Feast Day of Fools - James Lee Burke [205]
“What am I supposed to say? You’re pigheaded,” she replied. “If we weren’t in this spot, I’d shoot you myself.”
“You and Rie will always remain the best people I ever knew,” he replied. “And both of you became a permanent part of my life. How many guys can have that kind of luck?”
He held his shotgun with one hand and the railing attached to the brick side wall of the stairwell with the other. Then he raised his right leg and drove the bottom of his boot into the metal door. The reverberation shook the lock and the jamb and the knob, but the door held fast. He raised his foot and smashed his boot into the door again, then again and again, each time bending the lock’s tongue inside the jamb, until the door flew back on its hinges.
He heard the Thompson begin firing again and empty casings bouncing on the hardwood floors and feet running down a hallway. Then he was inside the cellar, inside the damp-smelling coolness that was not unlike a tomb’s, inside the reek of sweat that had dried on the bodies of people who had been tortured, inside the dirty glow of a yellow lightbulb that shone on the faces of Anton Ling and Krill, which seemed as wizened as prunes, as though they had already entered a realm from which no one returned.
The first man to come down the stairs from the hallway may or may not have been armed. Hackberry could remember no details about him other than he was not wearing a shirt, that his head was shaved and his mouth was ringed with whiskers, that there was blood splatter on his chest and arms, that his boots sounded like they had lugs on them as they struck the wood stairs, that his cargo pants were buttoned under his navel, that his mouth dropped open and his face seemed to turn into a bowl of pudding when Hackberry pulled the trigger on the twelve-gauge and watched him buckle over as though he had swallowed a piece of angle iron.
The man who had been first down the cellar stairs had not suffered in vain. As he clutched himself and stumbled and fell down the stairs, three more men followed, shooting over their comrade’s head, filling the cellar with a deafening roar of gunfire that echoed off the walls, the ejected casings shuddering in the electric light, the ricochets sparking off the stone walls and the bars and iron plating of the cells.
Hackberry worked the pump on his twelve-gauge and got another shell into the chamber and fired a second time at the top of the stairs. He saw the lightbulb hanging from the ceiling explode and buckshot cut a pattern across the wooden door that opened onto the hallway, but his adversaries were already into the cellar, firing blindly, breaking the glass in the far window, hitting the body of a man who lay on the floor by one of the cells, driving him and Pam Tibbs back toward the outside stairwell.
“Hack! The guy behind the post!” Pam shouted. Then she began firing the semiauto AR15 into a dark corner of the cellar, pulling the trigger as fast as she could, ignoring a bullet crease on her cheek and a blood-flecked rip in her shirt at the top of her shoulder.
Hackberry felt a blow strike him just above the hip, hard, a pain that punched through tissue and spread deep into the bone the way a dull headache might. He pressed his palm against the wound and saw blood well through his fingers, then something vital inside him seemed to fold in upon itself and melt into gelatin and cause him to lose balance and topple sideways toward a pile of cardboard boxes. All the while Pam kept firing, advancing toward the dark place in the corner, positioning herself between the shooter and Hackberry, shouting, “Suck on this, you motherfucker! How does it feel? Did you like that? Take it, take it, take it!”
Hackberry could not see the man she was shooting at. When Hackberry fell into the boxes, he saw Anton Ling and Krill