Dan had already loaded the arrow and stared intently in the direction of the stairs. Mattie was sure you didn’t say it that way—“loaded the arrow”—but she didn’t know how else to think of it. The rough wooden floor made her knees hurt, but it also creaked and she didn’t want to let the man below know they were there, so she kept still. Dan seemed weirdly calm, even when the footsteps began to clomp up the stairs to get them. It was like he shot terrorists with a homemade bow and arrow every day.
“Think you can hit him before he shoots?” she whispered, her nerves making her talk even when she knew she should be silent. “It might give us time to run.”
Ten-year-old Dan Thibodaux kept his eyes on the stairwell and nodded. Next to her dad, he was the coolest person Mattie Quinn had ever seen.
Quinn and Thibodaux stopped in a small stand of trees whose branches were decorated with life-size models of pirate corpses hanging in metal gibbets. In a morbid juxtaposition, the bodies of five shooting victims, one of them a little girl about Mattie’s age, lay sprawled in the grass among the same trees where they’d fallen in the process of fleeing their killers.
Quinn motioned for Mukhtar to get behind him when he saw one of the shooters enter the four-story wood-sided building that housed the log ride. A second, taller shooter disappeared around the corner.
“Tell me about the inside of that place,” Quinn said, nodding toward the log ride.
“It is tall,” the Iraqi boy whispered. “But apart from where people board the logs to begin their ride, most of the lower interior is scaffolding of wooden beams. There are only two floors. The second floor is at the very top.” He went on to describe the pirate scene inside while peering into the darkness at the building. Finished, he looked back and forth from Quinn to Thibodaux. “There is another door in the back but it is also on the first floor. If they are inside, your children have nowhere to run.”
“I got the tall son of a bitch around the corner,” Thibodaux hissed. “You take care of the one going in the side door. I’ll join you shortly.”
Quinn gave a grim nod, experiencing the white-hot rush he felt in his chest prior to any deadly conflict. These two surely murdered the little girl at his feet. “Wait here,” he said to Mukhtar, before moving out at a steady, silent trot. He had no weapon, but Mattie was in danger. If he had to, he would use his teeth.
Jacques Thibodaux was a very large man, large enough to kill one of these teenage pukes with his bare hands if the opportunity arose. But Hollywood movies notwithstanding, killing was rarely a quiet occurrence. People had a tendency to gurgle or squeak before they actually expired. Sometimes it took a brain a while to come to grips with the fact that it was already dead.
Sporadic gunshots popped and rattled around the park — killers, stalking and slaughtering their prey. A few more shots wouldn’t raise any suspicion. What Jacques couldn’t afford was for the kid to get a word out on his radio that someone had decided to fight back — or worse yet, to tip off the shooter inside and screw up Quinn’s approach.
This had to happen quickly.
As big a man as he was, the Marine could be a feather on the wind when he moved. He made a mental note to thank his sweet bride for making him wear the Sperry Top-Siders instead of his favorite pair of squeaky runners.
A giant paw dwarfed the minuscule Ruger .380 pistol. Standing in the shadows of the dark wood at the edge of the building, he cocked his head to one side, listening intently to try and pinpoint the location of his target. He could hear the idiot humming just around the corner, as if the guy was certain he was at the top of the food chain, with nothing to fear in the world. Thibodaux had gathered himself up to pounce when a flurry of movement in the bushes less than ten feet away caught his eye. At first Thibodaux thought it was Dan and Mattie, but it turned out to be three boys huddled together in the manicured shrubs. They looked to be about the age of his middle sons — somewhere between six and nine. Terrified and obviously separated from their parents, they were caught out in the open, in plain view of the shooter.
Still hidden by the corner of the building, Thibodaux raised his arms to try and get the boys’ attention and warn them without giving away his position. Around the corner the humming stopped.
“Hey little children,” a sneering voice called, thickly accented. “Do you think the shadows hide you? I can smell your piss and see the leaves shaking from here. Come out and maybe I will not hurt you.”
Spellbound, the little boys stared, frozen in place. For a moment Thibodaux feared they might actually comply. He reckoned from the sound of the voice and the scrape of a boot on gravel that the shooter was just around the corner — maybe five feet away and certainly close enough to hit the kids with no problem if he shot.
Thibodaux scoured the ground around him with his good eye, looking for a rock, but found none. With nothing else to throw, he kicked off one of the Top-Siders and threw it at the bushes, startling the kids out of their stupor.
Thibodaux heard another telltale scrape of a shoe as the shooter moved closer to the corner, no doubt trying to set up for a shot. Thibodaux heard him chuckle under his breath as the boys broke from the bushes like frightened rabbits.
The big Marine rolled around the corner with the .380 in his hand, coming face-to-face with the startled shooter. Surprised that anyone had the audacity to fight back, the tall jihadi attempted to backpedal. He held the rifle out with both hands, attempting to use the wooden stock to fend off what must have looked like an oncoming freight train barreling down on top of him in the darkness. Thibodaux swatted the rifle barrel out of the way with one hand as he brought the little pistol up directly under the shooter’s chin, depositing three of its seven rounds in rapid succession.
The terrorist’s eyes flew wide open as the bullets tore through his tongue. Three copper-jacketed lead slugs punched through his soft palate and sinuses to lodge in the slurry of bone fragment, blood, and gray matter that had moments before been his brain. Thibodaux grabbed the action of the little M1 carbine as the dead jihadi toppled straight backward like a felled tree.
“And that,” the Marine said to the lifeless body as he tucked the little .380 back in the pocket of his board shorts and shouldered the carbine, “is why I call it my gun-gettin’ gun.”
Chapter 9
“He’s coming,” Dan Thibodaux whispered. Mattie could see sweat beading on her friend’s forehead, but his breathing was steady, still oddly calm. He raised the white PVC bow and aimed the bamboo arrow at the open doorway. The footsteps grew louder on the stairs. “Get ready to run,” he whispered.
A new log came through the black opening at the far edge of the building, splashing with a loud whoosh into the water, bumping and clunking along the side of the flume as it bobbed by between the kids and the opposite door.
Mattie tried to squish herself into a ball, getting as low as possible while keeping both feet flat on the floor. She had already decided she was going to run no matter what happened. One of her earliest memories was of her dad giving her the “Stranger Danger” talk — warning her about what to do if someone tried to kidnap her. Her dad said she should always run. There was a chance the bad guy wouldn’t even hit you if he did decide to shoot. And if he did actually hit you, it wouldn’t be like the movies. The chances you wouldn’t die were a lot better than if you just stood there like a helpless target.
Sometimes, though, it was hard to be anything else.
Mattie clenched her eyes as the steps got closer. Water in the flume sloshed, bringing the log closer with a series of hollow thuds.