by TAYLOR ADAMS
She waited.
Lena, go.
No. Not yet.
Please, go.
Still, she waited. No second chances. Her timing needed to be exact. Her sister’s eyes watering with tears now, Cambry shoving her with an open palm, her voice twisting with frustration.
Go. You’re running out of time—
Now.
She whirled left, rolling away from the Corolla and into open space—another concussive crack as a bullet punched through the trunk, ripping through her sister’s folded clothes and tent inside and exploding out through the panel she’d crouched behind a half second before—and as she hit the concrete, she brought the Beretta up in knuckled hands and aimed straight across Hairpin Bridge’s lanes, at the semitruck’s cab. This time Lena didn’t aim through the truck’s shattered window, at the glint of a rifle barrel and a few half-glimpsed inches of scalp.
She aimed lower.
Lower. Directly at the truck’s door. Squarely at the Kenworth logo on the red paint. Exactly where she estimated a human occupant would be crouched.
She fired three shots.
They came out like three heartbeats, as controlled as a Tuesday afternoon at Sharp Shooters into a fresh deck of fifty-two: Crack. Crack. Crack.
Three silver holes pocked the door’s red paint. Exactly where she’d aimed.
Her third shot had felt different—if you spend enough time at the range, your muscles can identify the abridged recoil when the slide locks empty—and she knew this was it. She was out. But she stayed frozen there on her stomach, her empty Beretta’s sights still pin-sharp, aimed in a suspended moment on that truck, at the tight grouping of holes in its door.
Silence. The world seemed to catch its breath.
She waited for the man’s rifle to reappear over the door. For the next fiery muzzle blast.
She waited.
And waited.
She was sorely aware of Raycevic somewhere to her right. Aware that she was now vulnerable, that she should scramble back to her dropped purse, reload, and reengage—but strangely she sensed Raycevic was waiting, too, on a lungful of breath. A realization was building, coalescing in the air. She resisted it. She wouldn’t, couldn’t allow herself to believe it.
I got him.
* * *
Three pinpricks of daylight had appeared in the truck’s door, right before his eyes.
The old man slumped back, the cowboy rifle falling crookedly in his lap. He blinked in the sudden silence, the air still thick with scorched powder and smoke. He realized he was splashed with a warm liquid he couldn’t identify. It drenched his hair. Droplets cooling on his cheeks.
He stared stupidly at those three holes.
Then, with glacial dread, he rotated his neck and inspected the cab’s interior around him—trying to trace the three bullets’ paths, if any had hit him—as more liquid dribbled down his eyebrow, gumming his eyelashes. It was sticky. Body temperature.
Blood, he realized. My skull is blown open.
He fought a scream. He’d always wondered why women screamed when he smothered them in his plastic. There was never anyone nearby to hear. It was a waste of remaining oxygen. It was a strange and helpless animal thing that puzzled him, like why they moan during sex. But now he had a scream swelling inside his own chest, so maybe he finally got it. It gnashed against his ribs, threatening to burst.
I’m dying. Oh, Christ, I’m dying.
He tried to focus on straight lines. He thought in lines, vectors, angles. He’d been an A-plus geometry student. He never used Google Maps or Waze like the other drivers. No, sir—give him a map and a graphing calculator, and he’d find his way to Eureka, California, like a homing pigeon. And now, reconstructing the three bullets’ paths was how he processed his shock. Like a computer rebooting.
Bullet number one? It had entered the door just below the handle and pierced a folded map before skimming his belly just above the pelvis. His white T-shirt was soaked with blood. It didn’t hurt, exactly—more of an uncomfortable, hernia-like tightness. But it wasn’t fatal. It was a purple heart.
More warm blood dribbled down his forehead and into his eyes. Too much to blink away. That panicked scream thrashed inside his chest again.
I’m dying. That bitch domed me through the door, and oh, God, I’m dying.
Don’t scream. Bullet number two?
My brain is runny egg yolk, leaking out of my skull.
