The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [158]
Here in the kitchen, a fat woman in white polyester and a tall old man in black pants, dress shirt, and tie were sobbing and embracing, her short arms not able to meet around his waist, his long arms draped like warm scarves down her back. They saw him and the woman gasped.
“Where is she?” he said.
The fat lady whimpered. The tall man hugged her tighter and looked at Wayne with calm, deliberate hate. “What are you people doing to this house?”
“Is Canada Gold here?” He was trying to sound menacing, like murderer Wayne, but he was grunting and wincing over the words, the pain being everywhere now, through his head, down to his side, and all the way up from the bleeding feet-shaped blisters at the end of his legs.
The old man didn’t answer, but his eyes gave it away, a change of focus, a connection with something behind Wayne. With quickness that surprised even him, Wayne dove to the floor just as a bullet deflected off a stainless-steel appliance with a reverberating ping. A warning. The fat lady screamed and Wayne scrambled over to her on hands and knees as quickly as he could. He could feel the inflamed cut in his side splitting wide. Wayne held a painful breath and pulled himself up by the counter. By the time the shooter, who had fired from the hall, had entered the kitchen, gun pushed out in a two-handed grip, Wayne was crouching behind the old lady’s girth, Denny the Trucker’s gun at a halfhearted angle to her temple.
The shooter was wearing black jeans and a black T-shirt and he held a pistol, bigger and newer than Wayne’s, expertly in both hands. “Police,” he said. “My name’s Detective Bob Kloska. Put the gun down.”
Wayne gave the guy what he hoped was a menacing stare. He wasn’t dressed like a cop, but he sounded like one. He held a gun with a lot more confidence than Wayne did.
“There’s going to be twenty more of me here in a minute,” the cop said.
“There better not be.” Wayne didn’t know how convincing it sounded.
The cop bit his lip and studied him a minute and then he turned his head with recognition. “You’re the shithead from Nevada. Jennings.”
Christ, Wayne thought. “I guess you know I’ll do this, then,” he said.
“Let’s talk about this, Wayne,” the cop said. “Where’s Canada?”
Wayne fired into the ceiling and the gun wobbled and kicked in his hand with the shot. He looked not so much like murderer Wayne, he guessed, as a guy firing a gun outside a range for only the second time in his life. “Go!” he yelled anyway.
The cop looked at the old woman and then the old man, and with an unpleasant snarl, one more realistic and menacing than anything Wayne could manufacture, he backed slowly into the hall.
Wayne limped over and shut the door behind him and locked it with a cheap hook and eye, probably meant to keep important guests from wandering accidentally into the large but unglamorous kitchen. He did the same to the door on the other side of the room.
“What do you people want?” the old man demanded.
“I’m not people. I’m alone.” He bent over the kid—I’m sorry—and promised he’d get him to an ambulance, even though he wasn’t sure how.
“Fuck you,” the looter said.
The old woman wouldn’t stop sobbing.
The tall man asked, “What do you want?”
Wayne said, “I’m looking for Canada Gold.” He counted his wounds with his hand, one at a time, and winced.
The old woman’s wails turned to guilty shrieks and she buried her head into the old man’s side. Wayne was just now figuring that they were husband and wife.
“He called you Jennings,” the old man said. “You’re here to kill Nada.”
Nada. Only her friends called her that. Wayne said, “I’m here to save her,” and realized how insane that sounded, how insane the truth had become, so crazy that he would never be able to convince anyone of it. Wayne wasn’t prepared for it to come out so dramatically. It sounded