Warpath

45

Orange roils outward, the shade of a tiger after you stab him in the ass.

Boiling, the explosion is red at the edges like what any man sees as he enters his bedroom to find his wife occupying another man’s time. Black curls in as the first real precursors of death. The fat burst rises and sweeps in under itself; bulging out into a bulb. Rising on a column of flame. Mushroom.

The building around me snaps to life with peppered debris. Concrete slabs and pebbles, no doubt razor blades and ball bearings as well. I duck, feel a rain of dirt and rubble sprinkle down on me for long, long seconds.

I wait until I hear the quiet susurration of hissing flame, of ruins settling down into piles. Then I look up. Where the third floor was, there is now a black char mark. The outer walls are jagged teeth of blasted wreckage. Smoke billowing. Holes in the floor, pocked about like acne in all its varying degrees of severity. No rapist. No gang.

I stand up.

Something crunches behind me and I feel the gunshot before I hear it. My breath leaves in a great whoosh as powerful as that explosion and my face hits the window frame. Down. Guts on fire. Feel a fist grab me around the ankle and yank me back. Taste the concrete as it slides across my teeth.

Try and roll, try and struggle. Futile. Every organ I have just quivers and has teeth, chewing at my insides. Vision blurs and gets grainy. If I can just stand up, if I can just make a fist. But in the end my spine just quits bending and my hands quit clenching and my will to stop acting like a flopping fish on the shoreline evaporates. I’ll just rest a second. Get my second wind.

A fire has started in the back of my ribs, left side. Maybe right. Can’t tell anymore. Hard to breathe.

Footsteps around me. Shoes sliding along the bare concrete, shuffle shuffle shuffle. Whoever it is they need to pick up their feet when they walk. Kick to help me roll over on my back. Someone else’s hand in my jacket, taking my iron. Kicked once, twice in the face. Before my eye swells shut I see Thuggie standing over me.

46

“This is it, mother fucka. This is where your war led you.”

“Thuggie...” that name slides off my tongue the way a stomach rejects rotten food. The night of Willibald’s death comes rushing back, bulldozing. I see his face just enough to feel secure in the fact that the next time I see it’ll be beating to death the right coward. The facial hair, the baby cheeks and high eyebrows. Ugly.

“I recognize you. Pussy,” I say. “Always shooting when your target isn’t ready.”

He aims his piece down over my face. He looms there like the angel of death; gun metal gray scythe with a four-inch barrel guiding the way. His foot on my chest and all I can think about is how baggie his fucking pants are. They pool around his ankle the way a dad’s slacks do when his child tries them on for size.

“I ain’t got no rules, pig. And I play the game to win.”

“You got not balls, either.”

I groan, arch my back. I can feel the slug shift in my ribs. I scream. The agony of that little critter burrowing. My toes curl and as stupid as it sounds that tiny sensation puts life in my blood. The bullet, shallow and low. Missed my spine. My heart. I feel it throb through my neck, flooding my brain. My lungs burn but no pressure is building. They’re intact.

“War?” I ask through gritted teeth. “How ’bout your fucking foot soldiers shoot up the right house? This is where your war led to.”

“Fuck that old lady.” His tone is flat. The life of a woman wasted means literally nothing.

I spit some blood across his shoe. “Tell me somethin’, bro. Word on the street was...when you came back for—for the second drive-by, you. You were the shooter.”

He gives me the cockiest half-smile this side of Magnum P.I. “Fuck that old geezer, too.”

He points my own gun at me with his other hand, adjusts his grip, finger on the trigger. “Fuck you. I ain’t never killed a cop before.”

Shadows shift from across the room. I smell a change in the wind. I laugh. “I’m not a cop. But you will be killing the last swinging dick to make your mama slip around in her own goo.”

“You funny. You very—” And Thuggie’s head snaps forward. He pitches over against the wall behind me just as blood and brains start finding their way out of his mouth.

“You heard that?” I squeak out. The shadows shift again and Graham comes forward, looking like shit.

“The your mama joke?”

“No.”

“The part about killing my grandfather?” Graham asks.

“Yup. You heard it.”