Charlie Huston - The Shotgun Rule

He goes out and closes the door behind him.

Kyle Cheney grabs the doorknob, twists it, starts to pull the door open, and closes it before he can see the street outside.

He walks back to the livingroom and looks at the mess. The boy unconscious in the hall. His neighbor on the floor. He sits at the dining table and picks up an uncorrected test and a red felt tip pen and makes a few marks on the paper. Some of his son’s spit rolls down his chin and onto the table.

He gets up and goes to the bedroom and dresses in brown corduroys and a blue and pink madras shirt and blue socks and a pair of brown moccasins. From the nightstand he takes a photo of himself holding his five year old son; crouched behind him, arms around his middle, Paul squirming. He takes the picture from its frame, folds it in half and slides it in his breast pocket and gets his keys and checkbook and ID and walks past the wounded bodies and out of the house.

The sun is cracking the sky above the Altamont.

He walks around the block and finds his car and gets in and starts it and drives to the QuickStop. He doesn’t have any cash, but the man lets him write a check because he recognizes him and because he has ID. He takes his bottle and gets in his car and takes a long drink and sits and thinks for a minute.

If he closes his eyes, he can remember exactly where it was his wife’s car slipped the embankment. He can picture what the car looked like when he got the call and drove until he saw the flashing lights of the police cars and ambulance and fire truck. He can remember the elation.

He starts his car and pulls it onto the freeway and drives fast.

– Seriously, boss, why the hell you bring a gun with only two bullets?

– I got more.

Ramon laughs.

– I’m not lying, guys. I don’t think I can walk much, but I bet I can hop on one leg. After he shoots me, the rest of you got no problem.

– Shut the fuck up.

– Fernando, you promise me, you guys, too. Whelan, Hector, you all promise me you’ll kill this fatass, and I’ll get up and hop right at him and make him shoot that last bullet at me.

Ramon looks at the bullet hole in the wall again.

– Hell, I could get lucky, he might miss.

Geezer puts his back in a corner of the room, Fernando and Ramon to his right, the kids to his left.

– Gun can be reloaded, asshole.

– Yeah, how fast? Whelan, Hector, you guys in? Want to play some chicken with fatass?

George is shaking.

Hector pulls his hand free of George. He picks up the length of chain crusted with his own dry blood and stands up.

Ramon claps.

– That’s it, vato, that’s what I was talking about before, homies sticking together.

Hector stares at him, swallows more blood.

George grabs at Hector’s hand.

– Sit down, man. Sit down.

– No.

George watches the barrel of the derringer swing in his direction.

Geezer thumbs the hammer back.

– George, I promise you, these spics try to rush me, you’re gonna be the one taking the bullet.

Ramon sits up.

– Hey, I like that even better. You mean, I come at you, me and my brother and Hector come at you, you’re gonna blast Whelan? Ese, hear that?

Fernando yanks the splinter out of his butt.

– Yeah, I heard it, bro.

George is pulling on Hector’s hand.

– Sit down, man, I don’t want to get shot, sit down.

Hector edges down the wall, out of his reach, watching Ramon.

Ramon’s hand dips between the couch cushions and returns, holding the hacksaw.

– Yo, boss, look what I left lying around.

Glass shatters as Paul throws the bag of meth through the sliding door, making the hole Hector punched in it big enough to climb through.

– I got your shit, fatass, let my friends go.

Bob stands slowly, the lump on the back of his head throbbing. He goes to the phone and picks it up. He dials 9, but sees something he’d forgotten and doesn’t finish. He hangs the phone up and goes to the end of the hall and walks over the broken door, his foot punching a hole in it, and finds a glass and fills it with water and goes back to the boy on the floor in the hall and pours the water in his face and throws the glass over his shoulder and bends and takes the boy by his hair and slaps him.

– You, fuckhead, wake the fuck up, you little piece of shit, wake the fuck up. Where are my sons? What the fuck is going on and where the fuck are my boys?

The garage pitches and rolls and Andy thinks he’s going to go back to sleep, but he doesn’t.

He folds the plastic back around the parts of Jeff’s head that are still there. It’s weird, how it looks almost exactly the way it looks when he imagines shooting someone in the face.

He gags. But his stomach has been empty for awhile now and nothing comes out, but it makes his eye and his head hurt.

He stands up and pokes around in the chemicals and glassware and trash and piles of broken furniture and crap and finds a bent piece of rusted rebar with a clot of broken cement jutting from its end.

He swings it back and forth a couple times.

He sees himself standing behind the door when someone comes out to the garage as he brings the rebar down on their head and it gets lodged in there and they fall down and pull the rebar from his hand and it cuts his palm as it jerks free and he has to wiggle it back and forth to pull it loose from the hole in the skull of the dead body on the floor.

He swings it a couple more times, raising it above his head and letting gravity pull it down in an arc. He guesses at its weight and thinks about the density of bone and resiliency of flesh and figures that swinging it like that you wouldn’t have to add much force to it at all to create enough momentum to shatter bone and cause sufficient trauma to a person’s brain so that they wouldn’t get back up. Swinging it from the side like a bat will take more force. He tries it. The bar wants to slip from his hands, but it doesn’t.

He wonders how long it will be before someone realizes that he must be in the garage because they’ve eliminated everywhere in the house and then they come out to look for him.

Then he hears a gunshot.

And then breaking glass.

And then the screaming starts.

George watches as the bag of crank hits the floor and pulls Geezer’s eyes from him, the aim of the derringer drifting away, and he jumps at the fat man who is reaching for the drugs with the snapping claw of the grabber.

The bag is about the same size as a football.

Fernando sees George making a move and dives and rolls and cuts George’s feet from underneath him and tries to cover the bag with his body, but it’s snagged on the end of Geezer’s fucking grabber and is pulled away from him.

Ramon gets his crutch planted in his armpit and shoves himself forward, a stream of blood pulsing from his leg, pivoting on the rubber tip of the crutch to face Paul as he comes through the hole in the glass door, and being totally blindsided when Hector whips the chain across the side of his head, ripping his ear open.

George flies, his legs suddenly out from under his body, and plows headfirst into Geezer’s gut and Geezer grunts and jerks the grabber and the claw rips the plastic bag and it falls and he lets go of the derringer as he tries to grab the meth, but both drop to the floor, the bag spilling dirty yellow crystals.

Ramon swings the hacksaw backhand, the blade tearing through Hector’s black jeans and into the meat at the back of his knee. Hector’s leg folds and he goes down, swinging the chain, watching it wrap around Ramon’s crutch, and yanking as he hits the floor, bringing the jailbird down on top of him.