“Joey —” I started to scream. I cut myself off, instead standing and watching at the door. Joey dashed out and around the group of three, aiming toward the edge of the road where it met the parking lot.

  Three more shots and all three people hit the ground. Mayes, Shalice, and McNab, who fell clutching his side.

  Dammit, McNab.

  I stood in the doorway, aimed my own weapon, and fired off two shots at the first car in the line. I wasn’t aiming for anyone — I knew I couldn’t hit anything useful from this range with this piece — but I wanted to give Joey a fighting chance to do whatever… he was going to do.

  Joey turned around and ran back toward the bar, putting Shalice and the others directly between us. He didn’t look to his side, and he didn’t look up at me. His eyes were on her. They were dark and wild, and I could just barely see the whites of them, blazing downward with that nearly uncontrolled rage he was so good at mustering.

  I stood there like an idiot, watching, doing nothing other than aiming at the car while Joey scooped up Shalice from the ground as if she weighed nothing more than a doll, then came crashing through the last few steps to the front door.

  And that’s when I saw the shadowy figure, standing behind the open passenger door of the car, aiming a rifle at Joey’s back. My gun was already lifted, so I fired off another shot, but I wasn’t going to hit him. Nor would it do any damage if I did.

  “Joey! Behind you!” I tried to warn him. I tried to let him know that the guy had a bead on him, but the words were drowned out by a loud gunshot.

  Only this time the shot wasn’t from the direction of the thugs — it was behind me. And it hadn’t been the sound of a pistol or a rifle. I whirled around to see Fellows crouched at one of the blown-out windows, shotgun in hand, looking pissed. He pumped the gun and ejected the spent shell, then took aim out the window again.

  I looked back outside and saw that the ruse had worked. All the thugs had been taken by surprise, now focused on the side of my bar where the shotgun blast had come from. I stepped outside to receive Joey, who dumped Shalice into my arms and dove inside.

  He slammed the door shut behind us, and I laid Shalice on a table in the center of the room. There was blood everywhere.

  "No, no, no…" Joey was whispering, not paying any attention at all to the fact that Fellows was now lying prone on the ground by the window as the thugs' gunshots sprayed into the wall and ceiling. He wasn't looking at anything but Shalice, and I followed his gaze.

  “She’s hit,” I said.

  Joey nodded.

  “She’ll be okay.”

  Joey wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “You don’t know that.”

  “She’s going to be —”

  “You don’t know that,” he said, his voice shaking. “You can’t know that until we get a better look.”

  “The others?” I asked. I knew Joey hadn’t taken the time to check for pulses, but I wondered if he’d noticed how Mayes and McNab had fared.

  He shook his head. Either he didn't know, or they didn't make it. I knew McNab was likely dead, as he'd been the one to raise his gun and therefore the one they'd have been aiming at. I knew he'd been hit at least once, as he spun around a bit before he fell.

  Mayes I didn’t really care about. One fewer crooked cop in the world, I surmised.

  “I’ll get some vodka,” I said. There was a first aid kit in the kitchen, and a bottle of vodka would help clean and sterilize the wound, but Joey was right — I didn’t actually know if she was going to be alright. She’d been shot in the side from the looks of it. A wound there could mean anything from a clean shot to a hit to a vital organ.

  Joey, for his part, was trying to remain calm, but I could see it plastered all over his face that he was anything but. “I’m going… I’m going to kill —”

  “It’s okay,” I said, keeping my voice down and placing my hand on his shoulder. “You just take care of her. She needs you to stay with her.”

  He nodded, swallowed, then grabbed her hand while I raced back to the kitchen to get the supplies.

  Billy caught my eye on the way. He had that look of pure terror in his eyes, the sort of look a rabbit gets when it’s surrounded by a pack of wild dogs.

  He started to say something. “Is she —”

  “Shut it,” I snapped. “Get over there and help Joey. Keep pressure on the wound.”

  “But I can’t —”

  “Go!” I yelled. Billy snapped to his feet and jogged over to the table.

  I grabbed the first aid kit and a half-empty bottle of something cheap. It was a bit higher proof than some of the nicer vodkas so it would be better for cleaning the wound. I dumped the supplies on a table nearby and slid it over to line its edge up with Shalice's table.

  She was stirring, a gentle groan sounding from between staggered breaths.

  “Can you hear me?” I asked her.

  An almost imperceptible nod.

  “Good,” I said. “Stay with us. You can keep your eyes closed, but if it helps just focus on one of the lights above us.”

