Stolen Away

“Let’s go in your room,” I said, bending to button the pants back up, “and get some of your things, and then we’ll go. If you have some special toys you want to take with you, pick ’em out. We can’t take everything.”

“Why do you keep your raincoat on in the house?”

“Because we’re going, real soon. Now, let’s get your things.”

He was picking some toys out of a chest by the window, while from a dresser I was getting a few of his clothes, which I was in the process of stuffing in a pillowcase, when I heard something outside. Something like gravel stirring. I went to the window.

A car was pulling in, next to mine. It was a black Ford, brand shiny new. Two men got quickly out.

“Jesus,” I said.

“What’s wrong, mister?”

“We’re going to play a game, Carl,” I said, bending down again, taking him by his little shoulders and looking him straight in his dark-blue eyes. “It’s like hide-and-go-seek. I want you to hide under your bed, and I don’t want you to say a word or make a sound, okay? Until you hear me say, olly olly oxen free.”

“Okay.”

He scurried under the bed.

“Quiet as a mouse, now,” I said, and got my gun in my hand.

The two men I’d seen were old friends. I hadn’t seen them in a very long time. The last time had been four years ago in a suite at the Carteret Hotel in Elizabeth, New Jersey. When they’d been shooting Max Greenberg and Max Hassel to shit.

I stood just around the corner from the top of the stairs as I heard the front door open.

“Where is everybody?” A high-pitched whiny voice.

“I’ll check the house.” A gravelly baritone.

They were whispering, but I could hear them.

“What should I do?”

“Like the boss said—nobody breathing.”

“Jesus, a little kid, Phil?”

“Yes. Check around outside. Do Heller, the farmer and his wife and the kid and any chickens and cows that get in your fuckin’ way.”

While this was going on, I got on my belly and snake-crawled to the edge of the stairs and soon I could see them down there: Phil was the flat-faced guy with Oriental eyes, wearing a black coat and a gray hat and gray gloves with a great big .45 auto in one mitt; and Jimmy (I remembered his name from our first encounter) was the pug-nosed, bright-eyed, round-faced guy, who I’d winged last time, and who wore a gray tweedy-looking topcoat, and he too had a .45 in one gloved hand. No silencers. Who was going to hear it out here?

Jimmy was opening the door to go out when I opened fire on the fuckers. I got Jimmy in the side of the head and it shook him, made him jump like he was startled, only he was more than startled, because the inside of Jimmy’s head made it outside before the rest of him did, and he flopped sideways on the porch, on his brains, wedging the door open with his dead body.

Phil caught one in the arm, but unfortunately not the arm of his shooting hand, and he was returning fire, and .45 slugs chewed up the world around me, wall and banister and stairs and then he was gone, not out the door, where Jimmy’s body blocked the way, but into the house somewhere.

I didn’t see any other way to play it: I started down the stairs two and three at a time, the nine millimeter pointed off to my left, where Phil had gone, and I was looking at an empty living room when the son of a bitch popped up from behind a chair and fired off one well-placed round, clipping me in the side, sending me tumbling headfirst, clattering my way to the bottom in a jumbled mess of arms and legs, all tangled in my raincoat. I was stunned by the fall more than the gunshot, having hit my head five or six times on the way down; but I didn’t feel pain in my side yet, just wetness, and still on the floor, I fired back at where Phil had been, but he was gone and all I managed to do was put a bullet into the upright piano. It made a little musical ouch.

I wasn’t the only one bleeding: Phil had left a trail, and I followed it. I stumbled through the house, through a sitting room, into the kitchen, where a doorway led, goddammit, to the upstairs. Carefully, hugging the narrow walls of the stairwell, I made my way up the back stairs, and was following the bloody trail when I heard the child yelp.

I ran to his room; now it hurt.

Phil had pulled the boy out from under the bed, obviously, and was clutching the boy to him; the blond-haired baby-faced child looked at me with wide beseeching eyes as Phil hugged the boy to him like a shield and pointed that .45 at me.

I was weak, and I could feel myself slipping, but I steadied the nine millimeter at him and said, “Phil—there’s something you should know.”

Phil, whose face was whiter than the peeled potatoes in the sink downstairs, said, “What, asshole?”

I shot him between the eyes.

“A shot in the head,” I said, “kills all reflex action.”