Chapter 30
CASH
People think a gunfight is loud.
It isn't. Not on the inside of one, not for me.
The first rifle opened up and the muzzle flash lit the room white and the noise should have been the end of the world.
Instead, everything went quiet and slow and clear, the way it always does, the way it did at the bottom of the mine.
The world narrows to a corridor. The corridor fills with work.
And I go down it the only way I know how, which is calm, because calm is the one thing that keeps you alive when the air turns to lead.
There is a thing that happens to me when the killing starts.
I've never had a good word for it. It isn't rage and it isn't fear—I don't own either one.
It's closer to prayer. A settling. Everything I am comes to a single, fine point, and the point is this: not tonight. Not this dog. Not me. Not yet.
So, I danced.
The first one came out of the wall on my right in a cloud of drywall dust, rifle already up.
He was fast. He wasn't fast enough. I was moving before the room finished registering him, inside his muzzle before he could bring it to bear, one hand driving the barrel up toward the ceiling while the other put the pistol under his chin.
One round. I was already turning him, already using his falling body as a wall between me and the next gun, already firing over his dropping shoulder at the shape coming through the dust behind him.
Two rounds, center. The second man sat down against the framing like a tired thing and did not get up.
Two. Fluid. Almost gentle. That's how it starts. That's never how it ends.
Max took the third.
I didn't tell him to. I never have to tell him anything; that was settled in a kennel aisle.
He came off the floor in that flat, straight line, sixty pounds of muscle and war, and hit the third man in the arm as the man swung on me—not the throat this time, the arm, the gun arm, because Max is smarter than most men I've served with and he knew the gun was the thing.
The rifle went wide, stitching a line across the ceiling, plaster raining down.
The man screamed and beat at the dog fastened to his forearm.
I crossed the space and ended his screaming with two rounds and put my hand on Max's vest for half a second—good, good, off.
He released and wheeled and we moved together to the next, one animal with two bodies, the way we were always going to be.
That's when the fourth one caught me.
I felt it more than heard it—a hard, hot line drawn across the meat of my left shoulder, a round that came a half-inch from being the one that mattered and settled for opening me up instead. It spun me a quarter turn. It did not stop me.
Pain is information; that's all it's ever been to me. The information was: he's high and to your left, behind the sawhorse and lumber, and he thinks he's hit you worse than he has.
I let him think it. I let my body sell it, let the wounded shoulder drop. When he rose up out of cover to confirm the kill, I was already looking down my sights at the spot his head was going to be. It arrived on schedule, and I closed the account.
Four.
The room was chaos now. Muzzle flash strobing the dark, the air thick with dust and cordite and the copper smell that comes up under everything at the end, my own blood warm and running down my arm to my fingers.
Somewhere below us, Craine was gone through the floor and getting away.
I could not do a thing about that, so I put it away.
You put everything away but the corridor. The corridor still had two men in it.
The fifth one was smart. He'd hung back, let the eager ones die learning, and now he came at it right—moving, using the framing, cutting the angles, a professional the way the cutouts in the grass had not been.
He and I traded the room for a handful of seconds that felt like an hour, both of us flowing through the studs and the sheeting and the toppled tools, firing and shifting and firing.
I felt a round tug my sleeve and another punch into the drywall an inch from my face and spray my cheek with grit.
He was good. In another life, we might have worked together. In this one, he made the single mistake his kind can't afford, which is that he watched my gun and forgot my dog.
Max hit him from the low side.
The man went down and I was on him before he landed.
It was over, close and ugly and fast, the blade, because the pistol had run dry somewhere in the dance and I hadn't had the half-second to feed it.
I like the blade. It's honest in a way the gun isn't; it makes you feel the ending in your hand.
So, honest was what I gave it, and then the fifth man was still and the room, for one ringing breath, went quiet.
Five.
I came up off him bleeding from the shoulder and the cheek, my ears screaming that high, dead tone, Max pressed hard against my leg and favoring a back leg now—dinged somewhere in it, a graze along his flank where the vest ended, probably a line of red in the tan.
Both of us marked. Both of us breathing.
I put my hand down on his head. He leaned into it, and we stood there in the wreckage and the settling dust. Some fool part of me said: that's all of them. That's six.
It was five.
I have replayed the next two seconds more times than I can tell you, and I will replay them until I die, because they are the two seconds that should have been the end of me.
The sixth man was down but the sixth man was not gone. He'd caught one of mine early and gone to the floor and lain still in the dust and the dark among his own dead. I'd counted him finished because I was tired and hurt and I had let myself, for one heartbeat, believe the dance was over.
He rose up behind me with his rifle coming to my back.
I turned into it. Too slow. I knew I was too slow the way I know the dead—cold, certain, no argument in it.
