CASSIDY WAS READY TO START killing people.
It occurred to him as he crouched in the cold and the darkness, aware only faintly of her excited breathing somewhere behind him, that if you pushed a man hard enough, if you backed him into a corner, if you killed his pal—well, then you either broke him or turned him into a nasty, scary piece of work. He hadn’t been quite sure which way it would go with him until now, and now he knew. There was still one person left alive he cared for and that was what tilted the balance. Made him realize just who and what he was at the core, what he must always have been. Waiting in the darkness of a very cold four o’clock, he smiled to himself. It was a smile of recognition.
He waited, kneeling on the floor he couldn’t see, resting the barrel of the Purdey over-and-under on the back of the couch, pointed directly at the doorway. The pale moonlight, forcing its way through the clouds, reflected off the deep crusty snow and he knew they were out there, deciding how best to get inside and do the job. The wind whacked angrily at the windows, rattling them in their frames.
Then he heard the first creak of footsteps on the porch. The snow squeaked as someone came slowly toward the door. Slowly. Cassidy knew he had one advantage. They didn’t know they’d been spotted. They weren’t being quite careful enough. He had one advantage and it wasn’t going to last long but the first guy through the door was going to pay a hell of a price.
The footsteps stopped.
The storm door was pulled back, wheezing on its hinges. The doorknob began to turn, rattling ever so slightly. The door was easing open, inch by inch by inch …
Cassidy heard the footfalls in the darkness, one, two steps into the room, the shape black on black, too hard for him to center the barrels on. Snow blew noisily along the porch.
Now, now, he willed her to do it …
She hit the wall switch and all the lamps in the room came on in a blinding flash.
The man stopped dead, threw an arm across his eyes.
Just as suddenly the darkness engulfed them again, like the hood dropped over a parrot’s cage, but the after-image of the man hung suspended before him as he adjusted the barrels.
The man with the long pistol in one hand, wearing a black-and-red-plaid parka, a matching hat with the earflaps turned down …
Cassidy centered on the memory of the man imprinted on his eyeballs and squeezed off both barrels and took the kick.
The shell casings ejected onto the floor and he slid two more into the chambers while the man was being sprayed back out into the night. Wood splintered, glass exploded, and he heard the corpse smack heavily onto the porch, slide across the slippery snow dusting, and crash off the edge, through the thick crust. The door had been blown off the hinges. It banged noisily, clattered off a wooden pillar, and pitched off into the snow. A blast of cold air poured in and the sound of the blast echoed and slammed off the walls and then after a while it was silent again.
She came and knelt beside him.
“They’ve got to come inside to get us,” he said. “It’ll be a war. We’ve got to dig in.”
They pushed the couch over to the stairwell and got in behind it, hunkered down in the nook below the stairs. They sat with their backs to the wall and she shivered against him. He kissed her hair and wondered if he’d ever see her face again.
The tommy gun began its unmistakable burping and the room was full of slugs and flying glass. It made a hell of a racket. Bullets chewing at the wall, slivers of wood and chunks of plaster spraying everywhere, splintering the knotty pine. He saw the flash of muzzle fire, like live electricity darting out, tongues of flame in the darkness beyond the holes in the walls where the windows had been only seconds before. Slugs thudded into the couch. He pulled her down onto the floor. Slugs were ricocheting off the stone fireplace. It sounded like a Panzer division rolling through the farmhouse …
He tried to pull the world in over their heads. She was grabbing at his hand, frantic, fingers icy cold. The guns just kept chattering and ripping.
Somewhere they were coming inside now, under cover of all the racket …
It was going to be over pretty soon and Cassidy held her tight, wondering what it all had meant, wondering if it had been worth it …
Behind the deafening din of the machine-gun fire he remembered how it had all begun, a Sunday afternoon a thousand lifetimes ago, a football game. It seemed like yesterday, watching the ball climb through the air and hang almost forever before it began to come down and the ground all around him started shaking and, hell, he’d been scared then, too …