Like riding a bike, right?
“Car just dropped two off in the alley,” EP said on the line. “Now it’s coming around the block.”
Michael stood up and faced the back door.
“You two go lay down in the bathtub.”
Celeste got up and grabbed Cooper, but he shook her off.
“Fuck that. Give me a gun.”
Michael glared at him, and he stared back like Michael had sprouted wings. There was real murder in that stare. He couldn’t believe it was the same guy who had handed him drinks a few moments ago. He was so stunned he let Celeste walk him into the bathroom without saying a word. She moved quiet as a cat and breathed like a corpse. Her stealth was infectious, and he tried to make all his movements hushed as he lay down over her in the tub. She reached down her back and drew her pistol.
Out in the living room, Michael was still as death.
EP watched the two gunmen come down the back alley as the car screeched to a halt on the lawn out front. Smoothly, calmly, as if grooving to piped-in music while waiting to be seated, Michael took his phone out and flipped on the house’s camera feeds, then drew his pistol.
Despite all their jobs together, it was the first time EP had ever seen him draw his sidearm. Even through the fuzzy camera feed, it was beautiful. A big, polished, nickel-plated handgun that said, “MEGASTAR 10” on the slide. It fit him like a glove. Her weapon ID algos filed it away.
He glanced at his phone and aimed the gun one-handed through the kitchen. The two alley shooters were setting up around the back door. Two more gunmen had jumped out of the car on the front lawn and were moving to the front door with weapons raised. She stopped herself from saying anything, afraid to disturb what seemed to be in perfect balance, like silently watching a wild animal prepare to pounce.
It all happened so fast that she didn’t even take another breath until it was over.
A flashbang crashed through the kitchen window and fizzled on the floor with an anticlimactic ‘pshuh’. A dud. In the same instant, Michael’s gun erupted with fire and ear-shattering noise, and drywall puffed off the wall to the right of the door. Outside, one of the gunmen fell back as his head splattered open all over the grass. The second shooter didn’t even have time to pull the trigger. Another scream of fire, another headshot through the wall. The two shell casings fell within the same heartbeat.
The men at the front door heard the gunfire and rushed in, hoping to overwhelm the shooter, surely engaged to the rear, with some good old-fashioned violence of action, but Michael had about-faced before the first two were done dying in the backyard.
He dropped his phone, grabbed his pistol with both hands, and stepped to the left just as point-man kicked in the door and put one foot over the threshold, his AR sweeping the right side of the room.
Before his phone had even hit the ground, Michael put a single round through the door, still swinging towards him, and splattered point man’s brains on the curtains of the window to the right of the door. As it finished swinging inward to the left, Michael stepped to the right, ducking low into the dead man’s line of fire, somehow concealing his massive frame as the other shooter came in like clockwork, sweeping his rifle across the left side of the room.
Michael shot over the dead man’s shoulder and got shooter number two in the side of the head before he even realized his partner was falling.
As the shell casing tumbled in the air, Michael shifted his weight back onto his left foot, glided in front of the door frame, and fired through the wide-open front door, putting a final bullet through the passenger window of the car outside and out the top of the driver’s head. There was a brief shout of gunfire, the only shots the five-man team ever got off, as the driver squeezed the trigger on his drum-magged AK as he died and put a burst through the car door and into the lawn.
Then the bodies settled, and everything was still again.
Michael stood there in the quiet, looking up and down the street. A bird chirped and a dog barked and the sounds zipped like arrows through the cool air. He went back inside and pushed the door to, having to kick a pair of legs out of the way first.
He holstered his pistol over the corpses.
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“Cooper,” he called like a dad with a report card in hand.
A few moments of squeaky scrambling on porcelain and linoleum later, Cooper and Celeste stepped in cautiously.
“Where is the coin?” Michael said.
Cooper stared open-mouthed while Celeste looked away from the bodies and covered her face.
“Boss, you need backup?” Philip said in his ears. Michael held a finger up to the couple.
“No, all good here. I think I’m done being rusty.” The smile that broke out over his face made him look even more like a big kid than ever, and for some reason that scared Cooper worse than the bodies.
“Next time put some better doors on,” Michael said, pleasantly. “It’s supposed to be a safe house, after all.”
Cooper slid into the couch and went back to work on his drink, still spitting fizz. A shell casing had landed on the coffee table and laid sideways, spent. Celeste watched him drink like he had his straw in one of the bodies.
“Still waiting for an answer, Cooper.” Michael pulled up a leather slipper chair from the half wall under the kitchen counter and sat down opposite the coffee table.
