Chapter 16
Buckshot put Tamsin behind the cinderblock laundry and told her to stay there.
She didn't argue. That was how he knew it was bad—Tamsin Foley didn't stop arguing unless she'd already seen the shape of the thing coming and decided that the man in front of her was right for once.
She pressed her back against the cinderblock wall with the shotgun across her chest, and the two brothers flanked her, and she looked at Buckshot with gray eyes that said come back and didn't say it out loud.
He went into the tree line.
The ridge behind The Pines climbed through thick cedar and scrub oak, limestone outcrops breaking through the dirt every twenty yards, the kind of terrain where a man who'd scouted his positions could move between cover and never be seen from the lot below.
The spotter had called the man heading south with a rifle case on his shoulder, which meant he'd been up here already—had been sitting in these trees, watching, learning where Tamsin worked and where the brothers walked and which angles gave him a shot through the office window or the gap between the trucks.
A man who studied his targets before he moved. A man who worked alone. A man who had never once announced himself first.
Buckshot climbed the ridge with the sawed-off and didn't try to be quiet about it. Quiet was for men who hunted narrow—who picked a track and followed it and hoped to find their target at the end of it. Buckshot didn't hunt. He flushed.
The first shot came from sixty yards uphill.
The crack of a rifle split the afternoon and the round punched through the office window below—through the glass Buckshot had replaced after the first night, through the space where Tamsin had been standing ten minutes ago.
The sound echoed off the hollow walls, bouncing back from the bluffs across the highway.
Buckshot dropped behind a limestone outcrop. Below, he heard the brothers shouting, heard Tamsin's voice—sharp, commanding, keeping them behind the laundry.
A second shot. This one hit a truck door in the lot, punching through the metal panel at an angle that said the shooter had moved—twenty yards east, maybe more, repositioning between shots the way a man who'd planned his firing positions moved.
Fast, disciplined, impossible to track from the ground because the brothers were looking up into a canopy of cedar that swallowed everything.
"We can't see him!" One of the brothers, frustrated, scanning the ridge with nothing to aim at.
That was the problem. A man with a rifle and pre-scouted positions in heavy timber had every advantage.
He could shoot, move, shoot again—pick them off from cover they couldn't penetrate, at distances they couldn't close with handguns.
He'd chosen his ground the way a smart man chose ground, and from that ground he was untouchable.
Unless someone changed the ground.
Buckshot stood up behind the outcrop and started walking the ridge line.
He didn't aim. Didn't pick a target. He put the sawed-off into the first stand of cedar to his right and fired—the blast shredding branches and bark and sending birds screaming out of the canopy.
He racked, turned fifteen degrees, and fired again into the next dense patch of cover.
Then again. Loading as he walked, firing into every stand of brush and every shadow and every place a man could be lying flat with a rifle and a plan.
Not hunting. Driving.
He was tearing the ridge apart wide, the same way he did everything—no precision, no surgical strike, just overwhelming pattern into the whole spread of the hillside, making every piece of cover untenable, forcing the man in the trees to choose between staying in a position that was being shredded around his ears or moving.
A rifle shot cracked from his left. Close—thirty yards, maybe less.
The round went over his head and he heard it hiss through the leaves, and he turned and put the sawed-off into the cedar thicket it had come from.
The blast tore through the lower branches and he saw movement—a shape rolling out of the far side of the thicket, fast, heading downhill.
Moving.
The man was good. Quick, low, using the terrain—dropping behind outcrops, cutting between tree trunks, working his way south along the ridge with the rifle held close.
Buckshot followed, crashing through the brush without stealth because stealth wasn't the point, firing into every piece of cover the man could use, closing the distance by making the whole hillside impossible to hide in.
From below, behind the laundry, Tamsin's voice cut through the gunfire.
"Moving left! He's breaking left toward the cedar stand behind room twelve!"
She was reading it. From behind the cinderblock wall, watching the tree line the way she'd watched the pool fence during the Tillman fight, tracking the movement, calling the flush.
She couldn't see the man—nobody below could—but she could see the birds lifting out of the canopy and the branches moving and the pattern of disturbance that Buckshot was driving through the ridge, and she was reading it the way she'd once read the movement in a facility yard.
Buckshot cut left.
The cedar stand behind room twelve was thick—old growth, tightly packed, the kind of cover a man could disappear into and never be found.
But the man wasn't trying to disappear. He was trying to get an angle—one last shot, one clear line through the trees to the laundry wall where Tamsin was standing.
Buckshot got there first.
He came through the edge of the cedar stand at a dead walk, the sawed-off loaded, and the man came out of the trees fifteen feet in front of him.
Wiry. Quiet. Prison ink up one forearm. He moved like smoke—fast, fluid, already bringing the rifle around—and his eyes were flat and empty and absolutely professional.
Emmett Vance. The cleaner. The man sent to erase the woman who'd seen the operation from the inside.
Buckshot didn't give him the shot.
He put the sawed-off center mass at fifteen feet and pulled the trigger, and the spread caught Vance across the chest and put him backward into the cedar he'd been using for cover.
The rifle fell. The man fell. The trees caught him and held him upright for one long second before he slid down through the branches and came to rest in the dirt at the base of the trunk.
The echo rolled through the hollow. Down the ridge, across the lot, out over the highway and into the hills beyond. It bounced off the limestone bluffs and came back quieter each time, and then it was gone.
Buckshot stood over Emmett Vance in the cedar stand behind the motel and listened to the silence fill back in—cicadas first, then birds, then the slow return of everything the gunfire had chased away.
He looked down at the man on the ground.
The rifle case—the one the spotter had seen on his shoulder—lay ten feet away where he'd dropped it during the flush.
Inside was a scoped hunting rifle with a suppressor.
Next to it, in a zippered pouch, a folded piece of paper with a hand-drawn map of The Pines—every room, every angle, every sight line, and a circled X on the office window with a notation in small, precise handwriting: afternoon, 2-4, alone.
Not alone. Never alone again.
Buckshot folded the paper and put it in his pocket and walked down the ridge.
The lot was still when he came out of the tree line. Brothers on the walkway. Trucks with fresh bullet holes. The office window shattered again—the second time in two weeks—and glass on the gravel catching the afternoon light.
Tamsin came out from behind the laundry.
She walked across the lot toward him with the shotgun in one hand and her other hand clenched at her side, and her face was white and her jaw was set and her eyes were locked on his like he was the only solid thing in a world that had just tried to kill her from a hillside she couldn't see.
He met her in the middle of the gravel. Took the shotgun out of her hand and set it on the ground. Took her face in his hands the way he always did—thumbs on her cheekbones, fingers in her hair, forehead to forehead.
"He's done," he said.
"Who was he?"
"Doesn't matter who he was." He pulled the folded paper from his pocket and showed her the map.
The circled X on her office window. The notation: afternoon, 2-4, alone.
She looked at it and he watched the understanding move through her—not fear, not shock, but the cold recognition of how close it had been.
"He had my schedule," she said.
"Had. Past tense."
She put her hands on his chest. Pressed her palms flat against the scars underneath his shirt.
Felt his heart hammering under her touch—the adrenaline he hadn't let himself feel on the ridge, hitting now, all at once, because the map in his pocket had her name on it and the rifle in the cedar stand had been zeroed on her window.
"There's nobody left between us and whoever runs this," she said.
"No."
"No more crews. No more enforcers. No more cleaners. Just him."
"Just him."
She looked up at Buckshot with her hands on his chest and the gravel lot of her motel around them and three dead men's worth of lessons between them and the man at the top.
"Good," she said. "Let him come."