An explosion rocked the night, the blast as loud as any Mouledoux had heard during Desert Storm and a scream cut through the house. It sounded like Peeps, Mouledoux thought as he grabbed for his weapon while he dropped to the floor, expecting the worst. Soldiers, Amazon warriors, murdering hoards, he expected them all, because all of a sudden it clicked with him, not only the impossibility of it all, but the fact that Dr. Isadora Eisenhower couldn’t afford to let anybody who knew about her live, because as long as there was a living soul who knew her secret, she’d never be safe.
She wasn’t here to negotiate the release of her granddaughter. She was here to wipe out everyone who knew about her and right now that included him. And there wasn’t any doubt in his mind about how this was going to play out. Manny Wayne may have his private Blackwater trained security force, but they were not going to stop Eisenhower.
For a flash of a second he thought about looking for a hiding place till it was over, till Booth and Eisenhower killed the Waynes and their crew, took the captives and left, but even as he was thinking about it, another thought pushed it out of his mind. He couldn’t hide like a coward or flee like one either, because he was a cop, one of the good guys.
He didn’t care about the Waynes or their men and he didn’t care if Eisenhower and Booth got clean away and never paid for their crimes, that was beyond him. But he did care about the two girls upstairs. His fate was unimportant compared to their’s and he was convinced when Eisenhower and Booth breached the house, Manny Wayne would charge upstairs and use them as shields. He’d kill them before giving up.
And that was something Mississippi Bob Mouledoux couldn’t allow.
Ignoring his partner’s wailing, he pushed himself from the floor, went looking for the stairs.
Manny Wayne’s enlarged prostate saved his life. He drank a lot of coffee and that prostate had him in the john urinating more than he cared to admit. He had to go and when the urge came, he went. So, he’d left his post at the front window to take a quick pee, was halfway across the room when the deafening sound of an explosion racked the night and the front window blew out, sending shattering glass shooting into the living room. Thousands of slivery daggers peppered his back, sending him crashing to the floor.
The pain was intense, his back felt like it was on fire, his ears were ringing and he’d started peeing his pants as he pushed himself to his knees.
“ Peeps, they’re coming!” Manny couldn’t hear himself shout. He started to get up, still peeing as he realized he’d lost his weapon when he’d hit the deck. He scanned the carpet, saw it on the other side of the room. He scrabbled on all fours toward it, crawling like a baby, pissing all the way.
Magnum in hand, pissing finished, he pushed himself to his feet, fighting to ignore the burning swath of pain that was his back and the cold wet of his crotch.
“ Peeps!” Still deaf, Manny crossed the entryway, went to the den, found Peeps writhing on the floor, face a bloody mess. The man had been blinded, was obviously screaming, but Manny couldn’t hear.
However, he knew the men outside could and like a tortured soldier screaming in pain between the lines, Peeps’ wailing would take a toll on his guards, would unnerve them no matter how well trained they were, and this Manny couldn’t allow.
“ Sorry, Peeps.” He raised his weapon, aimed between the eyes, fired and though he saw the back of Peeps’ head blow off, he didn’t hear the sound of the Magnum in his hand. Had it not been for the kick the powerful pistol was known for, it might have been as if Peeps’ head had blown apart of its own accord, as if Manny Wayne hadn’t done it at all.
Izzy heard the pistol shot as Lila was loading the second grenade into the launcher.
“ What do you think that was all about?”
“ I don’t know,” Izzy said. “Maybe somebody inside is a bit jumpy.”
“ Maybe.”
“ Let’s give them a few seconds to sweat,” Lila said.
“ Trouble is, I’m sweating too,” Izzy said. “I’m all jittery inside.”
“ If I smoked,” Lila said, “I’d give you a cigarette to calm your nerves.”
“ Wouldn’t work.” She took in a deep breath, sucked it into her belly, sighed it out. “But don’t worry, I’ll be fine.”
Mouledoux was at the top of the stairs when he heard the shot from below and all of a sudden Peeps was silent.
