A Fire in the Night

by Christopher Swann

  Stop thinking about it and go, Ellie said. Annalise needs you.

  He took a breath, let it out, and strode across the road toward the woods. When he stepped off the asphalt, he knelt by a creek, runoff from the culvert under the road, and scooped up a patch of dark soil and rubbed it over his face and neck and the backs of his hands. Then he stood, the tire iron in his hand, and stepped into the trees.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Annalise could hear a car coming down the gravel road and driving out of the trees into the front yard. Thank God. She hoped whatever her uncle had found out at the library had been worth the wait. She walked into the foyer and looked out the sidelight, and her heart dropped. “It’s someone in a blue pickup,” she said to Lettie.

  “It’s not Nick?” Lettie asked from the living room.

  The blue pickup’s engine cut off, the headlights winking out, and then the cab door opened and a man stepped out. “No,” Annalise said, her voice lower, as if the man outside could hear her. Where the hell was her uncle? There was a man in the yard, tall, with big hands. Hands that could easily wrap around your neck. Chill, Annalise told herself, and she took a deep breath and let it out, trying to calm herself.

  “Who is it?” Lettie asked, suddenly right behind her, causing Annalise to jump. God, the old lady had crept right up on top of her. “Where’s the light? I can’t see a thing.”

  “No!” Annalise said, nearly batting Lettie’s hands away from a table lamp in the foyer. The older woman’s look of shock and hurt nearly made Annalise quail, but she reached out and grasped Lettie’s hands. “I’m sorry, but I’m scared. I … someone is looking for me.”

  Lettie looked at Annalise. “Well,” she said. “In that case, we shall leave the light off.” She squeezed Annalise’s hands, once, then let go and moved to the sidelight, bending forward to peer out the window. Annalise heard her take in a short, sharp breath. “He’s coming up to the door,” Lettie said.

  Annalise turned and hurried through the great room to the library, pulled the pistol out from the desk drawer, and went back to the foyer. Lettie was still looking out the sidelight.

  “Oh,” Lettie said, and straightened up. At the same time, there was a rapping at the door. Annalise held the pistol in one hand behind her leg as Lettie turned and smiled at her. “It’s Joshua Sams,” she said. “He’s a deputy. He’s good people.”

  Annalise hesitated. After hiding from the police for a few days, at this point she would welcome them. Maybe he knew where Uncle Nick was.

  Lettie opened the door. “Hello, Josh,” she said.

  “Lettie,” the man said, nodding. He clasped his hands together as if trying to still his fingers. “Saw your Jeep in the carport. Is the professor home?”

  “No,” Lettie said. “We’ve been waiting for him.”

  Sams leaned slightly to look around Lettie and see Annalise, standing farther back in the foyer, still holding the pistol behind her leg. “You must be Annalise,” he said, and gave her a smile. It seemed genuine but it looked sickly, somehow, as if the man had forgotten how to smile and was doing a bad job remembering. “Y’all know where he is?” Sams said.

  Lettie glanced at Annalise, then back to Sams. “We were hoping you’d know,” she said. “Do you want to come in and—”

  “I just—” Sams said, then swallowed. Annalise saw his clasped hands twitch and fidget. “I just need to talk to him. He … I shot someone, today.” Lettie held a hand to her mouth. Annalise stared. Sams kept talking, not really to them. “I shot someone,” he said. “In the library.” At that, Annalise gasped. Sams continued, oblivious. “I’ve never shot anyone before. Not in the Army, not as a deputy.”

  In a low, calm voice, Lettie said, “Who did you shoot, Josh?”

  “Man holding a gun on the professor,” Sams said. “I told him to freeze, and he tried to shoot me. I shot him first.” He seemed to recover himself slightly and looked at Annalise. “Your uncle’s okay,” he said, “he’s fine,” and Annalise nearly buckled at the knees with relief, but she was able to keep standing. “He saw—he saw me, afterward,” Sams continued. “I was in shock, and he knew. He knew what I was … thinking. I thought maybe if I could talk to him, he could help me.”

  Annalise saw Lettie shiver, either from the cool night air or from the deputy’s story. “Help you what, Josh?” Lettie said.

