South of Seven Mile Road
That same night
First rule of the raid: recon,” said Juba.
“Do you mind if I wait in the car?” said Jared.
“You follow on me and keep your mouth shut.”
The older man led the younger across the street, well down from the stash house. They waited in the alley, and when they heard nothing, they edged forward, surrounded on either side by the hulks of abandoned houses. The wind rushed, the stars were clearly visible, and their breath turned to vapor. Jared was already huffing.
They reached the property line, noting three gleaming vehicles parked in the alley: another SUV and two slick Mercedes S’s. All looked brand-new, freshly waxed, and preposterous here in the back alley of a rotting city. All three made the point that nobody fucked with these guys.
Juba crept through a fallen fence, edged through overgrown bushes, and shunted low across the yard, coming to rest in the lee of the house. Jared followed, a good deal less adeptly.
It was a prewar bungalow, brick, maybe prefab from Sears, Roebuck. Really, just a single story, with a few windows, probably a couple of small bedrooms off a hall, a living room, a dining room. There was a bit of an upstairs, under the eaves of the mansard roof. It looked like every other house in what had been an autoworkers’ neighborhood in the salad days before the Japanese attack—on Detroit, not Pearl Harbor. The house was old and sad and broken. It wanted to die.
“On your belly,” said Juba.
He crawled to the window, went still under its amber glow, waited for Jared to join him. Then he squirmed out and very slowly stood, surveyed, and ducked down.
“Three men, laughing. Lots of money. Lots of weapons—shotguns, mostly, and pistols. The windows are barred. A TV.”
“Must be the rec room,” said Jared.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“If it’s only three, we’re fine. Come.”
They repeated the drill at the next window, then slid around back. At each window, Juba took his recon, and in none did he find more men. Upstairs might be another matter, but he didn’t think so. He also stopped at the rear door. Leaving Jared behind, he squirmed around to the front, slid under the windows, showing nothing, and examined the door.
When he returned, he drew Jared back to the bushes and into the alley.
“Only the three. Maybe upstairs some women, but they’ll be no problem.”
“Maybe you underestimate women in the drug trade.”
“Okay, we kill them too.”
“No, I didn’t mean that. Let’s not kill any women. Actually, I’d prefer if—”
“We follow Allah, little boy. We do what must be done.”
“I can’t kill a woman,” said Jared.
Juba looked at him squarely. “Are you jihadi?”
“I guess,” said Jared.
“Okay.”
He abandoned the boy and went into the bushes. After some effort, grunting and tugging, he emerged with a straight ten inches of branch, from which he was busily trimming smaller limbs and twigs. He turned to a patch of unruptured asphalt in the alley and set to sharpening one end by aggressively turning and grinding it at an angle and, in a bit of time, had manufactured a pointed tip that looked like the business end of a bayonet.
He turned to the boy.
“We go to front and—”
“Whoa! Wouldn’t it be better to go back? Nobody to see. Suppose a cop happens to drive by?”
“The back door swings outward on hinges. You can’t get through it. The front swings inward. Also, it’s a new hollow-core door and it doesn’t look very strong. Locks come out of the wood easily. Understand?”
“Yeah,” said Jared without enthusiasm.
“Remember, you don’t touch, you don’t spit, you don’t rub. You don’t shed hair. Take off your sweatshirt and wrap your head to prevent hair from shedding. Also, cover your face, since if anybody sees it, they must die. If there are women there and they see your face, they must die. Or, maybe easier, I’ll kill you, let them live.”
“Ha ha,” said Jared. “Now you’re the funny one.”
“It’s time. Be a man.”
They crept to the lee of the house again, low-crawled down the side, turned the corner toward the front, and reached the front door.
“Go on,” said Juba. “Do it! Now!”
Jared swallowed and stood. More gracefully, more fluently, more practiced, Juba stood next to him, back against the door.
Jared pounded hard on its surface, feeling the rebound of the wood with each blow.
