Chapter 24
Malcolm had done his army training at Camp Breckinridge, down in Kentucky.
One of the drill instructors had been a six-foot-four sergeant the senior officers called Rosie.
Sergeant Mark Rose could have eaten them all for breakfast, so none of the enlisted men called him anything but Sergeant or sir.
He terrified them into learning how to fight and, with luck, survive.
Quick and quiet were hard to balance, Rosie had taught them, but when you needed both, you couldn’t ever sacrifice one for the other.
Sneaky motherfuckers tend to make it out alive, Rosie had said.
Those words were a mantra in Malcolm’s head now.
Half crouched, he light-footed it across the driveway, glad for the cover provided by the sound of the rain.
For a moment, he considered stealing the old Ford pickup, but he hoped to find something better under the tarp.
In the pickup, the three of them would have to jam into the front seat together and put Maggie’s crate in the rear bed, which was far from ideal.
Instead, he glanced into the back of the truck and spotted a rusty toolbox, from which he selected a heavy-duty flat-head screwdriver.
No time for second guesses, he trotted around the side of the barn to the silent bulk beneath the tarp and began to unveil what lay beneath.
The spot was partly hidden from the house, but sound tended to carry in the dark.
Sneaky motherfucker, he thought as the tarp slid off the van and puddled on the wet grass.
It wasn’t any ordinary van. He’d seen one of these before—a sleek, rounded, two-tone thing marketed as the Volkswagen bus, the family version of the company’s classic Beetle.
Gleaming red on the sides, it had a white roof, with the white coming down into a V on the thing’s nose like a daringly plunging neckline.
The minibus had a ring of windows around its circumference.
It sure as hell wasn’t going to be the most inconspicuous vehicle, but still better than a police car.
Jennie gave a low whistle, gesturing for him to hurry.
As if Rosie hadn’t drummed that into him.
As a little boy, he’d had a strong relationship with his sister, but as they’d grown older, Jennie had stepped into another role—not maternal; more like a stern schoolteacher.
With their father absent and Maggie so self-involved, Malcolm figured he and Elias had needed a certain amount of shepherding, but as a boy, it had made him bristle.
And now, it had been so long that he didn’t know what his relationship to his sister would be.
Violet stood thirty feet away, using a thick ash tree to more or less hide her from view as she spied on the old Victorian. Malcolm glanced at the house, but no lights had come on. The air felt thick with possibilities, none of them welcome.
Wiping his eyes, he opened the driver’s door of the VW, grateful its owner lived out here, where nobody would think to lock up their car.
The door hinges made a sort of squeak and then fell silent.
Malcolm exhaled relief that it hadn’t been louder.
He lay across the driver’s seat, thrust his upper body beneath the steering wheel, and used the screwdriver to pry open the steering column.
“Well?” Jennie whispered behind him.
Malcolm jerked upward, thumping his head on the steering wheel, and nearly cussed her out. He satisfied himself with a glare. “I can start it,” he whispered. “Let’s move.”
They hustled back to the police car. Malcolm glanced at the house, then at Violet.
She watched them with urgent eyes, and he gestured for her to look at the house instead.
They wrestled Maggie’s crate out of the rear seat and carried it to the minibus.
Malcolm focused on every step, afraid he would trip and make such a ruckus that the whole house would wake up, but they managed to get the crate to the minibus without stumbling.
Jennie got the back open, and they slid the crate inside.
As they set it down, Malcolm heard the bright, opening notes of “I’ll Be Seeing You.”
“Shit,” he whispered, turning to watch the house. The piano notes were subtle, but in the dark, they resonated, carrying a distance. The music seemed to quicken, the melody faster than typically played, and it grew louder. He shot a panicked look at his sister.
“What’s wrong with you?” Jennie rasped.
Malcolm closed the back of the minibus in a hurry, not careful enough to keep it quiet. The sound echoed, and Jennie grabbed roughly at his arm, turning him to face her.
“Get it together, Mal,” she whispered. “That was much too loud.”
He knew she wasn’t wrong, but he’d been off-kilter, and the memory of their childhood felt fresh. “It was that or Billie fucking Holiday!”
Jennie’s eyes narrowed. “What?”
Malcolm blew out a breath. He saw the truth in her eyes. Elias had heard the music, but Jennie was deaf to it. “Never mind.”
He slid back across the front seat and used both hands to dig into the ignition wires.
This wasn’t a trick he’d learned in boot camp but on leave in Seoul during the war.
The night had started with a prank on a senior officer they’d all hated and ended with a jeep buried in sheep shit, and an off-the-books, bare-knuckle boxing match in which the hated officer beat the daylights out of the mouthiest soldier in their platoon.
It was an ugly night, but Malcolm had come away with a story and the ability to hot-wire a car engine.
He’d had to do it twice more before the end of the war, under far more dire circumstances.
“You heard something,” Jennie whispered as he cut and stripped the wires. “Music?”
“Maggie’s favorite.”
“I didn’t hear a thing.”
“It’s not the first time,” he whispered, embarrassed. “Ever since she died.”
When he twisted the exposed ends of the wires together, the minibus started right up.
