Bad Blood

couple of them down, then I’ll be back here right on top of you.”
    “I’ll call Virgil,” Coakley shouted after him as he ran down the hall. “He’s gotta be close.”
     
     
    VIRGIL CAME UP and Coakley shouted at him, and he said, “Stop yelling, I can’t understand,” and she reined herself in and said, “We’re in the Rouse house. There’re guys outside with guns, lots of them. They’re shooting the place to pieces. There are some of them inside now. We’re upstairs in the bathtub. . . . Bob Hart is dead. . . .”
    Kristy was lying under her, weeping, and a rifle bullet, coming at a shallow angle, upward, clanged off the side of the tub, and they both screamed, and Virgil said, “Hold on, five minutes . . . five minutes. Listen for your phone.”
    Three shots from the front, Dunn, followed by a volley through the front wall, and Dunn crawled into the hallway and shouted, “How much ammo you got?” and Coakley shouted, “The clip in the gun and one more.”
    “Be careful with it,” Dunn shouted, and a slug crashed through a wall above his head and he put a hand over his head and pressed himself to the floor. A man poked his head around the corner of the stairs and saw Dunn on the floor and twisted toward him, with a shotgun, and before he could fire, Coakley shot him in the back and then in the head, and Dunn screamed, “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus . . .” and looked down the hall at her, and at the long gun that the man had dropped. He scrambled down the hall and grabbed it, and rolled over and checked the safety, then did another peek down the stairs. All Coakley could see was the dead man’s hand, and Dunn pushed it down the stairs and called, “Good,” and at that moment, a gunshot came through the floor and hit him in the ankle and he screamed, and came flailing down the hall toward Coakley, and dropped beside the bathtub and groaned, “I’m hit . . .”
    “Get behind the back of the tub. Nothing’s coming from the back but there’s been some from the front,” Coakley told him.
    Dunn obeyed, leaving a trail of blood, and Coakley pulled a bath towel off a shower stall hanger. “You got a knife? We got to get some pressure on the wound.”
    She looked over the edge of the tub, and Dunn’s face was bright red and sweating, contorted with pain, but he was controlled, the captured shotgun aimed down the hall, and he dug a switchblade out of his pocket and flicked it open. Coakley used it to cut a long strip out of the towel and said, “Wrap it tight as you can . . .”
    She could hear men shouting down the stairs, but couldn’t hear what they were saying. She said to Dunn, “Wrap that, give me the shotgun,” and she slipped out of the tub, took the shotgun, the safety was showing red, and she padded as quietly as she could down the hall. The shooting had slowed, but gunshots were still coming through, blowing plaster and wood, and she did a quick peek at the stairway, saw nobody but the dead man. She stepped across the stairway quickly, went in the first bedroom, did a peek at the window, saw nobody in the yard, checked the stairway again, and slugs started ripping methodically down the hallway, straight up, coming through the floor.
    She went to the window in the second bedroom, did a peek, saw a man, or part of a man, squatting by the corner of the shed across the side yard. She didn’t hesitate, but fired two fast shotgun shots through the glass, then dashed back down the hallway.
    Whoever was down below was still firing through the floor. He was the most dangerous one, she thought; the bathtub had nearly been penetrated by the glancing shot, and if he shot up straight through the bottom of the tub, he’d kill both Kristy and her; but as she watched the shots coming through, she realized that the shots were so vertical—coming up through the floor and into the ceiling—that he must be right under them. She waited for the next shot, fifteen feet away, ran back to it, and emptied the pistol magazine through the floor.
    She heard no screaming, but wanted to believe that she’d at least scared the shit out of him.
    Back in the bathroom, she reloaded and said, to Kristy, as her cell phone rang, “We’re doing fine, honey. We’ll be okay.”
    She answered the phone, and Virgil was there: “There are too many of them, we can’t come straight in. There are a dozen shooters around the place. . . . We’re coming across the field in the back. If you see people coming in the back,