Bullet number two—he tried to focus—was farther forward. The 9-millimeter slug must have nicked the steering wheel, passed under his armpit, and then hissed over the dashboard and—presumably—out the window like the others. Bullet two had missed him. A small relief.
This left bullet number three.
The one that killed me . . .
Bullet three had penetrated the door six inches higher, to his left, and ripped a cottony gouge out of the driver’s seat. He followed its path to the cup holder, where it had struck his sweet tea bottle. Glass blades glimmered. The seat was sticky with running droplets of tea, warmed by the sun—
Wait.
Tea?
He ran his tongue over his upper lip. Tasted it.
I’m splashed with sweet tea. Not blood. Thank Christ, it wasn’t blood and cerebrospinal fluid and chips of skull running down his face. He was okay.
He’d still taken a ricochet to the hip, of course, and it hurt royally. Blood bloomed over the belly of his shirt, livid red in the sunlight. But short of sepsis it wouldn’t be fatal, and he knew a veterinarian who’d fixed him up with some quality painkillers for his eye back in June. No, Lena’s three bullets through the door weren’t half as awful as he’d feared. He was down but not out, and he still had his Winchester cradled in his lap, and yes, even immobilized in his cab, he was still in this fight.
He twisted, feeling knives of pain above his crotch. From the floor space, he couldn’t see over the door. But sounds carried. If Lena approached his truck, maybe hoping to grab his rifle to fire at Ray-Ray, he’d hear her footsteps. He certainly wasn’t in much shape to run or duck or properly gunfight. His ass was planted here, in the sun-cooked nest where he spent sixteen hours a day anyway.
This didn’t bother him, but something else lingered at the edge of his thoughts. He feared he was missing something. Forgetting something.
Where did the second bullet go?
Didn’t matter. It missed him. Just like the one that had exploded the bottle of sweet tea in his face, and the five or six she’d fired through the windows that snapped harmlessly over his head.
It was lower than the others, his mind whispered.
It went somewhere.
Fine. He looked again, wincing through another stab of pain, and retraced the bullet’s trajectory as it punched through the door, gouged through the steering wheel, passed by his shoulder, and continued above his Quadratec CB radio, directly into—
He froze.
Kitty.
She wasn’t coiled into her familiar ball shape. Her pose was strange, arched. Her neck cocked backward, her jaw grimaced to show pink gums and needle teeth. A rivulet of blood ran down the dashboard. Kitty and him—they’d seen thousands of miles of highway together, from the white peaks of Colorado to the muggy wetlands of Louisiana. Sometimes she rode on his shoulders like a cold, clammy scarf. She’d seen him through three trucks, a divorce, a prostate cancer diagnosis, and the suicide of his son. Next week would have been Kitty’s twenty-third birthday.
Now, finally, Theo Raycevic screamed.
Chapter 18
Lena heard it echo from the truck’s cab. A surreal wailing cry that rose like a siren. It punched her gut—the raw consequence of it. The violence of discharging a firearm, watching it tear painful and irreplaceable holes into the world. Paper targets don’t scream.
For a split second she felt a pang of sympathy for the man she’d shot inside the truck, who’d been trying to kill her just moments ago.
She swallowed it.
The Beret
ta was slide-locked in her hands. Empty and sadly light, like a plastic toy. And Corporal Raycevic was still armed, still crouched a car’s length away. She heard his breathing, a soft and patient huff, as he weighed his next moves. The fight was still on. She’d injured one of her assailants, perhaps fatally, but she’d spent the last of her ammunition to do it. There’s no half credit in a gunfight.
With a quivering hand, she twisted a finger around her hair and tugged hard.
The man’s screams intensified, building like a migraine as Lena tried to think. Forcing her thoughts upstream against the noise: I’m defenseless. I need to reload. Or I’m dead.
“Dad!” Raycevic shouted. “Dad, are you hit?”
The asshole in the semitruck was Ray’s father. She pushed the revelation away. Another distraction, not relevant to her current problem.