  Joey had retrieved the tiny scissors from the first aid kit and was now cutting a hole in her shirt from below the breast to her waist. He made a big, wide circle in it, leaving most of it to cover her but revealing the wound.

  It looked terrible, but gunshots always did. Her dark skin did little to hide to the entrance wound, and from my first glance at it, it seemed that the round's trajectory would likely have put the exit wound — if there was one — closer to her spine. That was not good news.

  Joey felt gently around her side, pressing his hand up and around her back. She gasped. “Found it,” he whispered. “It’s near the appendix, but I don’t think it hit anything. There would be a lot more blood.”

  I nodded. I knew there was really no way Joey could understand that, but I didn't want to take away what little hope he had. I focused on Shalice's breathing, watching it rise and fall, steadily though painfully. She’s going to be okay, I told myself.

  Billy was surprisingly helpful, keeping his hands pressing downward on Joey’s shirt, which he’d removed and placed over Shalice’s side. The banker was still wide-eyed, but I knew he’d be with it enough to get the job done.

  Fellows fired another two shots, and I heard someone scream outside. There was a two-second delay, and more rounds splattered the side of my building. Fellows grunted, and I noticed he was clutching his hand.

  “They get you, too?” I asked, running over.

  He shook his head. “Just the tip of my finger. Shrapnel though, not a round. I’ll live.”

  There was a bit of blood, but he sucked on the finger and crawled to safety by the side of the bar. I joined him.

  “What now, Dixon?” he asked. “We’re running out of ammunition, and we have to be testing Rafe’s patience. With that last stunt you pulled…”

  “I don’t need a lecture, Fellows,” I replied. “I saw a shot, I took it. That’s it.”

  I tried to sound confident, but I looked over at Shalice, bleeding out on the table. God, she’d better make it, I thought. I wished there was a way I could take her place on the table. I’d been shot before, and I’d made it through. Even if it were a fatal wound, I wished I could be up there instead of her.

  “Any other bright ideas?” Fellows asked.

  “I’ve got an FBI friend,” I said, shrugging. “We go way back.”

  Fellows squinted. “He’d come all the way out here to settle a bad loan deal?”

  “Not a chance,” I said. “And he’d skin me alive for even asking.”

  “Great. So no ideas.”

  “No good ones.”

  “Mason!”

  I turned around and saw Joey approaching. Shalice was wrapped and resting, Billy’s hands still applying pressure to her side.

  “Joey?”

  He sped up, reaching us at the bar in two strides. I didn’t see his fist coming up until it was too late.

  Crack!

  My world went black for a second, and I was falling. Thankfully the bar was behind me, and I was able to catch myself on a barstool and hold myself up. I felt my jaw pop, the bruise likely already starting to form.

  “The hell was that, Joey?”

  He came up to swing again, but Fellows caught his elbow.

  “You could have killed her!” Joey screamed. “That was your fault!”

  I gaped at him.

  “You sent them out there. You sent her out there!”

  “Joey, I —”

  “Save it, Dixon. This was your doing. She dies, I kill you. You got it?”

  I didn’t know what to say. I was torn between arguing with him — she was the one who’d gotten Mayes called out here in the first place — and agreeing with him.

  “She’ll be fine, Joey,” Fellows said.

  Joey shook him off, and Fellows tried to move in to restrain him, but Joey moved away a couple feet. He was seething, but he seemed to be calming down. "You — you did this…"

  I didn’t say anything. What the hell was I supposed to say? Joey was feeling mad, scared, afraid — all the things he should have been feeling. I couldn’t blame him for that, and I couldn’t blame him for wanting to take it out on someone.

  But I also knew that starting something here and now, with Fellows and me, was not going to end well for any of us. We were stuck behind a rock and a hard place, severely outnumbered, and to split us up would guarantee our death.

  Fellows knew this, too. He looked at Joey, then at me, then back at Joey. He was trying to figure out what to do, what say. He had experience with this sort of thing, talking people off a ledge, trying to deflate the tension in a situation before it got out of hand. I could see him thinking about it, deciding what to do.

  And I could see that he was sizing both of us up, trying to determine which of us would win in a brawl. Joey was the obvious contender, young, stocky, and strong. He was scrappy in a way Navy boys often were, trained professionally to fight well and trained by experience to fight hard.

  But Fellows knew about my secret weapon — he had it, too. I call it "Old Man Strength," that strange phenomenon that occurs to men of a certain age that can't fully be explained. It's like the difference between weightlifting strength and functional strength. I was no bodybuilder, but my musculature had carried my frame for decades longer than Joey had been alive. There was something mysterious about that, and for whatever reason, it translated into a secret strength no one could explain. It couldn't be mustered on command, but it was there, lying in wait to surprise a much younger opponent.

