no idea who but probably a cop—had shot him, and the pain was blinding him. He knew he was bleeding bad.
Pretty much a done deal, he thought. He still had a last wish. If only he could get a peek at a cop . . . He still had three shells, he thought, three or four. If he could get a peek at a cop, he’d kill him, a good-bye kiss.
He pushed himself flat, glanced down at his leg, surprised by the amount of blood beneath it. The pain was bad but seemed to be diminishing. The heat must be getting to him, he thought, because he was getting light-headed. If he was going to get a cop, it had to be soon.
* * *
—
BOB STAYED behind the ridge with the rifle still propped on Lucas’s backpack, waiting for some sign of motion inside or underneath the trailer. Tremanty and Lucas slid sideways along the slope until they were beside and slightly below the Lexus, then Lucas raised his rifle, and Tremanty his handgun, and Lucas shouted, “U.S. Marshal! Come out of there. Come out on this side.”
The passenger-side window rolled down, and she shouted, “They raped me. They made me fuck all of them. They chained me up . . . That old man raped and killed Mrs. Harrelson. And he was going to kill me.”
Lucas shouted, “Come out of there.”
Tremanty half stood, loping toward the back of the Lexus, and when Lucas saw him moving he shouted, “Sandro! Get down. Don’t do that. Get—”
Boom!
The shotgun. Tremanty flew away from the car and halfway down the slope. Lucas looked at him in horror. And then Tremanty rolled over, got to his knees, turned to Lucas, and said, “Missed.”
“Jesus. Don’t do that shit. I already did it enough for both of us.” Lucas looked back at the Lexus. “Come out of there.”
Up on the hill, Rae had seen the shot and had seen Tremanty go flying, and she sprayed the ground behind the Airstream with a burst from her M4.
Cox slipped out of the Lexus and down to Lucas and Tremanty. Rae was shouting into her handset, “How’s Sandro? Is he hit?”
Tremanty said into his handset, “No, but my back is full of cactus stickers.”
Rae said, “What were you doing? My God, I’m gonna kick your ass when I get back down there.”
Lucas asked Cox, “How many people in there? In the trailer?”
“None. Well, two, but they’re both dead. This guy Cole was sorta taking care of me toward the end, he left me a gun to keep Ralph off me. But Ralph went back into the bedroom—” She broke off and began to cry.
“Where’s Mrs. Harrelson?”
“Ralph . . . Ralph raped her. And then . . . he had this shotgun—that shotgun, the one Deese has—and after he finished with her, he shot her. Right in the chest. I had that gun, but I was so scared. But I knew he was going to kill me next. So when he came out of the bedroom, I shot him first.”
She began weeping again, gasping for breath. “I was so scared . . .”
Lucas wasn’t entirely buying it, but he still had a Deese problem. He left Tremanty to take care of Cox and scuttled across the ridge back to Bob.
“He’s under there, all right, I saw him. But I didn’t have a shot,” Bob said. “I’ll tell you, he’ll bleed to death if we don’t get him out of there soon.”
* * *
—
ALL DEESE WANTED was one more shot, one more shot. He was sure he’d missed with the first one; he’d pulled around too quickly. The machine gun had scared him. He hadn’t been hurt, but he knew he couldn’t move backwards. He inched sideways, very light-headed now. There was a bunch of crap under the trailer, a pile of four-by-four timbers, each about five or six feet long, that smelled of creosote, an old pot with the bottom rusted out, some baling wire, a pile of narrow boards that might have been a wooden floor.
He slid one of the boards out of the pile to prop up the gun barrel.
One more shot, he thought. Was that too much to ask?
He moved another board to get it out of his line of sight and looked straight into the cold black eyes of a Crotalus scutulatus, the Mojave green rattlesnake, North America’s most poisonous rattler. It struck him in the face and he panicked, jerked away, slapped at it, missed,