Ninety-Four
I’M STILL STANDING next to the pickup when Helene Mayes jumps out of her car, her gun in her hand.
She walks over to me and looks down at the body of the big man, then pokes her head into the cabin of the truck and sees the body over the steering wheel, head to the side, so we can both see his dead eyes.
She walks up the road about twenty yards to where the first body is.
Walks back to me.
“You do this?”
I nod. My breathing is still coming hard and heavy, adrenaline only now starting to slow down, still trying to process how I feel about shooting three men dead. How I should feel about that.
All I know for sure is that I don’t feel guilty.
The only thing I’m really feeling is relief.
Helene Mayes says, “At least we know you can still hit what you’re aiming at.”
She looks down at the dead man with the face tattoos, then turns and yells at the cops getting out of the other squad cars that have followed her here.
“Somebody get the coroner’s van over here from Old Mill ASAP,” she says. “Then bag all these guns.”
She turns to face me again. “If we get as lucky as you were,” she says, “that gun next to him will turn out to be the one used to shoot Burt Webb.”
I look at her in the flashing lights from her idling car.
“Luck had nothing to do with it, Helene.”
I see on her face just the hint of a smile.
“Three against one,” she says. “They probably had no idea how outnumbered they were.”
“They didn’t expect that I’d be shooting back.”
“Evidently,” Helene Mayes says.
I take one last look down at the body at my feet.
“You said it was going to be a war,” I say.
“Shooting war,” she says, “especially after what they did to Burt Webb.”
I jerk my head in the direction of the house. “My grandmother call you?”
Now Helene nods.
“I told her I was on my way, and to stay inside the house until I got here unless she wanted to get arrested,” she says.
“For once in her life,” I say, “she did what she was told.”
Then I say, “You need my gun, right?”
“Not tonight,” she says. “A decision that only breaks several state and local regulations. But you hold on to it, even though I’m going to leave a car out front for the time being.”
She walks back up the road to the first body, comes back to the truck, looks down again, then says, “How’d you get to be such a good shot?”
“The way I got good at everything else I was ever good at,” I say. “Practice.”
I feel my phone buzzing in the front pocket of my jeans.
Taylor
Before I can say anything about what had just happened out here, Taylor says, “Silas, you need to get over to my house. Now!”
She sounds exactly the way she did, her voice loud and scared, when she’d called the night she lost her eyesight. I’ve got the phone far enough away from me that Helene can hear, too.
“What’s wrong?”
“Somebody just shot out the front windows of my house,” she says.
“Where are they now?”
“They drove off after I shot back.”
I tell her I’m on my way.
“I’ll drive,” Helene Mayes says.