She looked around the room, seeming to remember that we weren’t alone in the space. Joey and Fellows had started walking over, their conversation also apparently over.

  “I guess it leaves us here, together,” she said. “Once again fighting for our lives.”

  I nodded. “Fighting for the rest of our lives.” I leaned over once again and kissed her cheek, then looked at and waited for Joey to speak.

  He had a serious look in his eyes, the kind of look I had when I was about to get, well, serious.

  “Everything okay, Joey?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” he said. “We were talking. I think Fellows convinced me.”

  “Convinced you to what?”

  “We’re going to fight for this place, Mason. All of us. We’re in if you are.”

  20

  “What do we have, then?” I asked.

  “Couple pistols. Shotgun. Your rifle from the office in the kitchen.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it.”

  I let out a long sigh. This is going to be a long night.”

  Joey smiled. “Yeah, well, it’s going to be a really short fight.”

  “Ain’t that the truth,” Fellows mumbled.

  We were gathered in a circle near the front of the bar, discussing our options and pitying ourselves for the lame predicament we'd found ourselves in. I knew our chances at getting out alive would be vastly increased by the number of weapons we could scrape up, but we were severely short on the "boomstick" variety.

  Knives we had, but there was something I’d heard all too often about bring them to gunfights…

  The only other variable that would significantly bolster our chances was the number of people fighting on both sides.

  I grabbed Hannah’s arm. “How many are out there? Did you get a chance to count them?”

  She shook her head. “No, not an accurate count. But they were standing outside their cars when they sent me in. A few of them were grouped up by Rafe. As long as that was all of them and there weren’t any hiding on the other side of the building, I’d guess there were ten, maybe twelve.

  I glanced at the ceiling, nodding. “Not as many as I’d thought,” I said. “Still more than what I want to deal with.”

  “Did we get any of their guys when Jessup went nuts?” Joey asked.

  “I doubt it,” I said. “Maybe one or two were hit, or at least taken by surprise, but I’m not going to count on it.”

  Fellows grunted. “So where does that leave us? Three men and about four weapons between us?”

  “Three men and a woman,” Hannah said. We all turned to look at her.

  If I hadn't already known what she had been through, I'd have laughed. She was thin, taller than average, and carried herself like a lady who had been raised to carry herself like a lady. She had a stuck-out chin and pointy elbows when she placed her hands on her waist, and when I looked at her like that, it wasn't hard to imagine a typical old-west damsel who was often underestimated.

  "So. Four of us," I said. "Hannah's got a good shot, too. Maybe we put her on the rifle?" As much as I appreciated her willingness to join in and help out, I still wanted to keep her as far away from the fighting as possible. If we could set her up as some sort of sniper, tuck her in a back corner and take only dead-on shots, maybe I could keep her alive throughout all this.

  “Mason, we’ve got more company,” Joey said. He nodded toward the kitchen.

  We all fell silent, and I could hear voices, soft and deep, emanating from the blasted-out section of wall nearest the kitchen. They were behind the bar, right behind the kitchen door. I ran behind the bar and checked the monitors.

  The only thing on the screen was static.

  “They cut the feed,” I said. “What time is it, anyway?”

  “11:55,” Fellows said.

  “Right. Showtime.”

  I felt the sudden inclination to just run outside screaming at the top of my lungs, firing rounds into whatever moved until I was safely across the street and hiding behind a bush or a tree. And I thought I might even have a chance, too. Nothing like a deranged gunman screaming like a banshee to get the jump on your attackers.

  But that would only cause more trouble. Everyone else would be stuck here, fighting off Rafe’s little army with one less man and one less pistol.

  And I couldn't leave Hannah. Not now. If anyone were going to do a screaming banshee raid through the dark midnight streets at the edge of Edisto, it'd be Hannah and me together. Holding hands.

  Like Bonnie and Clyde.

  I smiled at the thought. It might be a decent way to go. After the life I’ve had, it might be a fitting ending.

