I did.
The Mercedes roared to life and I shifted into reverse, flooring the gas and spinning us around. The wheels screamed against the blacktop, grabbing the pavement as I shifted into drive and rocketed down Windmore Road, the back end sliding around the bend. A quarter mile away, three white Ford Expeditions flew past us in the opposite direction, heading back toward the house.
The ringing still shouted in my head, but it wasn’t loud enough to drown out the sound of the approaching sirens.
26
Stack heard something.
Well, Stack thought he heard something.
Fucking hearing.
He edged closer to the stairs, considered taking the man’s shotgun, then decided the magnum would do him just fine.
He stepped around the body at the base of the stairs, doing his best to keep the magnum trained forward, while pulling himself up the steps with his other hand on the railing. He’d made it up four of those steps before his screaming muscles and joints reminded him that he hadn’t taken an Aleve since sometime the night before. The rattling bottle in his right pocket (not to mention the ammunition in his left) did little to help conceal his current location, but truth be told, it would take a special bad guy to miss an eighty-two-year-old man clawing his way up the stairs in some kind of geriatric chase. He half hoped someone would shoot him before he got to the top so he wouldn’t have to climb the rest.
This time when he heard something, he wassurehe heard something—a cough.
Stack took another step. “I’m a retired police detective who’s been jonesing to fire a gun at a trespassing piece-of-shit for the better part of two decades. That last one felt real nice. I don’t know who you are, but you better get the fuck out of my house before I make the last of these steps!”
The shouting took the wind from his lungs, and Stack had to take a break a half dozen steps from the top. He didn’t sit, although he would have liked to. Instead he stood still, gripped the handrailing—the only thing keeping him from tumbling back down the steps like the man earlier, and drew in a series of breaths.
He never had a heart problem.
All the things wrong with his body read like a laundry list, but his ticker had never been part of the problem. Things changed, though, and if the pain in the left side of his chest was any indication, his heart was about to become another line item on his health insurance.
The pain in his chest was dull, a deep-rooted thump reminding him of his days playing football back in high school. A lifetime ago, the memories creeping back from someplace in his head as if only yesterday. Stack’s brain was funny like that. He couldn’t remember what he ate for dinner two days ago or even what he watched on television last, but at this particular moment he smelled the wet grass of the field behind the Macintosh farm, the scent of the dirt. He remembered the sun beating down from the east for the first time since the previous fall, and he remembered the pain of Henry Otter when he broke the line, got past Daryl Luthing, and barreled into him shoulder first, into his left flank. When the hit came, Stack remembered his mind telling him to hold the ball, and he fully intended to do that, but with Daryl’s shoulder smacking into him like a runaway bull came the sharp crack of a couple ribs, the complete evacuation of all air from his lungs, and the most godawful pain Stack had ever experienced. The football shot out of his hands straight up into the air and landed directly into the arms of Ernie Neidert, who ran it back for a touchdown. All of this played out in the second or two it took for Stack’s beaten body to crumble to the ground.
The pain Stack felt in his chest now felt no better than that day nearly seventy years earlier, and when the deep, burning ache had a good foothold in his chest, it began exploring, edging down his left arm all the way down to his fingers, still wrapped around the railing.
Stack didn’t want to die. He was too fucking stubborn to die, and he sure as shit wasn’t about to fall down his own stairs and end up spooning the shitknocker occupying that space now.
Pain or no pain, Stack tightened his grip on the railing and gave a good, solid tug. His legs kicked like pistons, and he shot up two steps, just like that. The pain in his chest fired back a ball of heat in protest, but before that could sink in and really deliver the hurt, Stack yanked at the railing again and made the last two steps. He collapsed on the floor of the narrow hallway at the top, his breathing ragged and drool leaving the corner of his mouth.
Someone walked up to him, came out into the hallway from the middle bedroom, the one with the expanded Wall of Weird. That someone stopped a few feet from his head. Stack tried to look up and get a better look at the person—all he could see were white shoes, white pants, and the bottom of a white coat much like the one worn by the man at the bottom of the stairs. Stack’s head wouldn’t move, though. His eyes barely wanted to move. He tried to swing his right arm around, the one holding the magnum, but as he did, he realized he was no longer holding the magnum. The gun might be on the floor beside him, or more likely he dropped it somewhere on the stairs. Either way, it wasn’t in his hand, and it did little good somewhere else.
The person standing beside him knelt down, got a little too close, and whispered in his ear. “That’s an interesting room you got there. My boss is gonna want to talk to you about that.”
Stack tried to tell the guy that he wasn’t about to talk to him, his boss, or the President of the United States, and if he did, he’d tell all of them fuckwad-nothing, but when he opened his mouth to speak, nothing came out but more drool, the pain in his chest and arm dialed up to eleven, and consciousness fell away.
27
Six minutes.
That’s how much time passed from the moment the white Ford Expeditions arrived at 803 Windmore Road, until Latrese Oliver and David Pickford climbed into the back seat of the middle vehicle, the cleanup complete.
The crew worked with practiced speed. The bodies of the dead were placed inside the two disabled vehicles and set ablaze with handheld TPA canister grenades. David had no idea where Charter obtained such toys, but he sure enjoyed instructing his subordinates to use them. He had been told they contained thickened triethylaluminium, a napalm-like substance that ignites when exposed to air. They made very little noise, just a simplepop!, followed by a puff of blue smoke, then a rush of flames that quickly engulfed the interiors before lapping out through the opened windows and over the roof, hood, and sides.
The interior of the house was photographed and videoed in under two minutes. The pictures and footage would be examined later by a team of specialists. If there was something worthwhile to find, they would find it. At the end of those two minutes, TPAs were placed in the house and ignited.
Burning the dead was nothing more than a precaution. Charter employees were not permitted to carry identification, nor did they appear in any government database. Criminal records, social security, birth, DMV—all were purged upon employment.
A single neighbor emerged once the gunfire stopped, running from the house two doors down at 807 Windmore when he saw David standing in the street, directing the team. The man was in his mid-fifties, with thin hair combed back over a rather small head. He wore a white tank-top undershirt, jeans, and no shoes. He held a .22 in his hand. By the look of the rust on the barrel, the weapon hadn’t been fired or cleaned in a long time. He ran at David, shouting that he called the cops, they were on their way.
“When did you call them?” David asked.
“Five minutes ago! You okay? You hit?”
