I slipped in, held the revolver at the ready with two hands. I didn’t always shoot with two hands. I had learned to shoot the Wild West way when I was a kid, and I never dropped it completely. It’s not as accurate, but I can hit pretty much what I shoot at, provided it’s in range and not moving too damn fast.
It was dark inside the house and I couldn’t tell where I was going at first, so I just squatted down and let my eyes adjust to the shadows. I didn’t turn on the little head-beam light, knowing if I did, all I was doing was giving them a little spot target on my forehead. I squatted there with my back against a wall trying not to breathe too loud. After a few minutes I could see better in the dark, make out shapes. It was all furniture as far as I could tell. Rising up, I moved across the floor with the revolver at the ready.
I stopped when a voice said, “Don’t move.”
67
“Jesus Christ, Vanilla,” I said. “You damn near made me mess myself.”
“Better than a bullet in the head,” she said. “Be quiet.”
She took me by the sleeve and pulled me over to a space behind a stack of boxes.
“Why?” I said.
“Now’s not the time,” she said. “I decided to go in with you, and right now, that’s all you need to know. My take is if they have one dog outside, now dead, there might be one inside. They used to always have two. My other take is the guy in the yard isn’t the only one. He was making the perimeter as I arrived. He didn’t see me, but I decided it was best he go. It’s best they all go.”
“How many is all?” I said.
“We’ll determine that as we continue. This storage room leads into a large room. The training room. That’ll be our first stop. And good luck. You’ll need it.”
“Thanks for boosting my spirits.”
“Put the pistol in your pocket, and use the shotgun. Go for heavy firepower if that’s what you got.”
We went out from behind the boxes and across the room, Vanilla leading the way. She moved smooth and silent as a ghost, and when we came to the double-wide doors that led into the big room beyond, we could see light through the cracks and at the bottom of it.
Vanilla spoke so that I could hardly hear her: “Ready.”
“Yes,” I said.
She grabbed the door handle and turned it briskly and threw the door wide. There was a guy in there, a big guy, blond-headed, handsome like a movie star. But unlike a movie star he had a real gun and it was in a shoulder holster. He was sitting at a table with a deck of cards in his hands. When the door popped back, his head snapped around, and when he saw us standing there, he turned in his chair and went for his gun, and while I was still trying to lift mine, Vanilla shot him. Her gun coughed through the silencer, like a patient in a doctor’s office with a finger up his ass. The man in the chair fell back and his feet went up and a spray of blood went up with him. In that moment, a man, the dead man’s card-playing partner, came out of a small room off to the side, zipping up his pants. He saw us. Vanilla shot him through the chest while he still had hold of his zipper.
She stopped by the man who had been in the chair and looked at him. He wasn’t going to wake up and brush himself off. She went over to the other, and I followed after, like a puppy learning from a smarter dog. The man on the floor moaned once, opened one eye, and looked at her. She shot him through the head.
The rest of it was like a bad dream. We cruised quickly across the floor and to the double doors across the way, and Vanilla opened them without hesitation, not loudly, but not like she was still being sneaky. As she opened it, the sounds of popping hit our ears briskly. A moment later, I knew the source of the sounds.
We had stepped into it up to our necks.
It was a large long room, and there were targets at the far end, and there were four shooters taking practice on them. Three men and a woman, all young. When we stepped into the room, they turned.
And so did their guns.
I moved left and Vanilla moved right. I cut down with the shotgun and blasted the girl in her middle. She went back and down and her gun went sliding across the floor. There were two coughs to my right and two men dropped, and I let loose with the twelve-gauge again, and the last man lost his face.
“We’ve made enough noise,” Vanilla said, “so from here on out, it has to happen fast.”
There was a hallway, and it oddly split left and right. She went right without saying a word to me, walking very fast in her sensible shoes. I went left, walking less fast in one of the two pairs of shoes I owned.
I walked with the gun before me. The hallway was narrow and the walls were drab olive, or appeared that way in the near dark. There was some light from little runners near the floor. The hall went on for a long time and then it curved ever so slightly. Eventually, the hall opened up into a circular room. The room was dimly lit and there were martial arts mats on the floor. There were more mats stacked to one side, about five feet high, and across the way was an open door.
A young woman, perhaps twenty, came through the door at a rapid walk. Her long hair was tied back and looked orange in the light. She had on a bulky sweatshirt and sweatpants. She had a gun by her side. She was obviously on a mission, and that mission was me. That shotgun of mine had made so much noise I might as well have been a one-man band.
She lifted her gun with calm deliberation and fired. I was already moving, but the hair on the left side of my head fanned a little. The bullet couldn’t have missed me by more than a micro fragment. It made a sound softer than Vanilla’s gun; it too was silenced. I fired twice, quickly, as I dodged, the reverberation of the shotgun loud in the room.
But she was moving too. She moved like Vanilla moved. Both my shots missed, and as she fired again, I rolled, hit the matted floor, and came up behind the high stack of mats, crouching. The stuffing inside them poofed out as the silencer sneezed again.
I scurried on hands and knees farther behind the mats and put my back against the wall, about middle ways, so I could see both ends of the stack and above. The way the light overhead was set, I could see her shadow fanning around on the floor. She was climbing at a crouch over the top of the mats and was going to be above me, shooting down.
I ducked to the left of the mats, so low I was almost duckwalking, moved as quietly and quickly as possible. I glanced back at her shadow as she rose out of her crouch and was near the edge of the mats, where she expected me to be.
I stepped out from the mats in a nice noiseless move that would have impressed a mouse, lifted the shotgun just as she realized she’d been snookered and was turning to find me. I shot up and hit her in the chest. She made a noise like I had punched her and went off the mat and hit the floor with a loud thump. I couldn’t see her, but I knew I had hit her good. I went around the edge of the mats and saw her lying on the floor on her back, her head propped against the wall. She still had the gun. Her face looked odd in the light. She way trying to figure who in the hell I was. Her brow was covered in sweat. Her lips were tightly clenched together. She was leaking blood all over the place. I could see where her sweatshirt had been ripped and riddled by the blast. She had her gun pointed at me. Her legs were spread out in front of her in a loose manner that made them seem as if they belonged to someone else, just borrowed for the occasion. She had a clear shot. I was about to cut down on her again, and then she lowered the gun. It lay across her lap. Her eyes were looking at me. It took me a moment before I realized she wasn’t seeing anything. I didn’t move for a brief moment, just stood there with my gun pointed at her. She had been an attractive kid.
“Okay,” I said. “That’s how it tumbles. That’s how it goes.”
I was startled to discover I was speaking out loud.
68
I went through the open doorway the woman had passed through and slinked along a wide corridor that was