  But not for Hannah. I couldn’t imagine her body getting punctured by torrential rains of flying lead, watching her die an agonizing death by a thousand bullet wounds.

  Nope, “screaming banshee couple” was a horrid plan.

  “Keep your eyes and ears on the kitchen, Joey,” I said. “Let me know what they’re doing, where they’re moving. But the rest of us need to have our eyes glued to that wall.” I pointed at the northern wall of the bar. “Or what’s left of it, anyway.”

  At that moment the entire bar plummeted into darkness. My eyes adjusted quickly, helped by the light filtering in from the eight or so headlights that were pointing inside.

  “They cut the power now, too!” Fellows said.

  Within seconds the headlights went out, and once again my eyes did their best to adjust. This time, however, they came up blank. It was damn-near pitch black inside the bar.

  “I can’t see anything!” Joey yelled.

  “They shut off their lights,” I replied. “Give it a few more seconds, we should at least be able to see some shadows.” Thankfully the moon was out tonight. Not full, but more than just a sliver. It wasn’t much, but the blue-hued pangs of light bounced off trees and vehicles and humans, just enough to help my eyes make out their movements.

  "They're doing something," I said. "Gathering around the west side. Probably getting ready to hit the front door." I knew they'd be coming from all accessible angles eventually, which meant the front door, the back kitchen door, and now the side of the building with the gaping wounds from the grenade blasts. The holes where the windows used to be weren't huge, and they didn't reach all the way to the ground so they wouldn't be ideal access points. Like any good old castle defense movie, if anyone tried to climb inside over the wall, all we needed to do was push the ladder back and watch them fall.

  And in this case, the "ladder" was their face, and by "push" I meant shoot bullets at it.

  So they would leave the long side of the bar for last, or at least until they thought we were overwhelmed enough to not be worrying about defending the stronghold and focusing instead on protecting ourselves. And at the rate I felt we’d be going through our ammunition, I figured that would be happening somewhere between 1 and 30 seconds after the fighting began.

  I looked around. Joey was glaring at the kitchen door, and I could tell he was just begging for someone to come through it. He had the shotgun at the ready, aimed high. Hoping for a headshot. I knew it was pointless — that weapon didn’t need aiming from that distance. Anyone with a pulse would be putting a watermelon-sized hole in the kitchen door and a million watermelon seed-sized holes into the heads standing directly behind it.

  But I silently commended him for waiting. The men could be standing to either side of the door, or they could have moved down into the alley, or somewhere else entirely. Blasting a hole through the door now and missing would be devastating to our limited ammunition supply, and it would give away our element of surprise.

  I silently cursed my lack of planning. At my apartment, I had ammunition to prepare just about any consumer-grade weapon on the market that was easy to find, and I had enough of it to fend off a group three times this size, were I to have enough hands to fight with.

  Here at the bar, it was a different story. During my days taking out marks, my bar was home base, but I preferred to do things without getting knives and guns involved. They were messy, and it was crucial that my work was clean. I also liked to be a bit more creative than "just a contract a killer."

  If a mark came in asking for a Whiskey Smash, well then I'd find a cheap bottle of bottom-shelf whiskey and smash it over their head a few times. If I were lucky, there'd still be enough whiskey left in the broken shards of glass that I could pour myself a stiff drink afterward — shaking it, of course, with mint and lemon juice and a bit of sugar and pouring it over crushed ice.

  One time a mark asked for a Lemon Drop. An odd request from a 250-pound, grizzled middle-aged man, but hey — I'm here to please. I scoped him out, verified he was the mark, and promptly set up an elaborate scheme: during a trip to Charleston a few weekends later, he was mysteriously and surprisingly killed by blunt force trauma. The cause? A forty-five-pound bag of lemons, dropped from the top of a building on the corner of a street late one night. An odd way to go, no doubt, but the cops weren't about to spend too much time or taxpayer money searching for the murderer of a convicted convict.