  “Help me stop seeing it,” Sams said, and his eyes looked haunted—that was the only word Annalise could think of, haunted. “I keep seeing myself pull my thirty-eight out of my holster and shouting, ‘Freeze!’ and the man whips around, trying to point his pistol at me. I shot him, twice. It was so loud, my ears still … he wouldn’t freeze and I shot him twice and he fell to the floor and died, and then it happens all over again, like a film loop, and I—” Sams took a deep breath and let it out in a shuddering exhale. “I—I’m sorry.” He took a step back.

  “Where are you going?” Lettie said.

  “Sorry to bother y’all,” Sams said. He started to turn to the truck.

  “Joshua Sams,” Lettie said, and Sams stopped and turned back. “You aren’t going anywhere but inside this house. We have a nice fire going, and you can meet Nick’s niece and we’ll wait for the professor to come home.”

  Sams hesitated, clasping and unclasping his hands. “I don’t want to be any trouble,” he said, glancing at Annalise.

  “Oh, Josh,” Lettie said, and she stepped forward, opening her arms.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  From the hillside, Cole stared through his binoculars, unbelieving. It was the deputy from the library. Cole watched the man pause at the front door of the cabin before raising a hand to knock. How civilized. Cole gripped his binoculars so that his knuckles ached. That man down there had shot Dawes. And now his showing up at the cabin royally screwed up their mission.

  “Cole, all good? Copy.” That was Jonas in his ear, like the proverbial angel on his shoulder keeping him on track.

  “Got eyes on target,” Cole murmured.

  “The professor?”

  “Negative,” Cole murmured. Quickly he scanned the deputy’s truck—maybe the professor had gotten a ride home. The truck looked empty. He swung the binoculars back to the deputy just in time to see the front door open, but whoever had answered the door did not step outside into Cole’s view. Cole lowered his binoculars, blinked rapidly, and peered at the deputy. He was in clear profile to Cole, maybe forty meters away, slightly downhill from Cole’s position behind the fallen tree. Cole raised the binoculars again. The deputy was talking to someone. The man looked like shit, Cole thought.

  “Cole,” Jonas said in his ear. “Do you have eyes on the professor?”

  “Negative,” Cole murmured. “Stand by.”

  The deputy kept talking, fidgeting with his hands. Whoever was inside the house still hadn’t stepped outside, and Cole couldn’t see who it was without breaking cover and moving. Again he swept the front yard with his binoculars. Nothing—the deputy was alone.

  The deputy took a step back from the door. He looked like he was about to turn and go back to his truck. Cole dropped the binoculars to let them hang from his neck and raised his MP5 to his shoulder. They didn’t need someone else to worry about.

  This is for you, Dawes, Cole thought. You and Mandy. His sights tracked on the man’s chest, then up to his head.

  The old woman ruined the shot.

  Cole was far enough away at forty meters that he selected single-shot mode for better accuracy. Just before he squeezed the trigger, the deputy’s head clear in his sights, an old woman came out of the doorway with her arms open, apparently to give him a hug. The deputy leaned slightly forward toward the woman, whose head moved in front of the deputy’s.

  Cole fired, the shot a single, hard pop—the people down at the cabin probably didn’t even hear it. The bullet struck the old woman at an angle in the very back of the head, probably creasing her skull like a stone skipping off a pond. Cole saw her sag against the deput
y. Blood flowed down the back of her head. From inside the cabin, someone started screaming—a high voice, a woman. The girl.

  Shit.

  “Cole, we heard a shot,” Jonas said in his ear. “What’s your status?”

  Cole flipped the selector switch to three-round burst and fired, rap-ap-ap, just as the deputy lunged toward the doorway, the old woman in his arms. The doorframe magically splintered, and the deputy jerked as if his arm had spasmed. Then the deputy and the old woman were inside the house and out of his line of sight.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  One moment Lettie was moving to hug the deputy—Sams, she had called him—and the next moment she fell forward into Sams’s arms, not dramatically but almost leaning in to him, like someone who’d had too many drinks at a party. Annalise saw the skin at the back of Lettie’s head split open as if an invisible knife had sliced across her scalp. Her blue-gray hair bloomed dark red.

