Trait saw someone coming toward them from the bulldozer, a dark shadow holding two guns. Trait pushed the limping warden ahead of him with one hand, drawing his gun with the other.
It was another of the Marielitos. Something had split them up. He was pointing his guns and yelling but Trait could not hear him over the roar of the M60. Trait raised his gun hand behind the warden.
When the Marielito got close enough, Trait shot him three times. The second round pierced the con’s forehead above his eye and dropped him. He never returned fire. The warden was pulling on Trait, but Trait had him firmly by the back of the neck and forced him around toward the rear of the station. They turned the corner and Trait hustled him down the narrow lane between the buildings and the trees, skirting the gun battle inside the town common.
Chapter 30
Rebecca stopped with Kells inside the trees at the edge of the blacked-out Gilchrist Common. The general store was outlined before them. She had bought a sandwich there a long time ago.
“Do you hear drums?” she whispered.
He indicated that he did. He was kneeling in the snow, looking out over the darkened center of town.
“Where are they coming from?” she asked.
Kells said, “Your head.”
The first gunshot split the night. It was answered by two more, then yells and scattered bursts. She made out three figures running toward the old schoolhouse, and recognized Tom Duggan by his long coat. She heard Coe’s rifle. They were taking fire from inside.
Louder reports close by. A convict shooting from the other side of the general store, between it and the library. Kells pressed his revolver into Rebecca’s free hand and pointed her to the rear of the store. “He’s going to run,” he said, rising and starting for the store’s front porch.
Rebecca hurried out of the trees and along the side of the store to the back. Wooden pallets were stacked by the rear door, and there was a picnic table submerged in snow.
The gunplay nearby went tat-tat-tat, crisp and particular. She could tell that Kells was firing, swapping shots with the shooter. She dropped the gasoline jug near the door.
She heard boots thumping in the snow. Someone was running toward her along the side of the store. She pressed tightly against the wooden door, arms stiff, keeping a two-handed grip on Kells’s gun.
More shots and rounds spit into the pine branches behind the store.
A dark figure turned the corner. He was holding a long weapon and he was not Kells. Rebecca saw small, bright eyes at the same time the con spotted her hiding in the shadows not six feet away.
She fired twice. The noise and recoil of Kells’s revolver shook her.
The con staggered backward with a startled grunt. But he stayed on his feet. He looked down at his chest and the rips in his parka exposing his flak vest.
He yelled and brought his long gun up again, but a spray of bullets stopped him, ripping him knee-to-head.
Rebecca’s bullets had pushed the con back into Kells’s sight line.
The con twisted hard and fell facedown in the snow. As he lay there his semiautomatic gun kept firing into the ground, a muffled pum-pum-pum-pum.
Kells moved into her view, silencing the con’s gun with a kick to the man’s arm. He grabbed the con by his boot and dragged him behind the store, leaving a streak of blood-darkened snow.
Rebecca’s arms remained straight, the gun still aimed and ready. Kells moved into her sight and eased her muzzle away from his chest before reaching down to seize the con’s weapon. He kicked the man over. The con was dead.
“Get his vest,” Kells told her, taking the gas jug and opening the back door.
The sound of more gunfire got her moving. She knelt carefully next to the dead man, touching only his green parka, drawing the zipper down and pulling it open. She saw the dimples she had left in his black vest. She pulled at his coat sleeve and used her boot to roll him over, twisting the jacket off him. Then she unstrapped the vest and tugged it over his head.
She shed her own coat and strapped the vest over her sweater as Kells reemerged carrying the fuel jug and a flare. Rebecca smelled smoke on him, and light flickered orange inside the store.
Kells checked the load of the con’s weapon and then handed it to Rebecca, trading it for his revolver.
The alarm tower behind the library — a narrow granite obelisk, dark against the darker sky — was the last remnant of Gilchrist’s volunteer fire department. “Cover the common from the top,” Kells told her. “The others are working toward the church for a good angle on the police station. That’s where I’m headed. You’ve got about thirty rounds left. Use them sparingly. Don’t draw any attention to yourself and don’t get found. Just snipe. Keep them off balance.”
She felt proud of Kells’s respect, even if she had had to shoot a man to earn it. She grabbed his arm before he could leave. “What was it?” she asked him. “What was it that you saw in me that I never knew was there?”
“It was all right there in your book.”
She released him but for a moment he did not run. Light from the flames starting inside the general store showed the steam rising out of his sweater collar. She wanted him to stay. She was only just starting to understand him. She realized she wanted to know more.
“You’ll be all right,” he said, starting away.
He took off running for the brick library. Rebecca ducked inside the stone archway, rusted iron rungs leading to the top of the narrow tower. There was a short ledge below the old horn, iced but flat, a perch for her to stand on and look out over the common.
She was only a few feet higher than the one-story library. She could see spurts of gun flame here and there, and made out some movement between the old buildings across the common.
Kells was at the side corner of the library. He stepped out and fired three quick volleys, one across the common and two more straight up the street. Then he curled back, weapon up, as chunks of brick cracked off the library facing.
The loudest answering fire came from a gun in front of the police station. Despite her poor sight angle, Rebecca issued two rounds in that direction, and the con’s weapon jerked and felt good kicking at her chest. She looked back along the tree line, scanning it for a form in white moving slow against the terrain, but, of course, she saw nothing. When she looked back at the library, Kells was gone.
Chapter 31
Gunfire rattled in the night. Ant one of them might hate fired the shot that killed the convict guarding the door to the town hall. But Dr. Rosen was certain that it was his rifle and not Coe’s that felled the man firing at them from inside the school.
He stole through the foyer with Coe, under the watchful, granite eyes of Gilchrist’s town fathers. But the missile launcher supposedly stashed inside the town hall was gone.
They gave up the search and found Tom Duggan in the back hall. An old-fashioned hip door swung behind him. Behind that, the room marked Archives was alive with an angry orange glow. The gasoline jug was gone.
Tom Duggan’s brow was soaked with sweat. Dr. Rosen recalled seeing his granite bust sitting on the foyer floor, waiting to be installed with the rest. Now his flames fed thirstily on the ancient paper, the Gilchrist archives beginning to whip and roar.
“For Polk,” Tom Duggan explained.
He was the first out the side door, Coe second, and Dr. Rosen taking up the rear with ammunition clacking in his coat pockets, hopping the rail of the handicap ramp into the snow. Gunfire cracked, but it was a short, clear run to the rear of the church. Kells’s strategy appeared to be succeeding. The convicts were shooting wildly, and only the occasional bullet thudded a wall or cracked a pane of glass.