Chapter 4
Buckshot put the sawed-off in Tamsin's hands at five in the morning and watched her check it like she'd been handling twelve-gauges her whole life.
She hadn't. But she racked the slide with the heel of her palm, thumbed the safety, and held it low against her hip with the muzzle pointed at the floor—trigger discipline, weight distribution, no wasted movement—and he didn't need to ask where she'd learned it.
Four years working around people who needed controlling. Some things stuck.
"If anyone comes through that connecting door," he said, "you put a hole in them."
"I know how doors work."
He almost smiled. Almost. "Stay in the office. Don't come out until I come get you."
"And if you don't come get me?"
"Then I'm dead and you've got bigger problems than the door."
Her gray eyes held his. No fear in them. Something sharper—the look of a woman calculating whether the man standing in front of her was worth the risk of caring whether he came back.
He reached out and put his hand on the side of her neck. His thumb traced the line of her jaw, once, and her breath caught—the first crack in that squared-off composure he'd seen since last night. He could feel her pulse going fast under his palm.
"I'll come get you," he said.
Then he turned and walked out into the predawn dark, because if he stayed in that office with his hand on her skin one more second, he wasn't going to leave at all.
The lot was staged and waiting. Still had set it up clean—Cottonmouth in room three with a clear line down the walkway, Proof in room seven covering the truck lane, Spillway and Current at the far end in fourteen with the angles on the access road.
Buckshot took the gap between rooms five and six where the ice machine alcove gave him cover and a wide sight line across the whole gravel apron.
Wide. That was how he worked. Not one target, not one angle—everything in the spread.
The sky went from black to gray. Mist came off the highway and hung in the lot like smoke. The hills turned green in the first light, and cicadas started up in the tree line behind the motel, filling the hollow with noise that would cover a lot of things.
Buckshot waited.
He was good at waiting. A man who'd spent thirteen years selling guns out of a hunting supply store learned that the deal happened on its own schedule, not yours. You set the table, you put the product out, and you waited for the buyer to walk through the door.
The buyer walked through the door at six-fourteen.
Two trucks came off the highway in tandem. A box truck and a flatbed, moving slow, no lights. They pulled into the lot and swung wide, lining up with the room doors at the far end of the block—rooms nine through twelve, the same rooms Sharp's outfit had been loading for three months.
Five men got out. Three from the box truck, two from the flatbed. They moved with the flat, bored efficiency of men doing a job they'd done before—pulling gloves on, dropping the tailgate, walking toward the room doors with a crowbar and a bolt cutter.
And there was Sharp.
He came out of the box truck's cab last, the left side of his face bandaged from cheekbone to jaw where Tamsin had opened him with the keyring.
His hunting knife was on his belt. He walked toward room eleven like a man coming back to a place he'd already frightened, expecting it to still be frightened.
Buckshot let them get to the doors.
Let them get the crowbar into the jamb of room eleven. Let two men start pulling crates toward the truck bed. Let Sharp stand in the walkway with his back to the lot and his hand on his knife, looking at the office where the light was on and Tamsin was behind the desk.
Then Cottonmouth kicked open the door of room three, and the lot came apart.
The first man went down before he turned around—Cottonmouth was that fast, that cold, the kind of man who gave one warning and had already given his. The second man dropped the crowbar and went for a pistol in his waistband and Proof took him from the doorway of seven, clean and final.
The other three scattered.
That was where Buckshot lived. In the scatter. In the moment when men stopped thinking and started running and the geometry of the lot collapsed into a close, ugly, screaming mess between parked trucks and room doors where nobody could get clean.
He came out of the alcove and put the sawed-off into the gap between the box truck and the wall.
The blast tore through a wheel well and a truck panel and sent gravel and metal fragments spraying across the walkway, driving two men out from behind the truck bed and into the open lot where Spillway and Current were waiting.
One went down. The other made it to the flatbed and came up with a rifle.
Buckshot racked and fired again—not at the man, at the truck. The windshield blew out and the man flinched behind the door, and in that half second Proof put him down from the side.
Gravel and gunsmoke. Shouting. The echo of the shots coming back off the hills like the hollow itself was firing.
A crash from inside the office.
Buckshot's head snapped toward the sound. The connecting door—the interior door between the office and the first guest room—was coming open, and a man was pushing through it, one of Sharp's crew who'd come through the room from the back side of the building where no one was watching.