Nothing. He pounded again.
Sounds of scuttling inside.
Then the thump-thump of someone racing down the hall.
“Who the fuck is that?” came the call from the door.
“Ginger sent me. Man, he’s hurt bad. They jumped him, beat his ass, and took his shit. I think he’s going to die.”
“Who the fuck are you?”
“Ginger told me to come here. He may be dead by now.”
A view hole in the door opened, as whoever was in there had to check out the messenger before deciding what to do. Juba pivoted and without pause or hesitation, but with full strength, commitment, and great accuracy, jammed the sharpened stick through the hole.
Jared heard an unprecedented sound. It had both the qualities of crunch and slurp to it, something cracking, something squirting, and the stick disappeared as whoever now received it surrendered to gravity. Juba, fast as a snake, reared back and drove the sole of his right foot at high velocity into the door, just above the lock, and the wood splintered as if it were balsa. The impact sprang the door, ripping splinters and chunks with it, as bolts and chains clanked with their sudden release, and Juba was in, followed by Jared, who got just a brief look at the guard. He lay against the wall, about six inches of raw stick protruding vertically from his left eye socket, a torrent of blood washing down his slack face and running onto his black satin shirt. Jared had never before seen the devastation to flesh that violence brings, and it froze him solid for a second.
Juba had no time for coaching. He snatched up the man’s weapon, a short-barreled semi-automatic shotgun, pivoted, throwing its bolt even as he lifted it to his shoulder, and stormed down the hall. Another figure, in the full animation of urgency, appeared, Glock in hand. But he was way behind the action curve, and Juba put what had to be six gallons of buckshot into his center chest, shredding it, and him, lifting him off his feet, where he bounced against the doorframe and went to the floor like a shock of wheat.
The ear-stabbing blast of the gun, and the acrid smell of burnt powder, snapped Jared free of his trance, but also set his ears to ringing like all the alarms in the world. Following Juba, he raced down the hallway, while struggling to get his hoodie wrapped around his skull, and he ended up looking more like a bedraggled mummy than Juba, whose wrapping was tight and efficient.
Juba reached the doorway out of which the man had come. Instead of bursting through it, he went prone and snaked around it low. Whoever was in there expected no such move; for his misinterpretation, he got his own six gallons of buckshot in the knee. He went down, tried to rise on his one good leg, and Juba sent buckshot in an angry cloud into his genitals. Juba rose, strode in, and Jared heard the headshot.
But he became aware of scurrying upstairs. He had paused halfway down the hall at the foot of the stairway.
“Stop!” he screamed in English. “If you come down, we’ll kill you. Stay upstairs and hide until we’re gone.”
But suddenly a large woman materialized at the head of the stairs, her face bulging out with fury, and she came leaping down the stairs at Jared. She was immense and full of adrenaline. He swallowed as she launched from five steps up and filled the sky like a crashing dirigible, huge enough to squash him. But some instinct caused his legs to spring, and he jumped to the right. She thundered past and landed with what sounded like meat smashing into wood at three hundred miles an hour. He knew if she got her hands on him, it was all over, so his cowardice poked him into action, and he kicked her, hard, in the face. And then he kicked her again.
She went prone, but was still breathing and struggling to move, rolling over like a large farm animal caught in the muck, and, the next thing he knew, he was using her face as a trampoline—up, down, up, down. And then Juba pulled him back.
“Good,” Juba said, “you are warrior now. Allahu Akbar! God is great! Now, come on, we have to get the fuck out of here.”
Jared looked at the carnage he had unleashed. The woman’s face was pulped, and squalid splatters of blood reflected greasily in the yellow hallway lighting. Her wounds had swollen so quickly that she looked as if tumors had overtaken and eaten her features. Her immensity made her stillness even more apparent.
Hideous detail, never to be unseen: a dental bridge, with two gold teeth and one white one, all twisted and bent, sitting in the puddle of blood that was oozing across the floor.