I hadn’t replaced the mag in my pistol, and my body was a quarter-second behind where it needed to be.
I looked down what was almost the length of that rifle at a man who had every reason and every angle, and I did the only thing there was left to do.
I stepped in front of Max.
It's the last thing I remember choosing before the window came apart.
Not a heroic thing. Just arithmetic, the only arithmetic that was left—if one of us walks out of here it's the dog, because the dog is hers, because I promised a good old soldier on a kitchen floor that I'd keep her and the dog is how I keep the promise if I can't keep it myself.
Then, the world broke inward in a storm of glass.
Brock came through the second-floor window like the wrath of God with the harbor at his back, two hundred and forty pounds of Dane, and he was firing before his boots found the floor.
The sixth man's rifle swung off me and never finished the trip.
Brock stitched him top to bottom and the man folded down into the dust for good and did not rise again.
The echo of it rolled around that ruined room and out the broken window and away over the water. And then, there was nothing.
Nothing but the ringing. The dust turning slow in the last of the muzzle-flash ghosts.
My own heart, loud now that it was allowed to be.
Six men on the floor of a dead admiral's house, and two of us still standing, and my brother crouched in a blown-out window frame with glass in his hair and his rifle still up, sweeping, making sure.
"Clear," Brock said. His chest was heaving. "Clear. Cash. You with me?"
The exhale came up out of me from somewhere near the floor of my soul.
"I'm with you," I said.
I sat down. I hadn't planned to. My body made the call without me, folded me down onto the dusty boards among the dead, and Max came around and pushed his bloody head into my chest. I got my good arm around him and held on, the two of us wrecked and breathing and alive in the middle of all that stillness.
I could feel the men around me going out—that's the other thing nobody knows, that I feel them leave, six of them lifting off at once like a flock going up—and I did not shepherd a single one.
Not tonight. Tonight, they could find the door themselves. My hands were full of the living.
Brock crossed to me, glass crunching under his boots, and went to a knee. His eyes ran over the shoulder, the cheek, the blood, the dog. Fast, expert, a brother taking inventory.
"You're hit."
"I'm fine. It's meat. He's grazed—" I ran my hand down Max's flank and he flinched and let me. "Back leg and his side. He needs a vet more than I need a medic. See to the dog first."
Brock almost smiled at that. Almost. He keyed his radio instead and I heard him call it in, heard the calm come back into his voice now that the loud part was over, the machine of my family folding this night up and making it disappear the way it made everything disappear.
Then, he looked at me, and I watched him not want to say the next thing. I already knew, so, I said it for him.
"Craine."
Brock's jaw worked. He looked at the hole in the floor where a bed had been, the dark square of it, the trap door standing open on nothing.
"Gone," he said. "There was a tunnel under the drop—service run, old utility line from the base days, we didn't have it on any map.
By the time Ryker's people got to the mouth of it, he was in a car and off the yard.
We lost him, Cash." He said it like it cost him.
"He played it clean. Whole thing. Start to finish. We walked right into it."
I sat there in the wreckage and let that land. I waited for the thing men are supposed to feel at a moment like that—the failure of it, the rage, the bitterness of a hunter who cornered his man and came away empty-handed and bleeding.
It didn't come. Something else came, instead.
A lightening in my chest. Strange and sweet, like a held breath let go.
I noticed, far off and unbothered, that the blood running down my arm had stopped being a trickle a while back.
Brock was saying my name. His voice was going thin, drawing away down a long hall, and I couldn't remember why it mattered.
My vision narrowed to a bright sliver, and I thought, without alarm, that maybe I'd gone blind. I reached for my eyes. My arm wouldn't listen. Neither would the rest of me.
And down I tumbled.
Down and down, the way you fall in the first hard drop of sleep, except this drop had no bottom I was afraid of.
Down the familiar well. Down past the noise and the dust and my brother's fading voice, down through the floor of the world I've kept one hand pressed against my whole life.
Down to the forever. Down to the in-between—the wide, warm country I've carried in me since I was a boy at the bottom of a mine, and have wanted, God, help me, every day since.
It knew my name. It always has.
And this time, when the light gathered itself into a shape, it wasn't my father's face that came out of it.
It was a dog.
Gray muzzle. Steady eyes, clear now, the cloud gone out of them. Standing easy on four good legs like the years and the last night had never touched him, ears up, watching me come the way he'd watched a stranger in a kitchen a lifetime ago. Off duty at last. Waiting.
There you are, I thought. You old soldier. There you are.
Duke huffed—one short, patient breath—and turned, and looked back at me over his shoulder the way he had that first night in her front room. Only the question was different now.
You coming? he asked. Or you going back for her?