John Connolly - Dark Hollow

He almost looked surprised. "What you say?"

"He was waiting for Billy. If something happens to me, you take care of it, okay?"

He nodded, then added. "Man, you be takin' care of it yourself. They ain't killed you yet, then they ain't never gonna kill you."

I smiled and we separated, slowly making our way in a pincer movement toward the front of the station house, and Tony Celli's men.

I do not remember clearly much of what happened as I stumbled into the darkness. I recall that I was shivering constantly, but my skin was hot to the touch and my face was shiny with sweat. I had Jennings's gun, and had restocked the speed loader from the box of shells, but it still felt strange and unfamiliar in my hand. I vaguely regretted the loss of the Smith & Wesson. I had killed with it and, in doing so, had killed something inside me, but it was my gun and its history over the previous twelve months had mirrored my own. Perhaps it was for the best that it now lay deep in the water.

Snow was falling and the world was mute, its mouth stifled with flakes. My feet sank deep as I followed the wall, the station house to my left, cold piercing my boots and numbing my toes. On the other side of the station, I knew, Louis was moving steadily, the big shotgun in his hands.

I stopped where the wall fell suddenly at the edge of the building, becoming instead a three-foot-high surround for the parking lot. I glanced into the lot, saw no movement and made for the cover of a late-model Ford, but my responses were sluggish and I made more noise than I should have. My hands now shook continuously, so much so that I had to reach up with my left and still the barrel of my gun as I went. The pain in my side was unrelenting but, when I looked down, I saw only small bloodstains on the sweater.

The snow was being urged on by a wind that seemed to have gathered renewed vigor as the night drew on. Great swaths of white were swept into my face, and flakes crowded on my tongue. I tried to find Louis's dark form, but could see nothing beyond the lot. I knelt down, breathing heavily, sick to my stomach. For a moment, I felt that I might faint. I took a handful of snow and, crouching carefully, rubbed it into my face. It didn't make me feel much better, but the gesture saved my life.

Above me, and to my left, a shape moved behind one of the cruisers. I saw a black, patent leather shoe rise from the snow, flakes still clinging to the cuff of the dark pants above it, the tail of a blue overcoat dancing and waving in the wind. I rose, and the gun rose with me, up, up, until my head and the gun were above the hood of the Ford. And as the figure turned, registering the movement, I fired a single shot into his chest and watched dispassionately as he fell back into the drift that had built up against the wall. There he remained slumped, his chin resting on his breast, his blood turning the snow black.

And in that instant, something happened inside me. My world turned dark as the blood-drenched snow and my mind began to lose its general focus. The universe blurred at its edges, leaving me with only a pinhole of perspective. And as the world shifted and tilted I seemed to both feel and hear the sound of a blade entering flesh and then a noise like a melon being halved with a single blow. I followed the tiny lens of clarity across the wall and over the road, where a small bank sloped down to the trees. In the snow a man lay in a heap, his body split from chest to navel and snowflakes gathering in his ruined head. There were footprints around his body, deep and firm. The footsteps veered away from the body and headed toward town, following a second trail of prints whose footfalls were distorted by a limp. There was blood between the marks of Mifflin's shoes. As I followed the tracks, more shots came from the direction of the station house, among them the sound of Louis's gun.

I walked south for five, ten minutes, maybe a little more, before I found myself at the end of a residential street. A woman and a man, both elderly and wrapped tightly in overcoats and blankets, stood on their porch, the old man with one arm around the woman's shoulders. There were no more shots now, but still they waited, and still they looked. Then they caught sight of me and both drew back instinctively, the man pulling his wife, or perhaps his sister, back through the open door and closing it behind them, all the time never taking his eyes from me. There were lights on in some of the other houses, and here and there curtains moved. I could see faces haloed with dim light, but no one else appeared.

I reached the corner of Spring Street and Maybury. Spring Street led on into the center of town, but there was darkness at the end of Maybury, and the twin trails of prints moved in that direction. About halfway down the street, they separated, the distorted set moving on into the shadows, the second set veering northwest through the boundary between two properties. I guessed that Mifflin had got there first and found himself a position in the darkness from which he could view the street below him, and his pursuer had veered off to circle him when he guessed what was happening. I turned south and made my way around the backs of the houses until I came to the edge of a copse of trees where the western verge of the forest began. There I halted.

Perhaps thirty feet from me, at the edge of a pool of light shed by the last streetlamp on the road, a cloud formed and then disappeared. Something moved in a startled, frightened gesture. A face scanned to the left, then to the right, and a figure peered from behind a tree. It was Mifflin, one arm still shrouded in a sling. As I drew nearer, shielded by the shadows and my footfalls silenced by the snow, I saw blood drip thickly from his fingers and join a growing pool at his feet. I was almost upon him when some small sound caused him to turn. His eyes grew wide and he rose swiftly, a knife flashing in his good hand. I shot him in the right shoulder and he spun, his feet twisting beneath him, falling on his back and loosing a loud cry of pain as he landed. I moved forward quickly with the gun trained on him. He blinked hard and tried to focus as the light illuminated my features fully.

"You," he said at last. He tried to rise but he had no strength. Only his head moved before the effort proved too much and it fell back into the snow. As I looked at him, I saw that a long gash had been torn across the front of his coat. Something shone wetly within.

"Who did this?" I said.

He tried to laugh, but it came out as a cough and blood sprayed from his mouth and flecked his teeth with red. "An old man," he said. "A fucking old man. He came out of nowhere, slashed me, then took Contorno before we even knew what was happening. I fucking ran, man. Fuck Contorno." He tried to move his head, to look back to the town. "He's out there now, watching us. I can tell."

Maybury was quiet, and nothing moved on the street, but he was right: there was a watchfulness about the darkness as if, somewhere in its depths, someone held his breath, and waited.

"There'll be help here soon," I said, although I was unsure even as I spoke that things had gone our way back at the police department. At least we had Louis, I thought, otherwise we'd all be dead. "We'll get you to a doctor."

He shook his head once. "No, no doctor," he said. He glared at me. "It ends here. Do it, you fuck, do it!"

"No," I said softly. "No more."

But he was not going to be denied. With all the strength left in his body, he reached into the breast of his coat, his teeth gritted with the effort. I reacted without thinking and killed him where he lay, but when I drew his hand from his coat it was empty. How could it be otherwise, when he had only a knife to defend himself?

And as I stood back something seemed to flicker in the darkness across the street, and then was gone.