Holly had Amelia’s hand in hers as they ran. The girl was barefoot, Holly didn’t understand how she could keep running, her feet must be bloody by now, but she didn’t question it, just kept trying to put more distance between them and the limo. If they could make it into the trees…
But two girls on foot are no match for a 180-horsepower engine, and they were still in the middle of the road when the black Cadillac came tearing around the curve. It squealed to a stop on the shoulder and the back door opened. They were caught like deer in the proverbial headlights, only the headlights weren’t proverbial, they were real, and so was the gun in the blue-faced guy’s hand.
Suddenly they heard the sound of another car engine, loud and getting louder, and the gunman spun to face it. Holly pulled Amelia by the hand and they hared off into the trees, running blindly toward the next bend in the road. If they could flag someone down, another driver, anyone—they might just possibly survive this.
Behind them, Holly heard gunshots split the night, but the bullets didn’t seem to be hitting anything near them, so she just kept her head down and ran.
* * *
What the bullets had hit were the front windshield of the car her dad had stolen, and then the driver’s-side door and the trunk as the Camaro had skidded past the gunman on its way toward a fucking enormous tree. The front bumper crumpled like a gum wrapper and March took the steering wheel right in the sternum, his forehead banging down for a glancing blow. “Ow,” he said, blinking to clear his vision. He was seeing double—two gunmen racing down into the trees after his daughter, two Healys scrambling out of the woods on the other side of the highway and down the steep incline to where March was.
Two Healys?
March raised an unsteady hand toward the figures in the cracked windshield. “Hey…”
“You okay?” the Healys said, in unison. Their outlines were moving together and apart, together and apart. Right now they looked like Siamese twins. “Car still go?” the Healys wanted to know. March shrugged. “Stop fucking around! Come on!” The Healys didn’t wait, they just ran off into the woods.
Well, good, at least that evened the sides up a bit. Two gunmen, two Healys. Two girls. Fuck. The Healys were right, what was he just sitting there for?
March threw the car into reverse and stomped on the accelerator. The engine burned, trying to pull away from the tree. He groaned with frustration, fed more gas to the engine, and tried not to think the worst when he heard the loud bang in the distance below. Come on. Finally the car took off, and as he drove, for the first time in a long time, March started praying.
* * *
What March had heard had not been a gunshot, though it could have been one and very nearly was. The blue-faced gunman had emerged from the woods thirty feet away from where Holly was holding Amelia up with one arm around the waist and trying to flag down a passing car with the other. She’d had no success. And now—the gunman laughed to himself—now she never would.
He paced slowly toward them, gun dangling down by his side. He wasn’t in any rush now.
“Freeze!” he shouted, but it was a joke, ’cause they were already frozen, right? Like little bunny rabbits, like the ones he’d first learned to shoot with, god almighty had his brother squealed when he’d found ’em all dead by the well, but hey, little bro, that’s what animals were for, wasn’t it? You killed ’em, you skinned ’em, you ate ’em, you didn’t fucking cry over them, boo hoo, like a little girl. He’d never managed to toughen the boy up, thought for a while maybe he was one of them switch-hitters like you saw on TV sometimes, but no, the prick was married now, four kids, so he must’ve learned to put it in sometime, but fuck almighty, the boy had been a pussy growing up. Anyhoo—
“Wow,” he said, “you guys are fast! Woo!” He laughed loudly. Then he raised the gun. Enough. Time to get paid and back to Detroit and his cover job as co-head responsible for Troop 782. We’re loyal to purpose and integrity/Pledged to the Scout oath eternally…
His finger found the trigger, stroked it gently, then started to pull.
The girl, the younger one, looked really anxious now, which was how he liked it, but weirdly she wasn’t looking at the gun. They always looked at the gun, especially little girls. But this one was looking up over his shoulder, and she was saying something: “There’s a—”
He whipped around, just in time to see the front grill of a speeding van from two inches away.
Then he was lifted off his feet and slammed through the air, his jaw and shoulder pulverized, his gun hand snapped backward so the knuckles lay flat against his wrist, his pelvis fractured in five places. He felt blood filling his pants, his socks, his chest. And then for just an instant he felt the road under his back. He didn’t feel anything else from the neck down after that, because his spine had snapped.