  I've had some pretty good runs in my day. Most marks are easy — I wish I had a nickel for every time a mark came into my bar and ordered — and was served, painfully — a Screwdriver, an Irish Car Bomb, or a White Russian. (The White Russian always did require a bit of acting on my part. I'm white but hardly Russian, though I've honed my accent over the years).

  Over the years I've come to appreciate more the marks who require a bit of creativity. The Dark 'N' Stormy, the official drink of Bermuda, had me up at night until a flash of brilliance broke through my dense skull. It simply had to be done in the dark. During a storm.

  I took out the mark by breaking his neck during one of the many tropical storms that were — thankfully — quite common in South Carolina.

  The Mai Tai was more common than I’d thought, likely due to its being one of the oft-requested ‘tiki drinks’ that are served at the Caribbean and Polynesian Pop bars around the world, dressed up in fancy clothes of fruit and flora, disguising the relatively simple recipe in a charade of garish colors and plenty of sugar.

  I had a mark come in and order a few of those, bragging the entire time that ‘Suavé from Mexico made the best ones anywhere, and yours aren't nearly as good,' which, by the way, is not the sort of thing a bartender is fond of hearing from his patrons. He paid with the ‘mark' he'd received from my previous employer: the coin of unknown origin that my employer would give to the man or woman, telling them to go visit me in Edisto Beach, as I no doubt had ‘what they deserved.' What they deserved, in their mind, was another hit of some drug or some other disgusting, illegal fancy they had, but to my employer and I, ‘what they deserved' was to be swiftly and unceremoniously escorted out of the land of the living.

  Anyway, this mark came in and ordered a few Mai Tais and bragged about his complete and utter triumph over the paid ‘entertainment workers,’ as he’d called them, that he’d bought in a shady Mexico back alley.

  It took me a few extra minutes to come to the solution, but it was as brilliant as it was fun. The police never found him — Joey dumped him in the bay — but if they had, they would have noticed that he had been strangled.

  With my tie.

  Yet after all the trouble I’d gone through to ensure a creative and satisfying departure for all these scum-of-the-earth types, there were a few drinks I was terrified of.

  What would I do to the mark who came in and ordered a Dirty Banana?

  Or a Fuzzy Navel?

  Or — shudder — a Sex on the Beach?

  I’m not about to say that a lack of creativity was the reason I quit, but it sure helped the decision.

  I was out of the game, but at the moment I wished I was back in it — even though I never did have a full arsenal of weaponry here, I would have at least been at the top of my creative prowess. Killing these guys and getting away with it would have been child’s play back in my prime.

  Now, though, I just wanted a couple more shotguns and a lot more ammo.

  Or even just a few more pistols.

  21

  The lights were still out, but the moonlight trickling in made it possible to barely see the silhouettes of my small army. Hannah was right next to me at the bar, Fellows was watching the front door, and Joey was still posting up near the kitchen, awaiting our visitors from the alley. I was looking at Hannah, still not quite believing that she was here.

  “Boss,” Joey said. “They’re not by the door anymore.”

  I walked up to him. He didn’t turn around, still diligently aiming the shotgun at the door. “How can you tell?”

  He shushed me, then pointed up to the ceiling. I held my breath, trying to be as quiet as possible, then I heard it. A faint, metallic scraping sound. Then another.

  “They’re in the vent,” Joey said.

  I tried to picture the top of my little building. I’d been up there only twice, once shortly before I’d bought the place with an inspector, and another time after a massive hurricane had rocked the area. I knew the vent from the griddle in the kitchen dumped out to the back of the place, both to keep the exhaust and smoke away from the front of the building and the street, and also because it was the shortest distance from where the stove sat.

  “They’re going to drop right onto the stove,” Joey said. “Should we just turn it on?”

  The vent, if I remembered correctly, ran up and through the ceiling to the roof, then ran straight to the edge of the roof and down about halfway to the ground.

