Killing Down the Roman Line Read online

  “Jim?” Puddy’s voice was shrill and disembodied in the night air. The pub owner, out there in the dark somewhere.

  “Get over here.”

  “Are you crazy?”

  “Goddamnit Puddy, On the count of three, you come running!”

  Puddycombe refused and cursed his name. Jim racked the slide, spinning out the dead hull and counted off loud and clear. One two three. He stepped out from behind the tank and fired but the trigger locked up. The gun didn’t fire.

  Jim blanched. He pumped the slide to clear the jam and blasted the house without aiming.

  Puddy bolted into the open and dove for cover behind the rusting tank just as Jim withdrew to safety. The barkeep’s eyes saucered in a desperate hope. “Did you get him?”

  “No.”

  He pumped the slide again, emptying the smoking shell. He pumped the slide one more time but all that spun out was one unfired round. Just one.

  Puddycombe trembled so hard the tank rattled. “Tell me you have more ammo for that thing.”

  Jim wiped the last shell against his shirt, drying it off. He slid it up the breach, landing it into the ammo tube. One pump on the forearm and the round snapped into the chamber.

  One round. Make it count.

  He looked down at Puddy’s hands. Empty. No gun, not even the tire iron. “Where’s the other rifle?”

  “God knows. Hitch had it.”

  Hitchens lay in the wet grass, his feet propped on the bottom step. Lit up in the flames of the burning vehicle.

  There, next to the body lay the rifle. Out in the open, in full view of the house, the bolt action smack in the middle of no man’s land. It may as well have been on the moon.

  “We have to get it.”

  “Screw that,” Puddycombe said. “We need to get the hell out of here.” He flipped onto his belly and crawled away, keeping the tank between himself and the house.

  The shotgun roared. Buckshot rippling the grass before his hands, Puddycombe scuttled back to safety. “Oh Jesus.”

  Jim cast his eyes into the dark, seeing nothing. “Where’s Kyle?”

  “No idea. Probably dead.”

  “Kyle!” Jim hollered the name over and over. No answer came. Was he expecting one? The man never spoke.

  Puddycombe snatched him by the arm. “Quiet. Do you hear that?”

  Jim cocked his ears. A cold vacuum. “I don’t hear anything.”

  Then he heard it. Corrigan’s voice calling from the darkness. Calling out Jim’s name.

  He edged an eye past the corner of the tank, seeing only a bit of the house. Didn’t dare stick his neck out any further. “Where is he?”

  The pub owner listened, trying to triangulate the voice in the dark. “I can’t tell.”

  “Jimmy!” Corrigan’s voice bellowed again. “Throw out your weapon and we’ll talk!”

  Jim felt his balls shrivel. They were trapped and Corrigan knew it. How fucking stupid were they? Was he? They had walked right into this mess. He had led them all into this.

  Puddy was shivering. “We gotta make a run for the truck. There’s no other way.”

  Corrigan kept calling to them, his voice anywhere and everywhere. “Put down your arms,” he hollered. “Let’s talk about this like civilized men!”

  Jim felt his legs cramp up from squatting so long. He shifted positions, working the blood back into them. It only made the stinging in his calf worse. The shredded leg of his jeans was black with blood and clinging to the skin.

  Their position was beyond bad, pinned down behind a rusting tank. Waiting to be picked off.

  Their position! Listen to him. Jesus! Clichés from a hundred movies rattling around his brain. Whatever. Use it. What did soldiers do when they pinned down like this? They used a distraction to cover their run. Lobbed a grenade and ran for higher ground when the thing exploded.

  They had no grenade. He looked at Puddycombe, shivering and close to tears. They weren’t soldiers. Just two soft, middle-aged morons who deserved to die for being so fucking stupid.

  Puddy nudged his ribs. “Jim. The Molotov.”

  The wick was still burning but the bottle lay out of reach. Ten, twelve paces away, near the useless bolt action. There was no way he could make it in time. Run out into no man’s land, hurl the bottle at the house? How long had it been burning? It would blow up in his hand.

  “Come out, Jim!”

  The voice was closer this time. For all he could tell, Corrigan was on the other side of the oil tank. “Come out, Jimmy, and I’ll reserve some clemency for you! I know your heart wasn’t in this! You were led astray by the petty bastards of this town!”