The shotgun blast from inside the office was the loudest sound of the morning.
Tamsin fired through the connecting door at three feet and the man went backward into the guest room and didn't get up. She racked the slide—he heard it through the broken window, that hard metal clack—and then her voice, cutting through the gunsmoke and the chaos like a blade:
"Pool fence! Coming over the pool fence!"
Buckshot spun. A man was scrambling over the chain-link fence around the empty pool, trying to flank the lot from the south side. Nobody else had seen him. Nobody else was looking that direction, because the fight was in the gravel and the walkway and everyone's attention was forward.
But Tamsin had been looking. Tamsin, in the office with the shotgun and the broken window and a dead man in the doorway behind her, had been counting bodies and tracking movement the way she always did—the way she couldn't stop doing—and she'd called it.
Buckshot put the sawed-off on the fence and dropped the flanker in the pool enclosure, and the man landed on the concrete apron and didn't move.
The lot went quiet for one second. Two.
Then Sharp ran.
He broke from the walkway and sprinted for the highway—past the trucks, past the bodies in the gravel, past the rooms he'd been loading and the operation he'd been running and all of it burning down around him.
He ran the way a man runs when he's decided that everything behind him is already lost and the only thing left is the road.
Buckshot went after him.
Not running. Walking. Long, even strides across the gravel lot with the sawed-off reloaded and the morning light coming up behind him and the mist burning off the highway.
Sharp had thirty yards on him and was pulling away, legs pumping, that bandaged face turning back once to see if anyone was following.
Buckshot didn't need to run. Running was for men who aimed.
He stopped at the edge of the property where the gravel gave way to the drainage ditch along the highway. Brought the sawed-off up. Settled the stock against his scarred shoulder.
Sharp was in the ditch, scrambling up the far side toward the road, twenty feet away and climbing.
Buckshot pulled the trigger.
The spread caught Sharp across the back and shoulders and put him face-down in the ditch grass, and the echo rolled out across the hollow and faded into the hills and didn't come back.
Silence.
Morning birds. The tick of a cooling engine. Somewhere on the highway, a car that had been approaching slowed, thought better of it, and turned around.
Buckshot stood at the edge of the ditch and looked down at Wendell Sharp in the weeds and felt nothing in particular about it. The man had put hands on Tamsin. He'd come back to a place he'd already frightened, expecting it to be frightened again. He'd been wrong.
He turned and walked back across the lot.
Six bodies in the gravel. Two trucks bleeding fluid from a dozen holes, tires flat, windshields gone. Crates spilled across the walkway where the fight had knocked them out of the truck bed. Brass casings everywhere, glinting in the first real light of morning.
And Tamsin.
She stood in the office doorway with the shotgun held low against her hip, exactly the way he'd shown her.
Her hair had come loose from the rubber band and hung across her face.
Her chest was heaving. Behind her, through the broken window, he could see the man she'd dropped in the connecting doorway, and the smoke still hanging in the office air.
Her hands were steady.
Buckshot walked to her. He didn't stop at a polite distance, didn't give her space to decompress, didn't do any of the things a reasonable man would do after a woman had just killed someone for the first time in her life.
He walked straight to her and took the shotgun out of her hands and set it against the wall and put both his hands on her face.
Her skin was hot. Powder residue on her cheek. Her gray eyes were wide and bright and looking straight into his from four inches away.
"You called the flanker," he said.
"I saw him."
"Nobody else did."
"I know."
His thumbs traced her cheekbones. His forehead dropped to hers. She was shaking now—not her hands, her whole body, the adrenaline finally letting go—and she grabbed the front of his cut with both fists and held on like the ground was moving.
"You're mine," he said.
He didn't plan it. Didn't think about it. It came out of him like the shotgun blast had come out of the office—fast, close, impossible to take back.
She looked at him with her fists knotted in his leather and her body shaking against his and her lip still split from last night.
"You don't get to decide that," she said.
"No." His hands tightened on her face. "But I just did."
Behind them, Still's voice carried across the lot, giving orders for cleanup. Brothers moved. Trucks were checked. The bodies in the gravel started being dealt with in the quiet, efficient way that men who'd done this before dealt with bodies.
Buckshot didn't move. He stood in the doorway of a wrecked motel office with his hands on the face of a woman who'd just saved his life from a direction he hadn't been watching, and neither of them let go.