Chapter 16 - The Ambush in the Pines
The door held, but the upper hinge shrieked under the shearing force of the second blow.
I didn't wait for the third.
I raised the Remington, aimed directly through the center of the wooden door at waist level, and squeezed the trigger.
The blast was deafening in the enclosed foyer. The orange muzzle flash illuminated the stairwell in a split-second snapshot of violence. A swarm of nine lead pellets punched through the solid oak door, blowing out a fist-sized crater of wood and shredded paint.
Outside, a man screamed—a wet, guttural howl of agony as the heavy buckshot tore through the door and shredded his lower abdomen. The sound of a heavy body collapsing into the rain was immediate.
"Fall back! Fall back! She’s firing through the goddamn door!" someone barked from the driveway.
I racked the slide with a brutal, mechanical stroke. The red plastic hull flew over my shoulder and bounced down the stairs with a light clatter.
I didn't stay on the mezzanine. That was an amateur's mistake; if they threw a flashbang or peppered the second floor with automatic fire, I’d be pinned. Instead, I moved silently down the service stairs at the rear of the kitchen, slipping out through the side mudroom door that opened beneath the covered breezeway leading to the detached garage.
The rain hit me like a wall of cold needles, soaking through my flannel shirt in seconds.
The three remaining men had retreated to the cover of the lead Suburban. One of them was dragging the wounded man by his tactical vest across the gravel, leaving a dark, glistening trail that the rain quickly washed into the dirt.
"Call Arthur!" the man on the radio was screaming over the roar of the wind. "Tell him the bitch has heavy artillery! She took out Miller’s hip! We need—"
I raised Ethan's Sig Sauer with both hands, leaned against the stone pillar of the breezeway, and fired three deliberate shots into the engine block of the second Suburban.
*Crack. Crack. Crack.*
The high-pressure radiator hiss erupted instantly, spraying steam into the cold air. Before they could locate my muzzle flashes in the pitch-black rain, I shifted my aim down and put two rounds into the rear tires of the lead vehicle.
"She’s in the yard!" a voice screamed. A shotgun blast tore through the cedar siding of the garage three feet above my head, showering my hair with splinters.
I didn't fire back at the muzzle flash. I moved.
I sprinted low along the perimeter of the boxwood hedges, slipping through the dark like a ghost that had lived in these woods for twenty years. I knew every root. I knew where the flagstone path ended and the mud began.
The man with the shotgun was advancing cautiously down the side of the garage, his weapon tucked tight against his shoulder, sweeping the dark with a high-intensity tactical flashlight.
He walked right past the dense cluster of rhododendrons where I was kneeling.
When his back was to me, I stepped out from the leaves. I didn't shoot him. I didn't want the noise to alert the remaining driver.
I brought the heavy steel barrel of the Remington down across the back of his helmet with every ounce of rage, grief, and betrayal that had festered in my soul for nine months.
The composite helmet cracked with a dull, sickening thud. His knees buckled instantly, his flashlight pitching forward into the mud, and he hit the earth like a felled cedar.
May you like
I pressed the muzzle of Ethan’s Sig against the base of his bare skull before he could even moan.
"Tell me what I want to know," I whispered into his ear over the drumming rain, "or your family will be having a closed-casket funeral of their own by sunrise."
