Peck had dragged the foam pad into the mudroom, which still had functioning screens, because the house was too hot and the cross-ventilation from the open windows kept the Hayk Simonian stink at bay. In the dim light of the sixty-watt bulb, he pushed himself up, popped a Xanax, opened the door, took a step down, unzipped, and peed off the side of the back stoop.
As he was doing that, he saw a crack of light to his left, at the barn. And a figure in the light: that fuckin’ Flowers, no question about it.
Caught in midstream, he tried to get back inside the house without peeing on himself, and succeeded, mostly, except for one hand, but did pee all over the foam pad and in the doorway to the main part of the house. At that point, figuring he was near the end anyway, he finished peeing on the kitchen floor, wiped his hands on his pants, and got the rifle.
Getting as close to the kitchen lightbulb as he could, without throwing shadows that might give him away, he carefully extracted the magazine from the bottom of the rifle, cursing himself for not loading it earlier, and began to fumble cartridges into the magazine. He didn’t know exactly how many rounds the magazine would hold, but he managed to press in eight or nine before he knocked the cartridge box off the kitchen counter, and the metallic cartridges hit the floor like a rain of steel bolts.
That panicked him. He tried to shove the magazine into the rifle, but got it backward, couldn’t make it fit, realized what he was doing when he saw the pointed end of the top bullet aimed at his eye. He turned the magazine around and managed to seat it, and he worked the bolt to chamber a round.
Two Xanax-calmed thoughts about Flowers: he had to go because he stood between Peck and his truck; he had to go because the barn was full of live tiger and dead tiger parts and, more troubling, fingerprints left by Winston Peck. The whole quarter-million-dollar dream was going down, but if he could kill Flowers, he could dump the gas cans in the barn and the house and burn them to the ground. That would take care of the prints and any DNA that might be around, as well as the man who had somehow tracked him here.
If he could kill Flowers, he had a chance.
–
Virgil snuck back to the front of the barn to peek at the house, and when he did it, he saw a flicker in the light from the kitchen, and seconds later, the sound of metallic cartridges falling on the floor. He knew the sound because… he and his hunting buddy Johnson Johnson had dropped any number of metallic cartridges on the floor of any number of hunting cabins.
The sound meant that somebody-probably Peck-was loading a gun, which meant that the gun wasn’t quite loaded. Virgil ran as softly as he could to the front of the house, because the kitchen, where the light was, was in the back. He took his gun out and climbed the sagging front porch steps. At the top, he tried to see through the glass rectangle in the front door, but it was dark inside, and he could see nothing. The porch boards creaked underfoot as he moved to the door, and Virgil hesitated, listened, then took another step forward.
When he put his foot down, the porch board collapsed with a noisy clatter, and Virgil went through up to his right thigh. As he struggled to get out of the hole, the boards under his other foot began to crack, and he could go neither up nor down easily. He set his gun aside and tried to pull himself out of the hole with his hands, as if he’d fallen through lake ice.
–
Peck had stepped out on the urine-soaked back stoop, thinking that he might see Flowers either coming or going from the barn. He wasn’t confident of his combat skills, but he had little choice. Flowers had to go and the range would be short. He put the rifle up to his shoulder as he’d seen soldiers do on news broadcasts, wrapped his finger around the trigger, and waited.
And heard Virgil fall through the porch floor.
He knew exactly what had happened, because he’d almost gone through himself. If Flowers had fallen through, he’d be at least temporarily discombobulated, and Peck might shoot him from the range of six feet.
He turned and ran down the side of the house, looked under the porch railing, saw Virgil on his hands and knees. Virgil saw him at exactly the same moment and Peck pushed the gun through the railing directly at Virgil’s chest and pulled the trigger.
The trigger didn’t move and Peck’s brain froze. Virgil saw that, knew what had happened-Peck’s gun’s safety was on, but it could be off again in a quarter second-and launched himself at the front door, smashed it open and rolled inside. Straight ahead was a stairway leading to a second floor and a hallway that led to the kitchen. If he took the hallway, he’d be silhouetted in the thin kitchen light.
He took the stairs.
–
Peck wasn’t as quick on the uptake as Flowers, but realized in the next second that the gun’s safety was on. He thumbed it off and ran around to the porch stairs in time to see Flowers topping the stairs inside, and fired a single shot, wildly off-target; a plume of plaster dust exploded from the ceiling of the second-floor landing, two feet above and three feet to the right of Flowers’s head.
He saw Flowers launch himself into a bedroom. That bedroom was a dead end: he worked the bolt on the rifle, chambering another round, climbed the porch steps, careful now… and kicked Flowers’s pistol. He had an idea of what it was, because Flowers had been clambering out of the hole in the porch with both hands open and hadn’t had time to scoop it up before crashing through the door.
Peck picked up the pistol, thinking it would be handier in an up-close fight, though he knew almost nothing about handguns. He tried to find a safety, failed, and pulled the trigger instead. He’d been holding the gun nearly upright when he did that, not expecting it to go off, and when it did, the recoil not only wrenched his hand backward, but he nearly shot himself in the nose. Additionally, something hit his left eye, like a piece of sand, but a hot, burning piece of sand, and his eye shut of its own accord. When he tried to open it, it flooded with tears.
Worse, when the pistol went off, he’d been so startled he’d dropped it, and it had fallen through the hole in the deck of the porch. He was back to the rifle and half-blinded. He shouted up the stairs, “Hey, Flowers… lose your gun?”
Flowers yelled back, “Can’t talk now, I’m on my cell phone, telling my partner exactly where you’re at and everything that’s happened tonight. You’re fuckin’ toast, asshole. Better give it up or you’re gonna die here.”
Peck pointed the gun at the bedroom door-he could see only an edge of it from the bottom of the stairs-and pulled the trigger, worked the bolt, pointed it again, and pulled the trigger again. His eye hurt like hell, but when he wiped it with his shirtsleeve, the tearing seemed to have stopped, and he got some vision back in that eye.
He worked the bolt again, climbed halfway up the stairs, and fired another shot through the wall of the bedroom.
–
Virgil was lying on the floor under the bedroom window. As long as Peck stayed down the stairs, it’d be hard to get a slug to him. If he came up the stairs, Virgil had a major problem: the bedroom wasn’t much bigger than a modern closet and Peck could stand back and blow holes in it all night long, depending on how much ammo he had. Sooner or later, Virgil would get hit.
And the third shot, because of its angle through the wall, seemed to Virgil to come from the stairway, not from the bottom floor.
He had to move.
–
He waited, waited, and Peck shouted, “Gotcha, Flowers,” and Virgil yelled back, “I don’t believe you do,” and when the fourth shot came through the wall, knowing that Peck would have to work the bolt, he stood up and kicked the rotten double-hung window right out of its frame. He struggled through the window, exposed now, afraid Peck would run down the stairs and catch him, but another shot came through the wall, missing him by three feet. Virgil hung for a moment from the window ledge, looking down in the dark.