George Pelecanos: Down By the River Where the Dead Men Go

LaDuke took one step in. The floorboard creaked beneath his weight.

Coley stiffened his gun arm and did not move.

“Let’s get out of here, LaDuke.”

“Maybe you ought to run, Pretty Boy,” Coley said.

LaDuke’s face reddened.

“And maybe,” LaDuke said, “you ought to make a move.”

“LaDuke,” I said.

His finger tightened on the trigger.

“Know what this thirty-eight’ll do to that pretty face?” Coley said.

LaDuke just smiled.

Their eyes locked, and neither of them moved. The sound of our breathing was the only sound in the room.

“Hey, Jack,” I said, very qu sahe sietly.

Coley squeezed the trigger on the. 38 and LaDuke squeezed the trigger on the shotgun-both of them, at once.

The room exploded in a sucking roar of sonics and fine red spray. LaDuke’s head jerked sharply to the side, as if he had been slapped.

A rag doll slammed against the wall, fell in a heap to the floor, the head dropping sloppily to the chest. The rag doll wore the clothes of Coley. Everything above the hairline was gone, the face unrecognizable; the face was soup.

“I’m shot, Nick,” LaDuke said almost giddily. “I’m shot!”

I went to him, pulled him around.

The right side of his jaw was exposed, skinless, with pink rapidly seeping into the pearl of the bone. You’re okay, LaDuke, I thought. You turned your head at the last moment and Coley blew off the side of your face. You’re going to be badly scarred and a little ugly, but you’re going to be okay.

And then I saw the hole in his neck, the exit hole or maybe the entry, rimmed purple and blackened from the powder, the hole the size of a quarter. Blood pumped rhythmically from the hole, spilling slowly over the collar of LaDuke’s starched white shirt, meeting the blood that was the blow-back from Coley.

“Nick,” LaDuke said, and he nearly laughed. “I’m shot!”

“Yeah, you’re shot. Come on, let’s get out of here. Let’s go.”

I went to Coley, kicked his hand away from the front of his pants, where it lay. I reached into his pocket and retrieved my keys. LaDuke stood by the door, facing it, shuffling his feet nervously, one hand on the stock of the Ithaca, the other on its barrel. I crossed the room.

“How many in the shotgun?” I said.

“Huh?”

“How many in that Ithaca?”

LaDuke mouthed the count, struggled to make things clear in his head. “It’s a five-shot. Four now, I guess.”

“You got more shells?”

He nodded. “And my Cobra. And your extra clip.”

“Good. Give it to me.” I took the extra magazine, slipped it in my back pocket. “Now listen. There’s more of them, and they’re gonna be comin’ up the stairs. Maybe outside, covering the fire escape, too.”

“Okay.”

“We gotta go out this door now, see what’s what. We gotta go now. We don’t want to be trapped in this room.” ‹›

“Okay.”

I jacked a round into the chamber of my nine. LaDuke pumped one into the Ithaca.

“You ready?”

“Yes,” LaDuke said, nodding rapidly. “I’m ready.”

I opened the door, ran out blindly, LaDuke close behind me. I turned to my left.

A man was coming through the open window at the end of the hall. He was cursing, pulling at his shirt where it had snagged on a nail in the frame. There was a. 45 in his free hand.

From the stairway at the other end of the hall, Sweet emerged from the darkness. Sweet ran toward us, the. 22 straight out in front of him.

“You!” he shouted.

I kept my eyes on the man in the window. My back bumped LaDuke’s. I heard the pop of the. 22, and the round blowing past us, and the ricochet off the metal shelving in the hall.

“Kill Sweet, LaDuke. Kill him.”

LaDuke fired the shotgun. Sweet’s scream echoed in the hall behind me. Then the. 22 was popping and the shotgun roared over the pop of the gun.

The man in the window freed himself, pointed his weapon in my direction. I fell to the side, squeezed the trigger on the nine, squeezed it three times, saw the man was hit, saw him caught in the broken glass. I aimed, squeezed off another round. The man in the window rocked back, then pitched forward, a black hole on his cheek and a hole spitting blood from his chest. The casings from my gun pinged to the floor. I turned around at the sound of the Ithaca’s pump.

LaDuke walked between the offices fronted with corrugated glass. He stood over the convulsing body of Sweet, Sweet’s heels rattling at the hardwood floor. LaDuke kicked him like an animal. He stepped back, fired the shotgun. Flame came from the barrel and wood splintered off the floor. Sweet’s body lifted and rolled.

“Hey, Nick,” LaDuke said. Through the smoke, I could see his crazy, crooked smile.

A man in a blue shirt came running out of the stairwell, an automatic in his hand.

I shouted, “LaDuke!”

LaDuke stepped through an open door. Blue Shirt moved his gun arm in my direction.

I dove and tumbled into the bathroom as a vanity mirror exploded above my head. Another round blew through the doorway. The round sparked, ricocheted, took off some tiles. A ceramic triangle ripped at my sleeve. The glass of the shower door spidered and flew apart. Glass rained down and stung at my face.

I looked behind me, saw the bricked-up window. The footsteps of the shooter sounded near the door. I could feel the sweat on my back and the weight of glass in my hair. The Browning felt slick in my hands. I gripped it with both hands. From the hall, LaDuke yelled my name. ‹. ‹ my bacdiv height="0em"›

Then there were gunshots, and more glass, the corrugated glass of the offices blowing apart. I rolled, screaming, out of the bathroom, looked for anything blue, saw blue and the black of LaDuke’s black suit, fired my gun at the blue.

The man in the blue shirt danced backward, shot off his feet, caught between the bullet of my gun and the blast of LaDuke’s shotgun. He hit the floor, saliva and blood slopping from his open mouth.

I walked through the smoke toward LaDuke, glass crunching beneath my feet. A steady high note sounded in my ears and blood pumped violently in my chest. LaDuke pulled a fistful of shells from his jacket pocket, thumbed them into the Ithaca. I wrist-jerked the magazine out of my automatic, found the loaded clip in my back pocket. My hand shook wildly as I slapped it in.

“What now?” LaDuke said.

“Out the window,” I said. “Come on.”

“I say we finish things up downstairs. The rest of them are down those stairs.”

“You’re bleeding bad, Jack. You gotta get to a hospital, man.”

I couldn’t tell if he had been shot again. There was an awful lot of blood on his shirt now; blood still pulsed from the hole in his neck.

“You see that turpentine, man, and those jars?”

“Jack.”

“Come here, Nick. I gonna show you what we’re gonna do now.”

He went to the shelved area of the hall, and I followed. Behind us, from the stairwell, I could hear men shouting at us from the first floor.

LaDuke stopped at the jars and the thinners and the paints. He put his shotgun on the floor. I kept my gun trained on the stairwell. He poured paint thinner into the jars, then ripped some rags apart, doused the rags in thinner, and stuffed the doused rags into the necks of the jars.

I put my hand around his arm, but he jerked his arm away.

“Man,” he said, “we are going to light this motherfucker up!”

“Let’s go, Jack.”

LaDuke smiled, the smile waxy and frightening. The bone of his jaw was jagged and the pink had gone to red. His eyes were hard and bright.

“You’re going into shock, Jack.”

“You got matches? You always got matches, Nick.”