Matt shouted, swinging the gun to his hostage’s head and back at the hard case.
He sidestepped to his left, putting the car between him and the hard case, who raised his left hand in a calming gesture while keeping his gun aimed at Matt’s face.
“Easy, Matt,” he said. “Just take it easy.”
“Who the fuck are you people?” Matt yelled, still edging sideways, his eyes darting left and right nervously, keeping tabs on the front and rear of the house.
“I’m impressed that you made it here, Matt,” the hard case said, clearly trying to work out how Matt had found them. “In fact, I’m pretty impressed by everything you’ve done since this thing started.”
Matt was now at the back corner of the Merc. The hard case wasn’t backing away. He was actually tracking Matt, sidestepping smoothly and moving closer to the Merc that was now between them, eyeing the surroundings with radarlike focus. There was something deeply unnerving about him. The missing ear and the scar, the bald head that tapered up in the shape of a bullet—and they only served as a backdrop to the real darkness that emanated from the ceramic-black eyes that looked like they’d been to hell and back without blinking, the dark, eyeliner-like eyelids that rimmed them, and the sharp eyebrows framing the stygian mask that brooded out of the center of his face.
“And what is this thing?” Matt rasped. “What the fuck’s going on? What happened to my brother?”
The hard case shook his face slightly, in a condescending, tut-tutting way. “You know what, Matt? You’re too concerned with the past. You need to think more about your future.”
Matt backed up another step. “What did you do to my brother?” he yelled again. “Is he still alive?”
The hard case didn’t flinch. He stayed unsettlingly calm, his cold eyes seemingly assessing Matt’s position and evaluating possible outcomes. “You’re messing around with something you really don’t want to be messing with,” he finally told him. “My advice to you is to let it go. Find yourself a nice, deep hole, bury your head down, and forget any of this ever happened. Or better still—”
—and he just squeezed the trigger, once, with no discernible emotion, just made a decision and acted on it without a trace of emotion. The round hit the guy Matt was holding up squarely in the chest—
“—let me put you in it.”
Matt felt Brush Cut jerk and felt a sudden burn at his own side, by his left ribs, but he didn’t have time to pause and check it out. He had to stay on his feet as everything rushed into a frenzied blur.
Brush Cut’s legs gave and he started to fall just as the hard case fired again, then again. One of the shots hit Brush Cut in the shoulder, the bullet exiting close to Matt’s crouched head, whizzing past his ear and splattering his face with blood and bone shards. Matt struggled to keep Brush Cut up, using him as a shield while firing back at the hard case, who ducked behind the Merc. He faltered backward, his eyes scanning around, the burning sensation in his left flank getting stronger with each step. The hard case came up for another shot, got Matt’s hostage in the thigh. Two more bodies rushed out of the back of the house, guns out. They saw Matt, crouched into firing positions, but they were wide open and Matt got one of them in the shoulder a split second after he realized it was the auburn-haired girl from the van, the night they took him and Vince Bellinger. She tumbled sideways as if her feet had been knocked out from under her. The other shooter dived behind the Merc and joined the hard case. Matt kept moving, still using the bloodied-if-not-dead Brush Cut as a shield, lugging his heavy body back toward the street, step by step, inch by inch, firing away every time he spotted a flash of skin. A couple of shots whizzed by and he retaliated with three more of his own, then his gun’s magazine spat out its last round and the slide locked in its open position.
He saw that the hard case and the other shooter cottoned onto it as soon as he did, and they emerged from cover with little concern. He looked around frantically and realized he was now only a couple of yards from the sidewalk. Summoning whatever energy he could muster, he dragged Brush Cut’s dead weight back a