“Stop that!” Brady shouts, ducking. At the same time he’s struggling to raise the Scar. “Stop doing that, you bi—”

Holly fires a third time. The sleeve of Brady’s shirt twitches, and he yelps. Hodges isn’t sure she’s winged him again, but she at least grooved him.

Hodges gets to his feet and tries to run at Brady, who is making another effort to raise the automatic rifle. The best he can manage is a slow plod.

“You’re in the way!” Holly cries. “Bill, you’re in the fracking way!”

Hodges drops to his knees and tucks his head. Brady turns and runs. The .38 bangs. Wood splinters fly from the doorframe a foot to Brady’s right. Then he’s gone. The front door opens. Cold air rushes in, making the fire do an excited shimmy.

“I missed him!” Holly shouts, agonized. “Stupid and useless! Stupid and useless!” She drops the Victory and slaps herself across the face.

Hodges catches her hand before she can do it again, and kneels beside her. “No, you got him at least once, maybe twice. You’re the reason we’re still alive.”

But for how long? Brady held onto that goddam grease gun, he may have an extra clip or two, and Hodges knows he wasn’t lying about the SCAR 17S’s ability to demolish concrete blocks. He has seen a similar assault rifle, the HK 416, do exactly that, at a private shooting facility in the wilds of Victory County. He went there with Pete, and on the way back they joked about how the HK should be standard police issue.

“What do we do?” Holly asks. “What do we do now?”

Hodges picks up the .38 and rolls the barrel. Two rounds left, and the .38 is only good at short range, anyway. Holly has a concussion at the very least, and he’s almost incapacitated. The bitter truth is this: they had a chance, and Brady got away.

He hugs her and says, “I don’t know.”

“Maybe we should hide.”

“I don’t think that would work,” he says, but doesn’t say why and is relieved when she doesn’t ask. It’s because there’s still a little of Brady left inside of him. It probably won’t last long, but for the time being, at least, Hodges suspects it’s as good as a homing beacon.

32

Brady staggers through shin-deep snow, eyes wide with disbelief, Babineau’s sixty-three-year-old heart banging away in his chest. There’s a metallic taste on his tongue, his shoulder is burning, and the thought running through his head on a constant loop is That bitch, that bitch, that dirty sneaking bitch, why didn’t I kill her while I had the chance?