Page 33 of The Jackal

He didn't blink. Fair enough.

I was filling the glass a second time when the back of my neck came alive.

I can't tell you the science of it. I've quit trying to explain the things my body knows before my mind does—it's all the same well, the finding and the feeling, the sense that turns your head toward a thing that hasn't announced itself yet. All I know is that between one breath and the next, the water going into that glass stopped being the loudest thing in the room. Every animal part of me came up out of the quiet at once, hard, and listened.

My eyes went to the window over the sink. Nothing. Dark yard, the shape of the live oak, the fence.

Then, to the front door.

Duke was already looking at it. He'd come up off his pillow without a sound, that old body forgetting its age, weight forward, ears up, a low thing starting in his chest that I felt more than heard. The two young ones slept on. But the old soldier and I stood in that dark kitchen and stared at the same door at the same moment, and I knew, the way I know the dead, that it was already too late to do the smart thing.

The door came in.

Not a knock. Not a jiggle of the handle. The whole door came in off its hinges under a boot, wood cracking. Two men shouldered through the gap with the fast, low economy of men who'd done it before—rifles up, sweeping, the front sight leading them into the room.

I didn't hesitate. Hesitation is a thing that happens to men who are afraid, and that machinery came out of me a long time ago, at the bottom of the earth. My gun was in the bedroom, in my bag, a hallway and a lifetime away. So, I took what the room gave me. My hand already had the big chef's knife out of the block by the stove, the heavy one, before the second man was all the way through the door.

And Duke became a young dog again.

I've seen a lot of things move fast in my life. I don't know that I've ever seen anything move like that old shepherd moved right then. Every gray year fell off him between the pillow and the door. He came off the floor in one flat line, straight as a thrown spear, all that ruined age burned clean away by the one thing a lifetime of training and instinct had left standing—there is a threat, and it is between me and mine—and he took the first man in the throat.

The man went back and down with feisty pounds of war dog fastened to his neck, and his rifle jerked up and loosed a burst into the ceiling, plaster raining down.

The second man swung toward the sound.

I threw the knife.

I've thrown a lot of things at a lot of men. There's no art to it worth explaining, and no time to explain it if there were. The knife crossed the kitchen and took the second man in the eye socket, buried to the handle, and his rifle went off as he fell—not aimed, just the hand clenching shut as the lights went out in him—a long, ripping burst that walked across the room in the dark.

I was already moving through it. You move through it. You don't freeze and you don't flinch and you don't waste the half second it costs to be afraid. I crossed to the second man as he dropped, and the two young dogs hit him from the side in a snarling tangle. I put my hands on his rifle and tore it out of dying fingers and came up with it on my shoulder—sweeping the door, the window, the black yard beyond, ready to put down the next man through that gap.

There was no next man.

The night held its breath. Two of them. Only two.

I stood there a moment with the rifle up and my pulse flat, reading the dark the way I've read a hundred rooms after the noise stops. The two young dogs were barking themselves hoarse over the second man, who wasn't going to mind. The first man was still down under Duke, making the wet sound a throat makes once it's been opened, his boots kicking slower and slower against the floor. Duke had him. Duke had not let go through any of it—not the gunfire, not the fall, not anything. The old dog just held on the way he'd been built to, jaws locked, a low sound coming out of him.

Movement at the edge of my eye. I brought the rifle a quarter inch toward it before I knew what it was, and stopped myself cold.

Mags. In the mouth of the hall, in a T-shirt, her hair wild from the bed, her face white and her eyes huge and moving from the door to the blood to me to the dogs, trying to make the picture add up into something a person could survive knowing.

"Call Dominion Hall," I said. My voice came out level. The work voice. The one that steadies people. "Now, Mags. Give them the address. They'll know."

She didn't move. She was looking down at Duke. At the old dog still locked onto the man on her floor, and something in her had started to understand what her eyes hadn't finished telling her yet.

"I'll take care of it," I said, gentler. "Go, make the call."

She went. God, bless her, she went—because she trusted me, and because some part of her already knew she didn't want to watch the next part.

I cleared the house first. That's the discipline. You don't tend to anything until the room can't kill you. I went out through the shattered front, onto the porch with the rifle up—empty street, a dark sedan at the curb with its doors hanging open, nobody in it, nobody behind it. I came back through and checked the back, the yard, the fence line the young dogs patrolled. Nothing. Two men had come to that little, crooked house in the dark, and two men were all they'd sent. Both of them were on the floor.

The sirens wouldn't be far—gunfire on a quiet street brings them.

I set the rifle on the counter, and I knelt down by Duke.

The first man had gone still under him, at last. I put my hand on the old dog's shoulder to ease him off, to tell him it was done, he could stop—and my hand came away wet.

Sticky. Warm. Blood, too much of it, and not the man's.