“Say something, Dad. Please—”
But the trucker’s cries had already tapered off, leaving a strange vacuum.
“Dad?” His voice hardened. “I’ll get her. I promise.”
Cold terror seized in her gut, a wave of trapped-animal panic. She urged herself to focus. Ignore the distractions. My second magazine. Where is it?
In her purse.
Where’s my purse?
In the center of the bridge. Where she’d dropped it.
In the open.
“Shit—”
She could see it from here. Twenty feet away? Thirty? She steadied herself against the Corolla’s dusty bumper and considered running for her purse. Could she bolt the distance, grab the mag, slam it into the Beretta, and return fire—all before Raycevic shot her? No. No chance.
Worse, with a single car’s length between them, the silence cast a microphone to every footstep. He’d hear her very first step. She wouldn’t make it halfway. She’d die with bullets in her back.
“I’ll kill the little bitch, Dad. I promise—”
She gripped the empty pistol, exhaling through shivering teeth. Bad ideas shuttering through her mind, one hopeless dead end after another. Run for my purse? Get shot. Stay here? Get shot. Hide under the car? Get shot.
She’d backed herself into a hard corner. She didn’t know what else to do. She kept looping her hair between her fingers, falling back to that terrible mindless habit and twisting until the pain was unbearable. Her eyes watering with stinging tears as the ideas turned more desperate.
Charge Raycevic? Get shot.
Throw the empty gun at his face? Get shot.
Another knot around her index finger. Twisting harder. Harder.
Beg for mercy? Get laughed at, then shot—
Her hair tore from her scalp with a sharp, crackling rip. A rush of fresh warmth.
It startled her, the sickening sensation of her own body coming apart. All of her senses caught up to her at once and the world went thick, gauzy. Pain flared from her shredded elbow. And to her right, beside the Corolla, she heard a gentle, leathery click. Then another.
Approaching footsteps.
He was coming.
* * *
He might kill me tomorrow.
I know this. I’m not stupid. And in case he does, I need to set the record straight on something about Cambry.
Here it is.
One summer in Oregon, when Cambry and I were twelve, we came across a whitetail doe that had been hit by a truck. Her legs were broken. Her eyes lolled up at us and she made this strange rumbling noise from low in her throat, like a cat purring. And if you went to our school you’ve already heard the next part a thousand times: that to my horror, I watched young Cambry Nguyen wordlessly kneel, pull out her butterfly knife, and slit the doe’s throat.
And it’s all true. She did it.
But only because I asked her to.
When she refused, I begged her. I promised I wouldn’t tell. I couldn’t stand to hear the purring anymore or see those awful bent legs, and I knew it was miles to the farmhouse, hours until an adult could get there, and I was too much of a coward to do it myself.
So finally, Cambry did it.
I watched.
Then she rinsed her hands in a creek and we didn’t speak at all on the rest of the walk back. It started to hail. I remember sobbing the whole way, the two of us walking on opposite sides of the highway under the pelting storm. I know now that ending the animal’s pain wasn’t enough. I’d needed someone to blame, and you can’t blame a truck.
When we got home, I didn’t just break my promise. I told my parents it was all Cambry, that twelve-year-old Cambry murdered a dazed animal for no reason at all. I showed them the blood on her secret folding knife, which it turns out is illegal to own under eighteen. They believed me. Not her. To this day, they still believe my version.
Cambry Nguyen. Deer Slayer.
I’m the reason she was the only seventh grader at Middleton Junior High with her very own psychotherapist. I’d relished being the victim with the nutcase sister, so I kept retelling the story with new details and gore. She’d lost most of her friends by October—none of their parents allowed her in their homes. Someone filled her locker with a can of red paint. And as she grew up, Cambry lived down to her reputation and kept acting out—the stunt with the toilet and the sponge was a highlight—but it wasn’t until high school that the psychologist finally pegged her: schizoid personality disorder. To this day I don’t know if she had always been there or if I pushed her.