“Should we leave?” Celeste said suddenly. Michael didn’t even look at her.
“We can leave when I know where we’re going.”
Cooper held the drink on his thigh. “How do I know that if I tell you, you won’t—”
“You don’t,” Michael said. Celeste had to look away from him. She had never seen him like this. Evil in his eye, taunting. The gunfire had shaken up something in her that had only just settled after the earlier shootout, and she felt that other self, the strong one, fall away from her like it was escaping.
Cooper tried to regain the conversation. “Then why should I—”
“Because I get paid if I kill you right now, but I get paid more if I get the coin.”
“So I tell you where it is, you kill me—”
“And the coin isn’t there because you lied to me.”
“So you keep me alive just long enough to make sure I’m not bullshitting you, then you kill me.”
“No.”
“Why not? That’s what I’d do.”
“That’s because you’re a small-time thief. I’m running an organization. I have to look ahead.”
“What—”
“If I kill you after you tell me where it is, then you run and tell everyone you meet how I fucked you over, the next time I get sent to collect something, no one’s gonna want to play ball and I’ll have to do everything the hard way.”
“But won't word get around that you only do half a job? Didn’t someone hire you to get the coin and kill me?”
“They also told me we would be the only team on the job. You’ve seen how that turned out. Getting the coin and letting you slip out would be a nice way to tell them to go fuck themselves while still getting paid.”
Cooper watched the golden bubbles rise to the surface and disappear. Where did they go, when they left this god-forsaken place? Did they appear in the drinks served in the Allclub? Celeste was looking at him now, and he found something in her eyes he hadn’t seen before, at least not in years. He felt sure that the girl from his memories had come back and was trying to say how sorry she was about how long she had been gone with only one look. Cooper squeezed her hand and looked back at Michael, suddenly feeling like he had someone on his side of the table.
“All right. Let’s go.”
“Tell me where we’re going, Cooper. I need to get people on it as soon as possible. We don’t want to walk into another ambush.”
It was an odd silence with the bubbling of the drinks and the muffled suburban ambiance. To Celeste, it felt like the past two days were balancing on this thin sliver of a moment, and she was getting pinched somewhere between.
Cooper came to the conclusion, like rolling to a stop in a dead car, that his choices were between getting shot here in this house or maybe getting shot later and probably getting sent to Nightmare anyway. He didn’t trust the big guy, but he wasn’t ready to leave yet, now that he had found something worth looking at.
“It’s at the DC.”
“Distribution Center. Got it,” EP said on the line.
“Where at the DC?” Michael said.
“I don’t know.”
“What?”
“I slipped it into the returns. I’ve never even been there.”
“Fuck,” EP said. Michael unrolled his bag of neon Trolli gummy worms and ate two without looking away from Cooper. EP clattered away on a keyboard in his ear.
“When did you do this?” Michael asked, after he had chewed the worms for a bit, clearly working out some frustration.
“Thursday.” Cooper shifted in his seat. Maybe he shouldn’t have told him until they got there. Would that have worked? He probably would have just got shot anyway. He pulled Celeste into a sideways embrace on the couch and felt her warm full body conform to him. He looked her in the eyes and the look was still there. This is the way to go out, if he had to do it.
“Found it,” EP said through clenched teeth. “Thursday at eleven in the morning. He just slipped a box onto one of the pallets!” She was on the verge of screaming. Michael puckered from the gummy worms and the thoughts zipping through his head.
“What box?” he asked EP, but Cooper answered.
“A Go-pro. It’s in the little booklet thing.”
Michael crushed the candy bag back into his pocket and stood up.
“All right. Let’s go.” He waved towards the kitchen. Celeste squeezed Cooper and they rose shakily off the couch like a newly formed creature learning to stand.
“We taking a different car?” Cooper asked.
“Yep. One parked down the alley. Can you hit the lights?” Michael took his phone out. “We clear outside?”
Cooper left Celeste with his hand trailing behind him, slipping off her outstretched arm. Like two cells coming apart. He stepped over the bodies across the room to the light switch.
“Can we grab a bite somewhere?” He asked. “I haven’t had shit to eat since—”
The room exploded in a flash and the 10mm round caught him in the back of the head and splattered his face all over the curtains with the rest of the gore. Celeste hadn’t even seen Michael draw the gun. She stood there, watching Cooper become just another object in the room, as Michael ejected the magazine and loaded a full one. After he had put both the pistol and half empty mag under his shirt, she drew her own gun and aimed it at his head.