The black, empty doorway felt like a mouth waiting to close on him. He slowly crossed in front of the sagging doors and then edged around the building, stopping once to pull the Colt out of his pocket. When he came to stairs leading up inside the barn, he stood for a long time, listening, but heard nothing from inside. There was a hiss- click, loud in his ears from the walkie- talkie, and he jumped and almost pulled the trigger on the pistol.
He put his hand on his chest and willed his heart to stop racing, then moved quickly across the driveway to the side of the house away from Manny and Rick. He inched across the front, keeping low, ducking under a dark window to reach the porch. He pulled the parka off over his head and threw it behind him. He pulled the walkie- talkie out his bag, dropped the bag on the porch, and pointed the big Colt at the door. He keyed the mike twice and threw the walkie- talkie down and kicked the door in with a steel-toed boot.
THE HALLWAY WAS dark. There was a stink of ammonia and acetone and charcoal, the wet, catpiss reek of meth labs that made his eyes water. He heard Manny shouting that they were federal agents and did the same. He moved into the open space, wheeling left and right with the pistol. Somewhere in the house the dog barked, crazy to be let out. There were two dark and empty rooms on either side of the hallway and stairs leading up. He ran down the hallway screaming, “Down on the ground; get down!”
At the end of the hallway he turned right and saw Manny standing over Ponytail, who was on his knees with his hands behind his head.
Ray pointed at Rick with his empty hand. “Cuff him.”
Rick stuck his pistol into his jeans and pulled a wire wrap from his belt. He pushed Ponytail onto the floor face first and jerked his hands up behind him, fumbling with the wire wrap. He rubbed his knee and winced. “Hold still, you dumb Piney fuck.”
Ponytail screamed into the floor. “You got to read me my rights. You like to broke my nose.”
Rick pulled the pistol out of his belt and smacked the barrel against the back of the prone tweaker’s skull. “Shut the fuck up, hillbilly, or I’ll break your head.”
There was a piercing scream from the doorway, and the thick-waisted woman stood there in a yellow T-shirt and cutoffs pointing a long- barreled shotgun. Rick jumped up as Manny and Ray aimed their guns at her. The dog was going insane behind a door somewhere, the barking like a scream over and over.
“Drop the gun!”
“Federal agents!”
She swiveled the gun at Ray and Manny in turn, her eyes wild and full of tears.
“You leave him be!”
Ray pointed his pistol at the floor and held one hand out. “Calm down, for Christ’s sake. No one’s hurting anyone.”
Ponytail tried to raise his head. “Charlene, go get my cell phone and call my brother!”
Ray bared his teeth, trying to smile. “Don’t move, Charlene.”
Ponytail’s voice was hoarse, lisping through rotted teeth. “It’s the Zionist occupying army. They come to put them chips in us.”
“Chips? What?” Ray heard a loud metallic click and turned to see Rick pulling back the hammer on the big revolver, the gun at Ponytail’s temple.
“Drop that’” was as far as Rick got before Charlene’s shotgun went off, deafening Ray. The blast spattered Rick and Ponytail and a yellow refrigerator with buckshot. Ray dropped his pistol, and Manny pulled the trigger on his scattergun, knocking the woman back into the hallway. Rick howled on the floor, rolling in blood and brains from Ponytail’s shattered head and what looked like milk leaking from a half- dozen holes in the refrigerator.
Ray felt like his skull was cracked, his ears ringing. He took two steps into the hallway to see Charlene’s staring eyes and caved- in chest. Manny stepped to the side door and vomited into the rain. Ray picked up his cold pistol and stuffed it into his belt. “Everyone be calm,” he said to no one.
Rick moaned and turned in circles on the slick floor, trying to stand up. The air was full of blue smoke. Ray smelled burned gun-powder and the meaty tang of blood. He pulled a chair onto its feet and sat down in it. “Everyone just stay put.” He felt insane.
There was a cracking somewhere and a rush of feet and the dog was in the room. Ray jerked at the pistol at his waist, but the animal careened through the kitchen and out the side door, knocking Manny off his feet and leaving a trail of bloody paw prints.
Rick sat back on his haunches, bleeding from his arms and his chest. “Jesus, my arm’s broke.” His eyes rolled back white and he fainted, falling into the corner against a pie safe. Urine splashed out of his pant leg as he breathed one last terrible, gargling breath, a sound like water emptying from a copper pipe. The dog’s barking dwindled as it disappeared into the storm.
Manny lurched back into the room, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. Ray shook his head, not believing any of it. He said, “We gotta go.”
“Fuck that. I’m not doing this for free.” Manny stepped across the kitchen, trying to avoid the mess on the floor.
Ray held his hand up. “I’ll look. Let me look. Find something to get rid of this mess with.” He looked around at the blood on the walls. “Jesus fucking Christ, what the fuck happened?”
They stood there for a minute, and then Manny put the shotgun on his shoulder and walked out into the rain. Ray got up and walked back out through the hallway, trying not to look at the woman and to stay out of the widening pool of blood. Neither plan worked. He saw that her T-shirt was a uniform red now. He forced himself to keep moving, scraping his shoes on the linoleum to get the blood off. At the end of the hallway he turned left and came back out to the landing. He went out to the porch and rummaged in the bag for his flashlight. When he got back inside he pushed the broken door back into place and pointed the light into the corners of the front room. He could see the cooker with its tubes and wires, dark and cold, and thanked the Tweaker Jesus for this little bit of mercy. There were Mason jars and empty two- liter soda bottles on a long table, a stack of coffee filters, a pile of charcoal briquettes. In the corner of the room was a yard- high pile of empty charcoal bags and ripped packages for cold medicine.
He made his way upstairs, forcing himself to move fast and trust that there was no one left in the house. He kept replaying the scene in the kitchen over and over, trying to make it happen right. He moved from room to room down the narrow hallway, finding each one empty. A wet, reeking bathroom, the tiles peeled from the wall; empty bedrooms, old bedsteads furred with black dust. In what had been the master bedroom there were clothes on the floor, bottles of water, and a box of surgical masks. Under the mattress on the floor was a paper bag with a few hundred bucks in it, and he picked it up. He rolled it tight and jammed it into the pocket of the windbreaker. He pushed open the closet doors, pointing the flashlight beam at stacks of wood, a pile of newspapers with headlines about Reagan.
Off the master bedroom was a padlocked room, and he lifted his leg and kicked the door twice hard with the sole of his boot. The cleats gave way in the rotted wood, and the door swung back with a banshee howl from the rusted hinges. He found a light switch on the wall and pushed it up with a hand covered by the sleeve of his parka.
A faint orange light set in a lamp shaped like a rocking horse showed a child’s room, a room for a girl: white furniture, a pink plaid ruffle around a sagging bed. Everything was sunken in gray dust unmarked by fingerprints. A brush with a red handle was sitting on a white vanity, a Mariah Carey poster hung bowed out and sagging. Ray thought there was something wrong about his going into the padlocked room, and standing in the doorway he wished he hadn’t forced the door. The closet stood open, empty, and he half- heartedly opened a couple of drawers, releasing a shower of dust onto his boots. He turned off the light and backed out.