His first thought was that the women were in the house already, but how could that be? Peeps had a thirty-eight, like Mouledoux’s own and he’d heard them fire a thousand times on the range and in the Nevada desert. If the women weren’t in the house and if Peeps hadn’t fired, that left only Manny Wayne and that cannon he used for a pistol.
It had started.
He hustled down a hallway, checked the first door on his right.
Bathroom.
He checked the second, found an empty bedroom.
Behind the third door and the first on his right, he found a master bedroom, a king size bed facing a glass wall, which on a clear day probably had a gorgeous view of downtown Reno’s colored lights, but today he saw only fog. He was backing out of the empty room, when he heard something knocking about. He turned toward the sound, saw a door, the master bath or a walk-in closet.
He started for it as something banged into it from the other side and he instinctively knew somebody was kicking it.
He pulled it open and found the two girls. Their hands were bound behind their backs with plastic handcuffs and they had grey duct tape covering their mouths, wrapped around their heads. Their eyes were wide open, so apparently Manny had lied about them being drugged.
“ I’ll get you out of here.” He worked his index fingers between the duct tape and Amy Eisenhower’s mouth and pulled it down over her chin, till it was wrapped around her neck, turning it into a grey necklace.
“ Ouch.”
“ Yeah, Amy I know that probably hurt,” Mouledoux said. “Sorry.”
“ Do Alicia,” Amy said.
“ Right.” Mouledoux repeated the process with Alicia, who immediately gasped in as much air as she could.
“ You okay?” Amy said.
“ Get me out of here and give me a gun,” Alicia said. “So I can kill that son of a bitch.”
“ She’s okay,” Mouledoux said.
Then another explosion ripped through the night.
Lila threw the grenade launcher over the cliff, pulled her Glock from her shoulder holster as Izzy unslung the riot gun.
“ You can use that?”
“ You betcha,” Izzy said.
“ You’ve got five rounds, make ’em count.”
“ Make ’em count, yeah, you can count on it.”
“ Then let’s rock and roll.”
“ Okay.” Izzy sucked in a deep breath, inhaling the eerie fog, which seemed to give her courage.
“ We’ll go in through the back, shooting anything that moves. Then we’ll bust out the front door and kill the rest of them.”
“ Got it.”
Like the first blast, the second blast knocked Manny Wayne on his ass. He didn’t hear it, but he felt it as the force of the explosion just outside the front facing window and it blew him across the room. No glass this time, the first explosion had seen to that, and the pain didn’t last long, because he smacked the side of his kauri wood desk with the side of his head and the world went dark.
Lila kicked open the back door with a force Izzy didn’t know a human could possess, ran through a laundry room with Izzy hard pressed to keep up. In the kitchen, Izzy was surprised to see it empty. Lila swept right through it and on into a dining room, then into a spacious living room that looked like it was straight out of a western movie. The front windows had been blown out. There was blood on the carpet.
“ This way,” Lila passed an entry way, went through an open door and into a large room that had been made into some kind of office. Animal heads on the wall. A hunter’s lair. An expensive desk, cowhide couch, hardwood floor with an oval carpet and a dead man in the center of it with half his head gone. A bloody mess.
“ That’s Manny Wayne,” Lila pointed to another man face down on the floor, by the foot of a dark wood desk. Blood covered his back. He looked dead.
“ Two down,” Izzy said.
“ Come on!” Lila spun around, headed out of the room, toward the front door. At it, she opened it, drew the forty-five from her leg holster and with a pistol in each hand, she stepped into the night with Izzy, riot gun at the ready, right behind.
Outside, the night around them was clear, but the mysterious fog ran right up to the side of the house on each side and it was moving in. The area to the fence, far away to the front of the house, was clear as well, but the fog blocked out anything beyond.
“ Your left,” Lila said as she faced right and started firing both guns, stitching up a big man’s chest, turning him into meat.
Izzy turned left, leading with the riot gun. Saw a man in black fatigues. He had a pistol in his right hand and a startled look on his face, but surprised or not, that didn’t stop him from bringing his gun to bear on Izzy, but he was a fraction of a second late. Izzy pulled the trigger and blew his head off as the riot gun kicked her in the gut and she pulled the trigger a second time, blasting away into the night and wasting a shot.
