Blinking, he saw the kid, sprawled in the snow, not fifteen yards away. His eyes blooming with spots, Gator couldn’t aim the pistol. He stepped out from cover. She saw him, pushed up on her feet, and started running again.
Gator’s breath came in a helpless giggle as he sprinted after her. Gaining on her going past the shop-clinging to the damn cat cut her speed. Rounding the house, reaching out now, feeling the tips of her hair whipping in the wind, grazing his fingertips.
“Got you,” he yelled, grabbing a handful of her hair, yanking her roughly back as he skidded to a halt, grasping her hair at arm’s length while she swung one arm, kicked at him. Her breath coming in fierce little sobs. Damn cat squirming in the crook of her elbow.
Heard someone yell over the rushing flames. Sheryl?
Stunned, he focused his eyes on the yard in front of the house, at the vision of two figures running in the hellfire blaze. Running straight at him. A man on the left with a shotgun and a woman on the right, in pajamas it looked like, with her arms outstretched, hands empty. Behind them he saw the county cruiser at the end of a trough of snow, somebody who could have been Keith, one hand shielding his eyes from the fire, the other raising a pistol.
Immediately Gator wrapped the girl in his left arm, pulling her in close, and jammed the muzzle of the Luger against her head.
“Everybody stop where you are,” he shouted.
They didn’t stop.
They were all in. Broker keyed on Nina. “Call it!” he screamed, running at the guy who was holding a pistol to Kit’s head fifty yards away.
“Break left, draw fire,” Nina yelled back.
Without slowing his stride, Broker swerved to the left, danced briefly, giving her time to close the distance. Then he raised the shotgun and ran straight at the guy, screaming, out-of-his-mind crazy: “Let her go, or I’ll blow your fucking head off. Let her go. LET HER GO!”
Nina continued forward, plodding now, arms outstretched, pleading, hysterical. “Don’t hurt her. PLEASE. Don’t hurt her.” Slowed her pace to a deliberate walk, out of sync with the frantic screaming all around, the rolling fire light, the crunch of a secondary explosion, flaming debris arcing up. Thirty yards…
Nygard’s shaking voice calling out, “Wait, wait.” Barlow behind him, yelling too. Kit’s screams topping off the bedlam. “Mom, Dad!”
Twenty-five yards…
Gator’s heart was about to come right out of his chest like the tiny monster in Alien. He clicked his eyes on the bedraggled imploring woman for half a second, then quickly fixed his attention on the guy. It was him. Broker. His gaunt wolf face gone to mindless rage, running in from the right. Screaming. Loony. With a leveled shotgun. Keith back there, gun out in a two-handed grip. This black woman in a state trooper’s suit, all tucked and neat like a painted toy soldier.
“I’LL DO IT!” Gator screamed, pressing the pistol against the squirming kid’s head. Fucking cat clawing, going nuts. “I SWEAR…”
Broker coming on with the shotgun, irrational. Barely twenty yards away now. He’d lost it. Eyes pure psycho in the firelight. Gonna shoot no matter what. “It’s your kid?” Gator screamed, astounded.
“Let her go!” Broker screamed back, coming on.
Even with the world blowing up all around, burning shit falling from the sky, instinct demanded that Gator protect himself from crazy people. He switched the pistol toward Broker, thrust his arm and jerked the trigger.
The instant the man holding Kit took the pistol out of line, away from her head, Nina’s right hand flashed for the small of her back.
This time it didn’t come up empty.
She smoothly drew the.45 jammed in the drawstring of her sweatpants, swept it up, set the stance, slapped her left hand over her right, and extended. The iron triangle formed in her heart and forked down her arms. Undeterred by the fire and blowing snow, she instinctively pointed, not aimed. Squeezed hard on the grip. Soft on the trigger.
Chapter Fifty-six
“What’s Mom doing now?” Kit asked.
“She and Sergeant Barlow are putting a pressure bandage on her back,” Broker said.
“What did you call it again?” Kit said.
“The bandage? It’s called a flutter valve-”
“No.” Kit knit her dirty forehead. “The way she’s hurt?”
“It’s called a sucking chest wound.”
“But it’s on her back,” Kit said.
“Her lung’s hurt, her lung’s in her chest,” Broker said in a calm voice. He stood on the road, oblivious to the raw carnage-scented smoke and fire; far enough back from the barn to be alternately chilled by the gusting wind and roasted by the flames. The night seemed softer, the barn burning down, the snow tamer, twisting on spiral zephyrs. The clouds still swirled with that orange glow, surreally enhanced, like Photoshop, by the blaze and rising smoke. But he couldn’t really tell; he was drunk, on fire with adrenaline and relief.
So he just hugged Kit astraddle his hip and watched her face carefully in the flickering light for signs of shock. So far all she showed was an unwillingness to release her hold on the cat. And a voracious curiosity. Her wide green eyes were drinking it in; the burning barn, the body off in the snow, all the cops showing up, and her mom and the trooper sergeant working at strict combat speed to stabilize Cassie Bodine.
“What’s that shiny stuff?” she asked.
“It’s plastic wrapping from a bandage pack. They’re taping it over the bullet hole and leaving a corner loose…”
“Why’s that?’
“So Teddy’s mom can breathe, honey,” Broker said.
“Isn’t she cold?”
“More important now to get her lung working; see, it was collapsed,” Broker said.
Kit chewed her lower lip and scrutinized Nina and Sergeant Barlow, who knelt fifteen feet away. They held Cassie Bodine in an upright sitting position. They’d ripped away her clothes, and she shivered-eyes dilated, face waxy gray, naked to the waist. Her bare flank and lower back were splashed with orange Betadine disinfectant and frothy lung-shot blood. When they finished the tape job, they nodded to the two volunteer firemen crouching around them, holding a blanket as a windbreak. Nina and Barlow briefly discussed the bandage with one of the firemen, then scooted out of the way.
The fireman then covered Cassie with the blanket and lifted her carefully in a fireman’s carry, keeping her upright while a third fireman gently fitted an oxygen mask to her face. Then they started walking down the road to where Howie Anderson stood, lit by the headlights of six police cars parked three by three on either side of the road. He held a mobile radio in his hand and was looking up into the fitful sky. Keith Nygard knelt next to a stretcher at Anderson’s feet, where the woman who’d kidnapped Kit was swaddled in blankets, her head a loose mummy wrap of bandages. Right after Barlow discovered Cassie breathing, she’d found the other woman staggering from the barn fire; blind, her face and scalp a crisp.
When Nygard saw them bringing Cassie, he stood up, went to her, and put an arm lightly around her shoulder. He looked to Howie on the radio, said something to Cassie, then tilted his face up into the night.
Another fireman stood next to Broker with a blanket, wondered with his eyes if he should cover Kit.
“Not yet, we’re good,” Broker said quietly. He held Kit tighter as Nina approached, watching her stoop, wash her bloody hands in the snow, then wipe them on the thighs of her ragged sweat-pants. Standing, she swiped her hands a few more times down the front of her jacket, leaving a dirty crimson stain on the black ARMYtype.