Killing Down the Roman Line (32 page)

“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.

“Get it off! Jesuschrist Get it off!”

Jim gaped stupidly. It looked unreal, some Wiley Coyote cartoon made real. Puddy’s screams snapped him back to life and he pulled at the iron jaws. No give whatsoever. Tight as death. “I can’t get it open.”

“Pry it off! Shoot it off! I don’t care.”

Bill and Jim tugged and strained but their bare hands were no match for the iron vise and they had nothing to pry it open with. The tire iron that Puddy had was gone, lost in the weeds somewhere. Jim slid the barrel of the shotgun through the jaws but had no way to pry it open, no leverage to work off of.

There was nothing to do and Puddycombe read it in their eyes. “No,” he pleaded. “No no no no.”

Jim took up the chain and followed the links to where it was anchored to the ground. Pulling and straining against it until the spike plucked free and Jim fell back on his ass. He dropped the chain into Puddy’s hands. “You’ll have to run with it.”

“Are you fucking crazy! I can’t even stand!”

The snap of a twig. Footfalls, somewhere in the dark. “Rub a dub dub, gentlemen.”

A glowing haze of light floating in the pitch. Corrigan bled out of the night with the lantern in hand like some nightmarish railwayman.

Jim dove for cover as Corrigan swung and fired from the hip. A red hot blast ripped into his good leg, his buttock. Hot and searing like a thousand bee stings.

Puddycombe bore the brunt of it. The skin flayed from his cheek, flapping wet and free. His back shredded to exposed meat. Pinholes of gunblack against red muscle tissue.

Berryhill took his share of spray. He lay face down in the clover making an ungodly noise.

Jim rolled up and popped onto his knees, drawing the Mossberg up fast and outgunning Corrigan. Faster than fucking Eastwood, getting the drop on the murderous sonofabitch.

Corrigan bristled, his gun frozen at the half cock.

Jim’s heart knocked into his throat. He wanted to spit words at him, something matching his rage but his brain emptied of all but the most banal words and comforting curses.

“Go to hell.”

Corrigan’s hand shot up to ward off the blast. A useless instinct. Jim pulled the trigger—

Click.

The sound all wrong. No righteous blast, no redeeming kick to the shoulder. He squeezed harder but nothing would move the trigger piece. Load fail. Gun jam. Death.

Glee stitched across Corrigan’s mouth. “Misfire.”

31

“DIG TWO GRAVES,” his father had told him once. “If it’s revenge you’re planning, dig two graves.”

Of all the bullshit, liquor-sodden advice his father had doled out to him, and there had been plenty, this one bonmot came rushing back to Jim now, of all times. The last time his father had hit him, a stinging backhand across the mouth when Jim was sixteen. Instead of taking the punishment as usual, Jim had snatched up a shovel with pure murder in his heart. And then his father’s warning about revenge needing two graves.

The old man was right.

It galled him to admit it but Jim had no other choice, staring down the barrels of the shotgun. At Corrigan, ready to blow his head clean off. He should have dug two graves. Maybe more. Puddycombe lay sprawled over his feet, bleeding out from the catastrophe of his head. He should have dug poor Puddy’s grave too.

His leg stung like a son of a bitch and Corrigan kept talking, yammering on about something. What the hell was he saying? Maybe the man intended to talk him to death.

“Jimmy.” Corrigan’s voice pierced through the white hum, foul and obscene. “Put the gun down.”

Jim looked down at the shotgun in his hands, surprised it was still there. He lifted a hand up in compliance. Everything screamed at him not to let go of the gun, useless as it was. What else was there? He forced his fingers to relax their grip. The Mossberg clunked to the earth, a dead stick of metal and wood.

“Get on your knees.”

The last humiliation of the condemned. Prostrate, made to beg for your life. He thought of Emma and Travis and how they would be alone. Crying for help when the end came and he wouldn’t be there. Left behind to pay the levy for his sins.

Jim didn’t move. What was the point?

A moan, low and guttural. Berryhill, forgotten in the moment, crawled away. Fingers scratching at the dirt, dragging his dead puppet legs.

Corrigan watched the pathetic escape. “Like the slug you are, Mister Berryhill.” He lowered the barrel and aimed the bores at Bill’s head.

“No!” Jim faltered forward, stupidly waving his hands like he was flagging a bus. “Don’t—”

The crack split Jim’s ear, the boom of the gun echoing over the field. Berryhill’s head was a smashed pumpkin, broken inwards to wet pulp.

Corrigan looked at the mess, frowning at the gore sprayed over his boot. He wiped it in the grass and then swung the shotgun back to bear on his captive.

Jim was already running.

Sprinting blind, knees jerking and popping over the uneven terrain. Divots and gopher holes ready to snap a leg or twist an ankle. He tripped over an anthill and tumbled into the corn stalks.

Get up, get up, get up
.

Another blast from the shotgun. Back there, but not aimed at him.

Puddycombe.

His leg was on fire, leaking bad and slowing him down but he kept running. The ancient stone fence rose into view. He swung his bleeding leg over and fell to the far side. Looked back the way he came.

Corrigan trudging through the field after him, lantern swinging in his hand.

He looked west. A speckle of light peeked through the chestnut trees. The last thing he wanted was to lead the crazed gunman to his home but there was nowhere else to go.

He moved on, limping and falling in the dark, the lights of the house guiding him. Maybe Emma was gone, packing Travis into the truck and driving to Norm’s. He could barricade the house, call the police. Pray that they got here in time.

Corrigan had fired both barrels. How many hulls did he have in his pocket? He glanced back and saw the twinkle of the lantern. Pixie light moving through the dark. He didn’t look back again.

Tangling in the chokecherry bush, he pitched forward and tumbled onto his lawn. The lone bulb of the porch light left on.