Hobbs turned his head toward the voice, but he could see nothing but the streaks of raindrops burned white by the light above. Hopeless. Still, he thought about diving to the side and pulling his gun.
Hurlocker had frozen in midstep. Hobbs had heard him rail about the “federals” enough to know that he would never be taken alive. Fine, thought Hobbs. If this is it, then this is it. Then he looked at the kid.
It was a mistake. He saw Alan making the same slow-motion mistake. Thinking too much. But worse than that, he was just a kid. He had his whole life in front of him. And he was going to go for a hopeless pull on assailants in the dark. Hobbs couldn’t move. Wet and shivering and old and exhausted, something came back to him. He couldn’t have the kid throw all his tomorrows away for…for him, for money, for nothing.
He opened his mouth to tell him to stop. The kid hadn’t made his move yet, but Hobbs could see it coming. He was too slow. Too late. His lips parted, his diaphragm contracted. The hiss of the beginning of the s in the word stop slid from his lips. And then there was the roar of gunfire.
Something knocked him off his feet. He went down and gasped for a breath that wouldn’t come. There was no pain. And that scared him even more. He was on the ground and he couldn’t get up. He felt warm urine running down his leg and ignored the shame of it as if it had come from someone else.
Hurlocker was sprawled in the sand, facing away from him. He wasn’t moving. Hobbs was sure he was dead. On the ground, maybe ten feet from Hurlocker, Alan kicked and screamed, clutching his right thigh.
Hobbs tried to speak. Tried to tell him. Tried to curse God and fate and the voice in the darkness, but in his chest was only pain.
A man in an FBI windbreaker emerged from the darkness. He said, “What in the hell did you do that for?” Angry, surprised, sounding off balance and out of control. He did not look away as he spoke, only cycled his gaze and his gun through the three men lying on the ground.
A blond woman entered the pool of illumination beneath the tungsten light. Her short hair was plastered to her head by the rain. It made her look like a beautiful skull.
“I said what the fuck!” said the man.
She walked past the man in the windbreaker and knelt next to Alan. She frisked him and found his gun. “Check the others,” she said, all business.
“How about fuck you! I’m not doing shit until you tell me why you just went all Rambo.”
“Is that a weapon?” she asked, pointing at Hurlocker’s corpse.
The man shifted his gaze. Even racked by pain and trying to catch his breath, Hobbs saw it coming. Hell, it was even funny. The nudnik looking away, the woman raising Alan’s gun and shooting him through the back of the skull. The man’s body falling heavily on the wet, sandy soil.
Seeing this, Hobbs wanted to laugh one last bitter laugh before he died, but he could not. His chest convulsed once and there was a flash of white. For a moment he saw nothing but pain.
When he opened his eyes again, the woman was standing over Alan. She asked, “Where’s the money?”
Alan said something, but his words were drowned out by the rain and the roar of blood in Hobbs’s ears.
She stepped on the kid’s leg and Alan screamed. Then, in the exact same tone of voice, she asked again, “Where’s the money?”
This time Hobbs heard Alan say, “Fuck you.”
She shot him in the other leg.
The cold, professional part of Hobbs knew what was going to happen, what had to happen to all of them. Maybe there would be more or less suffering, but the end would be the same. But still, stupid as it was, he was proud of that “Fuck you.”
The woman stood on both of Alan’s legs now and his scream rose to a peak and disappeared. There was the roar of thunder and another flash. Hobbs thought she had shot him again, but no. It was just the storm.
“OK, OK, it’s still in the truck,” Alan screamed. This was enough to buy him a temporary reprieve. She got off his leg.
“Where’s the truck?” the woman asked, sounding almost bored with the whole thing.
Alan told her, quite simply, where the truck was. He even added latitude and longitude. Kid was smart. He liked that play even better than the “Fuck you.”
The woman said, “Thank you,” with exaggerated politeness. Then she shot him in the head.
Even though there was no point to it, even though it was inefficient and unprofessional, Hobbs tried to cry out. He tried to get up. To do something. To hurl himself in rage at this woman from the storm. He tried. But he couldn’t. So he fell back in the mud and tried to die.