truck the man behind the Chevrolet rose into a crouch. He was holding a silvered revolver with a stubby barrel but he had the advantage of short range.
He fired three shots, the second of which hit Scott in the back. I’ll never forget the look of sheer surprise on the kid’s face. He stumbled over his own feet and began to stagger.
“Shit,” I muttered.
Aimee, who’d just reached the safety of the hallway, turned as I spoke. When she caught sight of Scott she started screaming.
I moved out fast onto the porch, aware that almost anything was better than staying close to that noise. Scott had made it halfway to us but he was losing momentum and direction. The man behind the Chevrolet had risen into plain sight and was steadying his aim for another shot.
I ran across the grass until I was up against the solid front end of the Dodge and shot the man on the other side of the Chevy, just once, about half an inch below his right eye. He fell back behind the car and didn’t come up again. I hadn’t expected him to.
His mates took that as their cue to open fire but I’d lost interest in this uneven game. I turned back for the house, ducking my shoulder under Scott’s arm as I ran past him, just as his legs gave out and he started to sag. I swept him forwards, using all my strength to keep him on his feet. Xander ventured out as far as the porch steps to help take the load. The bullets seemed to be raining down all around us. How the hell could they keep missing?
We all burst through the narrow doorway into the hall and fell onto the tiles. Aimee slammed the door shut behind us, turning the locks firmly like that was going to keep them out.
“Shit man, who
Aimee had bent and was clutching Scott’s hand as he thrashed and twisted. Her eyes were shimmering with tears. “
I knelt in front of Scott who was sprawled where he’d landed, half on his side, propped against the wall to the kitchen. He was still conscious and crying with the pain.
I eased his hands away from his body. The bullet had left a small but messy entry hole just behind his left hip. There was no exit wound, but that didn’t make it any better. He was losing blood at a rate that meant most of the loose rug in the hallway was already greasy with it.
“We need to get him away from the door,” I said. Xander and Aimee’s faces were grey with shock. Suddenly this adventure game had cracked back and bitten them, big style. It wasn’t fair. “Scott, you’re going to have to move now.”
“No-o,” he wept, writhing when we tried to get him up. In the end we just grabbed the edges of the rug and dragged it, with him on top, through the door into the tiny bathroom. He mewled at every jolt.
I gathered all the towels I could find from the rail and used them to pack onto the wound. They were pale colours that turned almost instantly scarlet. “Here,” I said to Aimee and Xander. “Lean on the towel, keep it pressed hard onto his hip. Like this.”
My demonstration was met with a squeal of protest from Scott. His legs threshed weakly.
“You’re hurting him!” Xander objected.
“It’ll do more than hurt him if we don’t stop the bleeding,” I shot back. “Keep it pressed on – as hard as you can. And call the cops.”
Xander glanced at me sharply, but he nodded and flicked his mobile phone out of his pocket. I heard him already speaking to the dispatcher as I got up and moved past Trey, who was still in the hallway, staring at his injured friend.
“For God’s sake stay down and keep out of sight of any of the windows,” I told him.
I tiptoed round the house, skirting Henry’s corpse to peer carefully out of the broken window in that room. Outside it had all gone quiet again. The kitchen looked out onto the front porch but from that angle I couldn’t see if the man I’d hit was still lying behind the Chevrolet.
I cursed myself then for shooting him dead. At the time my only thought had been to save Scott’s life, but wounding the man would have been a far better strategy. That way his comrades would have had to tie up manpower and resources to either get him away from the scene, or treat him there, as we were doing with Scott. Killing the gunman outright meant they could forget about him until the fight was over.
Which, by the looks of things, wasn’t going to take long.
“The cops are on their way,” Xander said, the strain clear in his voice. “They said to just sit tight and wait for them to get here.”
I nodded. I was waiting for our opponents to make the first move in any case and it wasn’t a lengthy wait. Just as I started to move back out of the kitchen again the first of the shots came, half a dozen of them in a random pattern straight through the front door. I dived across the hallway and landed half on top of Trey, keeping him flattened down hard onto the floor.
After the pandemonium came an eerie silence, broken only by Scott’s quiet moaning.
Then a voice I didn’t recognise shouted, “Hey, Fox, we want you and the kid. Come on out and the others get off.”
I lifted my head. “And if we don’t?” I yelled back.
I could almost hear the man shrug. “Makes no difference to us.”
I shuffled round until I could look at the bullet holes in the door again. Sunlight shafted through them, highlighting the dust motes that drifted and spun inside the hallway. The holes ranged from a couple of feet off the ground to head height. If we’d been standing they would have hit us. Not exactly warning shots, then.
I hutched back into the bathroom. Xander and Aimee both had their eyes fixed on me. They were still keeping the balled-up towels hard against Scott’s hip, their hands bloody with their efforts. Scott protested less, now. His face had turned almost as pale as his hair and pearls of sweat had formed on his forehead, sliding sideways to the floor.
“The cops are on their way,” I called to the men outside, hoping that their need not to be apprehended was greater than their need to kill us.
The man on the other side of the door just laughed. “I know,” he said, almost lazy with it. “Actually, Charlie, we’re already here.”
For a moment I was stilled by my own surprise, then I scrambled across the hallway into the kitchen and risked a peek through the window. Outside, behind Scott’s pickup, stood a good-looking man I recognised instantly. Even without his trademark Oakley eyejackets.
He wasn’t in uniform, like the first time I’d seen him at the house in Fort Lauderdale. Neither was he in casual dress, as at the theme park. Today was different. Today Oakley man was wearing a dark suit and white shirt like the other two men alongside him. Brought a whole new meaning to the phrase dressed to kill.
I looked at the others while I had the chance, but I knew I hadn’t seen either of them before. One was short and stocky, with pale gingery-blond hair. The other guy was dark skinned, slightly Hispanic, with a pencil-thin moustache across his upper lip and a single gold hoop in his left ear. I wondered if all three of them were cops and just how they were planning on explaining the dead man behind the Chevrolet.
I dropped back below the level of the kitchen cabinets. Through the doorway I could see Scott had started to twitch, going almost into convulsions. I could hear Aimee’s voice taking on an edge of panic as she whispered to Xander.
I crawled back through to the bathroom.
“It’s the same guy,” I said to Trey. He didn’t need to ask who I meant. The fear froze his face into a tight mask across his bones. “We’re going to have to give ourselves up.”
He hesitated, just fractionally, then nodded once, not arguing about it.
“OK,” I shouted. “I’ll bring Trey out, but only if you let us get the kid who’s injured out of here first.”
“You’re in no position to bargain,” Oakley man shouted back.
“That’s true, but if you have to shoot us out of here you’re likely to lose more men. This way’s easier.”
There was a pause, as though he was weighing up the merit of what I’d had to say. His voice matched his appearance, I realised. I didn’t know enough about American accents to pinpoint his origins, but it sounded educated. The kind of voice I would have expected from that attractive collection of features.
“OK, Charlie,” he said at last. “Come on out and we won’t stop the others leaving.”