  Jim couldn’t help himself. “Go to hell!”

  Puddycombe snatched Jim by the collar and shook him. “Shut up. You’ll lead him straight here.”

  He pushed him away and stared at the burning bottle. He could make it.

  It’s not that far.

  Do it.

  When Corrigan sounded again, the voice rang from somewhere else. “Didn’t go as planned, did it? You cocksuckers come for the kill but this time the Corrigans were ready for you!”

  Puddy gave up. Gurgling up dry sobs and a web of drool blowing down his lips. “Oh Jesus. What have we done?”

  Corrigan kept calling from the darkness. Come out! I’ll show mercy! Jim listened to his name echoing in the night and in a flash, it all clicked together. Puddy’s question and Corrigan’s bellowing. What had they done?

  “We walked right into this—”

  Puddycombe wiped a fist under his nose. “What?”

  “He planned it this way.” Jim felt his heart banging off his ribs. “We walked in here with guns and he kills us in self-defence. He’ll get away with it too.” Jim felt his guts empty out. Outsmarted and played for a fool. Local bumpkins go after city slicker, wind up dead in gun battle.

  Puddycombe saw it, as clear as Jim now. His jaw worked up and down stupidly and he was blubbering all over again. Sobbing for what they had become.

  Dead men.

  30

  EMMA MADE TEA. She didn’t know what else to do. Trouble reared up, you put the kettle on. It was how her mother handled a crisis, her grandmother too. Cancer, war, plagues of locusts? Make the tea and then we’ll deal with it.

  Her lip was still swollen and hot to the touch. The ice had done nothing to get the swelling down and the thought of anything hot touching it made her wince. She pushed the tea aside and reached into the hutch, pulling down her dad’s response to crises. She poured a lethal dose into a rock glass and knocked the bar off the first finger. It burned, just not the way tea does.

  Make it hurt.

  Of all the bloody-minded things to say. Her last words to Jim flinging back at her like an angry boomerang. She’d meant it in the moment, pure revenge in her heart, but that moment was over. She had sobered up in the stillness after he left. Those stupid words tumbling through her head. The implications of it. Consequences.

  Corrigan was armed too. The gun on the mantle. She’d spotted it there when he tore at her clothes and clawed her skin. If she could have gotten her hands on it, she would have shot him dead herself. But that’s not what had happened. When it was over, she had simply pulled her clothes back into place and walked out the door without even looking at the rifle. It mocked her from its perch, just out of reach.

  She had sent her husband off to a gunfight. Given her blessing to blind revenge against a dangerous man. A violent ex-con and killer by his own admission.

  Make it hurt.

  She killed the glass and poured again and her eyes latched on the phone in the hall. She scooped it up and dialled his cell. She would tell him to forget what she’d said and come home and everything would be all right. It rang and rang without an answer.

  The linoleum creaked. Travis stood in the doorway. His face a drawn disc of white.

  Emma put the phone down. “You okay?”

  “I heard something,” he said. “I think it was a gunshot.”
>
  “Are you sure?” An instinctive response to allay her child’s fear, assure him that everything was okay. A lie she’d told at least once a day since Travis was two years old. “I’m sure it’s nothing. Just a tree branch falling off. Something.”

  As if angry at the dismissal, gunfire cracked through the still air. Bang, bang, bang. All of it downwind from the old house down the road.

  Emma’s hand shot to her mouth, bumping the tender lip. Gunfire, without a doubt. Travis sprinted to the door, flung back the lock and ran outside. She barked at him to get back inside and rushed after him.

  “Something’s on fire over there,” he shouted.

  She followed him onto the porch where he pointed across the field. An orange glow lit up the treeline like a false sunset. Flames wisped up and winked out and rose again. Whatever was burning out there had to be big. The house itself?

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t know. Come back inside, honey.”

  “No.”

  She chased him back inside and locked the door and hurried him into the kitchen. Crises spilling all over the place, one went to the kitchen. Why? To brew more tea? Make a sandwich?

  She should call the police. They would stop it. But Jim had told her to leave if he called. He meant for her and Travis to be far away when the trouble started.