Fighting for air, she grabbed a breath as she tossed the riot gun aside. She pulled a Glock from her shoulder holster, pulled the other from the holster on her hip and now, like Lila, she had a gun in each hand.
“ Four down now,” Lila said.
“ How many more?”
“ Not sure, at least four, five with Tucker.” Lila said. “You alright?”
“ Yeah.” Izzy grabbed a second breath. “Sorry about the wasted shot. Don’t like the riot gun, prefer the pistols.”
“ No time to be sorry.” Lila pointed with the Glock in her left hand to the fence in the front of the house. Two men were running from it, toward them, each with a stubby looking machine gun like thing in their hands. They looked like quarterbacks running for a touch down. Izzy couldn’t tell if they were running toward them or from the fog that seemed to be chasing them.
“ Mac 10s,” Lila said, “very bad.”
They were bringing their weapons to bear even as they ran, but before they could fire they lost the race with the fog. It was as if it had swallowed them whole. It was moving faster than they had been and it was coming for Izzy and Lila.
“ Move, move, move,” Lila shouted.
Izzy went left. Lila went right as automatic fire tore up the front of the house, behind where they’d been standing an instant ago.
“ Now,” Lila said and they both started firing into the mist, where they’d imagined the bodyguards would be, where their fire seemed to be coming from. The girls kept firing till their pistols ran dry, twin Annie Oakley’s standing tall, dusters flapping in the wind that seemed to be driving the fog that was upon them now.
“ On the ground!” Lila shouted and Izzy dropped to the grass. “You okay.”
“ Yeah,” Izzy said. “I’m fine.”
“ You reloading?”
“ Yeah.” Izzy ejected her clips, tossed them aside, slapped in new, jacked rounds into the chambers. “I’m good to go. You?”
“ Yeah.” Lila said. “Stay where you are, I’ll crawl to the sound of your voice.”
“ This way,” Izzy said as she saw Lila belly crawling on the grass, coming toward her like a snake, a pair of guns in each hand, deadly as fangs.
Mouledoux had started for the master bath, to look for something to cut the girl’s plastic cuffs off, when all hell broke loose outside. It sounded like combat, like he was back in Kuwait, back in a firefight.
“ Holy shit!” Amy said, when the gunfire stopped. “What was that?”
“ That,” Mouledoux said, “was your grandmother.”
“ She sounds pissed,” Alicia said.
“ It’s never a good thing to get on Nana’s bad side,” Amy said.
“ Sounds like nothing’s changed,” Alicia said. Then to Mouledoux, “Can you get us out of these?”
“ I was just going to see if I could find something to cut them off.” In the bathroom he found a pair of barber’s scissors, which Manny Wayne probably used to trim his sideburns.
“ Can you hurry?” Amy Eisenhower said. “Because these are on too tight and I’m starting to lose sensation in my hands.”
“ Coming.” Back in the closet, he knelt to the floor, cut the cuffs that were binding Amy’s hands behind her back. Then he did her friend Alicia.
“ Much better.” Amy’s hands were white.
“ Give me those.” Alicia took Amy’s hands in her own, started rubbing the circulation back into them. “I seriously need to shoot someone.”
“ I think Amy’s grandmother is pretty much taking care of that,” Mouledoux said.
“ Think we got ’em?” Izzy’s whisper seemed like shouting, so quiet had it become when the shooting stopped.
“ Yeah,” Lila said, “we got ’em.”
“ You don’t think they’re flat on their bellies, like us, waiting?” They were so close to each other, Izzy could taste Lila’s breath and for a brief instant she felt like they were lovers, like their lives were going to be bound together forever.
“ No, I think they’re dead.”
A scream, more terrifying than anything Izzy had ever heard, pierced the fog. Before she could think or react a giant of a man, with arms longer than her legs, kicked Lila in the stomach, sending her flying as he grabbed Izzy with his monster hands, lifting her from the ground.
“ I have her,” the giant wailed.
“ No you don’t, Lugar!” Lila shot him in the chest. One, two, three times, each round barely missing Izzy as she took the giant down. He fell with a thud, arms flaying. Izzy hit the ground hard, holding both Glocks in tight fisted grips as she rolled away.
