As the door splintered, Letty screamed a last time, “Mom, Mom, run in the apartment, run in the apartment, block the door…”
Then she turned and ran toward her parents’ bedroom.
Tres came through the door first, the four-by-four discarded on the stoop, a Mac-10 in his hand. Martinez was a step behind him with a nine-millimeter handgun. Tres scanned to his left, toward the main part of the house, which may have saved Letty’s life, because he did not instantly pick up on her as she fled along the open hallway above the living room. As it was, he got off one burst, which peppered the wall behind her-almost missing.
But not quite. One nine-millimeter slug hit her left forearm, broke the bone, and blew bloody tissue onto the wall behind it; the pain was intense, but she’d been hurt before and didn’t slow down. Sam’s room was halfway down the hall, on the right, and as she passed his door, she could see him staring at his video game, oblivious to the screaming. She reached out with her good hand and yanked the door shut and went on down to the master bedroom.
Weather was in the kitchen with the baby. Martinez and Tres couldn’t see her, but they heard her when she knocked over a chair as she ran toward the back stairs, up to the housekeeper’s apartment over the garage.
Martinez snapped at Tres, “Take the girl,” and Tres ran that way, toward the stairs, as Martinez ran toward the kitchen. She expected Davenport to appear, and ran awkwardly, with the pistol extended in front of her, toward the kitchen.
In the bedroom, Letty pulled open the bottom drawer of Lucas’s bedside stand, forced herself to calmly go through the quick two-finger-three-finger-two-finger sequence of Lucas’s pistol safe’s combination lock.
Had to get it right the first time and she did it deliberately, even as she heard the footsteps on the stairs, the man with the machine gun…
Tres ran up the stairs and saw the bloody splotch on the wall, and heard the girl in the far bedroom. He smiled and slowed his step: it was over.
Letty looked and mostly behaved like a young upper-middle-class girl, but she’d grown up so desperately poor, in the far-northern Minnesota backcountry, her father long gone, her mother a helpless and hopeless alcoholic.
She had, as a child, learned to fend for herself trapping muskrats off the local swamps, for grocery money. Pushed to the wall, she’d had no problem with killing, either muskrats or people. Davenport met her on a murder investigation, during which her mother had been murdered. He and Weather had later adopted her.
The early desperation had marked her, indelibly. She did all the things that young girls now did, texted and Tweeted and Facebooked, fretted over lip glosses and uncurling her hair, and a few other things as well. When Lucas went to the range to work with his pistols, she went along as often as she could.
And she had an ability.
With her left arm dangling at her side, she used her right hand to do the two-three-two-finger sequence, meant for rapid access to the pistol, and there was the Gold Cup Colt.45. She picked it up and slapped the butt against her thigh, to make sure the magazine was well seated, then, holding the stock between her knees, used her good hand to jack a shell into the chamber. There was a second magazine in the safe, and she stuffed it in her back jeans pocket, gripped the pistol, and turned back toward the door.
All of it, from the time she’d shouted at Weather to the time she turned toward the door, had taken no more than eight or ten seconds; perhaps not that. But she could hear the gunman pounding up the stairs, and she ran toward him, heard him coming down the hallway, lifted the pistol eye-high, stepped sideways, and saw him.
Right there.
Eight feet and coming fast, but his gun pointed sideways toward the bloody wall. He wouldn’t have done it that way if he’d believed Lucas was upstairs. He would have moved more slowly with the pistol up.
As it was, he had just tensed his diaphragm for what would have been a grunt of surprise, but he never got it out. Tres never had a chance to talk to his saints, to see that their prediction of his early death would be correct. Before he could begin any of that, Letty, shooting for the white spot in his left eye, pulled the shot a bit and sent the.45 slug through the bridge of his nose. As she stepped over his dead, falling body, she shot him a second and third time in the heart.
Letty spent no time worrying about the Mexican boy: he was dead. She heard a burst of shots, one at a time but fast, from the stairs to the housekeeper’s apartment above the garage, and she went that way, running lightly, quietly, down the stairs, turning the corner, through the living room and kitchen, to the bottom of the stairs, and then up.
Martinez had gone into the kitchen expecting a close-up shoot-out with Davenport, but the kitchen was empty. At the same time, she heard somebody running in the back, and she followed the noise, pushing the pistol out ahead of her, as she’d been trained, found a door going into the garage and a carpeted stairway going up.
She heard a door slam at the top of the stairs, but took just a second to pop the garage door and look inside the garage. There were two cars, but no sign of life. She ran up the stairs, heard a heavy
She heard Weather scream something, and she kicked at the door, but it didn’t budge, and she fired five shots at the doorknob and lock, and then kicked it, but unlike the usual Hollywood-movie sequence, the door remained closed.
Frustrated, she emptied the gun at the door, ejected the magazine, and fumbled another magazine from her jacket pocket.
A woman’s voice, on the stairs, said, “Hey.”
Letty was halfway up the stairs when she saw Martinez empty the gun at the door and jack out the magazine. She said, “Hey.”
Martinez turned, jerking her head around, saw Letty there, with the big.45 in her hand. Tres, she barely had time to think, must have failed. She blurted, “I have no gun. I am empty.”
She dropped the pistol and the magazine.
Letty said, “Bullshit. You tried to kill my mom and my little sister.”
She shot Martinez in the heart. Martinez didn’t go down, but staggered backward, a shocked look on her face. She lifted her hand, and Letty shot her again, in the heart, and Martinez sagged but still brought the hand up, as if to fend off the bullets. They were now only six feet apart, and Letty shot her a third time, in the face, and then Martinez slid down the wall, leaving behind a smear of blood. Letty screamed, “Mom, are you all right?”
“We’re all right,” Weather shouted back. “We’re all right.”
“Stay there,” Letty shouted. “Call nine-one-one, call nine-one-one.” The housekeeper had a hardwired phone in her room.
The pistol was empty. She ejected the magazine and slapped in the second one, and followed the muzzle down the stairs. Were there more of them, out in a car? She crawled into the kitchen, took Weather’s cell phone off the kitchen counter, crawled back to the stairway where she could make a stand, if necessary, and, with her good thumb, punched Lucas’s call icon.
He came up five seconds later, and she shouted, “Dad, Dad, we’ve got a problem, Dad….”
Lucas said he’d be there, and she believed him. Nobody else came through the door. She crawled up to the kitchen doorway, sat with the gun, not at all in shock, feeling not bad, but feeling ready.
Two dead, and she felt not bad at all, except for the ache in her arm. She looked down at it, vaguely surprised by the damage: she knew she’d been hit, but blood was draining out of the wound, so she pressed it against her shirt and looked back toward the door.
