Dennis Lehane - Since We Fell

“My plan,” he said calmly, “is that we take the tunnel under the house. We come up in the back bedroom on the first floor. We come out into the house, while they’re peeking out the windows for us.”

“And what’s to stop them from shooting us then?”

“We’ll have the drop on them?”

“The drop?” she said.

“Yes.”

“They’re professionals. A good man with a gun can’t defeat a bad man with a gun if the bad man is at ease in violent confrontation and the good man is not.”

“Fine,” he said, “your turn.”

“What?”

“Your turn,” he repeated. “Give me a better idea.”

She took a minute. It was hard to think over the terror. Hard for any word to find space in her brain besides Run .

She told him her idea.

When she finished, he chewed his lower lip and then the inside of his mouth and then his upper lip. “It’s good.”

“You think?”

He stared at her, as if judging how honest he could afford to be. “No,” he eventually admitted, “it’s not. But it’s better than mine.”

She stepped up close to him. “There’s one big problem with it.”

“Which is?”

“If you don’t do your part, I’m dead within a minute.”

He said, “Maybe even less.”

She took a step back and flipped him the bird. “So how do I know you’ll hold up your end?”

He pulled the pack of cigarettes from his jacket pocket and offered her one. She waved it off. He put one between his lips, lit it, and returned the pack to his pocket.

“Be seeing you, Rachel.” He gave her a small shrug and walked off through the mill toward the night watchman’s house and never looked back.

She drove the Range Rover along the train tracks that ran between the mills and the river. She left the tracks just past the last redbrick building and bounced over cinder block and boulders, and hoped that none of the things scraping the underside of the vehicle was strong enough or angled in such a way that it could puncture the gas tank. She bounced along until she found the little road Brian had described and then she was clinging to the backside of the hill that led up to the night watchman’s house.

Near the top, she stood on the gas and lurched up and over the ridge, the Rover tilting hard to the left, so hard she feared she’d tip over, so she went against her natural instincts and pressed down even harder on the gas, and the vehicle slammed back down on all four wheels and shot up into the clearing behind the house.

Both Ned and Lars came out on the back porch. They were armed. Ned cocked his head at her in surprise but also triumph, a look in his small eyes that she’d seen plenty of times in her life, a look that never failed to make her feel tiny and yet outraged at the same time:

Stupid girl .

She put the Rover in park and stepped out of it, keeping it between her and the porch.

“Don’t run,” Ned said. “We’ll just have to chase you. And the story will end the same way but with us just a bit more fucking perturbed.”

Ned had the Glock he’d killed Caleb with in his hand, the silencer already attached. The soundtrack of her death, she feared, would be a soft pffft . Then again, Lars cradled a large hunting rifle, the kind she imagined could take down a bear, so maybe her death would come with a bang.

They both walked off the porch at the same time.

She pointed her pistol across the hood at them and said, “Stay there.”

Ned held up his hands, looked over at Lars. “I think she’s got us.”

Was Brian somewhere safe, watching the scene play out with a smile on his face?

Lars kept walking toward the Rover. But he did so on a diagonal line. And so did Ned. But in the opposite direction. So that each step they took brought them closer to her yet farther from each other.

“Fucking stop .”

Lars sauntered a few more steps before he did.

It was quite possible Brian kept a backup passport. He could just let her die and go spend all the money.

“What’s this?” Ned said. “Red Light, Green Light?”

He took two steps toward her.

Brian, she wanted to scream. Brian!

She extended her arm across the hood. “I said stop.”

“You didn’t say red light.” He took another step.

“Stop!” Her voice bounced off the house and echoed down the hill.

Ned’s voice stayed level and smooth. “Rachel, you’ve seen some movies, I’m sure, where little girls with guns hold off big bad guys with guns. But, honey, it doesn’t work that way in real life. You let us come off that porch. And then you let us get meaningful separation from each other. Which means that now, in this real life of ours, you can’t shoot both of us before one of us shoots you. Instead, I’ll shoot you or he will and it’s not gonna be real hard to pull off.”

Brian, Jesus. Where the fuck are you? Did you abandon me?

Her hand shook enough that she placed her elbow to the hood of the Rover to steady it. She pointed the gun at Ned, but that left her unable to cover Lars.

Ned cocked an eyebrow at her elbow vibrating off the hood. “See what I’m talking about?”

Oh shit. Shit. Shit. Did you forsake me?

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Lars take two more steps.

“Please,” she said. “Just don’t move.”

Ned smiled at that. Checkmate.

From upstairs, the baby cried.

Lars looked up at the sound. Ned kept his eyes on Rachel.

And Brian stepped out on the porch, leveled the shotgun, and pulled the trigger.

The blast entered Lars’s back. It exited his front while the rifle was still in his arms. Pieces of buckshot and pieces of Lars hit the passenger side of the Rover and the rifle left his arms and landed on the hood. Lars went to his knees, and she shot Ned.

She couldn’t actually remember squeezing the trigger but she must have because he shouted as if he were shouting at a ref making a bad call at a sporting event, a dismayed and disgusted “Ahhhhhhhh,” and then he toppled back against the porch steps and she could see the gun was no longer in his hand.

She came around the Rover, kept the gun pointed at him. He watched her come, watched Brian come too, pointing that shotgun at him. Brian’s arm shook — hers, to her surprise, did not anymore — but it didn’t much matter when you were talking about a shotgun.

Lars made a soft thud when his face planted in the dirt.

She picked up Ned’s gun. She held on to it and put her own in the waistband of her jeans. Then they were both standing in front of him, wondering what they were going to do.

The hole she’d put in Ned was in his shoulder. His left arm drooped, as if there were nothing to hold it up anymore, so she presumed her bullet had shattered his collarbone.

He looked at her, breathing shallowly through his mouth. He looked forlorn and lost, a salesman at the end of a bad week. The blood spread down his off-white shirt and soaked the left side of his jacket, one of those plaid, fleece-lined shirt-jackets a lot of construction workers wear.

“Where’s your cell phone?” Brian said.

Ned grimaced as he reached into the right pocket of his corduroy pants. He handed Brian a flip phone.

Brian opened it, scrolled through the call log and then the texts.

“When did you arrive?” he asked.

“’Bout nine,” Ned said.

Brian opened one of his texts. “You told someone ‘We got C.’ What’s that mean?”

“Perloff’s wife was Objective C. You’re Objective A.” He gave Rachel a weary flick of the head. “She’s B.”

The baby wailed again, muffled by glass and distance.