  “We should go over there.” Travis pressed his nose against the dark glass of the window.

  “Stay away from the window, honey.”

  “What if Dad’s in trouble?” Travis didn’t move, didn’t even turn around.

  “Get away from the window!”

  Travis spooked like a horse and turned with a nasty look on his face and she immediately regretted it. She was regretting a lot of things tonight. Let this be the last of it.

  Travis flopped into a chair and she dialled Jim’s number again.

  ~

  Bill Berryhill was still alive. Out there in the dark, calling for help. For his mother. Pleading with God to make the hurting stop.

  Jim couldn’t tell where the voice was coming from. Just out there, somewhere. Puddy stifled his moaning and stilled himself, listening to those awful cries. “Can you see him?”

  “I can’t see anything.”

  The crackle of the burning truck and then the cries started up again. Bill called out Jim’s name, begging Jim for help.

  Jim crept forward, one knee in the damp clover, ready to go to him. He did it without thinking. His name called out by a man injured in the dark, a magnetic pull impossible to deny.

  Puddy held him back, hissing in his ear. “Don’t be stupid. He’ll shoot you down before you get there.”

  “I can’t just listen to that.”

  “Do you think I want to?”

  Bill wouldn’t let up, calling and crying and pleading. When no one came, he turned nasty. Jim, you fucking bastard! This is your fault! This all your fucking fault you fucking bastard!

  Worse than the cries for help, stinging deeper than the lead shot puncturing his leg. Worse because of its veracity. Puddycombe gripped his arm, worried he’d run but all Jim did was lower his head.

  “Don’t you listen to that,” Puddy hissed. “He doesn’t know what he’s saying.”

  An image popped into Jim’s brain, slotting down in front of his eyes. Stones tumbling into the weeds, rolling and knocking through strands of timothy. The tractor blade pushing down the old stone fence that divided the property.

  Who was going to know? Go ahead, till that unused land.

  In knocking down the stone fence he had rifled a graveyard that should never have been disturbed. Shaking loose the old ghosts, uprooting them from the cold soil. Uprooting Hell. Bill was right. He wished he could tell him that.

  Puddy was hissing into his ear again. Tugging his sleeve the way Travis used to, hijacking attention. He snarled at Puddy, annoyed at the man’s insistence but then he saw what it was.

  Corrigan stood in the yard, twenty feet to their left. Looking north into the night, to the sound of Berryhill’s cries. In plain view and wide open. The shotgun in one hand, cracked open at the hinge. Slotting fresh hulls into the barrels. Vulnerable.

  The Mossberg lay in Jim’s lap. One round left, loaded into the chamber. One shot, make it count. His fingers wrapped around the grip but his hands had gone numb like frozen clubs at the end of his wrists. But all he had to do was swing the gun up to his shoulder and blow the son of a bitch away. He didn’t even have to really aim at this distance. The spread of buckshot would flay the man to shreds. But he had to do it slow, a sudden movement would alert Corrigan.

  Puddycombe held his breath and leaned back away from the gun barrel. Hope bubbled his stomach, they were gonna make it after all—

  Ring. Ring.

  The phone in Jim’s pocket.

  As loud as bombs.

  Click. Corrigan had the gun snapped and shouldered in less than a heartbeat. Squinting down the barrels with Jim dead to rights.

  Jim’s hands atrophied. He almost pissed himself, eyes dilating at the twin bores pointed at his face.

  The phone rang on and on, burning a hole in Jim’s pocket.

  Corrigan leered at him. “That’d be the missus, yeah?”

  Puddycombe started whimpering. Arms covering his head like it could ward off the shotgun blast. “Please…”

  “Don’t beg, Mister Puddycombe,” Corrigan spat. “You come up here like cowboys looking for blood, the least you can do is take your punishment like a man.”

  “Wait,” Jim broke, his guts ready to pour out. The rifle a stick of useless in his frozen hands. “Just wait a minute.”

  The gun barrel raised up a notch, Corrigan squaring the bead between Jim’s eyes. “Goodbye Jimmy Hawkshaw—”

  A new sound broke the spell, sharp and metallic. The click-clack of a bolt sliding, locking. Corrigan tore his eyes from his gunsight.