  Annalise screamed. That seemed to galvanize Sams into action. He lowered his shoulders and plowed into the house, carrying Lettie. As he did so, part of the doorframe burst jaggedly apart, and Sams grunted. Then he was stumbling in the foyer, trying to keep his feet and not drop Lettie.

  Annalise let the pistol she was holding fall to the floor and reached out to take Lettie. “Oh my God,” she said. Blood was flowing down the back of Lettie’s head. Annalise struggled to hold her up. “Oh my God,” she said again, and she lowered Lettie as gently as she could to the floor, squatting and then sitting on the floor as she did so. She hesitated for just an instant before laying the older woman’s head in her lap. She could feel Lettie’s warm blood soak through her jeans and onto her thighs.

  Sams kicked the front door shut behind him, and Annalise looked up and saw with horror that the sleeve of his left arm was wet with blood.

  “Got shot,” Sams said strangely, as if his tongue were thick in his mouth, and then he sat down heavily on the floor. “Going to need a … bandage.”

  Annalise stared at Sams, then down at Lettie, her head still bleeding into Annalise’s lap. Lettie’s eyes were open and wet, and her lips moved as if she were whispering, but no sound came out. Oh fuck, Annalise thought.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  Cole moved down the hillside, his weapon up and tracking the front door. It had slammed shut after the deputy ran inside, but Cole was pretty sure he’d hit the man at least once. “Jonas,” he said into his mic, “I’m at the bottom of the hill, five meters from the cabin. One, possibly two targets hit. Need to breach the house.”

  “Copy that,” Jonas said. “Coming in on your six. Zhang, Hicks, you’re with me.”

  “What about me?” Waco asked in his ear. Jesus, Cole thought, the kid earned a place on my team and he still sounds like a whiny bitch.

  “You watch our backs,” Jonas said in a do-not-disappoint-me voice. Then they said nothing more.

  Cole crouched behind the rhododendron that bordered the lawn, eyes never leaving the front door. Within sixty seconds Jonas crept up beside him. “Still no professor?” Jonas murmured.

  Cole shook his head. “I shot the deputy who took out Dawes. Some old woman from the house stepped into my line of fire—tapped her in the back of the head.”

  “Dead?”

  “The deputy was still on his feet and got the old woman into the house. Don’t know about him. But the old woman’s a goner. Where are the others?”

  “Hicks and Zhang are going around the back, Waco’s up in the trees.”

  Cole nodded. “Then you and I go in the front.”

  CHAPTER FORTY

  Nick moved through the trees, crouching as low as he could without sacrificing speed. He remembered his instructor at Quantico making them run through the woods again and again. You have five minutes to reach the objective without being detected, he would say, and Nick and his squad would have to cover two hundred yards of forest and get to a tree with an orange ribbon tied around the trunk, all without being spotted. He’d been wearing full combat gear then, which had weighed him down. He’d also been fully camouflaged and almost thirty years younger. Nick ignored the memory and advanced from tree to tree, eyes peering into the darkness. He knew the terrain, knew where the men were going. He just needed to surprise them.

  He was cresting the top of the hill above his house when he heard the rap of a single shot—even suppressed, there was no mistaking the sound—and froze. Then a muted shriek, followed by the rap-ap-ap of a burst. Every instinct screamed at him to sprint downhill to save Annalise. Instead, he crept even more quietly, keeping low, zigzagging rather than advancing in a straight line, eyes scanning ahead, looking for the outline of a head, a shoulder, an arm.

  There. Next to a lightning-blasted oak, not halfway down the hill. A thin slice of exposed flesh, like a white grin in the dark. The back of a man’s neck.

  Nick froze again, then slowly reached out and moved his free hand over the forest floor, careful not to brush against any dead leaves or brush, searching for a loose rock or a pine knot. Nothing. The man below him began slowly moving downhill. Nick could see his profile, the stubby automatic weapon in his hands. Nick passed the tire iron to his left hand and, with his right, carefully unzipped his fleece pocket and withdrew his cell phone. Then he took two steps forward and hurled it several yards to the man’s right.

