he didn’t make a sound. A cluster of pines separated the first and second cabins. I pushed the branches aside to step through them; Doran simply ducked his head and bobbed through. The needles left a sticky sap residue on my hands. We were behind the second cabin when the light inside the next building became visible.
“Is that it?”
Doran didn’t respond. He’d stopped where he was, staring at the cabin as if he didn’t trust it.
“What?” I said, my voice a harsh whisper.
“He knows.”
“Gaglionci?”
Doran nodded and ducked, got low to the ground and stared back up the road at the trailer, then swiveled his head to look at the rest of the cabins. I knelt beside him.
“What are you talking about?”
“The lights. He wouldn’t have left lights on in the cabin. We had the windows blacked out with cloth. He wouldn’t have taken it down unless he wanted someone to think he was there. He’s setting a trap in case I didn’t come back alone.”
Light showed on the road behind us. It was Thor. I could tell that from the look of the headlights and how low they were, trademarks of the small car. Doran had underestimated the time it would take to walk up here along the tracks. We’d gone at a good pace and barely arrived ahead of Thor.
“Shit,” I whispered. “This is too fast.”
Doran said nothing. Staying low to the ground, I moved along the wall of the second cabin after the RX-8’s headlights passed over it. Thor was driving slowly. I came around the edge of the building and knelt beside it. A few shingles, blown off the old roof, lay around my feet. I swept them out of the way and planted my left foot, brought the gun up with both hands, and rested my forearms on my knee. Thor had stopped the RX-8 at the third cabin but hadn’t gotten out yet, leaving the engine idling. The headlights lit up the outside of the cabin, and I leaned forward and stared at it. Nothing changed. The door stayed closed, the light stayed on. If Doran was right, and Gaglionci wasn’t inside, then we were in trouble. Any hope of a surprise was gone now—Gaglionci wouldn’t have missed that car.
“Where would he go?” I said and spun in time to see that Doran was twenty feet away, moving toward the tall reeds that filled the lake basin. I stood to go after him, but in that moment I heard the engine of the RX-8 roar and gravel spin under the tires as Thor hammered the accelerator, and I turned back to see what was happening.
He kept the car in reverse—screamed it backward about ten feet and then cut the wheel, spinning it around to face the trailer. As the car spun he hit the brights, and the beams caught Tommy Gaglionci full in the face as he stepped out of the trees just up the gravel road and lifted a shotgun.
The brights had been a good idea, a last-ditch attempt to disorient Gaglionci, but he still pumped a shell into the chamber and got off a shot that blew a cloud of fiberglass and metal off the front end of the RX-8.
I lifted my Glock and fired, but it was a long distance for a handgun, and I missed wide and low. He heard the shot, saw it kick into the gravel by his feet, and spun and fired the shotgun in my direction, showering wood chips from the cabin wall around me.
I stumbled to the nearest tree, just a few feet away, fell against it, and looked out on the dark road. The RX-8 was motionless, smoke rising off the engine compartment. Maybe the last shot had damaged something critical and frozen the car. I watched and waited for a door to open and Thor to step out, or at least return fire. Instead there was nothing but the thin stream of smoke. The car’s windshield was shattered, Thor nowhere to be found.
I rolled onto my shoulder and looked up the road, searching for Gaglionci. A shadow moved in the trees, but then it was gone. He was working his way down to me through the trees, and I couldn’t see a damn thing. It was a bad position, backed up against the cabin wall with just the one tree offering shelter. I could either move forward, deeper into the trees and toward Gaglionci, or try to get behind the cabin, where Doran had gone.
I’d just made the decision to retreat and move behind the cabin when the RX-8’s engine howled. I looked back in time to see the tires find purchase on the loose gravel road and send the car roaring toward the trees where Gaglionci had been moving. No driver was visible behind the wheel. Thor must be lying beneath the dash, using the car for protection, and driving blind.
Gaglionci spun around a tree no more than thirty feet in front of me and fired the shotgun once more, blowing the remaining shards of the windshield away, but the car didn’t slow. He hesitated for one second before diving back into the trees, and then Thor cut the wheel again and the car hit the pines broadside.
For a few brief seconds everything was quiet and still. There was more smoke rising out of the engine compartment of the car, the radiator probably leaking steam from one of the shotgun blasts, and the headlights cut a crooked swath through the trees, one of them pointed up now, into the sky. Nobody moved near the car. I could see the airbag filling the driver’s window. I stepped around the tree and moved cautiously into the open, looking for Gaglionci and wondering if Thor was dead. Almost at that moment, they both reappeared.
Gaglionci had hit the ground and rolled when he saw the car accelerating toward him. Now he rose again and stepped toward the RX-8 with his shotgun leveled. I lifted my own gun and tried to draw an accurate line on him while he pumped the shotgun, and as he did that Thor rose up in the wrecked car and fired out of the back window, the only one that didn’t have a pine tree in the way.
He took two shots but missed with both, and Gaglionci swung the shotgun back around toward the car and got off another blast that hit the trunk and back window. Then he was stumbling back, sliding down the ditch behind him and into the grass.
I put three rounds into the weeds where he’d disappeared, and then it was quiet again. There had been no sound from Doran, who was probably hiding in the woods somewhere or moving away from the camp. He’d chosen escape at the first possible opportunity. I started up the road at a jog, watching the tall grass and trees where I’d last seen Gaglionci. He didn’t fire at me, but I could hear the rustling and breaking branches as he moved through the woods. I fired blind into the trees again, two shots that had no hope of hitting him. Then the sounds of his retreat were farther away, and he was out of range and lost to the darkness.
I pulled up alongside the RX-8 just as the passenger door popped open and Thor fell out onto the grass. There was blood on his face and on his arms, but he was alive and moving. I knelt to help him up, but he waved me off and used the car as a support while he got back on his feet. He never let his Glock out of his hand. The blood appeared to be from a collection of shallow cuts, not from a gunshot.
“Are you hit?”
He shook his head and wiped at his face with the back of one gloved hand. “Not badly. He was firing buckshot. I took a few pellets, maybe.”
Looking closer, I could see where his jacket was tattered on his left side, blood saturating the fabric along his ribs. He glanced at it, too, but didn’t seem concerned; he was ready to speak when he was cut off by a scream from up the gravel road.
“
Gaglionci had reemerged from the trees, now fifty or sixty yards up the road, beside the trailer. We could see his silhouette against the shape of the building. I started to run as Thor turned and laid his wrist over the roof of the RX-8, and I’d made it only a few steps when I heard the report of his Glock three times, shots that came closer than they should have, firing at that distance in the dark. None of them connected, though, and Gaglionci turned for the trailer, the shotgun rising again. I didn’t even bother to lift my own gun, just kept running, knowing the only chance I had was to make it there before he got inside, knowing also that it wasn’t a real chance, that he was too far ahead, that I would be too late.
Gaglionci opened the door and stepped inside the trailer and fired. I heard the gunshot and shouted as if it had struck me, still running, stumbling now, my feet going too fast for the rest of me. In the same instant as I realized the sound of the shot had been wrong—a harsh crack instead of the throaty roar of the shotgun—Gaglionci tumbled back through the door and hit the ground. The shotgun fell free, and I got my balance back on the loose gravel and ran harder until I was standing above him, my gun pointed at his forehead as he twisted in pain.
“It’s probably a good thing,” Andy Doran said from inside the trailer, “that I was here.”
He was leaning against the door, a revolver in his hand that was aimed at my chest.
