Time to pull out.
Exfiltration was fast and practiced. She capped the scope and powered it down, slung the rifle crossways over her back then dropped down from her tree. Eli joined her and stood sentry while she broke the rifle down further and bagged it so it could be stashed quickly in the trunk of the car once they made it back to the road, then they headed away through the woods. Occasionally, they came across the stacked branches and litter of a den built by the neighborhood kids who slinked from their houses and went feral in these woods. There was no one around now, the late hour and weather had seen to that.
They drew close to the edge of the trees and Eli stopped. The dark yard they had passed through earlier was now bright with light spilling from several rooms in the house and a TV was blaring loudly somewhere inside. Too chancy to go back that way and risk being seen.
Eli pointed right and moved off, keeping the boundary lines of the properties in sight as they moved through the trees looking for another way out. They found a quiet house, no lights on, no movement inside, no car in the drive, and no security lights pointing out at the yard ready to light up anything that moved across it. There were no toys or trampolines in this garden, just a lawn surrounded by a wooden fence running all the way around the property. Carrie wondered if it had been put up to keep the neighborhood kids out. Either way, it wouldn’t stop them.
She went first, springing over the fence and landing in a crouch, her hands feeling the cold, wet earth through her gloves. She heard the creak of the fence and the squelch of Eli’s boots as he followed her, crouching down behind her, so near she could feel him. She savored the delicious closeness, a momentary distraction that made her slow to react.
The dog appeared out of the dark in an explosion of noise and teeth. It launched itself straight at her, a large, angry animal, black as the night, all muscle and rage. She turned and raised her arm to protect her face from the claws and the bite, but the dog did not reach her.
Eli’s boot caught it just behind the head, turning the snarl into a yelp and sending it spinning away. It landed on its side, rolled and scrabbled to get to its feet, but Eli was already on it, grabbing its rear legs and heaving it up, flipping it high with an arch of his back then down hard, smashing its head against the ground. Another yelp squeaked from it as the soft earth stunned it but did not knock it out. The dog clawed at the ground again, weaker now, its back legs kicking free from Eli’s grip, desperate to get away from the source of its pain.
Eli stepped forward, his trailing leg whipping through the air, connecting with the dog’s throat in a wet thud that snapped the dog’s head back. This time it did not yelp at all because its windpipe had been crushed. Its tongue lolled from its mouth, bloody and twitching as it fought for breath. Eli moved over it, raising his boot high and bringing it down hard, stamping the life out of it repeatedly in fury until Carrie laid a hand on him, pulling him away and past the house to where the streetlights swayed in the wind.
They vaulted the chain-link gate with the BEWARE OF THE DOG sign on it, keeping in the shadows of the trees until they made it back to the Little League baseball park where they’d left the car, well away from the streetlights.
Eli got in the passenger seat. Carrie drove, the heater on full, filling the car with dry air and noise, neither of them speaking until they were a couple of miles down the road.
“You okay, baby?”
Eli didn’t reply.
Carrie let it slide and settled into the roar of the heater and the rumble of the road, worrying about what lay beneath his silence.
She had never seen him kill anything before tonight and there had been something magnificent and terrible about the way he had done it. Eli wasn’t physically imposing, if anything his height made him appear slimmer than he was, but there was something about the way he carried himself, something lean and dangerous, like an old-fashioned razor — and she knew where it came from.
Like all true lovers, part of their intimacy lay in the secrets they shared. Eli had confessed his in the mission military hospital where he’d been released after being locked up for seven months for nearly killing someone. One by one he had detailed, in a quiet, expressionless voice, all the people he had killed in his relatively short life. It had started with the kid in juvie who had tried to touch him somewhere he shouldn’t. He hadn’t expected the skinny, younger boy to fight back and had been caught off guard when he did, slipping on the tiles in the shower block and cracking his head. Eli told her how he had jumped on top of the boy, grabbed his hair and hammered his skull against the tiles until someone else found them and dragged him away. Eli’s tormentor had died in the infirmary two days later.
I just wanted to make sure he stayed down—he told her—but then I couldn’t stop.
This first homicide kept him institutionalized until he got a release into the army where his country turned his aggression to good use. Carrie had listened as he listed all the people he had killed while in uniform, stroking his head and letting him talk them all out as if he was exorcizing demons. Killing was his gift, but also his curse, and she knew his true secret, whispered to her alone in the quiet of a psychiatric cell he’d been sent to after killing a sergeant in a fight over a toothbrush:
I like it — the killing. I like it. It’s the only thing I ever been good at. But killing is a sin, so I must be damned to all hell for liking it so.
She looked across at him now, the muscle in his jaw working in that way it did when something was eating him up inside.
“Hey, baby, it’s okay, honey — you were only looking out for me,” she told him. “Saving someone you love from hurt is a righteous thing to do. And some poor dumb animal don’t have no immortal soul.”
He shook his head. “Animal or a man,” he said, “it’s all the same for me.” He stared ahead, his face lit by the wash of oncoming headlights, his eyes focused on something darker than night.
She wanted to stop the car and hold him, stroke his head, but they needed to get away. Stopping a car by the side of the road in this weather was just inviting some do-gooder or a highway cop to come snooping, and they couldn’t afford to be seen.
“You want to make the call? Tell Archangel what we saw at the house,” she said. “I’ll look for a motel where we can rest up.”
Eli dug a phone from his pocket, the screen lighting up his face as he searched for the number. He switched it to speakerphone and the sound of dialing and connecting chirruped in the enclosed space.
Carrie had never been concerned with killing or death the way Eli and many other men like him seemed to be. She had heard all the arguments against the deployment of women in theaters of war and thought most of it was just horseshit. The first time she had watched an Iraqi tank commander’s head snap back after she squeezed the trigger of her M24 she’d felt nothing, nothing at all. Never lost a single moment’s sleep about it neither. And it was the women who gave birth, and then watched their sons and husbands go off to war. Living on when everything you’d loved had been taken away, that was the really tough stuff. Killing was easy.
The ringing tone purred amid the rumble of the road. Someone picked up and Archangel’s voice joined them in the car.
“Is it done?”
“No,” Eli said, “he wasn’t there, but someone else was. Cops of some sort I think.”
“Did they see you?”
“No.”
There was a pause on the line. “He can’t have gone far. Let me see what I can find out. Go somewhere safe and wait for my call; until then God bless and keep you both.”