displayed in a locked glass case.
Wishing he could draw Happy aside, Godo wanted to tell him that Thumper here, Mr. Chuckles, he may have recognized his voice. The original plan had called for Happy to talk, maybe Efraim, no one else, precisely because the guy could make everybody else. That’s what happens, Godo thought, when things get rocked on the fly. The endgame blurs, you miss the most goddamn obvious things. Then again there was the weapon, he may have figured it out from that alone, though one AK looked pretty much like the next. He’s not going to the law, he reminded himself. Too much to lose, too much he’d have to lie about. Which meant if this thing went south, it wouldn’t be later, it wouldn’t be cops, it would be right here, in this room.
He didn’t see a safe. The paneling had no obvious defects to suggest a false wall, the gun cabinet hid nothing. That left the rug. With Happy training the Glock on the girl, Chuck slumped in the desk chair looking on, Godo shouldered the desk aside, lifted the rug, found the cutout square in the concrete, a notch for a hand grip, the wavy outline of the newer cement like a water stain. Figuring the thing was booby-trapped, he dragged Chuckles from his swivel chair, dropped him near the hidey-hole and cocked the.25.
“Open the safe but don’t reach inside. You do, I blow the back of your head open. And my buddy here does your girl.”
His right arm weakened, the bandage seeping blood, Chuck struggled with his left to lift the heavy concrete panel-one try, two, barely budging it upward. Godo leaned down, flipped the back of Chuck’s ear with the pistol’s snub barrel, then pressed it to the hollow at the back of his skull. “You’re not fooling anybody.”
The man went back to his task, redoubled his effort or pretended to, hefting the concrete slab out of its form-fit hole, pushing it aside with a wincing grunt. The safe lay below, bearing a nameplate: Churchill. It had taken some real work, Godo thought, cutting through the old floor, digging a hole deep enough, planting the safe, squaring it plumb in the hole, reworking the cement. He wondered if Chuck had done it all himself. He seemed the type, industrious, thorough, paranoid.
“Open it up now.”
Reaching down, Chuck leaned to the side a little for the sake of the light, making sure he could see the numbers on the dial as he worked the tumblers, clumsy again, left-handed. His daughter, in Happy’s grip, shuddered and blinked, watching closely like everyone else. Three alternating spins, a pull of the lever, he drew back the door. Figuring there was a gun inside for just this sort of situation, Godo pressed the.25 to the man’s head. “Back on out, sit down.”
The man crabbed his way to the swivel chair and dropped into it, his breathing shallow and rough, the bloodstains on his sleeve and pant leg larger now. Godo gestured for Happy to bring the daughter over, sit her on her father’s lap, and as she got dragged from one spot to the other he noticed, for the first time, the Rorschach of dampness in the crotch of her pajamas. He felt a sudden meek sympathy. He remembered blowing ballast his first time in combat, Al Gharraf, his MOPP suit drenched with piss. Some guys in his unit crapped themselves. The indignities of war. Of warriors.
He lifted the barrel of the.25 until it was level with the bridge of the contractor’s nose. “You got that safe rigged-there a trip wire, a flash-bang, anything else in that hole-you better tell me now.”
Dry-mouthed still, Chuck worked his tongue around, trying to talk. His girl sat perched on his knee, gazing at the floor. Ashamed. Don’t be, Godo wanted to tell her. He traded glances with Happy, stepping back and letting the.25 drop as his cousin lifted the Glock in its place, pressed it to the contractor’s head and spoke for the first time Godo could remember since the start of the robbery.
“Anything goes off,” he said, “you die. And I promise, the girl gets it too, the wife, cleaning lady, everybody. You got one way out. Take it.”
The girl started crying again, breathy tears, eyes shut tight, like she was trying to catch herself, hold back. Godo flashed on a house raid in Fallujah, the unit acting on a tip about a weapons cache, finding only a Shia woman with facial tattoos, a line of big colored dots along her chin and eyebrows, standing in the kitchen with her simpleton daughter who wore a shabby white linen dress and bit her arm to stifle her sobs, trying to be brave as the marines tore her home apart. Something about this girl here, Sammi her dad called her, she was the portal. Then became now, the claustrophobic shadows and the adrenalin fever and the smell of lentils and goat fat and mint, all of it, flooding his senses. Don’t do this, he thought, trying to shake it off, but it was already too late. The misgiving and dread lingered. They belonged.
