The truth of the matter

CHAPTER THIRTY

Out of the Darkness For a moment, we stood frozen that way: Waylon with Margaret held to him, the gun at her head. The fat guard with his machine gun trained on me. The other guard, a tall, slender olive-skinned man, lying stationary on the living room floor. And me, with my hands in the air. We were all motionless and silent. Upstairs, the dog went on barking.

Then Waylon let Margaret go. He shoved her. She stumbled forward until she was standing next to me. He pointed his pistol in our direction.

“Should I kill them?” said the fat guard.

I glanced at him, off to my left. I could see in his eyes that he was eager to pull the trigger.

Waylon thought about it. Behind his scruffy black beard, his heavy features worked slowly.

“No,” he said quietly. “Not yet. I still want to find out what he knows.” Then, after a pause, he added very casually, “But the woman-she is useless to me. Kill her.”

The fat gunman didn’t hesitate to do as he was ordered. The barrel of his machine gun swung from me to Margaret. I saw the gunman’s finger begin to tighten on the trigger.

I grabbed Margaret by the arm and pulled her behind me. I stood between her and the gun.

The fat gunman let out a curse. “Get out of the way, punk!”

I stood motionless and answered him with an empty stare. He couldn’t kill Margaret without shooting me, so for a moment-a second, two, three-he was paralyzed. But it was really we-Margaret and I-who were out of options, out of hope. I could delay the inevitable for only a little while, but the chase, in fact, was finished. I knew we were both less than a minute away from death.

“I’m sorry I brought this on you,” I said to Margaret over my shoulder.

“No, it’s on all of us,” she answered back. “It always has been.”

Waylon laughed, his white teeth flashing. “Very touching. Very heroic. Very moving.” He shook his head, still grinning. “All right, West,” he said to me. “You win. You win at last. I had orders to question you, but you’ve made it impossible. Congratulations, tough guy.” Turning to the fat gunman, he said, “I’ve had enough of this. Kill them both.”

“Drop it!”

Everyone in the room froze. The command had come from the open door of the house. I turned and saw nothing there-nothing but the night and darkness.

Then out of the darkness stepped Detective Rose, a pistol in his hand. He held the gun high in both hands and kept it trained on the fat gunman.

“Put the gun down right now,” he said.

The fat gunman hesitated and Rose fired off a round. He lifted the barrel of his pistol so that the bullet flew over the fat gunman’s head. It crashed into the wall, opening a small black hole and sending a puff of plaster into the room.

That was all the fat gunman needed to see. Terrified, he immediately stripped his machine-gun strap over his head and dropped the weapon to the floor. He put his hands up.

But not Waylon.

While Rose’s attention was on the fat gunman, Waylon turned and leveled his 9mm at the detective. I saw it- but I was too far away to do anything about it.

My arms flew out helplessly. I shouted, “Rose, watch out!”

Rose turned and Waylon fired at him and Rose fired back all in the same instant.

The room seemed to quake with the deafening explosions. My eyes wide, I saw the frame of the door go jagged as splinters flew out of it. Waylon had missed.

For what seemed like a long, long second, the two men just stood there with their guns trained on each other. It was weirdly quiet. It came to me that Sport had stopped barking upstairs, as if he were listening too, waiting to find out what had happened.

Then Waylon looked down in surprise to see the black hole that had appeared in his chest.

The next moment, the terrorist collapsed to the floor, dead.