Sixty-Eight
IT’S FINALLY TIME for Burt to make the drive to Old Mill, the excitement inside him having gotten even bigger as he keeps checking his watch.
Maybe this is the way Silas always felt before the start of a big game.
Burt is holding his new to-go cup in his right hand, his car door having automatically unlocked, when he hears a voice call out, “Hey, Chief.”
Only now it’s not an empty hand he sees coming out of the driver’s-side window.
It’s the barrel of a long gun, one Burt recognizes right away as a Rough Rider, just because he knows guns the way he knows his antique cars.
Back when he was still a football player, they always said that the problem with Burt Webb, as hard as he tried, was that sometimes his brain moved faster than his body did.
Burt doesn’t get his hand to his gun fast enough, or think to drop his coffee cup or throw himself on the ground or somehow yank the door open and throw himself across the front seat of his squad car.
For some crazy reason, for no good reason, he flashes back to the academy now, being taught about how bullets travel faster than the speed of sound.
The bullet hitting you before the sound of the gunshot catches up.
It happens that way now.
Happens before Burt can move or clear his gun, his brain somehow speeding up and slowing down at the same time as the bullet hits him—tears into him—high up in his chest, like it’s some kind of fireball trying to split him in two.
He thinks about Taylor then.
Sees her face.
Is that her bus coming up the road?
But then he doesn’t see anything because the next bullet is catching him even higher than the first, an explosion of light in his head before his world goes dark and then Taylor is gone because everything is.