Davies said, "Security concerns dictate we didn't have the time for the farewells everyone would have liked. It's all imperfect. We do the best we can."
I started to say something about the quality of their "best," but something flashed in the corner of my eye. Davies saw it, too, and her body tightened into battle mood.
A light through the living room window. Movement in the yard.
Davies had her pistol in her hand. The other agent had taken a firing position, aimed toward the door.
Isaac said, "What's happening?"
Davies motioned to me with one hand, keeping her pistol trained toward the window.
"Get up. I need you moving now."
I grabbed Isaac and pulled him to his feet.
"Get him in the kitchen," Davies said. To the young agent, she said, "Give him your other gun."
From the hallway, the young agent focused on the front door. "I can't do that, Agent Davies."
"I'm not asking." Her eyes flashed toward him. "You can still tell them I overpowered you."
The young agent un-holstered his other pistol and handed it to me. "You know how to use one of these?"
I flipped off the safety, pulled back the action and racked a round in the chamber. "I've watched a lot of Bruce Willis movies."
"Yeah, just try to not fucking shoot a good guy, okay?"
Davies said, "There's a door in the kitchen, looks like a basement. Leads downstairs into a panic room. Code's four-four-nine-four. Get him --"
A figure dressed in black, with night vision goggles glowing in the darkness, appeared at the window. He stuck something on the glass. There was a flashing red light and a beeping.
Davies pressed her hand against my shoulder, pushing me out of the room. I dragged Isaac out with me as the explosion rattled the house, shook the floor beneath our feet, and the window shattered and blew inwards, turning into a million slivers of glass.
34
What happened next:
It's all in five seconds. Or five minutes. Somewhere in between.
Front door, another explosion.
Someone screams.
Gunfire. Automatic weapons. The screaming stops.
Davies. "Move! Move! Move!"
Me, pulling Isaac behind me.
The kitchen. Two ways in. Agent at one entrance. Davies at another.
Davies. "Get him downstairs."
The panic room door. Other end of the room.
Outside. Weapons firing. Bullets strike the kitchen windows. Bulletproof glass.
The rattle of gunfire. Far kitchen entrance. The young agent dances. Collapses into a pool of his own blood.
Two men, wearing ski masks, stand in the doorframe. Machine guns and bulletproof vests.
My gun raised into the air. I don't think. I react.
Aim.
Fire.
One shot. Boom. The bullet hits the man square center of the forehead. His head jerks backward, and the rear of his skull explodes, sending blood and chunks of brain across the wall behind him.
Somewhere, surely angels sing at this miracle. Which is fucked up, but oh well.
The second man drops to his knees as I pivot my aim at him and pull the trigger. My bullet lodges into the doorway. Because you only get that lucky once.
He unleashes a wave of gunfire tracing a pattern toward me as I fall to the floor. There're more shots fired behind me and the path of the man's machine gun arcs upward and into the ceiling as he screams and a plume of blood pulses out from the side of his neck like a gusher of oil. He drops his weapon and folds his hands over the wound as blood spills all over the tile floor. There's another shot that goes through both hands. He stumbles and slips on his own blood collapses backward. He hits the floor with a thud and his head bounces and cracks. The bone of his skull shattering is audible over the surrounding gunfights.
Davies stands behind us with a thin wisp of smoke trailing up from the barrel of her pistol.
The panic room door. I pull at the knob but it doesn’t turn. There's a keypad next to the door, with a small yellow light above the keypad.
Davies. "Type in the goddamn code!"
I punch in the numbers. Buzz and the light turns red. I key the numbers again. Another buzz, and the light remains red.
Me. "It's not working."
No emotion from Davies. No time. There’s shit to do.
Davies. "You, Isaac, back here."
Isaac is on the floor, like a cat, on all four, ready to pounce. He springs to his feet. Back to Davies. Me, right behind him.
Davies reaches into her pockets, hands me her car keys. "I'm cover fire. You and Isaac run for it. I'll follow."
