“Sit down.”
“You ain’t gonna shoot me,” Nolan said, and I could see that he knew it. “I ain’t done nothing wrong. You’d be killing an innocent man. You said it yourself; you’re here to protect me.” He put his hand on the door handle and pulled.
I stood up. “Close that door and sit the hell down, Nolan. You’re delusional.”
Nolan swung the door open wide, letting in the freezing morning air. He turned his head to the doorway and closed his eyes, inhaling a lungful of cold through his nostrils. “Shoot me.” He chuckled. “You don’t know what a killer is, son.”
I got out of the chair and pointed the Beretta at Nolan’s head, cocking it. “Try me.”
“You don’t know how… how goddamn glorious it is, killin’ a man. A pansy like you couldn’t appreciate it.” He opened his eyes again and turned his head back to look at me. “I’m gonna go and wait outside for my son to come home. He won’t be long. And when he gets here, I’ll show you a killer.”
I let the muzzle of the gun drop and walked over to Nolan, then put a hand on his shoulder, gripping hard. “I don’t need to shoot you to make you do as you’re told, old man.”
Nolan opened his mouth, but he never got the chance to say his piece.
The right side of his head, the side facing away from the door, exploded like a water balloon in a microwave. I caught an absurdly detailed freeze frame of it: a flap of hair and scalp swinging up, skull fragments and chunks of brain and a gray-blue eyeball and a torrent of blood all expanding out from the epicenter in a multicolored starburst of gore. And then the world was red and I barely registered the crack of the gunshot as it caught up with its work.
33
For a moment, I was senseless. Nolan’s blood was in my eyes, my ears, my mouth, my nostrils. The coppery, viscous taste of it brought a series of involuntary gags from my throat. I resisted the overwhelming urge to lose it completely and dropped to the floorboards, praying that I wasn’t too close to the open door or to the window. If I was, I was a sitting duck.
I clawed at my face, wiping blood and unidentifiable chunks of Nolan’s head away until my vision returned. I managed to hold off until I’d crawled over to the safe side of the cast-iron stove in the corner before I vomited. After a momentary spell of dizziness, my head cleared.
Unbidden, my brain started trying to compute how Wardell was here at this moment when he’d dumped the van seven hundred miles away only a few hours before. Either that wasn’t Wardell out there, or Wardell hadn’t dumped the van. Explanations could come later, if there was a later. Right now, all that mattered was that someone had me pinned down. I felt my gut sinking as I became aware that my hands were empty. I’d dropped my gun at some point after Nolan’s head had exploded, probably while clearing the stupid bastard’s blood off of my face. I looked around.
It lay on the floorboards about a yard from Nolan’s virtually decapitated body, just outside the still-spreading pool of dark red blood. And, unfortunately, in full view of the open doorway.
I considered my options. The grisly manner of Nolan’s death told me that Wardell — it had to be him, didn’t it? — was probably still using the rifle. I had to assume that he knew I was there. He’d probably have seen me through the front window, and besides, it would have been obvious that Nolan had been talking to someone. The old stove would afford some protection, but I wasn’t sure it could stop one of those rounds. The biggest thing in my favor was that I was out of the line of sight. The other thing in my favor was Wardell’s frugality. He wouldn’t want to waste limited ammunition on blind shots. If I moved quickly, I could probably grab the Beretta before he could get a lock on me. Depending on how far away he was, of course.
My only other option was to stay put and hope he got bored of waiting. Somehow, I didn’t think that would happen. In a way, the situations where only one realistic course of action presents itself are the easiest. You just take a breath and do it.
I pushed off my right foot, took two steps, and dived for the Beretta. As my fingers closed around the grip, the doorway slid into my field of view and I saw a figure approaching the cabin, a hundred yards away, carrying some kind of assault rifle, another rifle strapped to his back. I tucked my right arm under me and turned the dive into a roll as my shoulders hit the bloodstained wood.
An assault rifle? I rolled past the doorway and up onto my feet in a crouched position as two things happened: A maelstrom of bullets tore into the space on the floor I’d occupied a second ago, and Eddie Nolan’s words repeated in my head. Got things all ready for him. So much for frugality with ammunition.
As the firing ceased, I gripped the Beretta two-handed and launched myself back the way I’d come, not wanting to give Wardell breathing space. I fired four quick shots at the figure outside, but he was already diving to the ground. Was that Wardell? It was hard to tell at the distance. The height and build looked right for him.
My lunge carried me past the doorway and back behind the shelter of the stove. It looked like he was toting an AK-47—assuming he wasn’t tooled up with armor-piercing rounds, the combination of the walls and the stove might be enough to protect me.
Another rattle of gunfire and the beautiful sound of polymer-coated steel jackets ricocheting off cast-iron proved me right.
They kept coming, though. When the hail finally abated, I guessed he’d emptied an entire magazine from that AK, which told me two things: one, that he wasn’t short of ammo, and two, that while Wardell was a purist when it came to long-range killing, he could be pragmatic when he found himself in a fight. If I’d nursed a hope that “one shot, one kill” was an absolutism that Wardell applied across the board, and therefore an exploitable weakness, the last thirty seconds had hammered a couple of hundred nails into the coffin of that hope.
I took advantage of the brief lull to dive across the room and slam through what was left of the kitchen door. It wasn’t hard to do; the door now had all the structural integrity of a slice of Leerdammer. I kept low as I made the kitchen, a renewed burst of fire punching big holes in the drywall separating the two rooms.
The Remington was still there on the floor. Was it loaded? Going by the ten minutes I’d just spent with Nolan at the end of his life, I thought it was a safe bet. I grabbed it left-handed and glanced at the wide-open back door, praying that Wardell, or whoever the shooter was, didn’t have company. It didn’t really matter though. The fact was, there was only one possible way out. I took it.
I hurled myself through the door, aware of another burst of fire ripping through the wall and hearing the dulled impacts on the stove from the next room. Outside, the sky had clouded over. I didn’t have time to scan the tree line, but then I didn’t need to. If there was a halfway-competent hostile up there, I’d be dead long before I knew about him. I swiveled left and approached the back corner of the cabin. My gun had a seventeen-round capacity. I’d loosed four already, which left me with lucky thirteen, plus whatever was in the Rem.
I took the corner of the cabin low and hugged the west-facing wall. The shooter was still at the front of the cabin. I could tell by the efficient, machined sounds of another magazine clicking into place. There was a pause of twenty or so seconds while nobody shot. Then mother nature decided to bump the table.
A gap in the cloud cover rolled under the morning sun, casting alien, elongated shadows west for the briefest of seconds, like somebody opening and closing a lighted doorway. It showed me the top of the shooter’s shadow, putting him around ten feet from the front door, roughly dead center to the house. The inevitable trade-off was that it gave him my position too.