“Punkin, you stay with Brian,” Philip says to Penny. Then he shoots a glance at Nick. “Nicky, I want you to see if you can slip out a side window, take the machete, double back on ’em if you can. You follow me?”
Nick understands exactly what he’s saying, and he takes off down the side hallway.
“Stay behind me, but stay close.” Philip raises the shotgun, the butt against his shoulder. Carefully and focused with cobralike calm, Philip shuffles commando-style toward the sound of footsteps on broken glass now coming from the kitchen.
“Nice and easy does it, hoss,” the home invader says in a cheerful Tennessee twang, raising the barrel of a nine-millimeter Glock as Philip enters the kitchen with the shotgun also raised.
Before being so rudely interrupted, the intruder had been calmly looking around the kitchen as though he had just climbed out of bed for a midnight snack. Headlamps, coming from outside, pierce the room with harsh radiance. The pane of glass above the doorknob behind the man is busted in, and the faint light of dawn is just beginning to glow.
Well over six feet tall, dressed in shopworn camo-pants, muddy jackboots, and a blood-soaked Kevlar flak vest, the home invader is completely bald, with a scarred, missile-shaped head and eyes like craters cut by tiny meteors. On closer scrutiny, he looks sick, like he’s been exposed to radiation, his jaundiced skin mottled with sores.
Philip points the worthless antique shotgun at the bald man’s cranium—about eight feet between the two men—and Philip concentrates on pretending—maybe even believing—that the shotgun is loaded. “I’ll give y’all the benefit of the doubt,” Philip says. “I’ll assume you thought the place was empty.”
“That’s exactly right, hoss,” the bald man says, his voice calm, maybe medicated, like that of a dreamy disc jockey. His teeth are capped in gold, and they shimmer dully as he smiles a reptilian smile.
“So, we’ll thank y’all to just leave us be—no harm, no foul.”
The man with the Glock apes a hurt frown. “Now, that ain’t too neighborly of you.” The man has a slight tremor, a tic, percolating with latent violence. “I see y’all got a cute little thang back there.”
“Never mind that.” Philip stands his ground. He can hear the front door squeak, footsteps crossing the parlor. His brain crashes with panic and warring impulses. He knows the next few seconds are critical, maybe even mortally so. But all he can think of doing is to stall. “We don’t want any bloodshed, and brother, I guarantee you, no matter what happens, yours and mine’s gonna be the first blood that’s shed.”
“Smooth talker.” The bald man calls out suddenly to one of his comrades in the dark. “Shorty?”
A voice answers from outside the back door. “Got him, Tommy!”
Almost on cue, Nick appears outside the jagged window of the back door, a large Bowie knife held against his windpipe. His captor, a skinny kid with pimples and a marine jarhead haircut, pushes open the door and shoves Nick into the kitchen.
“I’m sorry, Philly,” Nick says as he is shoved against the cabinets—hard enough to steal his breath. The slender young man with the crew cut holds the knife against Nick’s Adam’s apple, a machete thrust down the young man’s belt. A jittery, bony specimen with fingerless Carnaby gloves on his hands, the skinny kid looks like an escapee from a marine brig. His fatigue jacket has the sleeves torn off, and his long bare arms are riddled with jailhouse hieroglyph.
“Hold on, now,” Philip says to the bald man. “There’s no reason to—”
“Sonny!” The bald man calls out to another accomplice at the precise same moment Philip hears the footsteps creaking across the hundred-year-old hardwood floor out in the front parlor. Philip keeps the shotgun raised and aimed, but shoots a quick side glance back over his shoulder. Brian and Penny huddle in the shadows directly behind Philip, maybe five feet off his heels.
Two more figures have suddenly appeared behind Brian and Penny, making the little girl jump.
“Got it covered, Tommy!” says one of the figures as the steel-plated barrel of a large-caliber revolver—maybe a .357 Magnum, maybe an Army .45—becomes visible for all to see, pressing against the back of Brian Blake’s skull. Brian stiffens like a cornered animal.
“Hold on now,” Philip says.
In his peripheral vision, he can see that the two figures holding guns on Brian and Penny are a man and a woman … although he would use the word
The man next to her—the one apparently named Sonny—also looks as though he’s no stranger to the needle. His sunken eyes stare out from a pockmarked mask of ignorance and meanness, his emaciated form clad in army- surplus rags.
“I want to thank you, brother,” the bald man says, shoving his nine-millimeter back into its belt sheath, acting like the showdown has now officially ended. “You dug up quite a spot here. I’ll give you that.” He goes over to the sink and calmly helps himself to the jug of well water sitting on the counter, quaffing down an entire glassful. “This’ll do nicely as a home base.”
“That’s all well and good,” Philip says, not making any move to lower his faux weapon. “Only problem is, we can’t take on any more people.”
“That’s okay, brother.”
“Then what exactly are you planning to…? What are your intentions?”
“Our
Somebody that Philip can’t see snickers with great amusement.
Philip’s brain is a fractured chessboard, pieces moving now in herky-jerky motion. He knows that it’s likely that these hardened road rats mean to kill him and everybody else in the house. He knows they’re parasites, and they’ve most likely been circling the place like buzzards for weeks—Brian wasn’t hearing things, it turns out.
Even now, Philip can hear others outside—low voices, twigs snapping—and he does the quick mental arithmetic: There are at least six of them, maybe more, and at least four vehicles, and each one seems to be heavily armed, with plenty of ammo—Philip can see mags and speed-loaders clipped to some of the belts—but the one thing they seem to lack that maybe, just maybe, Philip can work with, is the appearance of intelligence. Even the big bald guy—who seems to be the honcho—has the look of a dull stoner in his eyes. There won’t be any appeals to mercy, no appeals to the better angels here. Philip has only one chance at survival.
“You mind if I say something?” he asks. “Before y’all do anything rash.”
The bald man raises his glass as though giving a toast. “You got the floor, friend.”
“We got two ways this can go down, is all I’m trying to say.”
This seems to pique the bald man’s curiosity. He sets down his glass and turns to Philip. “Only two ways?”
“One way is, we start blazing and I can tell you how that’s gonna play out.”
“Do tell.”
“Your folks will overpower us and that’ll be that, but the only thing is, I promise you one thing and—I’ll be honest with you—I’ve never been so sure of anything in my life.”
“And what’s that?”
“No matter what, I know that I’ll be able to get off a single shot, and I say this with no disrespect, but I will make damn sure that the overwhelmin’ majority of these steel beads go into the top half of your body. Now, sir, do you want to hear option two?”
The bald man has lost his sense of humor. “Keep talkin’.”
“Option two is you let us walk outta here alive, and you take our place with our compliments, and nobody has to clean up no messes and you get to keep the top half of your body.”
For quite a while, things proceed in a very orderly fashion (on the bald man’s orders). The junkie couple—in his stricken brain, Philip is coming to think of them as Sonny and Cher—simply back away slowly from Brian and Penny, allowing Brian to lift the child off the floor and carry her across the front parlor to the door.
The agreement—if you can call it that—is for Philip and his group to simply walk away from the villa, leaving all their things, and that’s that. Brian watches Philip backing out of the house with the shotgun still raised.
