“Hitler did.”
“Bad comparison. They were just waiting for the right guy to come along and tell them it was okay to turn people into bars of soap. Let’s call for backup.”
“Do it,” I said.
He opened his cell phone. “No service,” he said.
“Good. He doesn’t have any, either,” I said. “I don’t think Surrette will do too well on his own. You want the M-1?”
He pulled his .38 from his shoulder holster. “No,” he said. “Streak, even if he puts a bullet through my brain, I’m going to kill him. But if this is my last gig, I want you to make me a promise. Take care of Gretchen. She doesn’t realize how talented and smart she is. She got a crummy deal from the day she came out of the womb, and it’s because her old man was a drunk and a bum.”
“Don’t ever say that, Clete. At least not around me,” I said. I could see the pain in his eyes, and I knew he didn’t understand what I was telling him. “You’re one of the best people on earth,” I said. “No daughter could have a better father. You saved Gretchen’s life, and you saved my life and Molly’s. You changed the lives of dozens of people, maybe hundreds. Don’t you ever speak badly of yourself.”
His eyes were shiny, his face dilated. “Let’s blow up their shit.”
“A big ten-four on that,” I replied.
Clete kicked the back door once, twice, and on the third try, he splintered the wood from the hinges and the dead bolt and knocked the door in on the kitchen floor. Alafair came in behind us. In the living room I could hear Gretchen raking the glass out of a window frame with a hard object before she stepped inside.
The first floor was completely dark. Through the window, I could see the shadows of the trees moving on the lawn, and waves from the lake sliding up on the lighted sand by the marina. I kept hearing the sergeant’s voice inside my head: Their sappers are the best, Loot. They beat the French with the shovel, not the gun. They’re behind you, Loot. They’re coming through the grass.
I felt like someone was pulling off my skin, the way you feel when someone is pointing a gun at you and you’re unarmed. Clete was in front of me. He froze and cocked one fist in the air. He turned and pointed two fingers at his eyes, then at a hallway door that was partially ajar.
I couldn’t concentrate on what he was telling me. I knew our vulnerability did not lie in the basement; it was behind us. You follow the money, I thought. It’s been about money from the beginning. Surrette got rid of Caspian Younger’s daughter so Caspian could appropriate the oil lands she would inherit from a trust fund left by her parents. Surrette got rich by killing Angel Deer Heart, and Caspian got free of his father’s control.
I had no doubt that Asa Surrette and Caspian Younger were joined at the hip. I placed my hand on Clete’s shoulder. He turned and stared into my face, the lines at the corners of his eyes stretched flat. “We have to take them now,” I whispered. “Our back door’s open.”
Wrong choice of words. He shook his head, indicating that he didn’t understand.
“Caspian Younger just inherited his father’s empire,” I whispered. “He’s coming. Maybe he wants to cool out Surrette, too.”
“Caspian is a punk. I don’t buy it,” Clete said.
“He’s a greedy punk,” I replied.
Gretchen approached the door in the hallway from the opposite direction, the AR-15 at port arms, a thirty-round and twenty-round magazine jungle-clipped together and inserted in the rifle’s frame. She moved between us and the door. She cupped one hand on the back of Clete’s neck and pulled his ear close to her mouth. “I think I heard something upstairs. I’m not sure,” she said. “Watch your ass. I’m going down. If I get hit, don’t stop. Go over me and clear the basement.”
“No,” I said to her.
She smiled at me, then opened the door wider with her foot and eased her way down the stairs — fearless, beautiful — a warm odor like flowers brushing past me in the dark.
In only one or two instances have I seen a firefight portrayed realistically in a motion picture. The reason for that artistic failure is simple. The experience is chaotic and terrifying, and the sequence of events is irrational and has no order that you can remember with any degree of clarity. There is nothing dignified about it. The participants leap around like the shadows of stick figures dancing on a cave wall. The instinct to live often overrides morality and humanity, and any sense of the former self disappears into a vortex of fear, pain, and sometimes explosions akin in volume and heat to train engines colliding and blowing apart.
Later, images will come aborning in your sleep that you cannot deal with during your waking hours: shooting a man who is trying to surrender; firing an automatic weapon until the barrel is almost translucent and your hands are shaking so badly you can’t reload; lying paralyzed on your back in the mud while a medic straddles your hips as a lover might, trying to close a sucking chest wound with a cellophane wrapper from a package of cigarettes.
It’s that intense and that fast, all of it irreversibly installed in your unconscious. To relive it and try to reason your way out of it is like trying to reason yourself out of sexual desire or an addiction to opiates.
The first bursts came from somewhere in the corner of the basement and chewed away part of the wall and the ceiling. Then I saw Gretchen begin firing, squeezing off the magazine of .223 rounds at a rate of three or four rounds a second, the brass shell casings jacking into the light, bouncing on the concrete floor.
For Molly, the gunfire within the confines of the basement was deafening and impacted on her skull like a jackhammer. Terry had armed himself first and started shooting at the top of the stairs from behind a concrete pillar. Molly thought she saw Gretchen Horowitz on the steps, firing a semi-automatic rifle, her upper body in shadow, the rounds ricocheting off the pillar, the air filling with dust from the chipped concrete. Albert was trying to raise himself to his knees, the wire rimming his wrists with blood.
Jack Boyd had hidden behind the bedstead, his fingers hooked into the box spring; he was peering over Felicity Louviere’s prone body, his face terrified. “I’m unarmed! I’m not part of this!” he cried. “I was working undercover! You’re gonna hurt innocent people down here!”
Albert tore one hand from the wire, then began freeing his other wrist. The air was thick with smoke and dust, the bare bulbs on the ceiling jiggling in their sockets. Asa Surrette crawled on his hands and knees to the closet and pulled a semi-automatic rifle with a short barrel and a black stock out on the floor. He reached inside again and pulled out an armored vest and a box of rounds and another rifle and two banana-shaped magazines. He still wore his suit coat and sandals and a pale yellow shirt with long-tailed birds on it, like a man who had just gotten off a plane from Hawaii. “Shut your mouth, Jack, and get in the fight,” he said. He slid one of the rifles across the floor.
“Don’t listen to what he says!” Jack Boyd shouted at the stairs. “Ask Caspian! I was trying to help!”
“You lying little shit, get in the fight or die now,” Surrette said.
Jack Boyd crouched lower behind the box spring, his mouth trembling, his flared sideburns powdered with pieces of brick mortar. “Ask her,” he said. “I tried to be kind to her. I respected her. She’ll tell you that. I’m going to come out now. Don’t shoot.”
Surrette was on one knee. He began firing at the stairs while Terry reloaded, the rounds splintering wood out of the ceiling, caroming off the stone walls and whanging against the boiler. Surrette rose to his feet and bolted across the basement, smashing the bulbs in their sockets, dropping the room into darkness. “Thought it would be easy, did you?” he said. “You have no idea of the power that lives within me.”