“There’s a sensor,” Chuck said finally. The anger remained but it swam around in his eyes untethered. “Sets off a frag grenade inside the hole. Hit the switch just inside and on the top, push it back. That clears it.”
Godo studied him a second, looking for deceit, then lifted the Kalashnikov’s strap from around his neck, set the rifle on the floor, went to the hole, knelt down, peered inside. “I don’t see a switch.”
“It’s tucked inside the door. On top like I said. Have to feel for it.”
Godo checked that Happy had his gun up, hammer back. Godo reached down, put his hand inside the safe, curled his hand up and around, felt for the toggle. Just as a sixth sense told him no, back out, the flash went off, blinding him. The explosion came next, that fraction of a second that saved him, otherwise the hand would be no hand. Still, he felt the scorching wave rip through the glove and his skin caught fire or seemed to, the strange gum- stretch of time with its impersonal calm even as he knew he was yowling with pain, the gravity of shock and a muddy ring in his head, the after-blast, through which he could hear a fleshy drumming tock, the rotors of the little bird chopper overhead and he braced for the storm of dust, until he understood the sound was just blood, pulsing in his ears. He feared he might weep. He could make out scuffling, the Glock’s fierce crack, once, twice, and he snapped back through the funnel of time to now, then glass shattering, the gun cabinet, the barklike grunts of hand-to-hand, Happy and Chuck going at it, the thud of flesh against something hard, the side of a skull maybe, a throaty cry of pain and then the Glock again, three times now.
It got quiet.
The hand, his right, felt like he’d boiled it, fingers clenched so tight, a claw. His ears kept humming, a keening pitch, punctuated by the strangled howls of the girl, almost inhuman now, muffled by the tape gag she’d half worked loose just by screaming.
He blinked, tried to see but there was just a wincing blur, things shifting, outlines stripped apart and bleeding color. He waved his hand through the vaporous muck. In time he could make out Happy, upright, mostly so, leaning against the cabinet with its sawtooth glass, all broken, the girl in her pajamas huddled nearby. Happy’s sleeve was dark and that meant blood. His chest bellowed in and out as he tried to draw breath through the balaclava’s soggy black wool.
No sign of the contractor. Had he run?
He felt it first, the foot. He nudged it trying to stand, gathered his balance, saw the man finally, sprawled on the floor facedown, one side of his face a bloody knit of ripped flesh and jagged bone. Close-quarter impact from the Glock, Godo could put that together at least. One of the shotguns lay just beyond the dead man’s hand and Godo figured he’d pushed the girl up from his lap for distraction, shoved her into Happy, reached for the rack, pulled the weapon down.
Godo heard himself say, “You all right?”
Happy looked at his sleeve as though discovering for the first time he had an arm. “Cut it on the glass.” He pressed his hand to the bloody cloth. “You?”
PERCHED IN THE VAN’S PASSENGER SEAT, CHATO COULDN’T HELP HIMSELF, lifting his hand to slap high fives, grinning like the luckiest guy alive. Puchi, behind the wheel, obliged him distractedly, offering him a raised palm. Godo and Happy, the wounded, sat in back with Efraim, who rummaged through the duffel bags filled with weapons they’d taken off the walls of the cellar room. They’d left the safe alone-why risk a second blast?-even passed on the desk and the display cabinet, anything with a door, not worth it, scrambling to grab what was there in plain view. But that was a haul. They’d come for weapons and needed something to show for their trouble. They’d left the girl and the two women tied hand and foot, made sure their gags were tight, gathered up all the cell phones and cut the cord on every landline they found.
Happy, squeezing the cut on his arm, trying to stanch the blood, thought of Lourdes. Asking her to bear up with just a robbery in the picture was one thing, especially given who the target was, but they’d left a body behind and it wasn’t just Happy the law would come after. The whole crew was looking at felony homicide. That’d wipe the smile off Chato’s face, once he got his head around what it meant. And sure, Crockett was small-time, locals hadn’t seen this big a thing in who knew how long, but that just meant they’d call in the wise men. Word would reach Lattimore faster than rats up a rope. And they’d grind poor Lourdes down, no way she’d hold out. And that meant no
