Page 58 of The Jackal

I let her pull me in, let Joy's hand find my back and Vivi drop down onto the arm of the sofa beside me and Meghan reach over and take my hand, this circle of fierce women closing around the newest and most frightened of them. I let myself be held in the middle of my fear the way I'd held a hundred others in the middle of theirs. For one more minute, the room worked. It held. It held me up.

Then, the door opened.

Not the way Elias had opened it before—the easy head-in-the-door, the reassuring grin, the it's-all-green. This time the door came open fast and hard, and Elias was through it before it had finished swinging. There was no tablet in his hand and no grin on his face. Every screen he'd been watching all night was written across it at once.

The whole room came up off the sofas.

"What," Claire said. Not a question. Her voice had gone flat and hard. "Elias. What."

He found me. Out of every face in that room, his eyes came straight to mine and stayed. I have never in my life wanted less to be looked at, because I already knew, I knew before he said a word, the way you always know when the thing you've been dreading finally arrives wearing the face of a friend.

"Something's gone wrong," Elias said. "Out there. It's—" His jaw worked. "Maggie."

And the room, and the fire, and the black water, and every warm and holding thing in it, fell away beneath me all at once.

30

CASH

People think a gunfight is loud.

It isn't. Not on the inside of one, not for me. The first rifle opened up and the muzzle flash lit the room white and the noise should have been the end of the world. Instead, everything went quiet and slow and clear, the way it always does, the way it did at the bottom of the mine. The world narrows to a corridor. The corridor fills with work. And I go down it the only way I know how, which is calm, because calm is the one thing that keeps you alive when the air turns to lead.

There is a thing that happens to me when the killing starts. I've never had a good word for it. It isn't rage and it isn't fear—I don't own either one. It's closer to prayer. A settling. Everything I am comes to a single, fine point, and the point is this: not tonight. Not this dog. Not me. Not yet.

So, I danced.

The first one came out of the wall on my right in a cloud of drywall dust, rifle already up. He was fast. He wasn't fast enough. I was moving before the room finished registering him, inside his muzzle before he could bring it to bear, one hand driving the barrel up toward the ceiling while the other put the pistol under his chin. One round. I was already turning him, already using his falling body as a wall between me and the next gun, already firing over his dropping shoulder at the shape coming through the dust behind him. Two rounds, center. The second man sat down against the framing like a tired thing and did not get up.

Two. Fluid. Almost gentle. That's how it starts. That's never how it ends.

Max took the third.

I didn't tell him to. I never have to tell him anything; that was settled in a kennel aisle.

He came off the floor in that flat, straight line, sixty pounds of muscle and war, and hit the third man in the arm as the man swung on me—not the throat this time, the arm, the gun arm, because Max is smarter than most men I've served with and he knew the gun was the thing. The rifle went wide, stitching a line across the ceiling, plaster raining down. The man screamed and beat at the dog fastened to his forearm. I crossed the space and ended his screaming with two rounds and put my hand on Max's vest for half a second—good, good, off. He released and wheeled and we moved together to the next, one animal with two bodies, the way we were always going to be.

That's when the fourth one caught me.

I felt it more than heard it—a hard, hot line drawn across the meat of my left shoulder, a round that came a half-inch from being the one that mattered and settled for opening me up instead. It spun me a quarter turn. It did not stop me.

Pain is information; that's all it's ever been to me. The information was: he's high and to your left, behind the sawhorse and lumber, and he thinks he's hit you worse than he has.

I let him think it. I let my body sell it, let the wounded shoulder drop. When he rose up out of cover to confirm the kill, I was already looking down my sights at the spot his head was going to be. It arrived on schedule, and I closed the account.

Four.

The room was chaos now. Muzzle flash strobing the dark, the air thick with dust and cordite and the copper smell that comes up under everything at the end, my own blood warm and running down my arm to my fingers. Somewhere below us, Craine was gone through the floor and getting away. I could not do a thing about that, so I put it away. You put everything away but the corridor. The corridor still had two men in it.

The fifth one was smart. He'd hung back, let the eager ones die learning, and now he came at it right—moving, using the framing, cutting the angles, a professional the way the cutouts in the grass had not been. He and I traded the room for a handful of seconds that felt like an hour, both of us flowing through the studs and the sheeting and the toppled tools, firing and shifting and firing. I felt a round tug my sleeve and another punch into the drywall an inch from my face and spray my cheek with grit.

He was good. In another life, we might have worked together. In this one, he made the single mistake his kind can't afford, which is that he watched my gun and forgot my dog.

Max hit him from the low side.

The man went down and I was on him before he landed. It was over, close and ugly and fast, the blade, because the pistol had run dry somewhere in the dance and I hadn't had the half-second to feed it. I like the blade. It's honest in a way the gun isn't; it makes you feel the ending in your hand. So, honest was what I gave it, and then the fifth man was still and the room, for one ringing breath, went quiet.

Five.