“Asshole lives two houses down from here, and as far as I can tell, he lives by himself. I’ve looked at the house as much as I can, and I don’t see any reason to think that there’s any fortification of any kind.”
“So we’re not going into a rigged house,” Zack said. “I’m so relieved to know that a Bandit doesn’t have a secret agent, booby-trap style home.”
Mason rolled his eyes.
“Just keep focus on the mission,” he said. “I’ll take the front. You two will approach from the rear. We have to assume that the doors will be locked and that he would be alert to the sound of any windows breaking. That means that we have to operate with stealth.”
Because three bikes coming up here in the evening wouldn’t do that.
But actually, upon thinking about that, maybe that wouldn’t have been so bizarre. I couldn’t imagine that Damian didn’t have Bandit visitors every so often. There was no reason to think that the sound of bikes would throw up red flags.
“Since it’s not four in the morning, he’s probably going to be awake, so we’ll have to take whatever measures possible when we see him,” Mason said. “But obviously, the quieter we can do it, the better, just in case there are any other Bandits over or if he manages to call for help.”
“And if he does?” Zack said.
“Then we run like fuck.”
I shrugged. Seemed reasonable to me.
“All right, let’s move.”
I kept my body low and moved with Zack under the darkness of night. It wasn’t like we were Navy SEALs by any stretch of the imagination, but it wasn’t fucking cool to feel like we were operating on a real mission under real darkness. We were handling this like the fucking pros did.
And we were going to kill the second Bandit that had gang-raped Rachel. That, more than anything, was what kept me going.The one person in Santa Maria to treat me nicely when I wasn’t who I am.
We got to the back of the house and came to a sliding glass door. I prepared to pick the lock when Zack held a hand up. Quietly, he put a hand on the door and tried to pull. Unfortunately, Zack’s “go for the simplest answer” strategy didn’t work.
“Nice try,” I scoffed.
Zack kept quiet, scanning the area for anyone walking around, as I pulled out a copper wire and started fiddling with the lock. It took me a few seconds of jiggling around, but I managed to unlock it and slid the door open. I listened for a half-second for footsteps, but there were none. It sounded like he was listening to television upstairs.
I motioned for Zack to follow me up the stairs. Mason was still working on his lock, but I didn’t think he would mind if one of us got the kill. We all wanted the Bandits dead; it wasn’t a competition.
We climbed up the stairs to a floor with three doors. One was half-open, going into what looked like a bathroom. Two were shut. We heard the door with sports on the TV on the other side and moved toward it.
Zack and I crouched. We had to continue moving in slowly, moving in purposefully. Wecouldhave gone in guns blazing—and if I had it my way without concern for consequences, that would have been more fun—but if there were multiple Bandits in the room, that would have compromised our mistake. I reached down for the copper wire—
And then everything unfolded. And none of it fucking good.
The other door opened.
“What the—”
I raised my gun and instantly fired.
“Who the fuck?”
The person who yelled was Damian. Whoever I had killed…
I motioned for Zack to run downstairs and grab Mason. I ran over to the body and looked closely. I could see enough to know who I’d killed.
Damian’s little brother.
And now Damian was coming out, almost certainly with a gun.
“Who the—Marco! Goddamnit, Marco!”
Damian was distracted enough that I sprinted to the window, slammed my body into it, and fell on the slanted roof. I collected myself enough to then hop down—an uncomfortable landing, but one I rolled into—and sprinted as fast as I fucking could. It wasn’t fast enough to escape hearing Damian screaming, “Marco! Why! Marco, come on, man!”