  The phone in its chunky SatSleeve thumped onto the forest floor, crunching dead leaves. The man whirled, his weapon up. Slowly he took a step toward the phone, then another. Then he was moving more rapidly, searching for the source of the noise, Nick padding downhill after him.

  The man had reached the area where the phone had landed and was scanning the woods when something deep inside him—instinct, maybe, or his lizard brain firing on high alert—made him turn just as Nick leapt at him from behind a tree, arm raised. Before the man could even lift his weapon, Nick swung his arm down, the tire iron connecting with the top of the man’s head. The man fell to the ground as if poleaxed.

  Nick dropped the tire iron and crouched next to the man, feeling for his carotid artery. He was alive, although his pulse was thready. The tire iron had left a gash in the top of his skull. Nick saw that the man was young, not much older than Annalise. This registered as mere fact—Nick had no time for regret. That would come later. The man wore a black jumpsuit and his face was covered with camo paint. But his collar hadn’t been fastened correctly, which was how Nick had seen the back of his neck. It was a break Nick knew he probably wouldn’t get again.

  Nick hesitated as he stood over the man, looked at his MP5 lying on the ground, at the knife and pistol on his belt. He knew it would be safer to kill him. Instead, he picked up the MP5, the pistol, and the knife, found two spare magazines for the MP5 in the man’s jumpsuit and shoved them into his own pockets, and then vanished into the trees like a wraith.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  “Deputy Sams,” Annalise said, cradling Lettie’s bleeding head in her lap. “Deputy Sams?”

  Sams sat slumped on the foyer floor, but when Annalise spoke, he lifted his head to look at her.

  “I need you to get me towels,” Annalise said, taking a slight bit of comfort in the fact that her voice barely trembled. “Dish towels. From the kitchen. As many as you can find, okay? Please?”

  Sams’s face was pale and glistened with sweat, but he nodded, and then with a grimace, holding his left arm stiff and close to his body, he got to his feet. Once there, he leaned against the foyer wall as if to catch his breath. “Dish towels,” he said, looking at Annalise as if for confirmation. Annalise nodded, and wearily Sams nodded back and then stepped into the dining room, from where Annalise knew he could walk into the kitchen. Sams left a bright smear of red on the arch leading into the dining room, at shoulder height.

  “Annalise,” Lettie said weakly, and with a shock Annalise looked down at Lettie. My God, there was so much blood. So much.

  “Hey,” Annalise said with a smile, batting away tears with the back of her hand. “The deputy is
getting me some towels. It’s going to be okay.”

  Lettie blinked. Annalise realized how suddenly old Lettie looked, the wrinkles in her face like deep trenches. Lettie wet her lips with her tongue. “My head feels like … someone hit me with a … cast-iron skillet.”

  “Don’t try to move,” Annalise said, hoping desperately that she wouldn’t keep crying. “Just lie still. Towels are coming.”

  “Why? Is somebody … wet?”

  Annalise let out a hiccup of laughter. Looking up at her, Lettie smiled. The smile transformed her. Her face was radiant, joyful. “Gotcha,” she said.

  A heavy thud sounded against the door, and Annalise jerked her head up to stare at it. Fear lit up her spinal cord, but she was unable to move. Another thud, and there was a dull crack. Just as she registered that someone was trying to kick the door down, there was a third thud punctuated by another, louder crack, and the door burst open. Without thinking, Annalise picked the pistol off the floor and raised it. A man dressed in black stood in the doorway. Annalise pointed the pistol at him.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  Cole stared at the teenage girl and the old woman on the floor. There was a lot of blood on the girl’s jeans and, Cole could see, in the old woman’s hair. That must have been where he’d shot her. But where was the deputy?

  In that moment of hesitation, the girl raised a pistol and aimed it at his chest. Cole stared at the open end of the gun barrel. He was dead.

  The girl squeezed the trigger. Nothing happened. Confusion and anger ran across her face. She squeezed the trigger again, and Cole stepped forward and smacked the pistol out of her hand. It skittered across the floor into the dining room, where it disappeared under a sideboard.

  “What—” the girl managed.

  “Safety was on,” Cole said. He raised his MP5, holding it across his chest.