The van pulled to a stop a few yards down. The girls ran up to it, waving, hoping to get in, but seeing the heap lying in the middle of the road, the driver just shouted, “Holy shit!” and tore off. Leaving Holly and Amelia shivering and alone in the darkness. Well, almost darkness—the road was dotted with lights here and there, and there was one not too far away from where they were standing. And almost alone. The heap in front of them was still breathing.
Holly started to go to him, but Amelia held her back. “What the hell are you doing?”
“He’s hurt!” Holly shook her arm free, started toward the gunman again.
“Are you crazy?” Amelia said. “Get away from him!”
“Just hang on. We need to help him.”
Amelia watched as Holly gingerly approached the fallen man, but only for a few seconds. Then she turned tail and ran, vanishing into the trees.
Holly knelt down, took the injured man’s hand. You could still see traces of the blue paint, even under all the blood. His hand was shaking. She tried to steady it. “It’s okay,” she whispered. “You’re going to be all right. I’ll—I’ll get help.” She realized that she was crying. For what? For this man who’d tried to kill her? Who would have killed her for sure? But the next word came out of her throat all the same, and she meant it as much as she’d ever meant anything she’d said in her thirteen years: “Sorry.”
Healy burst out of the woods. “Holly?” He saw her then, saw the man on the ground, saw the man’s tangled, broken limbs, heard Holly crying.
“A car hit him,” Holly called, her voice ragged. “We need an ambulance!”
Healy jogged to her side. “Go see if you can flag somebody down.” He looked at the gunman, who was looking back up at him. The man’s eyes were open. Healy watched him blink, watched him breathe. “He’s in a bad way.”
Holly stared, the way a kid might stare at roadkill, which of course was exactly what this was. She was horrified, fascinated, repelled. “Go,” he said.
She took off down the road.
Healy waited till she was out of sight beyond the curve, then crouched beside the fallen man.
A wheezing breath. “You…”
“Yeah, me.”
The gunman somehow managed to laugh. He coughed, and the spittle that flew from his mouth was flecked with red. “You ever,” the man said, his voice barely more than a whisper, “hear of John-Boy?”
Healy shook his head, no.
“By now…he’s heard of you.” The man’s eyes held his, pain warring with satisfaction in them. “They’re flying him in,” he wheezed. “Now he’s going to kill that private cop, and his whole fucking family.” Another laugh shook the man’s broken chest. “And then he’s going to come for you. You ain’t got long to live.”
“Well, buddy,” Healy said, folding a handkerchief he’d taken from his jacket pocket, “none of us do.”
He reached down with the handkerchief in his hand, took hold of the man’s neck.
Now, Jackson Healy’s grip might not have won him an arm-wrestling contest with this boy’s partner, up by the hot tub, but he’d spent summers picking avocados, and oranges, and lemons, and in all the years since he hadn’t exactly become soft. And a man’s trachea isn’t much stronger than an avocado. It doesn’t take all that much force to collapse it, no, not even with a lovely layer of blue paint covering it.
Healy squeezed and wrenched and watched the light go out of the man’s eyes.
* * *
Holly ran back, arms and legs flying. You haven’t seen anyone out of breath until you’ve seen a thirteen-year-old girl, heartbroken and terrified, gasping in the middle of a highway in the middle of the night. “Healy!” she shouted, when she’d gulped enough air in her to manage it. “There’s no one here!”
Then her gaze fell to the man on the macadam, saw that he wasn’t moving anymore.
Healy said, “He didn’t make it.”
Holly stared at him, a question in her young eyes, which maybe didn’t look quite so young anymore.
She didn’t ask it.
Behind her, the busted Camaro raced around the curve and skidded to a halt. March climbed out of it and Holly ran to him, fell into his arms, was enveloped in a hug. She was still a little girl, she was; maybe not for much longer, but right now, that’s exactly what she was.
“Are you okay?” March asked.
“Yeah.”
Over his daughter’s shoulder, March exchanged a glance with Healy. In the air they both heard sirens. They were far away. They were getting closer.
“And that’ll be the cops,” Healy said.