Halfway down the hall, the swath of blood broke to the right and disappeared through the kitchen doorway. I turned in the living room, checked the shadows, saw the broken glass under the windows, the pieces of wood and curtain fabric that had come apart in the gun blasts, an old couch spilling stuffing and littered with beer cans.
The automatic gunfire had ceased as soon as I’d entered the house, and for the moment all I heard was the rain spitting against the porch behind me, the ticking of a clock somewhere in the back of the house, and the sound of my own breathing, shallow and ragged.
The floorboards creaked as I made my way across the living room, followed the blood into the hall. Sweat poured down my face and softened my hands as my eyes darted from the door at the end of the hall to the four separate doorways that lay ahead of me in the narrow corridor. The one ten feet up on my right was the kitchen. The one on the left spilled yellow light into the hall.
I flattened myself against the right wall and inched along until I had a partially obstructed view of the room to the left. It appeared to be a sitting room of some kind. Two chairs were positioned on either side of a wine cabinet built into the wall. One was the recliner I’d been able to make out in the dark last night. The other matched it. The wine cabinet hung in the center of the wall and the glass casing that usually ran over the shelves had been removed. The shelves were filled with stacks of newspaper and glossy magazines, and several more magazines were stacked on the floor beside the chairs. Two old-fashioned pewter ashtrays in three-foot stands stood by the arms of the leather chairs, and a half-smoked cigar still smoldered in one. I stood pressed against the wall, my gun pointed at the right side of that room, watching for moving shadows, listening for creaks on the floorboards.
Nothing.
I took two tight steps across the hall, pinned myself against the other wall, and pointed my gun into the kitchen.
The black-and-white tile floor glistened with streaks of blood and viscera. Wet hand prints, tinged a bright orange under the harsh fluorescent, stained the cupboards and refrigerator door. I saw a shadow spill out from the right side of the room, heard a ragged breathing that wasn’t my own.
I took a long, deep breath, counted down from three, and then jumped across to the other side of the doorway, saw in a flash that the reading room to my right was empty, stared down the barrel of my gun at Leon Trett sitting up on the kitchen counter, his eyes fastened on me.
One of the Calico M-110s lay just inside the doorway. I kicked it under the table to my right as I entered.
Leon watched me come with a pained grin on his face. He’d shaved, and his soft, curdled skin had an unhealthy, raw sheen to it, as if the flesh had been scraped with a wire brush and then lathered in oil, as if it could be lifted from the bone with a spoon. Without the beard, his face was longer than it had appeared last night, the cheeks so sunken his mouth was a perpetual oval.
His left arm hung useless by his side, a hole pumping dark blood from the biceps. His right arm was crossed over his abdomen, trying to hold his intestines in. His tan trousers were saturated with his own blood.
“Come to give me my clips?” he said.
I shook my head.
“Got some of my own this morning.”
I shrugged.
“Who are you?” he said in a soft voice, his right eyebrow cocked.
“Down on the floor,” I said.
He grunted. “Sweetie, you see me holding my guts in up here? How’m I supposed to move and keep them in?”
“Not my problem,” I said. “Down on the floor.”
His long jaw clenched. “No.”
“Get down on the fucking floor.”
“No,” he said again.
“Leon. Do it.”
“Fuck you. Shoot me.”
“Leon—”
His eyes flickered to his left for just a moment, and the tightness left his jaw. He said, “Show some mercy, baby. Come on.”
I watched his eyes flicker again, saw the hint of a smile form on his lips, and I dropped to my knees as Roberta Trett fired at the place I’d been and blew her own husband’s head off with a sustained burst from her M-110.
She screamed in shock and surprise as Leon’s face disappeared like a balloon popped by a pin, and I rolled onto my back and squeezed off a round that hit her right hip and jerked her into the corner of the kitchen.
She spun back toward me, that great mass of gray hair swinging across her face, and unfortunately the M-110 came with her. One sweaty finger grasped for the trigger, kept sliding off the guard, and her free hand grasped at the wound on her hip as her eyes stayed locked on her husband’s missing head. I watched the muzzle swing my way, and I knew that any second she’d come out of shock and find the trigger.
I dove out of the kitchen, back into the hall. I rolled to my right as Roberta Trett spun full circle and the Calico muzzle winked at me. I got to my feet and ran for the back door, saw the door getting closer and closer, and then I heard Roberta step out into the hall behind me.
“You killed my Leon, motherfucker. You killed my Leon!”
The hallway blew up like an earthquake as Roberta got her finger around the trigger and let loose.
I dove without looking into the room off to my left, discovered too late that it wasn’t a room at all but a staircase.
My forehead rammed a stair about seven or eight steps up, and the impact of wood against bone rocked back through my teeth like electrical voltage. I heard Roberta’s heavy footsteps as she stumbled down the hallway toward the staircase.
She wasn’t firing her gun, and that terrified me more than if she were.
She knew she had me boxed in.
My shin screamed as it banged against the edge of a riser as I tore up the staircase, slipped once and kept going, saw a metal door at the top and prayed please God please God let it be open.
Roberta reached the opening below and I lunged for the door, hit it in the center with the heel of my hand, felt it give way like a burst of oxygen breaking from my lungs.
My chest bounced off the floor as Roberta unloaded her gun again. I rolled to my left and slammed the door behind me on a splatter of lead that banged off the metal like hail on a tin roof. The door was heavy and thick—the door to an industrial cooler or a vault—and bolt locks lined the inside: four of them from a height of about five and a half feet to a depth of about six inches. I threw them one by one as the bullets continued to ping and thunk off the other side. The door itself was bulletproof, the locks incapable of being shot out from the other side, sealed by sheets of layered steel on this side.