“Wait a little, see if they’re moving at all.”
I grunt but say nothing. I’m not a hunter. Never have been—at least not since I shot my first deer at eleven, on a trip with a friend. My dad never liked it, either. I have hunted men, by necessity, with Daniel Kelly. But this doesn’t feel like that. Lying in the humid dark with gnats buzzing my face and mosquitoes draining my arms of blood feels like hunching in a hide waiting for a deer to walk by, one preoccupied enough or oblivious enough to let me shoot it from thirty feet away. But it’s not deer sitting in the yellow light beyond the windows of that little house, I remind myself. It’s people. Armed people. And we don’t even know how many.
“You ready?” Lincoln says suddenly.
“Fuck, no! Listen, I know where you are, believe me. But you’re crazy if you want to just bust into that house. We don’t know shit yet about what we’re facing. You’re better off setting it on fire and shooting them as they run out.”
He turns to me, his eyes glinting in the moonlight. “Like the old cowboy movies, right? I bet there’s a can of gas back at one of those houses we passed.”
“There’ll be dogs, too.”
He grimaces.
“This is the country, Lincoln. You can’t assume nobody saw us walking in here.”
“All the more reason to move now.”
I grab his arm. “Wait—”
The door to the house has opened. First through is a wiry figure that even from this distance I recognize as Snake Knox. The mere sight of him starts my heart pounding. Next through is another male figure, probably Alois, and then a woman.
“They’re leaving,” Lincoln hisses, panic in his voice.
I grip his arm tighter. “Stay still, goddamn it. Let’s see.”
I breathe a little easier when the trio walks past the truck and heads across the grass, on a line that will take them about forty yards to our left. A faint but steady flicker tells me Snake is using his cell phone. Behind him, the woman lights a cigarette and starts puffing away. The orange eye bumps up and down as they walk.
“Must be going to the main house,” Lincoln whispers. “We could take them right now.”
“Would you please calm the fuck down? You don’t want a shootout on open ground, without cover.”
“I’ll be smoking that bitch’s cigarettes in two minutes.”
“You charge them now, you’ll do it alone.”
“We don’t have to charge them. Use your rifle to take out the blond kid. Keep firing as they scramble. I’ll go get Snake. Kill the woman if she turns to fight. If not, let her go till we’ve got Snake under control.”
“You’re not going to kill him?”
“I’m going to have a word with him first.”
I’m hearing Lincoln’s tone more than his words, and he doesn’t sound like a man using objective judgment. “I’m no sniper, okay? Especially not at night. And you’re not, either.”
His jaw flexes angrily as the three figures recede, then disappear into the main house nearer the road.
“So what’s your plan, genius?” he growls.
The best course of action seems obvious to me. “They just made it easy, actually. Let’s just go into the dependency and wait for them. They’re bound to come back.”
Lincoln watched the trio vanish like a hunter being forced to let prize game walk in and out of his sights. But he says, “Okay. Let’s go.”
“Crawl or run?”
“Let’s run it. I’m tired of crawling.”
Unslinging the rifle, I work the bolt and chamber a round. Then, with a last glance at the main house, I start running.
Eight seconds of sprinting carries us to the door of the dependency.
Snake didn’t bother to lock the door; it opens almost soundlessly. The interior barely qualifies as spartan. Moth-eaten sofa, a Formica table, a couple of chairs. One sink with rusting fittings. The stink of mildew permeates the air, and I’d bet my last dollar termites have eaten 80 percent of the wood in the walls. The back room contains two cots and a scarred end table. There’s no toilet I can see. Probably an outhouse in the back.
“How you want to play it?” I ask, gripping the rifle tight.
Lincoln looks around. “Stand to each side of the door, so we’re behind them as they come in. Put ’em together on that sofa, too low to jump up and make a move.”
“You’re not planning to shoot them as they come in?”
Lincoln shrugs. “That’s fine with me. I thought you wanted to talk to them. I saw you put your tape recorder in your pocket.”
“I’d prefer it.”
“I’ll give you two minutes. But if they even think about shooting, they’re dead.”
I nod.
“If we have to open up,” he says, “I’ll shoot Snake, and you take whichever one of the others looks likely to fire first. That way we don’t throw away our lives shooting the same person.”
“Maybe you are thinking after all.”
Lincoln starts to move toward a window, but I hiss at him, and he freezes.
“You hear something?” he asks.
“No. But don’t go near a window. Your night vision will suck, being in this light, and they’ll see you long before you see them. Let’s sit with our backs against the front wall. They shouldn’t see us as they come in, and we’ll be behind them. They’ll also be walking in out of the dark, which should give us a slight edge.”
Lincoln nods slowly. “Thinking about it like that . . . it seems best to shoot right away. At least take out the woman and the blond kid.”
“Alois.”
“Whatever. If we shoot them outright, Snake will realize it’s suicide to keep fighting.”
“Been in a lot of gunfights, have you?”
Lincoln glares at me. “More than you.”
“Not as many as Snake, though. Whatever that old bastard does, the one thing he won’t do is lose his nerve. Don’t think of him as an old man. He’s a wily old crop duster who never refused a dare in his life. He’s walked away from two plane crashes that I know about, and he was a sniper in Korea. He’s killed a lot of people, both legally and otherwise. So don’t count on being able to predict what he’ll do.”
“Then let’s shoot him in the back of the head and take away his options.”
I breathe deeply, then sigh. “I’d rather talk to him, if we can manage it. All of them. If not . . . we’ll do what we have to do.”
After a few moments of reflection, Lincoln kneels on the floor, then turns and sets his broad back against the front wall. I crouch and move to the other side of the door, then sit and press my back against the mildewed wallpaper. Leaning my rifle against the wall, I take my Springfield nine millimeter from my pocket and jack the slide, then lay my arm across my knees.
Maybe a minute passes. Then Lincoln says, “What you think they’re doing in the main house?”
“Eating. No stove or fridge out here.”
“Yeah. No shitter, either.”
“You saw Snake was on his phone?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Let’s hope he’s not calling reinforcements.”