  Except…

  “No,” I said. “That’s not where they’re going.”

  “But how would —”

  “They’re not in that vent,” I said, turning and running back to the middle of the room. “There’s another one. Here.”

  I pointed up at the ceiling, at the air conditioning vent. “This one goes in a straight line. Two A/C dumps, one in here and one in the kitchen. That’s the shaft they’re in.”

  “It’s smaller,” Joey said.

  “But they’ll fit. And they won’t be jumping down onto a hot stovetop, either.”

  “And they’ll be in the kitchen,” Joey said. He reached for the door.

  “Wait,” I said. “Let me. I open, you shoot.”

  It was as good a plan as any, but even still, I’d learned my lesson. I ran it through and through in my mind. The old adage that had been drilled into me — and happened to be the main reason why I’d never enjoyed making plans in the first place — came to mind.

  No plan survives first contact with the enemy.

  The problem with using that quote as a reason to just forgo planning altogether, I’d come to find out over many years of testing, was a quote I came up with:

  No plan at all never survives any contact with the enemy.

  I was still wordsmithing it a bit, but I liked it. It fit my personality — I’ll plan, but only begrudgingly when I realize there’s no way not to.

  And this plan — wait for the goons to fall into the kitchen and then have Joey shoot them while I provided backup — was about as good as I could come up with.

  “Ready?” Joey asked.

  “Wait for the first to drop to the floor,” I said. “We should be able to hear it, and we want the best chance at getting both of them with one shot.”

  He nodded, waiting. I did as well.

  Neither of us heard anything. The scraping sound had disappeared.

  “Are they still there?”

  “Damn right they are,” I said. “They’re just working on their own plan.”

  We waited more. Fifteen, then twenty seconds passed.

  “What do you think?” I asked.

  Joey shrugged. “I think they’re still there, but now they’re waiting for us.”

  “Yeah, I think you’re right.” I paused, thinking. No plan survives no contact with the enemy, apparently. “Okay, on three. Aim high, try to get into the drywall around the vent. It’ll puncture the metal just fine.”

  “You got it.”

  I glanced at Hannah, who had already poured herself another drink and was holding the now-empty bottle up to her eye, looking down into it. I frowned, waiting for her to look over, but she was studying the inside of the bottle intensely enough to not even notice my staring.

  Weird.

  “Three… two… one… now!” I flung the kitchen door inward and rolled back out of the way for Joey to take the shot.

  He did. The gunshot was deafening, and I found myself trying to pop my ears as my eyes focused on the ceiling. The shotgun had performed admirably, blowing a massive hole in the drywall around the vent. The vent itself was mostly gone, only a few bends of twisted metal smoking around the interior of the shaft. Dust and smoke whirled through the air around the ceiling, and pieces of chalky drywall fell to the floor, finding their way onto the metal shelves full of food and equipment on their way down.

  And yet, I didn't hear anything else. There was no screaming, no groans of pain, no loud dying breaths. Unless the man had been poking down through the vent and Joey had wholly removed the guy's head with his shot, the shotgun wouldn't have killed him from this range through the drywall and shaft. And if he had removed the guy’s head, we would have seen a lot more than just white dust and grayish smoke falling on my shelves.

  “I missed,” Joey said.

  “No,” I said. “It was a perfect shot. They just weren’t there to begin with.”

  “Then where —”

  Before he could finish the sentence, I heard the sound of a small object bouncing down the now-open vent shaft. It pinged around a couple times quickly and then fell through the massive hole in the ceiling and into the kitchen.

  I watched it as it fell, unable to take my eyes off it. It looked like the little grenades they’d thrown through my windows, but they were smaller. Skinnier.

  “Joey!” I yelled.

  But it was too late.

  I tried pulling his head down, at the same time smashing my eyes together, closing them as tightly as I possibly could. I grabbed at the kitchen door to swing it shut, but it didn’t close all the way.

 

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