The psychotherapist was a drunk, too. Sorry, but he was. He came in for house calls with a red sweater and red cheeks like a shitfaced Mr. Rogers. I remember snippets of overheard sessions, and the one that lingers most is Cambry’s pained, pleading voice, muffled by a door: You’re not listening.
You’re not listening to me.
And now I wonder—if I’d kept my promise to my sister twelve years ago, maybe we would have had a functional relationship as adults. Maybe Cambry wouldn’t have felt the need to painfully uproot herself every few months from a world she could never relate to, living like a nomad in her Toyota with sea glass in the console and a tent in the trunk. Maybe that moment was the first domino, my only chance, and I lost her. Maybe I pushed her to that bridge in Montana.
Maybe it’s my fault that my sister is dead.
Maybe.
I’ll never know.
So there it is, in writing. It’s out of my head now. I can’t describe how much of a relief it is to see these words on a screen, a single click from posting on Lights and Sounds, from becoming history. If I die tomorrow, this won’t die with me.
I’ve let it go.
Maybe, if tomorrow goes wrong, this will give me some final comfort while Corporal Raycevic walks in close to finish me off.
* * *
He crept forward with his .38 up.
One careful step at a time. Glass kernels crunched like eggshells under his boots—he knew it didn’t matter. Every sound and every footstep was magnified in the double-edged silence. She certainly heard him coming. And if she moved, he would hear her, too.
He’d heard nothing.
Where could she go, anyway? She was crouched behind the Corolla’s trunk with nowhere to run. And she was low on ammo, if not empty. If she’d had a spare mag, she would have reloaded, and if she’d reloaded, he would’ve heard the click of a mag sliding home.
Again, he’d heard nothing. Just sun-blasted silence.
He kept his sight picture in focus as he advanced closer. He gently elbowed the passenger door aside. It clicked shut on a warped hinge.
Another crunchy step. Another.
“Hang in there, Dad,” he shouted to the truck. “I’m finishing her.”
No reply.
He held his revolver with the sights canted, in the textbook “high” position. His dominant hand up, his support elbow low. His support-side foot at a ninety-degree angle. Center Axis Relock, the system is called. A brutally pragmatic answer to Lena’s quaintly old-fashioned isosceles shooting stance, founded on the radical notion that gunfights don’t occur in shooting ran
ges. Real-life shooting scenarios are sudden, harrowing, and unpredictable, and an operator must be able to both retain their weapon from hand-to-hand attack and fluidly transition between close (unaimed) and ranged (aimed) fire. There’s a poetry to it, watching a user rotate their body to efficiently engage threats.
Yes, smug little Lena Nguyen might shoot tighter groups on paper, but she’d already learned that her rehearsed skills didn’t translate to the sweat and terror of real life. She’d already missed numerous shots, suffered a malfunction, and taken fire through cover. And she was about to receive her final lesson.
He came up on her. He sidestepped left around the Toyota’s trunk, weapon up in a bladed stance. Sights aligned. With perfect focus, he cleared the hostile space beyond the vehicle’s tailgate inch by careful inch, like slicing a pie, gradually revealing . . .
Empty concrete.
She was gone.
He blinked. What?
Left behind, a pair of empty Chuck Taylors. Slipped off and set neatly aside.
His brain struggled to process this. As jarring as three months ago, when Cambry had seemed to abruptly vanish into the night behind the bends of the dark highway, as if she’d evaporated. Where did she possibly go? And why would she take off her—
Something pressed into the back of his neck. A small circle of hot metal.
“Drop the gun, Ray.”
Christ, he marveled.
They really are twins.
* * *
Lena changed hands to train her newly taken revolver on Raycevic, and then she walked him at gunpoint to her purse. There she quickly knelt, grabbed her backup magazine, and reloaded her Beretta.
He watched sullenly. “Wait. You were empty?”
She smiled, thumbing the slide stop. Seventeen new hollow-point rounds, loaded and ready. She was getting the hang of this.
“Come on.” She tucked his revolver into her back pocket. “Let’s go see if Daddy is still alive.”
