounded drug dealer at the foot of the bed. “I’m going to make this really quick and simple. Show me where the money is, and you get help before you bleed out.”
The man looked at his two dead partners, back behind him to the unconscious woman on the bed, then back to Court. “Go fuck yourself.”
Court nodded, and he pulled the blanket out of the man’s grasp. He looked down at the blood pumping from the man’s hip. “Three minutes and you’ll lose consciousness. Five minutes, you’re dead.”
“I don’t give a shit.”
“Well, that makes two of us. I’ll find the money anyway. Or the cops will. Not that it will matter much to you, because you’ll be in a fridge at the morgue.”
Court saw the wheels spinning in the man’s head. When he realized he would gain nothing from his obstinacy he said, “Windowsill. Pop the ledge up.”
Court tossed the bloody blanket back to the wounded drug dealer, then he went to the boarded-up window. He yanked up on the wooden sill. With some effort, it pulled away from the wall. Inside was a channel in the frame of the house. He could see two bags there, and he fished them out quickly with a metal coat hanger he found lying loose on the floor.
The first paper bag contained a meth ball, a plastic bag holding small plastic baggies, each one containing a sixteenth of an ounce of crystal meth. Court wasn’t sure what the street value of it all was, but there had to have been a hundred or more bags.
He turned and tossed the meth bag into the lap of the nearly decapitated corpse, just feet away. “Careful, this shit’ll kill you,” Court said, and then he looked in the second bag. This one was stuffed with cash. Tens and twenties, mostly, but there were a few fives and even some ones. He held it up to the wounded man on the floor. “How much?”
Even though he’d stanched the bulk of the blood flow, the man was weakening noticeably. Through gasps he said, “I don’t know. ’Bout thirteen grand. Little more, maybe.”