the size of my fist. I rose off my knee but slipped on the wet grass and heard glass tinkling to my left.
I spun and fired over the porch banister into the window, blew the glass and frame to pieces, ripped a hole in the dark curtain.
Inside the house, someone screamed.
The gunfire had stopped. Echoes of the shotgun blasts and the chatter of the automatic weapon stormed through my head.
Angie was on her knees by the bottom of the steps, a tight grimace on her face,.38 pointed at the hole in the door.
“You all right?” I said.
“My ankle’s fucked up.”
“Shot?”
She shook her head, her eyes never leaving the door. “I think it snapped when you pushed me to the ground.” She took a long breath through pursed lips.
“Snapped as in broken?”
She nodded, sucked in another breath.
Poole moaned, and blood slid from the corner of his mouth in a bright, swift current.
“I have to get him off the porch,” I said.
Angie nodded. “I’ll cover.”
I laid the shotgun on the wet grass and reached up, grabbed the top of the banister Poole had bent back when his body had slammed into it. I put my foot against the foundation of the porch and pulled down, felt the base of the banister wrench away from the rotted wood. I gave it another hard pull and the banister and half the railing ripped away from the porch. Poole tumbled back into me, knocked me to the wet grass.
He moaned again and writhed in my arms, and I slid out from under him, saw the curtain in the right window move.
I said, “Angie,” but she’d already pivoted. She fired three rounds into the window and glass spit out of the frame, showered to the porch.
I crouched by the low bushes along the foundation, but no one returned fire and Poole’s back arched off the lawn and a mist of blood burst from his lips.
Angie lowered her gun, took one last long look at the door and the windows, then scrambled across the walk toward us on her knees, her left ankle twisted and held aloft as she pulled herself forward. I drew my.45, pointed over her as she crawled past, and then slid over to the other side of Poole.
Another eruption of automatic weapon fire tore through the back of the house.
“Broussard.” Poole spit the word as he grabbed Angie’s arm, his heels kicking at the grass.
Angie looked at me.
“Broussard,” Poole said again, a thick gurgle in his throat, his back arching off the grass.
Angie pulled her sweatshirt over her head, pressed it to the dark fountain of blood in the center of Poole’s chest. “Sssh.” She placed a hand on his cheek. “Sssh.”
Whoever was firing in the back of the house had a huge clip. For a full twenty seconds, I could hear the staccato screech of that gun. There was a brief pause, then it started again. I wasn’t sure if it was the Calico or some other automatic weapon, but it didn’t make much difference. A machine gun is a machine gun.
I closed my eyes for just a second, swallowed against a painfully dry throat, felt the adrenaline wash through my blood like toxic fuel.
“Patrick,” Angie said, “don’t even fucking think about it.”
I knew if I looked back at her, I’d never leave that lawn. Somewhere in the back of that house, Broussard was pinned down or worse. Samuel Pietro could be in there, bullets flying around his body like hornets.
“Patrick!” Angie screamed, but I’d already vaulted the three steps and landed on the crevice where the two sides of the ruined porch met.
The doorknob had been blown off in the ambush on Poole, and I kicked the door open and fired at chest level into the dark room. I spun right, then left, and emptied my clip, dropped it out of the butt and slammed a fresh one home as it hit the floor. The room was empty.
“Need immediate assistance,” Angie screamed into the cell phone behind me. “Officer down! Officer down!”
The inside of the house was a dark gray that matched the sky outside. I noticed a swath of blood on the floor that had come from a body dragging itself into the hallway. At the other end of the hall, light poured through bullet holes in the back door. The door itself dipped toward the ground, its lower hinge blown off the jamb.
Halfway down the hall, the swath of blood broke to the right and disappeared through the kitchen doorway. I turned in the living room, checked the shadows, saw the broken glass under the windows, the pieces of wood and curtain fabric that had come apart in the gun blasts, an old couch spilling stuffing and littered with beer cans.
The automatic gunfire had ceased as soon as I’d entered the house, and for the moment all I heard was the rain spitting against the porch behind me, the ticking of a clock somewhere in the back of the house, and the sound of my own breathing, shallow and ragged.
The floorboards creaked as I made my way across the living room, followed the blood into the hall. Sweat poured down my face and softened my hands as my eyes darted from the door at the end of the hall to the four separate doorways that lay ahead of me in the narrow corridor. The one ten feet up on my right was the kitchen. The one on the left spilled yellow light into the hall.
I flattened myself against the right wall and inched along until I had a partially obstructed view of the room to the left. It appeared to be a sitting room of some kind. Two chairs were positioned on either side of a wine cabinet built into the wall. One was the recliner I’d been able to make out in the dark last night. The other matched it. The wine cabinet hung in the center of the wall and the glass casing that usually ran over the shelves had been removed. The shelves were filled with stacks of newspaper and glossy magazines, and several more magazines were stacked on the floor beside the chairs. Two old-fashioned pewter ashtrays in three-foot stands stood by the arms of the leather chairs, and a half-smoked cigar still smoldered in one. I stood pressed against the wall, my gun pointed at the right side of that room, watching for moving shadows, listening for creaks on the floorboards.
Nothing.
I took two tight steps across the hall, pinned myself against the other wall, and pointed my gun into the kitchen.
The black-and-white tile floor glistened with streaks of blood and viscera. Wet hand prints, tinged a bright orange under the harsh fluorescent, stained the cupboards and refrigerator door. I saw a shadow spill out from the right side of the room, heard a ragged breathing that wasn’t my own.
I took a long, deep breath, counted down from three, and then jumped across to the other side of the doorway, saw in a flash that the reading room to my right was empty, stared down the barrel of my gun at Leon Trett sitting up on the kitchen counter, his eyes fastened on me.
One of the Calico M-110s lay just inside the doorway. I kicked it under the table to my right as I entered.
Leon watched me come with a pained grin on his face. He’d shaved, and his soft, curdled skin had an unhealthy, raw sheen to it, as if the flesh had been scraped with a wire brush and then lathered in oil, as if it could be lifted from the bone with a spoon. Without the beard, his face was longer than it had appeared last night, the cheeks so sunken his mouth was a perpetual oval.
His left arm hung useless by his side, a hole pumping dark blood from the biceps. His right arm was crossed over his abdomen, trying to hold his intestines in. His tan trousers were saturated with his own blood.
“Come to give me my clips?” he said.
I shook my head.
“Got some of my own this morning.”
I shrugged.
“Who are you?” he said in a soft voice, his right eyebrow cocked.
“Down on the floor,” I said.
He grunted. “Sweetie, you see me holding my guts in up here? How’m I supposed to move and keep them in?”
“Not my problem,” I said. “Down on the floor.”
