Seize the Night

this butchering creep and with extreme prejudice.
    Or maybe I'm just becoming.
    It's the rage these days.
    With my heart made brittle by bitterness, I might have pulled the trigger if the kids hadn't been there to witness the carnage. I was also inhibited because the copper skin on the curved walls was guaranteed to spin deadly ricochets in all directions. My soul was saved not by the purity of my morals but by circumstances, which is a humbling confession.
    With the barrel of the Uzi, Doogie gestured at the playing cards in the two men's hands. “What's the game?” His voice echoed tinnily around the curved copper walls.
    I didn't like these two men's watchful calm. I wanted to see fear in their eyes.
    Now Randolph turned his hand of cards face up on the table and replied to Doogie's question with too much dry amusement. “Poker.” Before Doogie decided how best to restrain the card players, he needed to determine, if he could, whether they had guns. They were wearing jackets that could conceal shoulder holsters. With nothing to lose, they might do something reckless—like take wild shots at the kids, rather than at us, before they themselves were cut down, hoping to kill one more tender victim just to go out on a final thrill.
    With four children in the room, we didn't dare make a mistake.
    “If not for Wisteria,” Randolph said, addressing me, “Del Stuart would have pulled the plug on my financing long before he did.”
    “Your financing?”
    “But when she screwed up, they needed me. Or thought they did. To see what the future held.”
    Sensing a pending revelation of an ugly truth, I said, “Shut up,” but I spoke in little more than a murmur, perhaps because I knew I needed to hear whatever he had to tell me, even if I'd no desire to hear it.
    To Doogie, Randolph said, “Ask me what the stakes are.”
    The word stakes spiraled around the ovoid room, still whispering back to us even as Doogie dutifully asked, “What are the stakes?”
    “Conrad and I play to see who gets to soak each of these tykes in gasoline.”
    Conrad mustn't have been in possession of a gun in the warehouse the previous night. If he'd had one, he would have shot me dead the moment that I touched his face in the dark.
    Moving his hands as if dealing imaginary cards, Randolph said, “Then we play to see who gets to light the match.”
    Looking as if he might shoot first and worry about ricochets later, Doogie said, “Why haven't you killed them already?”
    “Our numerology tells us there should be five in this offering. Until recently, we thought we had only four. But now we think …” He smiled at me. “We think the dog is special. We think the dog makes five. When you interrupted, we were playing cards to see who lights the mutt boy.”
    I didn't think that Randolph had a firearm, either. As far as I could remember from my hasty scan of his gallery of hellish achievement, his father was the only victim he'd dispatched with a gun.
    That was forty-four years ago, probably the first murder he'd committed.
    Since then, he preferred to have more personal involvement, to get right into the wet of the work. Hammers and knives and the like were his weapons of choice—until he started to make his burnt offerings.
    “Your mother,” he said, “was a dice woman. Rolled the dice for the whole human race, and crapped out. But I like cards.”
    Pretending to deal cards again, Randolph had moved one hand close to the storm lamp.
    “Don't,” Doogie said.
    But Randolph did. He snapped the lamp switch, and suddenly we were blind.
    Even as the light went off, Randolph and Conrad were on the move.
    They got to their feet so fast that they knocked their chairs over, and these hard noises rattled repeatedly around the room like the sharp rata-tat produced by a running boy dragging a stick along a picket fence.
    I was instantly on the move, too, following the curve of the room toward the children, trying to stay out of Conrad's way, since he was the one closest to me and would most likely go hard and fast for the place where I had been when the lights went out. Neither he nor Randolph was the type to run for the exit.
    As I sidled toward the kids, I slipped the infrared goggles off my forehead, over my eyes. I yanked the special flashlight from my belt, clicked it on, and swept the room where Conrad might be.
    He was closer than I'd expected, having intuited my attempt to shield the children. He held a knife in one hand, slashing