  Combat Kyle shimmered in the heat ripple of the burning truck. His face freckled with blood and Hitchens’ lost rifle in his hands. Aimed square at Corrigan. His teeth bared, chittering at a curse. “F-f-fucking p-p-pig,” he spat, taking forever to chew off each consonant. “D-d-drop the f-f-fucking gun!”

  Corrigan, cold as stone. “Go home, little man.”

  Nobody moved. A Mexican standoff.

  “Fucking shoot him!” Puddy shrieked.

  No one was minding the bottle. Least of all Kyle. Still burning less than a stride away from his foot. The Molotov exploded, the inferno swallowing Kyle to the waist in flames and glass shrapnel.

  The shockwave punched Corrigan out at the knees. Slammed Jim and Puddycombe hard up against the tank.

  Combat Kyle bansheed at the flames riffling over him. It didn’t sound human. The burning man scurried this way and that like some lesser demon spit out of damnation to dance on the ground, flames dripping from its flailing hands. The man no longer visible, a black silhouette inside rippling waves of orange. He fell and then crawled towards the two men and then collapsed. Rolled over. A godawful hissing sound leaked out of him.

  Jim felt his arm being tugged. Puddycombe pulling him away, screaming at him to run. Jim stumbled along, legs stiff and uncooperative. Dragging the Mossberg along.

  God knew where Corrigan was. Hell with it. Keep running.

  They tripped over Berryhill. The big man on his hands and knees, crawling away in the dark. “Help me up!” Bill’s voice shrill and terrified.

  They each hooked an arm and hauled Berryhill to his feet, grunting and wheezing under the strain. “Move your feet, you fat bastard!” Puddycombe barked, blowing out his cheeks. “I can’t carry you!”

  Jim looked over his shoulder. The house, the burning truck. The smouldering man. No Corrigan.

  Keep moving.

  Berryhill lurched and pitched on puppet legs. Clinging to the two men, a hair away from bringing them all down in a tumble. “Don’t you fucking leave me!”

  Jim bit back the pain in his leg. He could feel it bleeding fresh, leaking down
his ankle into his boot. Soaking the sock sticky and hot. Eyes front. Where to run? Hitch’s Tahoe sat in the rutted track where they’d left it. “Get to the truck! Move your fucking feet, Bill!”

  “I am!”

  They jerked and stumbled like tenpins. Hitchens had left the keys in the ignition. Jim remembered seeing them there.

  A gun blast, the shotgun report cracking in their ears. All three went down. When Jim looked up, he saw the blown out front tire of Hitch’s Tahoe. Something shuffled in the darkness and the shotgun sang again. The vehicle listed as the rear tire was shot out.

  The three men panted in the dark and their jaws dropped as flames appeared as if by magic inside the Tahoe. Escape route gone. Corrigan routing them from the darkness.

  Over the crackle of the flames came the click and snap of the shotgun being reloaded.

  They ran the other way. Back towards the house, dragging Berryhill along. Skirting around the other flaming vehicle and the headless carcass on the stairs. The husk of Combat Kyle, roasting in the flames, shifted and rolled over. One flaming hand flopped towards them, as if reaching for their ankles. Fire was everywhere, Hell landing a beachhead here in this world, this acreage.

  They grunted and heaved and kept moving. Berryhill’s legs like spastic clubs as the dipping willow leaves raked their hot faces. Staggering uphill until they came upon the little family graveyard. Six low stones and the big monument toppled and broken on the ground.

  Puddycombe tripped over a headstone and they all went down. The injured man taking the worst of it. Puddy wheezed, his face pink. “I can’t carry him.”

  “Get up,” Jim ordered. Noble words, he could barely stand himself.

  Bill swore and groaned. “Don’t leave me.”

  The barkeep shook his head, refusing to move. Jim snarled at him to get on his feet.

  Puddycombe got up too fast and staggered backwards with pinpricks of white beguiling his eyes. A loud snap. And then the screaming.

  Puddy dropped like a sack of dirt, clawing at his ankle. Screeching in hot pain, flailing his arms. The rusty jaws of the bear trap vised around his shin. Iron teeth cutting to the bone.