There’s gunfire outside, staccato bursts of machine guns, answered with repeated shots from semiautomatic pistols. Wailing in the distance, police sirens.
Deep breath.
Me. "Let's do this."
Isaac, right on our heels. Race to the door. Bodies fill the hallway. Jumping over them. Blood smeared down the wall. Everything stinks of copper and gunpowder. My knee hurts. Of course it does. Fuck.
At the front door. Sudden silence. A quiet that makes my stomach drop. The sirens, getting closer, the blue lights growing brighter in the dark sky.
Deep breaths again. Quick glances at one another.
The yellow VW, across the street. Fifteen yards away. Maybe. Shit. Fifteen yards. Seems like fifteen miles.
Davies pulls a cell phone from her pocket, hits the "push to talk" button. "Floyd? Mathers? You there?"
A man's voice. "Mathers here."
"Where are you?"
"East side of the house, ma'am."
"There's two friendlies down inside, at least four hostiles down inside. What you got as a count?"
"One friendly down, two hostiles."
"Floyd down?"
"Yes, ma'am."
Davies. A grimace. Tight jaw. Exhale. "We're exiting the building. Cover us."
"Yes, ma'am."
Davies steps out the door. Isaac follows right behind her. I pull up the rear.
Every step we take on the porch squeaks a floorboard. There's a dead man staring at us with empty eyes, half of his body sprawled across the swing.
We clear to the porch steps.
Davies. "We’ll run for it."
Me. "Awesome."
On the walkway. Feet barely touching the cement. Almost to the sidewalk. Fractions of seconds here. For this moment—only this moment—I am grateful my physical therapist is a goddamn masochist, because I am almost running like a real human being.
There's a gunshot. There's a sudden, intense burning in my left arm. Intense.
I spin and fire blindly. There's a silhouette standing somewhere in the yard, and then it's not standing anymore. It makes a noise, a grunt, and collapses to the ground. I see the gun in its hand, and there's another shot from it, but it misses by a mile, and goes over our heads. I shoot again, hit again. This time I see the spurt of blood.
Davies. "Mathers!"
She stops and runs toward the silhouette. In the light, now I can make out a face. It's the agent who let us into the house. He's nothing but a fucking kid.
Davies, to the agent. Standing over him. He's lifting the gun at her. She roundhouse kicks him in the side of the head. The gun goes flying. He lands on his side.
There's a silky warm wetness running down my arm now. I touch it and pull back fingers covered in blood. The wound is worse than a grazing, better than an entry wound, and hurts like a motherfucker. In the great symphony of life which is being shot, with having your knees taken out via a shotgun being the "1812 Overture," this is a community orchestra violin solo. Shitty analogy? You do better. You haven't been shot.
The agent. Gasping. "Sorry, ma'am. I had to."
He's hurt. I can see where I got him. There's an upper arm wound, looks to be an in-and-out, blood pulsing. I feel like that was the lucky second shot. The first shot is somewhere around his shoulder, and I realize he was wearing body armor, so it
's taken most of the impact.
Davies. "To the car. Now."
We don't argue. We run back out toward the street. I hit the key fob to unlock the doors, hear them click. Isaac slides into the backseat. Davies, coming around the passenger side. Me behind the wheel. Doors aren't even closed before I turn the ignition and pull out, squealing the tires.
Cop car lights come around the corner as we're leaving.
35
My arm throbbed with steady drum beats of pain by the time we made it to the interstate; gunshot wounds have a funny way of doing that.
The speedometer hovered around 80 as we barreled down the darkened highway. I eased up on the gas and took us down to 70. I debated on using cruise control. What were the rules for cruise control in the getaway from a death squad hit team? Is the term "death squad hit team" was redundant. If you were a "death squad," I suspected you were by default also a "hit team."
Like the heat, blood loss does weird things to your thought process.
