James Burke - Light of the World

I had no doubt that Asa Surrette and Caspian Younger were joined at the hip. I placed my hand on Clete’s shoulder. He turned and stared into my face, the lines at the corners of his eyes stretched flat. “We have to take them now,” I whispered. “Our back door’s open.”

Wrong choice of words. He shook his head, indicating that he didn’t understand.

“Caspian Younger just inherited his father’s empire,” I whispered. “He’s coming. Maybe he wants to cool out Surrette, too.”

“Caspian is a punk. I don’t buy it,” Clete said.

“He’s a greedy punk,” I replied.

Gretchen approached the door in the hallway from the opposite direction, the AR-15 at port arms, a thirty-round and twenty-round magazine jungle-clipped together and inserted in the rifle’s frame. She moved between us and the door. She cupped one hand on the back of Clete’s neck and pulled his ear close to her mouth. “I think I heard something upstairs. I’m not sure,” she said. “Watch your ass. I’m going down. If I get hit, don’t stop. Go over me and clear the basement.”

“No,” I said to her.

She smiled at me, then opened the door wider with her foot and eased her way down the stairs — fearless, beautiful — a warm odor like flowers brushing past me in the dark.

In only one or two instances have I seen a firefight portrayed realistically in a motion picture. The reason for that artistic failure is simple. The experience is chaotic and terrifying, and the sequence of events is irrational and has no order that you can remember with any degree of clarity. There is nothing dignified about it. The participants leap around like the shadows of stick figures dancing on a cave wall. The instinct to live often overrides morality and humanity, and any sense of the former self disappears into a vortex of fear, pain, and sometimes explosions akin in volume and heat to train engines colliding and blowing apart.

Later, images will come aborning in your sleep that you cannot deal with during your waking hours: shooting a man who is trying to surrender; firing an automatic weapon until the barrel is almost translucent and your hands are shaking so badly you can’t reload; lying paralyzed on your back in the mud while a medic straddles your hips as a lover might, trying to close a sucking chest wound with a cellophane wrapper from a package of cigarettes.

It’s that intense and that fast, all of it irreversibly installed in your unconscious. To relive it and try to reason your way out of it is like trying to reason yourself out of sexual desire or an addiction to opiates.

The first bursts came from somewhere in the corner of the basement and chewed away part of the wall and the ceiling. Then I saw Gretchen begin firing, squeezing off the magazine of .223 rounds at a rate of three or four rounds a second, the brass shell casings jacking into the light, bouncing on the concrete floor.

For Molly, the gunfire within the confines of the basement was deafening and impacted on her skull like a jackhammer. Terry had armed himself first and started shooting at the top of the stairs from behind a concrete pillar. Molly thought she saw Gretchen Horowitz on the steps, firing a semi-automatic rifle, her upper body in shadow, the rounds ricocheting off the pillar, the air filling with dust from the chipped concrete. Albert was trying to raise himself to his knees, the wire rimming his wrists with blood.

Jack Boyd had hidden behind the bedstead, his fingers hooked into the box spring; he was peering over Felicity Louviere’s prone body, his face terrified. “I’m unarmed! I’m not part of this!” he cried. “I was working undercover! You’re gonna hurt innocent people down here!”

Albert tore one hand from the wire, then began freeing his other wrist. The air was thick with smoke and dust, the bare bulbs on the ceiling jiggling in their sockets. Asa Surrette crawled on his hands and knees to the closet and pulled a semi-automatic rifle with a short barrel and a black stock out on the floor. He reached inside again and pulled out an armored vest and a box of rounds and another rifle and two banana-shaped magazines. He still wore his suit coat and sandals and a pale yellow shirt with long-tailed birds on it, like a man who had just gotten off a plane from Hawaii. “Shut your mouth, Jack, and get in the fight,” he said. He slid one of the rifles across the floor.

“Don’t listen to what he says!” Jack Boyd shouted at the stairs. “Ask Caspian! I was trying to help!”

“You lying little shit, get in the fight or die now,” Surrette said.

Jack Boyd crouched lower behind the box spring, his mouth trembling, his flared sideburns powdered with pieces of brick mortar. “Ask her, ” he said. “I tried to be kind to her. I respected her. She’ll tell you that. I’m going to come out now. Don’t shoot.”

Surrette was on one knee. He began firing at the stairs while Terry reloaded, the rounds splintering wood out of the ceiling, caroming off the stone walls and whanging against the boiler. Surrette rose to his feet and bolted across the basement, smashing the bulbs in their sockets, dropping the room into darkness. “Thought it would be easy, did you?” he said. “You have no idea of the power that lives within me.”

Molly would have sworn that the voice she heard was not Surrette’s, that it was disembodied and had no human source and rose out of a fetid well that had no bottom.

“Defy me, will you?” Surrette said. “See how you feel one hour from now about the choices you’ve made. Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair!”

Gretchen backed ouT of the staircase. The bolt on her AR-15 had locked open on an empty chamber. She dropped the jungle-clipped magazine from the frame and inverted it and reloaded with the second magazine. She snapped the bolt shut. “Did you hear that guy?” she said.

“Don’t be taken in. It’s his death song,” I said.

Down below, we could hear someone moving about and shell casings rolling across the concrete.

“I’m going outside to get a shot through the window,” she said.

“Did you hear that?” Alafair said.

“Hear what?” I asked.

“Upstairs,” she replied. She shone a penlight on the ceiling. “Somebody’s up there.”

“I heard it, too,” Clete said. “I’m going up there. Alafair, go down to the marina and use the landline to call the sheriff’s department.”

“The marina’s closed,” she said.

Clete went into the living room. The floor was bare, and I could hear his shoes on the hardwood, then the creak of a banister when he mounted the stairs.

“Can you hear me, Mr. Boyd?” I called into the basement.

There was no answer.

“You can walk out of this, partner,” I said. “Maybe it’s as you say — you were trying to bring in Surrette and get your badge back. Don’t take his fall.”

“Dave!” Molly said. “Somebody else is in the house! Asa Surrette is a fiend. Kill him!”

“When this is over, I’m going to take my time with you, bitch,” Surrette said.

When Clete reached the landing, he saw two doors on either side, a third directly before him, and an alcove that gave onto a balcony overlooking the lake. He paused, not moving, listening, pointing his .38 snub-nosed revolver in front of him with both hands. He opened the door on his right and let it swing back toward the wall while he aimed into the gloom. There was nothing inside except an exercise machine. He stepped back onto the landing, a board squeaking under his weight, and opened the second door. He could see a toilet bowl, a sink, and a bathtub with a shower curtain. He peeled back the curtain, looking over his shoulder through the open door.

There was water in the bottom of the tub and a layer of grit on the sides. He went back on the landing and eased his way along the wall until he could reach the third door without stepping in front of it. He twisted the knob and gently pushed the door open.