It had taken only seconds. He slid out and turned toward Jennie, ready for her to question his sanity, but he could see from her expression that not only did she believe him but something about what he’d said had made her angry.
“Jen, what’s the—”
From behind the ash tree, Violet shouted for Jennie. She turned to look, but Malcolm’s view was blocked by the minibus. When he tried to come from behind it, his sister shoved him backward and walked away from the VW.
“Sir,” Jennie said, loudly now. “There’s no need for the gun. Please let her go and we can talk about this.”
Malcolm hissed a profanity, dropped into a crouch, and scuttled around the minibus to the side of the barn. In the dark, the terrain around the building was a risk, but he had no other choice. Quick and quiet. Sneaky motherfuckers tend to make it out alive.
To him, his passage through ragged grass sounded loud enough to give him away, but at least he avoided tripping over a rusty old woodstove that had been abandoned there.
Malcolm could hear voices, the calm of Jennie, the fear of Violet, and the anger of a man he assumed was the owner of the house and at least one of these vehicles.
He couldn’t make out the words, but he hoped the man’s anger and volume would be distracting enough that he wouldn’t hear Malcolm coming.
“I promise, it’s not what it looks like!” Jennie said as Malcolm came around the other side of the barn.
In the rutted driveway, a fiftyish man in a plush robe and muddy slippers held a shotgun aimed at Violet’s back.
She stood with her hands up, facing Jennie, who had come away from the Volkswagen minibus and now stood beside the rusty pickup truck.
Malcolm stayed mostly hidden, hoping the shotgunner’s peripheral vision wouldn’t notice him.
He tried to gauge the distance between himself and that man, and the amount of noise he’d make if he ran that distance.
The ground was uneven, the grass tall in some places but bare and muddy in others.
If he tried to attack, he could see only two options—the guy would be startled and pull the trigger, cutting Violet in half, or he’d turn in time to take aim and obliterate Malcolm’s face.
He waited. They kept arguing, but Malcolm stopped listening to anything but the tone of their voices. Jennie trying to reason, the homeowner angry and suspicious, Violet scared but also frustrated that he’d gotten the drop on her.
Malcolm steadied his breathing and took a step. His boot squelched in the sodden earth.
“Listen!” Violet shouted, her back still to the shotgunner.
“Would you just listen for a moment? The train derailed. You must have heard it, or at least the police and maybe a fire truck going by! We’re trying to get help, but we ran out of gas.
I knocked on your door and nobody came, and we were desperate! ”
Malcolm hesitated. The homeowner let his shotgun droop a little, pondering. Violet had that effect on people. She just seemed so true.
The shotgun came back up. The man scowled. “That car you say run outta gas is a police car, and you sure as hell ain’t police.”
“They sent us,” Jennie said.
Violet’s face brightened. “They did! There were only two of them at first and so many injuries. Their radio’s not working. They had to send someone.”
He looked ridiculous in his robe and slippers, but the man was no clown. The shotgun stayed level as he marched up to Violet’s back and jabbed her with the barrel. “You and your girlfriend get over to the house. We’re gonna make a phone call.”
Malcolm crouched to run. Once they turned toward the house, he would attack.
As Violet walked toward Jennie, the man with the shotgun paused, cocking his head. They could hear a siren in the distance. He heard Jennie curse, but this wasn’t a police siren. The wail, growing louder, belonged to another fire truck.
The man turned toward the road.
Malcolm hurtled from the darkness. The man heard him coming and swept the shotgun back around, but Malcolm reached him first, grabbed the barrel, and yanked it from his grasp. The man went for his throat, but Malcolm batted his hands away, then cracked him across the head with his own shotgun.
The fire truck roared by, siren shrieking, as the homeowner slumped to the ground.
“My God,” Violet said, staring at the fallen man.
“He’ll survive,” Jennie said, grabbing the fallen man’s arms. “As long as we don’t run him over with his California surfer van.”
Wet hair veiling her eyes, Jennie dragged the homeowner off to the side of the driveway. Malcolm reached for Violet’s hand. They were all in shock, but he thought hers ran deepest, so he was relieved when she took his hand.
They ran for the minibus together.
“What now?” she said.
“Distance,” Malcolm replied, stolen shotgun heavy in his grip. “We get some distance, and we can talk about it then. When we can breathe.”
The minibus had been running the whole time, engine purring contentedly.
“I’m riding in front with you,” Violet said.
“That’s where I want you.”
They would be okay. He told himself that and tried to believe it.
The fire truck hadn’t gone half a mile when they heard it crash. A loud horn preceded that, blaring, and then the sound of tires. The lights were flashing, and the nearest streetlamp gave enough illumination that they saw it skid sideways and tip over, metal grinding on the road.
It went quiet for several seconds. Malcolm, Violet, and Jennie stood by the Volkswagen and stared down the street. Voices shouted, perhaps firefighters trying to determine who had been hurt, or if anyone had been killed.
The streetlamp nearest to them went dark. Malcolm noticed all the others beyond that one had also gone out.
Another popped, closer to the Victorian. Then the next winked out, and the next, and soon they were all dark. Only the lights of the overturned fire truck provided any illumination, a hellish, flickering red.
Amid those flashing crimson lights, men began to scream.