“ Behind you!” Lila shouted.
Izzy spun her guns around, firing without looking. By the time she’d seen what she’d done, a scrawny, little man with a big Mac 10 was dead on the ground.
“ Good job,” Lila said.
Izzy was breathing like a freight train. She fought to slow it down. Breathing under control, she said. “You knew him, the big man?”
“ I knew them all,” Lila said.
“ Yeah, I guess I forgot.” She took in a deep breath, let it out slowly. “So how we doing?”
“ Tucker’s still out there and he’s sly as a weasel and mean as a rabid dog. He’s not his father, not as sharp and not as cool under stress, but he knows how to use a gun.”
“ So what now?”
“ Thick as soup, this fog.” Glock in hand, Lila held out an arm. The weapon, along with her hand, disappeared in the grey muck. “What is this shit?”
“ Gerald, Weed, Lugar!” Tucker Wayne’s gravel voice pierced through the fog, like it had the strength of a powerful amplifier behind it. “Wilson, Grey, Smith!” A pause. “Call out your positions.”
Silence.
“ Speak of the Devil,” Lila whispered.
“ So, all down but Tucker?” Izzy said.
“ Yeah, sounds like,” Lila said. “I have to do him by myself.”
“ No.”
“ We could shoot each other in this fog,” Lila said. “So it’s best you stay here and stay low, till I finish it.”
“ No.”
“ Don’t have time to argue, Izzy,” Lila said. “You have to stay put and let me do this.”
“ Alright,” Izzy said.
“ Good.” Still flat on the ground, Lila pointed to the left with the forty-five. “The barracks is that way. That’s where he’ll be, inside waiting.”
“ How do you know?”
“ He’s not as brave or as reckless as his father. He’ll be playing it safe. He’s dangerous, but predictable. I’ll call out when I’ve finished it.” Lila started to turn away, when a low hum rumbled through the fog.
“ I can’t figure out where it’s coming from,” Izzy said.
“ It’s everywhere,” Lila said, “like the fog.”
The fog had effectively blinded them and though the rumbling hum hadn’t deafened them, it was getting louder, like a diesel truck coming down the road, till the sound leveled off, like the truck was running full out, but never getting closer.
“ What the-.”
“ Shhh!” Izzy put a finger to Lila’s lips as shots rang out, slamming into the house behind them. Still flat on the ground, Izzy put her mouth to Lila’s ear. “You were too loud, he heard you.” Just two words, that’s all it took for Tucker to zero in on their position. He was good.
Now Lila put her mouth to Izzy’s ear.
“ You go that way,” Lila pointed left, “to the house. Find the girls. They’ll probably be upstairs somewhere. Once I finish with Tucker, I’ll come to you and we’ll get outta here.” She squeezed Izzy’s arm, then pushed herself to her feet.
Izzy got up too and watched as Lila started off into the fog. No way was she going to leave her. So she followed, expecting any second for Lila to turn around and discover her.
Tucker Wayne had barely heard Lila’s voice through the rumbling noise, he let loose a burst from the Mac 10 in the direction he thought it had come from as the noise got louder, loud enough that it made thinking hard. He had to get out of the barracks. If he hadn’t gotten lucky and taken her out, she’d come for him here.
He clenched his hands around the weapon. He hadn’t gotten lucky. She was too good for that.
He killed the lights in the barracks, turning the building dark as the night. Then, easing his grip on the Mac 10, he moved from the front of the small house, through the living room to the small dining room, then the kitchen and on out the backdoor. He knew Lila Booth very well, but as well as he knew her, she knew him. He wasn’t a coward, but he was cautious. She knew that about him. She’d expect him to be in the barracks, so he wouldn’t be.
With a hand trailing the backside of the house, the way a boy would a picket fence, so he wouldn’t lose his way in the fog, Tucker went alongside it to the south side of the barracks. There was an old sycamore off to the right and in front of the barracks. His plan, if he could find it in the fog, was to move to it, hide behind it and, with the Mac 10 on full auto, shoot Lila Booth in the back when she passed by on her way to the barracks.
