“No, I ain’t. Not this time. I left those notes where they’re gonna be found real soon. Hell, you’ll be lucky to make it to the highway before the blue lights are on your ass. You might wanna get the fuck outta here. Get a head start.”
A small sound came out of me. Half laugh, half choke.
It hurt like a bastard. I felt like a hand had reached up under my ribs and squeezed my damn kidney. A coughing fit took over, and I doubled over, trying to stop the pain ripping up my back.
“You’re done, Bob,” I croaked as I laughed. “Whether I walk outta here or not, you’re fuckin’ done.”
The pistol came up over the top of the drum, and Bob fired.
The round caught me high on the left shoulder. It branded me, right through the meat and out the back, and the pain took my breath with it.
The shotgun jerked hard in my grip, and I squeezed the damn trigger. The blast went wide and high, opening up a crater in the cave wall a foot over Bob’s head. Dust and rock fragments rained down on the drum.
I racked the slide, but my hand wasn’t working right. The stitches in my pinky stump had let go for good. Fresh blood ran between my fingers. The shotgun weighed a bloody ton.
I couldn’t get another round off in time. Bob charged toward me.
I couldn’t fight him. I had to run. Had to get to the fissure at the back.
The plan had always been to fall back through that gap, come out the back, circle round, and put a load of buckshot through Bob’s spine while he was still trying to figure out where I’d gone. The plan had never been me getting shot first.
I shoved off the sandstone shelf and ran.
But my legs were like fucking jelly, wobbling all over the place. My left arm was hanging off my shoulder like it didn’t belong to me. The cave swam and tilted, and the bat roost above me swung with it. My breathing croaked in and out of me, ragged and wet, the sound of a man coming apart.
I made it ten steps before Bob fired again.
The bullet punched into my lower back. My legs stopped existing. The world tilted clean past sideways, and the floor came up and hit me in the face.
A scream came out of me that wasn’t human. It came up out of my chest and tore my throat open, and I couldn’t stop it, couldn’t dial it down, couldn’t even breathe around it.
The shotgun had slid out of my hand. I could see it in the dirt about six feet away. Might as well have been six miles.
Above me, the bats had gone berserk. The gunfire had set the whole roost off, and they were screeching and wheeling around the cave roof, hundreds of leather wings beating in the dark, their stink raining down with them.
I tried to push myself up.
Nothing happened from the waist down.
My hands worked. My good arm worked. My legs were two dead things attached to my hips, and they weren’t getting any messages from upstairs.
He’d put a bullet through my spine. Half my body was fucked. I’d seen enough downed cattle in my time to know the only answer was a bullet.
Frank Branson was done.
The empty service revolver was pressed up under my hipbone where I’d fallen on it. I tried to slide my good hand under to reach it, but couldn’t get the angle, couldn’t roll enough weight off the damn thing. Pain tore through me so bad I gave up.
The gun was worthless anyway.
Bob’s boots came into my field of vision. Worn, brown cop boots. Same boots he’d been wearing for years. He stood two feet from my face. I waited for him to shoot me. I lay there with my face pressed to the dirt and got ready for the muzzle against the back of my skull. That’s what he would do.
No witnesses. He’d said that dozens of times.
But Bob didn’t shoot.
His boots moved past my head. I tracked them as far as I could turn my neck.
He went to the duffel, and I heard the zip slide close. His boots crunched over gravel again, then he crouched beside me, close enough I could see his face if I rolled my eyes up. Gray stubble. A smear of Lyle’s blood on his cheek he wouldn’t know was there. The same brown eyes I’d been looking at since we were teenagers.
