Josh Bazell - Beat the Reaper - A Novel

But that was a lot of open ground to cover, and an obvious move. And whatever my odds were, Skinflick’s were half that. I motioned for him to come out of the hallway and follow me, and crossed to the open archway.

This led into the room at the right front corner of the house. We had crouched under its front-facing window when we’d first gotten out of the truck. Out the side-facing window you could see the shack. The room itself had a large-screen TV, a couch, a weight bench, and some shelves with plaques and trophies on them—most, apparently, for skateboarding. Above the couch there was a framed poster of Arnold Schwarzenegger from his bodybuilding days.

As I glanced at it, my peripheral vision caught motion out the side window, and I ducked and pulled Skinflick down with me.

It was a tall thin guy coming around the side of the shack toward the front of the house with the kind of fast cross-step you only learn in the military or from gun-maniac videos. He had an aluminum riot gun in his hands that he kept focused on the shack.

“Clear out back!” he yelled, by which he seemed to mean behind the shack.

His voice was weird. Also he was weirdly skinny, and his cheeks and forehead had the kind of acne you could see from twenty feet away.

Jesus, I thought. There was no way he was over fourteen.

I looked up just in time to knock Skinflick’s gun aside from where he was about to shoot through the glass above me.

“What the fuck?” he whispered.

I yanked him down below the sill. “Don’t shoot without telling me, don’t shoot glass that’s right in front of my face, and if your target is talking to someone, wait till you can see that person. And don’t kill any children. Understand?”

Skinflick avoided my eyes, and I pushed him onto his back in disgust. “Just stay the fuck down,” I said.

A man’s voice yelled, “Randy—get clear!” It sounded like the voice from the loudspeaker at the gate.

A machine-gun roar came right through the wall at us. Skinflick and I both covered our ears as much as we could without putting our guns down.

I rose just enough to look over the sill.

The shack was gone. Torn up islands of green fiberglass drifted toward the ground like leaves, and spun all the way into the front yard. It was like someone had just taken out the shack with a leaf blower.

I turned to the window at the front of the house. The kid with the shotgun was there, three feet away, in profile. If he had looked in he might have seen me. Instead he started walking back toward the spot where the shack had been.

Two other men came into sight from the back of the house and met him there.

One of the two was another teenager, but older—eighteen or nineteen. He had a Kalashnikov assault rifle.

The other man was a nasty-looking middle age, with a foam-front baseball hat and untinted aviator glasses. He was about five nine, with a lot of the kind of hard fat they don’t teach you about in med school, but which you see all the time on guys who like bar fights. He was carrying something that looked like a chain saw, only with a Gatling gun where the blade should have been. Smoke and steam pulsed off the whole length of it. I had never seen anything like it. [40] For the gun freaks: this turned out to be a .60 GE M134 “Predator” motor gun, firing a kind of depleted uranium bullet supposedly available only in China.

The two men and the kid kicked through the shredded fiberglass, then the middle-aged one noticed the hole in the side of the house. “DON’T LOOK LIKE WE GOT EM,” he shouted. It occurred to me that none of the three were wearing ear protection.

It was clear that they were about to move closer to the side of the house, at which point we would have to lean out the window to shoot them.

Skinflick, on his knees next to me, said, “We have to shoot.”

He was right. I made a tactical decision. I said, “You take the fat one. I’ll shoot the kids.”

We opened fire, and the window collapsed in front of us.

What I was thinking when I divided up the targets was that I would shoot both sons in the leg—ideally in the lower leg—and that Pops was so fat even Skinflick couldn’t miss him.

The problem was that I kept missing. It’s not that easy to shoot someone in the leg. It took practically my whole clip to shoot the older Karcher son in the shin and blow the younger one’s foot off.

Meanwhile, Skinflick fired off his whole clip without hitting Karcher once. At which point Karcher turned the motor gun on us.

As I yanked Skinflick backwards, the roar lit up again. Entire chunks of the corner of the wall we’d been kneeling against just evaporated, like in one of those movies where a time traveler changes something in the future and things start to vanish in the present.

The air filled with plaster dust and shrapnel and it became impossible to see. Skinflick squirmed out of my hands and I lost sight of him. I crawled inward, away from the corner, then behind some fallen masonry. Only when I noticed I was coughing did I realize I could barely hear.

After an amount of time I couldn’t judge, a gust of November wind pumped through the house, and the air cleared. The front and side walls of the room were mostly daylight. Big chunks of the ceiling were missing, showing a bedroom up above and some pipes spraying water down the remains of one wall. I could see all the way across the foyer. The Jesus painting, and the controls behind it, were wreckage.

Karcher himself was standing near what was left of the foot of the stairs. Skinflick was on his back at Karcher’s feet.

Skinflick still had his gun, but the slide was blown back to show how empty it was.

“OH, YOU ARE IN SOME FUCKIN TROUBLE NOW, BOY,” Karcher screamed at him. Apparently his hearing was coming back a lot slower than mine was.

“I AM GONNA KILL YOU SLOW, THEN FEED YOU TO YOURSELF.”

Deliverance is The Godfather for crackers.

It occurred to me that Karcher didn’t realize there were two of us.

I took my time standing up, and shot him cleanly through the head.

The rest you’ve read about. You’ve probably seen reenactments of it on true-crime television.

The older Karcher son, Corey, whom I shot in the shin, bled to death. The younger one, Randy, I tourniqueted. He might have lived, except that when I went to get the car, Skinflick shot him in the head. Welcome to the mafia, Adam “Skinflick” Locano.

When we loaded the three bodies into the trunk, the women came out on the front lawn and watched us, the older one howling on her knees, the younger one just staring. Later that night the bodies got divided into a half-dozen children’s coffins by a tech in the Brooklyn ME’s Office who owed the mob from betting on the Oscars , for fuck’s sake, and the six coffins were buried at Potter’s Field.

Before Skinflick and I left, I located as many of the Ukrainian girls as I could. There was one on the rack in Karcher’s “office,” who I couldn’t get to wake up, and who I would have taken with us if I’d thought we could get her to a hospital any faster than the cops would. [41] It’s true, by the way, that up close you could still read the “Home Depot” stencils on the planks of the rack. The ones that weren’t too covered in blood and shit.

There was a still-alive girl chained up in the upstairs bedroom of one of the sons—by pure luck not the room above the TV room. And there were a couple of dead ones hanging from chains in another shack.

The entrance to the storm cellar, where the rest of them were, was around back. It was the worst thing I smelled until I went to med school.

Skinflick and I stopped at the same payphone I’d used to meet up with the delivery kid, and I called the cops to tell them where to go and what to expect when they got there. Locano we called by cell phone. After we’d dropped the Karchers’ bodies off, we went home and took showers, and Skinflick got drunk and high and I went off to find Magdalena.