Davies rapped her knuckles against the passenger side window glass, watching the mile markers zoom by us. Isaac had his head slumped backwards, eyes closed, crying. The silence swallowed up everything else in the car.
"Are the police not going to be suspicious about the dead bodies they find all over the place?" I said. "We should have hung around."
"We couldn't take the chance," Davies said. "Sirens don't mean shit; it may have been anyone as far as we know." She sat up and turned on the cool, professional Davies. "I need to call in. Someone in the office needs to know."
"Like who? Because whoever organized the little hunting party on your not-so-safe safe house has turned agents." I checked my arm. The bleeding had slowed to a trickle. I'd most likely live from this. Lucky me. "It's good your guys are worse shots than Imperial stormtroopers."
"Find me a payphone," Davies said. "I can call Burwell."
"What about your cell phone?"
"I don't trust it. If they've gotten to field agents, then they may have gotten to our tech crews and might monitor calls."
I took an exit and pulled into a Sheetz parking lot. I parked in close to a bank of pay phones, underneath the humming buzz of the sodium vapor lights.
Isaac said, "I need to piss."
Davies said, "Go in with him."
"I doubt he needs me to hold it for him," I said.
"No, but you should take a moment to clean up your arm before it gets infected."
The woman had a point.
Inside the convenience store was almost an amusement park for sensory overload. A Katy Perry song blasted over the speakers. My ears rang with the sound of gunfire, and the music blurred with the ringing and the humming of the overhead lights. Two teenagers ordered a sandwich from the electronic kiosk. A skinny guy in overalls paid for a case of beer at the register. Kids loitered at the candy bars, and one slipped a Snickers into his shorts.
It was like those shitty movies schools used to show, telling you to stay off drugs. You know the ones, where one hit from a joint and the world shifts onto a 45-degree angle and everything turns into a collage of hysterical laughter, friends going out of focus, and calliope music everywhere.
We kept our heads down as rushed through to the store, pausing to grab bandages and peroxide before going into the bathroom.
It was 10 degrees colder than a meat locker in there, and the whole thing reeked of bleach. The fluorescents reflected off the freshly mopped floors, but still managed to be darker than a bathroom needed to be. Do you need romantic ambiance when you were trying to drop a deuce?
Isaac stood at an urinal and started his business. I leaned against the sink counter and checked myself in the mirror. Blood covered the arm of my shirt, and I wasn't sure how much of it was mine. I pulled the shirt off and twisted around to get a better look in the mirror. The skin was jagged and raw and thick with clotted blood. I washed it using the pink hand soap from the dispenser, trying to be delicate and failing.
Then came the peroxide. I gritted my teeth as I poured it. It bubbled and hissed and ran down my arm in pink dribbles and burned like a motherfucker. My throat went tight, and I shut my eyes and I pounded at the sink counter. I waited a second, then gave myself another dose.
I burped, and all I got for the effort was bile and stomach acid. I was sure I would vomit. I knew that sensation. We had becoming familiar with one another, me and that knowing when I’m close to spewing out my insides, and I didn't like it. I also didn't care for how regular violence seemed, or how violence and vomiting had become linked for me. I wondered what would happen if I reached that point where something like this happened and I didn’t care, that I didn’t have a visceral response. Oh, just another day in my life.
Behind me, someone said "You okay?"
I opened my eyes. Isaac watched my reflection in the mirror.
"I'm awesome," I said. "Can't you tell?"
He motioned toward my arm. "How bad is it?"
I shrugged. Big motherfucking mistake, since it pulled at the muscle close to where the bullet had passed. The sudden bolt of pain washed the world out into nothing but white and blood emptied from my head. My knees buckled. I braced myself against the edge of the sink, digging the heels of my palms in for support, and gave my head a good shake and sucked in some air, working to keep myself on my feet.
Isaac reached for me. I pushed back at him.
"I got this," I said, and blinked away until everything focused again
With the blood washed away, I saw the wound was larger than I'd thought. They don't sell Band-Aid big enough to cover this.
