The last bedroom was a guest room, neat and untouched, with an empty smell about it. Soto ran back down the stairs.
Kort asked, “We clear?”
“We’re clear.”
Kort was straddling Campbell’s back and now she grabbed the other woman’s hair and slammed her face into the floor hard enough to break her nose all over again, and shouted, “Where’s your brother, bitch? Where’s John? We know you know...”
“No, no, no, no...” Campbell was facedown in a puddle of blood.
“Gonna cut your foot off. Gonna cut you to pieces, and start with your foot...”
Soto had brought a canvas tool satchel through the door with him. Now he went to it and asked Kort, “How you want to start?”
Campbell screamed again and Kort smashed her face into the floor a few more times, and said, “Give me the DeWalt and the tie-off.”
Kort knelt one knee on Campbell’s back and said to her, “We’re gonna explain here. We need that information, where John is right now. We need a phone number, we need an address. You don’t tell us, we’re gonna start by cutting off your foot, and we ain’t giving you another chance...”
As he spoke, Soto was cinching a tourniquet around Campbell’s right foot. Campbell screeched, “Don’t know, don’t know...”
“All right, let’s do it the hard way,” Kort said, and she pressed one of Campbell’s legs to the floor and began sawing off her right foot.
—
CAMPBELL NOW WAILEDlike a fire engine, a long screech that quavered but never quit, and was one reason that neither Soto nor Kort detected the fly in the ointment, which arrived in the form of eleven-year-old Douglas Campbell, who’d been lying asleep, sick and mildly feverish, in his second-floor bedroom.
When Soto and Kort came through the front door and his mother began screaming, Doug woke, disoriented by the screams; but then he recognized quickly enough what they were, that something dangerous was happening, and heard somebody running up the stairs. He rolled off the bed and lay between the bed and the wall. Somebody ran down the hallway, stopped outside the door, then went on, and finally, back down the stairs.
When he was sure the intruder was gone, Doug crept out of the bedroom and down the hallway to a balcony over the living room, where he peeked around a banister and saw his mother facedown in a lot of blood, and a man tying a rope around her ankle.
Doug dropped to his knees, then his belly, and slipped on down the hall to his parents’ bedroom, where he got the Ruger 10/22 rifle out of his father’s closet. He’d shot it with some regularity since he turned six, under his father’s strict eye. His father kept two extended magazines separate from the rifle, stuffed into cowboy boots at the back of the closet. They were hidden as a precaution for when the cousins came over, which they did a couple of times a week. The cousins were a rough bunch, and if they’d found a loaded rifle in the closet, they’d be shooting the place up, and maybe each other, bigger than shit.
Doug was more responsible and so knew about the magazines. He got them from the boots, punched one into place in the rifle, put the other in the back of his Jockey shorts, jacked a round into the chamber, reminded himself about the safety, clicked it off, and walked back to the balcony.
He didn’t know that he should have simply opened fire. He only knew about shooting people from movies, so he poked the rifle over the banister and shouted, “STOP THAT!” andthenhe opened fire.
The genuine Ruger 10/22 extended magazine held twenty-five rounds of high-speed.22s. Kort and Soto lurched sideways when Doug screamed, and one second later, the.22 slugs were flying around them like so many bees as they scrambled for the door.
Kort made the mistake of slowing to grab the tool satchel and felt one of the slugs slap her across the butt and then they were tumbling across the porch and into the yard andstillthe bullets didn’t stop. Soto pulled his holstered Sig and said, “I think it’s a kid...”
But Kort groaned, “I been shot...”
“How bad?”
“Hit in the hip, in the hip...”
They were in the yard, thirty yards from the door, when Doug stepped onto the porch with the rifle. Soto yanked his Sig up, way too fast for accuracy, did a little calming thing he’d trained himself to do, and was drawing down on the kid’s chest when a.22 slug slapped past his ear, so close he could feel the breeze. He flinched, yanked on the pistol’s trigger, knew it was way off target, saw the kid drop the rifle magazine and punch in a fresh one, long as a banana, and Kort screamed and they piled into the car, with.22 bullets banging through and ricocheting off the doors, fenders, and window glass.
They sped away, straight down West Main, and the kid didn’t stop shooting at them until they were a hundred yards up the road and he’d run out of ammo.
—
THE CARwas a rental, but there was no possibility of taking it back to Avis with all the bullet holes and dents in it. They’d rented it with fake IDs, so that wasn’t a problem. Knowing that the cops would be looking for them within a few minutes, they took a snaky route across town, Kort screaming with pain: “Jesus, slow down, slow down, take it easy, you’re killing me...”
She eventually knelt on the front seat, because she couldn’t bear to sit on it. Once on I-65, they stayed in the slow lane, because the bullet-pocked doors were on the passenger side. On the highway, their car was no longer distinctive—another one of about a billion Toyotas.
They’d taken rooms at a Super 8, where they also had the second car. The motel had been chosen because it was old-fashioned, with room doors opening directly onto the parking lot, so they’d never have to walk through a lobby. Soto let Kort out and as she waddled painfully into her room, he parked the bullet-marked side of the car close enough to their second car that nobody would likely walk between them and see the bullet marks.
He glanced around—nobody paying attention to him—and then took a closer look at the side panels on the car. Three bullets had gone through the trunk and four through the back fender on the passenger side, and one through the glass in the back window. Two more had bounced off the side of the car, and one off the windowglass. He couldn’t believe neither he nor Kort had been hit in the car, but the kid had been shooting too low and at too much of an angle.
