Light blooms again in the peephole.
Too easy.
He’ll fudge the story later, he thinks.
He’s about to kick in the door when he catches the sight of himself in the large picture window. His double, his companion, like in the full-length mirror, but even larger. It’s nigh on dusk by now so the window catches the last light of the sun and reflects the street scene. Reflects Dietrich. He regards himself, his rifle held low in his hands, and he looks to himself like a war-stained soldier of old. Battle-tested. He straightens up, as though for a portrait. He notices dots of blood here and there all over him, his arms, his white linen shirt, now road-dusty and bloody. The tattoos of the faces crawl up from under the linen, up his neck, out his sleeves, like a little brood of children, looking up at him. His dead. His legacy.
He smoothes a hand over his shaved head. He steps closer to the mirror of the glass. Inspects his face. Not dead-eyed. Not at all. Turning the name of this vanquished old man over in his mind. A name like a primal grunt. Like a death rattle.
Unruh.
Dietrich looks closer still at his reflection in the window. He looks tired. There are bruised bags under his eyes. Well, no wonder, he thinks. He’s been working so hard.
And as he leans in and studies his face more intently, a strange thing occurs. He sees his face, reflected back at him, suddenly buckle, then crumble, sagging as though in sudden despair, starting right from the very center, dead between his eyes, then spiderwebbing outward, his whole face falling, slowly, with great deliberation; he watches with focused curiosity and puzzlement as his face disassembles itself into a dozen jagged sections, like a jigsaw patiently unsolving itself, and then he realizes it’s not his face that’s falling apart, it’s the mirror, it’s the window, that’s breaking and collapsing and now the whole window glistens and sparkles and shatters, then erupts in a million brilliant shards. And only now does he realize that this is all happening—has all happened, it’s all over—in a moment, an instant, the very last instant of his life.
Dietrich’s lean body goes limp, then buckles, as the bullet passes brightly through his brain, having traveled already through the glistening glass and then his forehead and then out of his head in a great red spray, then continuing onward in a hurry, as though Dietrich’s thin skull was just a minor detour on a longer, more urgent journey. As he slumps, a bright red mist forms a speckled cloud over his falling body, like a final thought bubble left to linger in the air. His body clatters to the porch with a thump, but he’s long past dead now, long dead, his last thoughts lost, his corpse already cooling on the porch. Only the empty tattooed eyes of his victims remain open, bearing witness.
Once the whole window has fallen in shards like a brittle curtain, Unruh steps out over the jagged sill and onto the porch, bending himself through the now-vacated windowpane, with Cooper’s revolver, gifted to him, along with its single bullet, held limp and smoking and empty in his left hand.
Unruh’s body is crooked and old and he strains in the sun to unfold himself to something like his former stature. Having dispatched Dietrich, he doesn’t give the corpse another thought. He’s more concerned with the warmth of the sun on his face, which is a feeling he hasn’t felt in a great long while. The spreading warmth on his cheeks and forehead, and on the wine stain that’s marked him since birth. He stretches in the sun— —and to a distant observer, Unruh seems to dance now, his body spasming in a joyful jitterbug that belies his obvious age. As he dances, the two agents move closer, their drawn weapons firing rhythmically, each round catching Unruh as they carefully sight the old man and squeeze their triggers methodically and expertly put him down. He topples like an ancient oak, felled, his body folding over Dietrich’s and lying still.
And as Burly and Gains inch closer, cautious to the end, they spot the blood-splashed photo clutched in Unruh’s out-flung hand, the photo of a smiling man, and they both wonder if this was some last target, some last victim, for this cold killer, before they stand over the bodies and empty their weapons into the pile, just to be sure.
When Burly kicks the door of the bungalow open, they find Bette Burr standing in the gloom inside. She’s unarmed, hands raised innocently. The body of Agent Bigelow, dragged in from the street, lies just inside the doorway, where Bette had hoisted him up and used him as a shield, propping his bulk up just long enough against the door to darken the peephole, so that his corpse absorbed Dietrich’s shots through the door. Then she let the body drop with a hard and noticeable thud. It was Unruh’s idea, the part with the body, but she enacted it; he was far too feeble. She went out into the empty street and dragged the body inside and hefted it up against the door, then let it drop with a heavy thump, while Unruh waited by the window with the gun, Unruh and Eleanor inside, the two of them accomplices at last.
With everyone else dead and her unarmed, the agents collect her and take her with them, not suspecting that this unassuming woman with an open face is anything more than a simple witness to this carnage. Not knowing that, today, pressing her full weight behind the hefted corpse against the peephole, she understood for the first time that some part of her father lives on in her, waiting to be acknowledged, and accessed.
Cooper does a head count.