I handed Isaac the box of bandages I'd brought in with me and told him to get me a roll of duct tape. Before he could say anything, I said, "Just do it."
When he came back with the tape, I ripped off inch-long pieces and stuck them on a paper towel. I pulled in all the air my lungs could hold and pinched together the skin on the wound.
I don't remember the shooting that ended my career with the state police; that has somehow been laundered and bleached clean from my mind. I don't remember getting my finger hacked off with pruning clippers. Your brain will shut down for these things, render those horrors unreadable in the memory banks. It's for your own well-being, so you can sleep at night, so you can function, so you don't turn into a drooling lunatic, forever caught in the Mobius strip of replaying your waking nightmares.
This pain, however, I don't think I'll ever be fortunate enough to forget. This pain was spectacular. It revitalized long-dormant neurons just to ensure I felt every mind-numbing, teeth-grinding, balls-shriveling piece of hurt.
In that moment I loathed every member of my bloodline. I hated every failed condom, every missed birth control pill, every overlooked ovulation, every drunken hookup, every half-hearted 2 a.m. fucking, clocking back multiple generations, before the time one of my ancestors had come to America because he couldn't fucking grow potatoes in Ireland. Every thought, action or decision leading to my conception, my birth, and to that moment, I hated with a passion I'd never imagined possible. I wished a pox upon each and every filthy Mick born with the surname "Malone." That was how much it hurt.
I gave myself what felt like days to let the sensation pass. It was maybe five seconds, tops. Long enough to leave my face soaked in sweat, like I'd come out of a cold shower.
To Isaac, I said, "I need you to help me tape this closed."
His eyes swelled to globes.
I exhaled a little. "This isn't rocket science. Grab the tape and where I've got the wound pinched together, pull the tape over it."
"Don't you need stitches?"
"Yes, but unless we run across a doctor buying a meatball sub, this will have to suffice."
There are damn few things more redneck than using duct tape to suture a bullet wound. It was uglier than homemade sin when we were through. I evaluated in the mirror, and it was a goddamn shit-show, but at least I wasn't still bleeding everywhere, which was all I could ask for.
Oh, and the f
ucking thing hurt. My brain adjusted to the pain, accepted this was the situation, and shut down enough so I didn't puke or pass out. It was the biggest favor the bastard had done for me since I was 12 and let me store away images of Penthouse centerfolds for later use.
We walked back out into the convenience store. No one gave us a second glance. Not much phases you at a convenience store in the middle of the night. I'd discovered as a state trooper, if you were out and about after midnight, you were headed somewhere, running from something, or looking for something. None of these are ever good when they're happening under moonlight.
I paid for what we had used, the cashier never looking up at me as he rang the items through. Outside, I saw Davies back at her car, standing with someone else I couldn't identify. As we got closer, I saw it was Burwell. They were talking, or least he was, while she looked tight lipped and upset.
I said, "So has Agent Davies told you about our night?"
Burrell turned and pointed a pistol at me.
"Our night, which has gotten much worse," I said.
"Mine is a steam shovel full of shit itself," he said.
36
"You could fuck up a wet dream, Malone," Burwell said.
Burwell sat looking somewhere between pissed and smug in the passenger seat of Davies' VW, his gun pointed at me. He had shoved Burwell into the backseat with Isaac, cuffing their hands behind their backs. Burwell cuffed me to the steering wheel. The asshole came prepared. No one had that many sets of handcuffs without also having a dominatrix on speed dial.
He made us toss our cell phones into the garbage back at the Sheetz. He didn't care I had eight months left on my contract. I guessed he didn't expect me to be around to close it out.
"I'm not sure how you guys are alive," he said. "They said they were sending eight guys in. In fact, when they told me the plan, I said it was too much. I already had a guy inside, so rein it in, I said. Nah, they said. Had to be sure. Be thorough."
Complicated Shadows Page 15
