Raphino still held his gun out in front of him. He entered with sweat on his brow, and spoke before surveying the room.
“Place is clear,” he said. “It’s just us.”
Immediately after the words came out, like a rebuttal to the declaration, a fourth man took one swift step through the door and put a gun to Raphino’s head. This man was young—in his twenties, probably—and had a cleanly shaven head. He stood behind Raphino at arm’s length and rested the muzzle of the gun on the back of his head. I hadn’t met him, or if I had, I didn’t recognize him. He came from nowhere.
“Kill him,” Vince said calmly. “Blow him away.”
My pistol swung from Vince to the new man, moving on its own. It was there immediately after Vince uttered the words, before they were even out of his mouth. It snapped to aim at his bald head. Time sped up now. I only tried to keep up.
I know I shot first. That’s one of the few things I know about what happened next. I shot first, and my shot was followed by dozens of others—from Raphino, from Vince’s shotgun, maybe from the fourth man’s weapon but probably not. My shot was what started it. Thankfully I hit him.
The pistol kicked back and more shots reverberated around the room, louder than I could have imagined, making my ears ring. I hit him because I was lucky, not because I should have hit him; I knew my way around a gun just as well as I knew my way around a cattle farm. But I hit him, right in the side of the neck, and he gagged and his bald head dropped and his gun jerked from Raphino’s head without firing, and after that small miracle then the room was a volley of gunfire. I hit the floor—instinctively, my sense of self-preservation raging in search of cover—and squeezed the trigger in the direction of the desk where Vince sat. My eyes weren’t open, I don’t think. I squeezed the trigger, one, two, three, four times, and more, until the empty chamber only clicked. The gun kicked like a mule, even held with two hands.
I came to my senses when the gunfire had stopped. My ears rang loudly. I don’t know how much time passed. A few seconds. Minutes, maybe. Each man was on the ground. I took inventory of my body—everything was still there. I could not find a hole or a wound or blood on my body. My grandfather had once described being hit in World War II—he ran five hundred feet across the battlefield before realizing he was bleeding from a bullet wound in his thigh. I couldn’t feel anything. My skin was numb.
Raphino was the first to get up. He crawled out of the doorway where he lay prone, then got up to a crouching position. He moved over toward me, still crouching, and checked if I was alive. He said something I couldn’t hear. I couldn’t hear anything, just a dull ring. Raphino looked in my face, then at my body. He nodded, satisfied, and went to check the man who had entered last.
57
They were both dead, or at least close enough. The nameless fourth man could have been clinging to life. It was hard to tell. As he lay on his back with dark blood pooling beneath his head and neck, a gurgling sound came from his throat. I noticed small holes from shotgun pellets in his sweatshirt. His eyes were open wide and lifeless. Raphino put a bullet in his chest.
Vince was slumped behind the desk, having fallen out of the chair. There were bullets in his chest, stomach, and left arm. Nothing on him moved. He was dead.
I did my best to stay on my feet, swaying from side to side and fighting off waves of nausea. I stood in a half-bended hunch and Raphino went to work. He took my pistol and wiped the handle on his shirt, then set it on the floor by Vince’s body. The decorative wooden walls of the office were splattered with blood in places. Boards were splintered where bullets hit. It was a warzone. Raphino gingerly removed his jacked to reveal a red stained shirt. I panicked at the sight, but he told me he was fine. He gritted his teeth as he peeled off the t-shirt, then instructed me to tie it around his right arm. I couldn’t tell where it was bleeding.
“Caught a few pellets,” he said through a grimace. “Coulda been a lot worse.”
He grunted as I pulled the shirt tight. We walked out the front door.
I did a second inventory on my body. No wounds. Lucky.
“You’re lucky,” Raphino said.
We walked to his car and he drove with one arm. Down the dark streets, winding down the mountainside, faster than we had come. Raphino laid out the plan. He would drop me at my car and drive himself to the hospital. I would disappear. He would face the music.
“You were never there tonight,” he said, staring out over the headlights on dark pavement. “That part should be easy; there’s nothing tying you to this area, other than your name on an apartment lease. No official documents for Murray, everything off the books. Right?”
“Right.” My hands were still trembling.
“You don’t go back to your apartment, ever. You get in your car and point a direction, then drive until you can’t anymore. I don’t give a damn which direction it is. Understand?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t worry about your things. You don’t need them. People skip leases all the time. You drive until you’re far away from here, and you never come back. You tell no one about tonight. As far as you know, it never happened. No one. Not your family, not your girl. No one.”
“Got it.”
“I went into that house alone, investigating a noise complaint.” He was forming the story as he told it to himself. “Front door was open, I made my way to the back, the two of them were arguing over something, then just started shooting.”
“Will it hold up?”
“Gotta try. I’m hardly ever on radio, so that won’t tip anyone off. Just a simple house call gone wrong.”
“What about the cops you work with?”
He nodded as we took a sharp curve. “They can’t call me on it. They’ll know, but they’ll never be able to say anything. They’re in too deep. God willing, Murray didn’t have any district judges on his payroll.”
We were quiet as the car descended into town. I eyed the passing cars, wondering which one contained Vince’s goons, maybe Adeline, finished searching my apartment and still on the hunt. I pictured her face when she walked in the house and found him. The nausea returned.
I wanted to beat him, but not like this. It was all I’d wanted since I’d seen the first brick of heroin in that trunk, to take Vincent Decierdo down. To break his stranglehold on me and so many people. But not like this. The thought hadn’t even crossed my mind. Even as we entered that house with guns drawn, it didn’t fully dawn on me that it could end in death. We were just going in to take him, that was all. The guns weren’t real, the bullets weren’t real.
But they were, weren’t they? They were. It was amazing to me how such a heavy consequence could be levied by the mere pull of a trigger. From living to dead in the movement of a finger. It was easier than it should have been.
Raphino didn’t want it, either. I could tell by the look on his face as he drove. Yes, there was the white-knuckling through the pain in his arm, but more than that. He’d wanted Vince as bad as I had, maybe more. And he wanted him locked up, not dead. God knew what was going to happen to him now.
58
He dropped me at the liquor store parking lot, thankfully still dark and empty. I got out, he did not.
He rolled down the passenger-side window so we could say goodbye.
“Take care,” he said from the drivers’ seat. “Just remember what I said and you shouldn’t have trouble. Get far away. Tonight never happened.”
I nodded. “You sure you’re gonna be okay?”