He moved round the back of the house, with a hand still trailing it, to the front, then he stepped out into the fog in the direction of the tree he couldn’t see. A few cautious steps and he was there.
But now he had a problem he hadn’t anticipated. He could barely see his hand when he held it out in front of himself, much less the barracks or the main house, which was where he’d imagined Lila would be coming from.
And she would be coming. Of that he was sure. When he’d called out to his dad’s men and got no reply, he’d known she’d prevailed and they were dead. Probably Peeps and the old man as well. He was on his own and he’d need a lot of luck to survive this night.
If only that damn noise would stop and if only the bloody fog would lift.
And as if Satan himself had heard his wish, the rumbling noise quit and it was quiet, like sound didn’t exist. He couldn’t even hear his own breath. And while he was marveling at that, the fog started to dissipate and in seconds it was little more than a haze and sure enough coming through the fog like she didn’t have a care in the world was Lila Booth, looking like a wraith in the mist with that duster and a pistol in each hand.
He could shoot her down now, but the slightest movement on his part would trigger a barrage of bullets. She was panther quick and panther deadly, waiting till she passed and was at the barracks would be the safer bet. The last thing he wanted was to face her head on. That would be suicide.
Izzy had been going in the general direction Lila had set out on. She’d imagined she was only three or four yards behind, but with the diesel like noise that seemed to be coming from everywhere and the blasted fog, she couldn’t be sure.
The noise stopped.
Izzy did too.
The fog started to fade.
Lila was about fifty feet in front of her and off to the left. Izzy had been going almost in the right direction, but not quite.
The cloak of invisibility vanishing, Izzy dropped to the ground as Lila broke right, sprinting like she was running for the tape. In seconds she was at the right side of the small house that Manny Wayne had dubbed as “the barracks.” If Tucker Wayne had been in there, he’d’ve seen her, but he hadn’t shot her.
How come?
And in the flick of an instant Izzy answered herself.
He wasn’t in there.
How come Lila couldn’t see that?
If Tucker wasn’t in the small house, where was he? Izzy looked over to the main house. It faced to the southwest, the barracks was off to its right and about a half a football field in front of it, affording Manny Wayne plenty of privacy while having his security guards not that far away. Could they have missed Tucker when they’d swept through the main house? Could he have been upstairs?
Izzy didn’t see any signs of life over there, so she didn’t think so, because if he’d been there with one of those machine pistols, he’d’ve cut Lila down.
She turned her attention back to the small house. It looked almost like the house she’d grown up in with her parents. It faced to the northeast, had a large bay window dead center in the front of the house, a window to it’s right, which in the house she’d grown up in would have been her bedroom, who knew what use it was put to here. And also like the house she’d loved, there was a front porch on the left, no porch swing here. Izzy imagined a living room on the other side of the front door, but that’s as far as her imagination would take here. This wasn’t the cozy little house she’d loved. There wasn’t any love here. This was a cold place.
Looking at the two houses, Izzy wondered why neither was built facing the northwest, where they’d’ve had a view of downtown Reno and it’s colorful lights. She couldn’t imagine a better view than that. Instead the main house faced the massive front yard which, other than a couple large trees, had nothing spectacular about it, except for the ugly fence that surrounded the property. The view from the barracks took in those trees as well as the main house. It was almost as if Manny Wayne didn’t want to acknowledge the world outside his domain and almost as if he didn’t care about beauty. It was all so desolate and with the exception of those two trees, barren.
Attention back on the small house, Izzy saw that Lila was in motion. Like herself, Lila dropped to the ground. Then she belly crawled along the front of the house. She was snake fast as she slithered under the window on the right, then under the bay window. Once past the windows she pushed herself to her feet, a pistol still in each hand with the one in her left pointed at the front door, like she’d expected Tucker to come bursting out of it.
But Tucker wasn’t in there. How come she couldn’t she see that?
Lila stood to the side of the door, aimed at the doorknob. She was going to blast it apart, but before she could fire, a man stepped out from behind the tree closest to the house.
Izzy shot him through the back.