Chapter Fifty-Four

Into the Night

“Bang,” says the man in the closet. “You want to go that way? You shoot me, I shoot her?”

By her I’m supposing he means Naomi, only because I’m slightly farther away, cowering in plain sight.

“Put the gun on the floor and place your hands behind your head,” Jack says.

The man in the wool cap gives us another loony grin, as if delighted that Jack is playing along. “Spoken like a real lawman. But here’s the thing, sunshine. I’ve got a gun and you’ve got a gun and I hate to say it, but mine is bigger than yours. You have, let me see, a nine-mil for the gentleman and a .38 for the lady. Nice firearms. Quality. But the gun in my hand is a Kahr PM45, nineteen ounces fully loaded, which means I can hold it all day long. And the nice thing about a large-caliber bullet, all it takes is one shot. I’m aiming at the lady’s torso, but even if I wing her in the arm or leg she’ll bleed out in less than a minute. So why don’t we go in the other direction? Put your guns on the floor and place your hands behind your head.”

“Never going to happen.” Jack is adamant, and his eyes are subzero.

“Thought you might say that. Here’s the real deal. I’m coming out, so you better back up or I’ll shoot my way through you. And I will not hesitate.”

The man strides out of the closet. We all back up, keeping the same distance. Naomi’s gun is starting to waver. I know from the shooting range that keeping a handgun level is a lot harder than it looks. Tie a two-pound weight to your wrist and see how long you can hold your arm out. Not long, even if you’re bracing.

“Hey, this is great,” the man says, moving us backward. “Let’s use the momentum. Keep rolling. Or die. Your choice. Personally I could care less. Always wanted to die in a shoot-out, and tonight is as good a time as any.”

Maybe you had to be there, but there’s never any doubt about his personal interest in death. Which, believe me, is even more convincing if the man in question looks like he was turned on a lathe from hardened steel and smells like he’s been eating raw hamburger left out in the sun. I know about the bad breath because as he slips forward, accelerating the pace, daring us all to die in an exchange of variously sized bullets, he reaches out his left hand, snake-strike quick, and grabs hold of my neck.

In the same motion he somehow slips behind me, all in that one sly movement, like a conjuror’s trick. And his gun ends up jammed under my chin.

“Don’t look so embarrassed,” he says to Jack. “I’ve done this before. More than once. And you know what? I’m not even going to ask you to lower your weapons. Take a shot if you think you can take me down without hitting my new pal here. No? Then keep moving. I do enjoy the company.”

My knees don’t seem to be functioning, but that turns out not to be a problem, because the man wraps his arm around my waist, lifting me effortlessly. With the business end of the snub-nose buried under my chin I don’t even fantasize about struggling or fighting to get free.

He makes Jack and Naomi go down the stairs backward, which he apparently finds very amusing. Jack is really, really angry, looks like he’s going to snap off his own teeth he’s so pissed, and Naomi has an expression I’ve never seen on her face. Fear. She’s trying to mask it, probably for my benefit, but there it is. She fears for my life.

The man with my life in his hands backs them all the way to the ground floor, to the rear fire exit. He swings me around like a rag doll and puts his back to the door.

Jack and Naomi are only a few yards away, still armed. Jack is still trying to find a shot that won’t risk killing me, too, but he looks discouraged.

“You’re good folks, I can tell that,” says the man who has the gun to my head, sounding oddly jovial. “You know why? Because you chose life.”

“What do you want?” Naomi says. “Why go to all the trouble of breaking into the residence?”

I can feel him laughing inside, which is nearly as terrifying as the gun under by chin. “It wasn’t any trouble,” he says. “I thought New Mommy might be visiting and I wanted to give her my regards.”

“New Mommy?” Naomi asks, puzzled.

“The skinny bitch with the two-by-four. She’s not here, obviously, but I’ll find her. Bet on it.”

He pushes backward through the door, carrying me out into the night.

It’s not like I think about death a lot. Not my own death. That stays buried away in the back of my mind, a dark little shape to be taken out and examined as rarely as possible. We’re all short-timers with specific but unknown-to-us expiration dates, we know that even as children, so what’s the point of dwelling on the fact of our own mortality? Bummer, man. But when I do have occasion to contemplate the end of me, I figure I won’t go easy. Not the type. I’ll be one of those who rage against the oncoming light, fighting to stay behind.

Or so I thought. As it turned out in this particular circumstance, in the arms of death himself, I was strangely docile. A voice inside was saying, this is it, you’ve come to the last moment of your life, try to be calm because the last thing you want—your very last desire—is to leave without your dignity intact. Don’t let fear turn you into something less than you are. Don’t let your last moment be one of terror.

So when the steel god of death tosses me aside and slips away, into the shadows, I remain where discarded, as numb as if I’d been wrapped in cotton batting.

Jack finds me a block from the residence. I’m sitting on the curb hugging my knees to my chin without a thought in my head. Just being.

“Alice, I’m so sorry.”

A moment passes before I can speak. Several moments. “You did the right thing,” I finally manage to say. “I’m alive.”

Chapter Fifty-Five

Whatever He Does for Fun

Daybreak finds Gatling in his home office in New Castle, setting up the operation at a discreet remove. Using third and fourth parties, none of whom have known connections to GSG, or to him personally. The operation is fraught with risk—they always are—but he finds himself responding to the challenge. In days of old a good cavalry officer rode to the sound of gunfire. Something of that remains, although in his particular case, given all of his powers and connections, the gunfire is likely to be in the form of a subpoena, rather than a hail of lead. As to the real thing, he’s been there, thank you very much. He knows what it is to melt himself into a mountainside as enemy snipers rain fire, bullets fragmenting inches from his head, and, all things considered, he prefers the current situation.

Having determined that a charter jet will be touching down within the hour, and that a fuel truck will be standing by at precisely the right moment, Taylor Gatling, Jr., grants himself a five-minute juice break. The hand-squeezed OJ is chilled to his preferred temperature, waiting on the shelf in the fridge under the office bar. He’s bending over to fetch it when the door opens. A door he distinctly recalls locking. He freezes in position, the most vulnerable parts of his body crouching behind the thickness of the bar, and then relaxes and stands up when he sees who it is.

“You’re kind of cute when you’re bending over,” Kidder says.

“Don’t you ever knock?”

Kidder holds up an electric lock-pick gun and pulls the trigger, making it spin. “Amazing little gizmos,” he says. “Only thing that stops ’em is a keyless dead bolt. The only thing more effective is a fifty-caliber bullet.”