windows. The second guy did the same after a couple of seconds, but around the other side of the tree trunk.
Lucas couldn’t see anything with the heavily armored cops hanging over him; neither could MacIntosh, who was sitting on his ass with his gun in his hand, who said, “I can’t see a fuckin’ thing.”
Lucas stood, tentatively, and eased out from behind the SWAT guy to get a look. Laser dots played over the side of the target, focusing on the front door and the windows.
The SWAT guy said, “They gotta be down. We put five hundred rounds in there and that ain’t no bullshit.”
MacIntosh said, “Hope none of our guys got hit, that was a fuckin’ machine gun in there.”
“Probably oughta enter from the back,” Lucas said. “I wouldn’t want to be the one who runs up that driveway.”
“That ain’t gonna happen,” the SWAT guy said. And, “Who are you anyway?”
“Marshal,” Lucas said.
“Pleased to meet you. Bob and Rae seemed like nice folks.”
“They are,” Lucas said. “That was a hell of a thing there. Hope nobody got hurt.”
He edged farther out from behind the SWAT guy, trying for a better view.
* * *
—
IN THE BLINK of an eye, the automatic weapon opened up from the nearest window, powdering the camphor tree where they stood. A slug hit Lucas in the chest and he went down. And he heard MacIntosh screaming and felt somebody pulling on his ankles, dragging him farther behind the tree. He was then looking up at the underside of a tree, heard more hundreds of rounds pounding the house, and then everything started going weird, not a lot of pain but somehow a lot of hurt, and he thought, “Hope I’m not dying,” and then, “Maybe I am.”
Somebody was screaming, “Get it down here, get it rolling, get the fuck over here,” and he felt himself picked up like a rag doll and put on a gurney, which felt comfortable and soft around his head and ears, and then he was in an ambulance and he heard the ambulance tech shouting, “You gotta roll, man, you gotta hurry,” and the siren was going and everything got dimmer, and farther away, and even dimmer.
Then it all went dark.
CHAPTER
EIGHT
When he thought about it later, the darkness was the worst of it, worse than the pain. Sleep isn’t dark, it’s not black. There’s something in your brain that’s always awake, so when the sabre-toothed tiger comes to the cave, your brain wakes you up and tells you to get the family spear.
The dark that Lucas fell into wasn’t like that. No part of his brain was awake. Then, at some moments, he floated into the still-living gray sleep state, only to fall back into the dark. Going back down was like dying all over again, every time it happened.
* * *
—
HOT AUGUST NIGHT, streetlights vibrating with humidity rings along Mississippi River Boulevard. Lucas pulled his T-shirt over his head and ran shirtless and sweating for the last two blocks to his house and up the driveway. He wasn’t moving as fast as he had in the spring, before he’d been shot. When he got to the garage door, he bent over, hands on knees, gasping for breath.
The bullet hole in his chest and the exit wound in his back showed as pink knots of new skin and scar tissue. A wave of nausea swept over him and he gagged, pushed it back, and finally stood up, sweat rolling down his chest.
His back ached, and maybe always would. The slug had hit him below the collarbone, punched through a corner of his pectoral muscle, knocked a hole in his shoulder blade, clipped the top of a lung, barely missed his deltoid, and exited through something called the infraspinatus.
He’d bled, Bob told him, like a stuck pig.
The docs told him it’d be a year before he’d be all the way back. He refused to accept that. And even when Weather pleaded with him to ease up, he couldn’t. He couldn’t because he was afraid of the darkness—the death—that had come over him over and over again.
And he was afraid of the weakness, that his body was betraying him. When he began going out, to the supermarket, to the drugstore, he sometimes had to put a hand on a shelf to steady himself. That hadn’t happened before. Ever. The docs said the shakiness would go away but it would take some time.
He suspected he had more gray hair two months after being