I hit the floor and somersaulted, rolling through the arch. I dodged to the side as the lights went back and forth through the darkness above me like the spotlights at some nightmare movie premiere. The beams flashed in a mirror on the dining room wall. The guns stuttered death and the mirror shattered, the light flying everywhere in a weirdly beautiful and sparkling chaos.
I got behind the wall and crouched low. I heard a Homelander bark a gruff command.
“Find the lights. I’ll find him.”
One flashlight beam broke off from the others and moved toward the dining room, where I was. The other two must’ve gone off looking for a light switch.
I crouched behind the wall, waiting. As long as the house lights were off, I had a small advantage: I could track them by their flashlights, but they couldn’t track me.
Now, though, as I crouched, waiting, my heart hammering in my chest, a wave of weakness went over me. In the first moments of the Homelanders’ invasion, a rush of adrenaline had given me new energy. But underneath that energy, I was still totally weak and exhausted from my illness and from the memory attacks. I didn’t know if I had the strength to fight now. I knew I couldn’t fight for long. Whatever I did, it was going to have to be quick.
The flashlight beam came toward the room, sweeping back and forth, trying to pick me out of the darkness. I crouched low behind the wall waiting.
The flashlight’s advance halted.
“Turn the lights on, would you!” the gunman shouted with a curse. He didn’t want to come through the archway until he could see. And yet, he started up again, kept coming forward cautiously toward the archway as I crouched there, waiting.
A voice shouted back, “I’m looking for the switch!”
The gunman stepped through the arch. Instantly, he swept the light toward me, searching me out, ready to gun me down. Because I was crouched so low, the light passed over my head. Still, the gunman spotted me in the outglow.
But by then, it was too late.
I hurled myself at him, coming in under the barrel of the gun. With all the strength I had left, I shouldered the gun barrel upward. At the same time, I struck at him low and hard. The gunman let out a gasp of pain and doubled over. His body went slack and started toppling down.
With my other hand, I grabbed the barrel of the gun. As he fell, already unconscious, I wrestled the weapon away from him, holding him up only long enough to pull the strap over his head.
Now I had the gun.
Just then, the lights went on.
There was only one Homelander in the living room. It was the fat guy with the stupid face who had been guarding the entrance to the compound. He was holding his machine gun leveled right at me, right at my head- and he was ready to fire and gun me down.
He had one problem. I was holding a machine gun too. And it was leveled at him. And my finger was also on the trigger.
“Drop it,” the fat guy growled.
“You first,” I growled back.
I moved into the living room, circling away from him, trying to get in a position where I could keep an eye on both him and the guard who had fallen unconscious in the dining room. The fat Homelander circled away from me too. We both kept our guns trained on each other.
Somewhere upstairs, I heard Sport barking and barking. He hadn’t stopped since the Homelanders broke in.
“You think you can outshoot me?” the fat Homelander said to me. “I can kill you before you pull the trigger.”
“Maybe,” I answered him. “Or maybe you miss and die. Wanna take your chance?”
“You’re finished, West!”
It was another voice, thick and guttural. Waylon’s voice. I recognized it right away.
My eyes flicked to the sound of it, and what I saw made my blood turn to ice.
Waylon was just coming down the stairs. He had Margaret with him. He was holding her in front of him, with his arm around her throat. He had a 9mm pistol pressed to the side of her head.
“We’ve been watching the house, you know,” Waylon said. “We saw her go upstairs with the boy. That idiot dog’s barking led us right to her.”
I could still hear Sport barking wildly, locked in a room upstairs, I guessed. And I thought: The boy. Larry. What about Larry? Where was he?
My eyes went to Margaret’s eyes. I saw the terror in them as Waylon pressed the gun to her. But I saw something else too. She was trying to tell me something. She made an almost imperceptible gesture-a little shake of the head: the boy was gone. She’d gotten him out of the house. Down the drainpipe, into the woods. Just like I’d told her.
I kept my gun trained on the fat guard, but I spoke to Waylon through gritted teeth.
“Let her go,” I said. “She has nothing to do with this.”
“I’ll let her go,” Waylon answered. “Just as soon as you put the gun down. On the other hand, if you refuse, I’m going to blow her head off.”
I hesitated, trying to think of something to do.
“Do you doubt that I’ll do it?” Waylon said.
I didn’t doubt it. I laid the machine gun on the floor.
“Now put your hands up.”
The breath came out of me in a sigh of surrender. I put my hands up.
It was over. I was caught.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Out of the Darkness For a moment, we stood frozen that way: Waylon with Margaret held to him, the gun at her head. The fat guard with his machine gun trained on me. The other guard, a tall, slender olive-skinned man, lying stationary on the living room floor. And me, with my hands in the air. We were all motionless and silent. Upstairs, the dog went on barking.
Then Waylon let Margaret go. He shoved her. She stumbled forward until she was standing next to me. He pointed his pistol in our direction.
“Should I kill them?” said the fat guard.
I glanced at him, off to my left. I could see in his eyes that he was eager to pull the trigger.
Waylon thought about it. Behind his scruffy black beard, his heavy features worked slowly.
“No,” he said quietly. “Not yet. I still want to find out what he knows.” Then, after a pause, he added very casually, “But the woman-she is useless to me. Kill her.”
The fat gunman didn’t hesitate to do as he was ordered. The barrel of his machine gun swung from me to Margaret. I saw the gunman’s finger begin to tighten on the trigger.
I grabbed Margaret by the arm and pulled her behind me. I stood between her and the gun.
The fat gunman let out a curse. “Get out of the way, punk!”
I stood motionless and answered him with an empty stare. He couldn’t kill Margaret without shooting me, so for a moment-a second, two, three-he was paralyzed. But it was really we-Margaret and I-who were out of options, out of hope. I could delay the inevitable for only a little while, but the chase, in fact, was finished. I knew we were both less than a minute away from death.
“I’m sorry I brought this on you,” I said to Margaret over my shoulder.
“No, it’s on all of us,” she answered back. “It always has been.”
Waylon laughed, his white teeth flashing. “Very touching. Very heroic. Very moving.” He shook his head, still grinning. “All right, West,” he said to me. “You win. You win at last. I had orders to question you, but you’ve made it impossible. Congratulations, tough guy.” Turning to the fat gunman, he said, “I’ve had enough of this. Kill them both.”
“Drop it!”
Everyone in the room froze. The command had come from the open door of the house. I turned and saw nothing there-nothing but the night and darkness.
Then out of the darkness stepped Detective Rose, a pistol in his hand. He held the gun high in both hands and kept it trained on the fat gunman.
“Put the gun down right now,” he said.
The fat gunman hesitated and Rose fired off a round. He lifted the barrel of his pistol so that the bullet flew over the fat gunman’s head. It crashed into the wall, opening a small black hole and sending a puff of plaster into the room.