The boots passed the VW’s rusted front bumper. She turned her head slowly, as though her neck would make noise. The men ducked underneath the open garage door into the IRVING light, looked around, then turned left, back toward the rear.
Kells was ready to move. He pointed forcefully toward the office door, then rose to pursue the pursuers. Rebecca grabbed after him but he was already away, creeping agilely along the wall of the garage, ducking under the door, turning after them.
Then she was alone in the awful silence of the service station garage. She was still a moment, then shuffled around to the rear of the VW. It was as though Kells had put her in a trance too. She was amazed she was moving at all.
She crossed the garage to the office door. She waited a long time there, far too long, clutching the empty shotgun. She was waiting for Kells to return.
She would look just once. Then she would pull back and keep waiting.
She turned toward the door glass. One man sat in a wooden folding chair, his face and hands inches from the space heater of glowing orange coils. He was a white man, his heated, brassy face bore the broad insolence of a lifelong bully.
She turned back after only a second, secretly thrilled with her invisibility, waiting, waiting. The shotgun was weightless in her hands. Her breathing was still problematic, but she rode it out like a swimmer tumbling beneath a breaking wave, waiting to float to the surface.
The squeak of the office chair turned her head. A familiar click-click-click noise inside, buttons being punched. She held her breath, turning for another quick glance.
The con was on his feet now. A big man, broad and sloppy. He was trying to dial out on the dead telephone.
Rebecca’s hands tightened on the shotgun. There was a police radio coiled on the service counter. The con was moving to it.
She did not know what was happening until she was standing inside the office and facing him, the shotgun leveled at his chest.
“Right there,” she said. By that she meant, “Don’t move.” She jabbed the shotgun barrel toward the radio in his hand. “Down. Put it.” The power of speech was failing her.
With the shock of her entrance came a dose of fear. At first the con obeyed, setting the radio back down on the counter.
Then the initial scare began to wear off. He saw that she was a woman. He recognized fright in her face.
“The writer,” he said, his expression becoming a crooked smile.
A swallow caught in her throat. They knew her. Again she tightened her grip on the shotgun.
He looked her over slowly. Seconds passed and she could sense him growing bolder and bolder.
Now he was looking at the shotgun. He said, “What are you waiting for?”
Kells, she thought, but Rebecca could not reply. Her mouth was tight, lips fixed, her mind cracking like an ice cube in a hot water.
The con’s pistol lay on one of the wooden chairs, oranged by the glowing heater. She saw his eyes cheat there and she was on the verge of panic. She wished she had bullets to shoot him.
The con was relaxing, his arms growing loose. His fingers twitched.
“You can’t shoot me,” he said. “Can you.”
She could not find the words. She could not say or move or do anything.
Slowly and defiantly, eyes trained on her, he moved a half-step closer to the chair. “You’re too afraid,” he said.
The word Don’t would not fall from her lips.
His smile spread, fierce and jagged, like a crack threading through thick glass. All at once he lunged for his weapon.
Rebecca rushed forward. She hit him with the shotgun. In movies they usually swing the butt end around, but all Rebecca could do was run the muzzle at him like a sword. She had aimed for his chest but as he ducked for his gun she caught him on the side of the forehead over his right eye. There was a snap of broken bone and the con staggered backward, off balance.
He stopped there, holding his head. His hand came away and blood filled the indentation over his eye socket and spilled in a thin line down the side of his face.
“Fuck!” he said. “Oh, you fucking—”
Correcting her previous bad form, Rebecca pivoted and brought the butt end around before he could move again, cracking the man sharply across his left ear. The blow whipped his head around and rocked him sideways. He fell throat-first against the edge of the counter, then sagged to one side, spilling to the floor.
The counter edge had crushed his windpipe. Rich, red blood from his head wound pooled beneath him as he lay choking to death. Rebecca stood over him, poised to strike again as the man went into convulsions. His hands opened and closed on nothing, forming tight, trembling fists, then opening slowly and for the last time.
Awful silence again. She stumbled backward against the heater, never taking her eyes off him.
Kells entered behind her with Tom Duggan. Kells took one look at the dead man and pulled the shotgun out of her hands. The butt end was cracked and he tossed the broken weapon away. He grabbed her arms, shaking her until her eyes rose to meet his.
There was a strange bit of fluff in his tight black hair. She reached up for it, fascinated. It was a tiny feather, a shred of down from one of the prisoners’ jackets.
Suddenly everything seemed hundreds of yards away. Adrenaline swirled in her mouth like sugar and her legs would not support her anymore.
Kells seemed to understand. He left her sitting in a wooden folding chair inside the front glass door of the station office while he worked. The Volkswagen Rabbit’s diesel engine turned over, and he ran it out of the service garage, plowing through the snow to knock over both pumps. Gasoline came spurting and there was no overhang, no safety devices, foam sprinklers, or alarms. He located, dug up, and pried off the underground storage tank caps on either side of the small island, while Tom Duggan dutifully tied together oily rags from the garage, feeding them into the holes. Kells moved seemingly on instinct, arranging his sabotage like a muralist working in a creative frenzy, while Rebecca watched and felt no sense of exigency at all.
He tasked her only once, handing over two red jugs of gasoline with instructions to stash them on the other side of the taxidermist’s house. She did this, passing the tangled bodies of the other two cons in the bloodied snow. Behind the taxidermist’s she was finally sick, watching her vomit splash into the virgin snow, hearing herself gurgle, but feeling nothing. She returned to Kells and the smell of gasoline was thick now, the cold air turned sticky, the station undulating like a mirage, rising fumes meeting the falling snow. There was a large, white propane refilling tank in one corner of the lot and Kells left it hissing, striding through the haze back inside the station. He reemerged with a Zippo lighter and a smaller red jug, pouring out a trail of diesel fuel as the three of them retreated across Post Road. He lit the fuse there. He did not wait to watch it burn.
Rebecca was stepping into a snowshoe binding as the first underground tank blew. A moment of hissing wind and a tremor, as though the earth had sucked in a full breath, then a tremendous eruption that dropped all three of them to the snow. The ground buckled and roared and the heat was immediate, oranging the snow and bowing the trees. Tree trunks snapped back and ice and snow plummeted down from above, pelting and nearly burying them.
A second, smaller blast followed, lacking the oxygen resources of the first. Rebecca felt a hand grip her coat collar and she got to her feet, shaking off the snow and branch debris, some of it flaming. The IRVING sign had fallen and Tom Duggan watched with the fire in his eyes, light and shadow flaring on his face. The wind swirled and smaller explosions ripped behind them as they turned and fled back up the slope, Kells paced them through the raining fire and ice.