Page 100 of Ransom
The scream blew through six speakers, and the feedback howled and broke, and the world ripped open. Carbines came up around the yard. Doors swung wide on the main building.
Coyote hit the dirt behind Nimue and rolled. When he came up, his knife was already bloody.
Nimue was a gopher snake, and Rex didn't know it. Coyote had taught me that in the second week I'd known him: a man who got hit by a snake didn't ask the snake's species. The body decided it had been killed, and the rest came along behind. Rex had already decided. He screamed bloody murder.
I drew on the closest man near the gallows and put one round through his chest. He fell forward off the platform into the front row of chairs and took the row down with him. One.
Then everything happened at once.
Mateo's rifle cracked from the gift shop corner. The first man on the roof folded. The second turned, and Mateo took him too. He went backwards into the AC unit with a clang that punched through the feedback.Attaboy, Mateo.Linc opened up from the north and one of the gate boys spun and dropped. The other got his weapon halfway up before Linc dropped him too.Good boy, Linc.
Coyote took the second flanker on the gallows in two steps. He came up under the man's guard, knife in low, out clean, in again at the throat.
Rex was still screaming and flailing, trying to get Nimue off him. He grabbed her once to throw her, and she struck him twicein quick succession before crawling under his collar.That'll teach you to grab a lady, Rex.
The man on the platform behind Winston went for the cleat where the rope was tied off.
He was going to drop Winston.
Like hell he was.
I shot him in the head. He fell sideways off the platform, and Winston had his wrists free in the same breath, rope off, noose off, and then Winston jumped.
Goddamn it, Winston.
He came down wrong. The right leg went out from under him on the landing, and he hit the dirt on his side and rolled, and for one bad second I thought he'd taken a round on the way down. Then he pushed up onto his good knee, and I remembered to breathe.
He scooped a pistol off one of Rex's fallen men and came up with it like he'd been born holding it. Then he was up on the bad leg, limping, and he was shouting something at me. "Go!"
I turned back to the yard.
Rex had thrown Nimue. I caught the motion in the corner of my eye, an arc against the floodlight. She landed in the dirt, righted herself, and stayed there with her head up.Sorry, sweetheart.Rex was on his hands and knees, hat off, white hair plastered to his skull, breathing in raw heaves. His pearl pistol was still on his hip.
He looked up at me.
The man looking at me from the dirt was the same man who'd burned my barn down this afternoon and built a gallows for my man this evening. The body might be giving out. The man wasn't done.
Rex scrambled to his feet and ran.
He went straight for the side door off the main building and was through it before I'd cleared the chairs.Fucker was fast for a man his age.
A round screamed past my ear from one of the perimeter men I hadn't accounted for. I dropped behind a table. Mateo shot him from the gift shop corner.Thank you, Mateo.Two more rounds came from the door on the far side of the yard. Linc opened up. The door went quiet.
Coyote collected Nimue and crossed the yard at a low run. He stopped at Winston's bad leg and went down on his haunches and looked up.
Winston shook him off without looking down. "I'm fine. Go on." Then, to me, with blood in his teeth: "Your man went that way."
"My man."
"Rex." He pushed me to the side door with the heel of his hand. "Go. Try not to enjoy it without me."
I ran.
I knew the hallway from the recon. It smelled of mouse, sawdust, and rot under fresh paint.
The Legends Wall was on my right. I ran past it, but Castillo's face caught me anyway out the corner of my eye, the date stamp under it from the night he died. He'd been in this hallway. Now I was in it for him.
And for Winston.
