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The St. Isidore Massacre, as one headline would brand the story in the following days, did not go as smoothly as Tim and Bree expected.
Tim was planning a surgical strike after he got into the house, which was easier than he had expected.
Debbie answered the door with a look on her face that was part worry, part fear and part, “Oh, I know who you are, don’t I?” She let Tim in.
Once inside, Tim the action hero, was ready to put the plan into action. Two quick shots to the knees of Steven, one more to the head of Debbie, a splash of gasoline, a flick of his Bic, grab the cookie jar with the cash, and he was out of there.
Forget about beating Debbie to death. Tim was not about to hit a woman. He’d part her hair with a bullet, but hit her? Not a chance.
There is always quick strangulation. It could be Plan B. It worked before, Tim promised himself.
Tim wound up emptying his gun. Six shots, one of which hit Steven. That one bullet and the element of surprise saved Tim’s life. The other five didn’t accomplish much at all.
However, Steven never saw him coming. The one bullet that hit the target splattered his knee cap all over the kitchen wall, coming from behind, exploding on exit.
Steven screamed and crumpled. The big man was down.
Tim was paralyzed by the realization that his wish had come true. Steven was screaming, holding his injured leg, foaming at the mouth and nose, crippled by the gunshot.
Steven would never walk again.
Just as well, Tim thought. He’s got no place to go.
Tim was as surprised by Debbie as Steven had been by him. Tim never saw her coming either.
But Tim heard the gunshot and felt the air ripple as the bullet tore by his head, about an inch from his ear.
Tim dove behind the kitchen counter as three more bullets from the gun that Steven thought he had hidden from Debbie in a bedroom bureau drawer slammed into the cupboard overhead.
Tim and Debbie were reloading at the same time, both hiding behind kitchen furniture and appliances in this suburban gun battle to the death.
Tim finished loading first and fired first.
He came out from behind the counter, using an avocado refrigerator to steady himself, shooting as fast as the revolver would allow.
Four more shots. One more hit. Right to Debbie’s forehead. Her scalp flew through the air like a bad pizza, splattering against the wall, starting a bloody slide to the floor.
One down and still one more problem for Tim.
As bad as he was hurt, Steven was becoming accustomed to the pain and was crawling toward Tim with a steak knife in his hand.
Two bullets left in Tim’s revolver. One of those bullets took care of Steven for forever more.
Steven and Debbie were both dead on the kitchen floor, eyes wide open, their souls connected like they had never been in this world. Both sharing a car on the train that goes to wherever it is that dead people go, assuming they were bound for the same destination.
I wonder.
Tim would have liked to stop to contemplate whether they were going to the same place and if he would ever meet Steven and Debbie again and what he would say if he did, but time for philosophical speculation was running short.
He had to get moving. The money from the cookie jar was jammed into his pockets.
The plan was about to come to a conclusion whether Tim figured out how to break the ice in the heavenly or hellish hereafter or not.
Tim didn’t know how fast a man his age could run.
Tim was about to find out
The gasoline canister had gotten kicked and tipped over during the gun fight. Gasoline was all over the kitchen floor, running in a river to the stove.
Yes, it was time for Tim to get moving.
He grabbed the canister and ran, spreading the remaining gasoline behind him, as he tore through the living room, tripping over an ottoman and falling out the front door.
Tim was thinking this would be as good a time as any to flick a Bic and set the gas on fire. But he was about two flicks behind the chemistry of gasoline meeting a natural gas pilot light.
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BREE WOULDN’T BE ABLE to tell anyone what she had seen first; Tim running from the house or the fireball that chased him out the front door. It might have been she heard the blast first and then felt the concussion of hot air hitting her through the window she had rolled down in the truck.
“It was like one of those slow-motion car wrecks you see in the movies,” Bree would say later. Then everything sped up to the speed of a maniac on angel dust.
Tim slammed into the side of the truck like he’d been shot out of a cannon. Close. He’d been shot out of Steven and Debbie’s house by the blast that leveled the one-story testament to the 1950s construction boom that had created St. Isidore.
It was often said that all the houses in the city looked the same.
This one didn’t. Not anymore.
“Move over!”
“Bullshit. Get in the other side!”
“Move the fuck over. Now!”
Tim won the argument thanks to the strength of his panic and the lack of eyebrows, mustache and goatee that he’d had at the beginning of the surgical strike.
Tim threw the drivers’ side door open with his left hand, grabbed Bree by her arm with the other, pulling her out, spinning her around and pushing her toward the front of the truck.
He got in while she raced all barefoot and baby-doll nightie around the front of the truck, scared to death Tim was going to drop it into drive and run her over.
Bree’s door was still open and her right leg sticking out, when Tim did find the “D” and smashed the gas pedal to the metal under it.
They were on their way.
Another explosion or two chased them from the neighborhood, heading north as every firetruck in Swinging Izzy — both of them — screamed south.
“You did it?”
Tim took a deep breath to try to control the adrenalin that was doing a three-minute mile through his bodily system, looked at her with his hairless, singed face and said,
“Seriously?”