  Joey stared us down, then deflated. He sank into a nearby chair, head in his hands. I waited, but he didn’t get back up.

  I let out a huge breath I didn’t realize I’d been holding. Old Man Strength or not, I knew I’d dodged a bullet — fighting Joey might not have been the end of me, but it would surely have hurt like hell.

  Just then, my phone rang.

  15

  When my phone rang, I fumbled around in my pocket for it. I pulled it out, but I didn’t notice the number on it. I couldn’t. For some reason, my mind turned to — of all things — writing. I thought about the phone in my hand, gently vibrating and singing that migraine-inducing ringtone, and what I might make up if I were writing a story about it.

  I've always wanted to write a book. I used to think that wanting to write a book was special as if I were the only person I knew who thought writing a book would be a cool thing. Turns out everyone on the planet wants to write a book — it's just that few people do it. Most people, at some point in their life, have at least a germ of an idea that would make for a decent short story. My "germ" of an idea came from a recurring dream I've had, and it's quite simple:

  A man’s phone rings, once per day, until the man answers it.

  The person on the other end tells the man to do something. Something straightforward, something so easy the man can't not do it. “Eat dinner,” or “check the mail.” Things the man would have done anyway.

  But the calls keep coming.

  Every day, like clockwork.

  The single phone call, followed by a single command. The man at first is confused, then amused, but he’s racked up a string of successful performances and starts to get in the habit of waiting for the phone call. The simple, repetitive tasks go from mundane to slightly out-of-the-ordinary, like “walk the neighbor’s dog,” and “mow your lawn.”

  Still, the man has put together a string of "victories," and the requests are hardly harmful — on the contrary, they're things he either would have done anyway or things that are helpful to his neighbors and community.

  That's when the story idea gets weird. In my dream, I'm usually the one with the phone, the guy who appreciates the repetition and habit of having an easy-to-please boss. Especially one who's hands-off, lets me do my own thing. But after a few minutes of dream-time, after I've been walking dogs and buying milk and filling my gas tank for a few days, the requests start to turn a bit more bizarre.

  The man — me — with the phone is told to walk shirtless down the street. Okay, he/me thinks, it’s just a funny thing to do. No harm done.

  Until there is harm done.

  “Suffocate your nephew’s hamster.”

  Now, I don’t have a nephew, so I'm able to stay an arm's length away from this particular scenario, and even in my dream, I know it's not real. But I can’t help but wonder what it would be like to actually be that man, the one living a slightly absurd version of Groundhog Day with a repetitiveness that’s slowly spinning out of control.

  The requests continue, moving from the realm of harmless and innocent to macabre and terrifying, and yet the man doesn’t want to know what happens when he fails to complete the task. He doesn’t want to find out who’s on the other end of the phone. And yet, he’s the one who’s dug his own grave, as he’s the one who’s developed the dopamine-inducing habit of completing each day’s task.

  It’s a weird, wild dream, and therefore a story idea I think I’d like to write someday. But that’s all I was thinking about when I grabbed the phone. I was thinking of the man — me — getting ready to answer the phone to the sound of a deep, digitally modified voice, telling me to do something that wasn’t what I really wanted to do.

  It’s an old phone, one Joey likes to make fun of. It has nothing but a tiny LCD window on the front of it that displays the number or the name of the person calling. Since the person calling me now wasn’t a person whose number I had stored in the phone, it only displayed the number.

  But I knew who it was.

  I opened the phone and placed it up to my right ear.

  “Dixon?” the voice said, crackling out and into my ear. "I don't want to screw around anymore. You know I'm serious now."

  “You almost killed her, asshole.”

  There was a pause, and then laughter. “Almost? Well I thought for sure we’d killed all three of them, but it was pretty clear by that kid’s reaction which one of them you cared about the most.”

  I recalled Joey running outside and grabbing Shalice, braving the rain of bullets.

  “Consider yourself lucky then, Dixon,” Rafe said. “I told my men to kill them all.”

  I gripped the phone harder. Joey and Fellows looked at me. They knew who was talking, no doubt, but they had no idea what Rafe was saying.

  “What do you want now?” I asked.

  “Besides what I already told you I wanted?”

  “You’ve already killed two guys, shot up another, blown up half my bar… what’s stopping you from just coming in and taking your banker friend?”

  “You are, Mason.”

  “Like hell I am.”

  “But you are. You and the others. See — I don’t actually want to kill you, Dixon. You’re in the way, and I really don’t like people who get in my way. But I don’t have anything against you Billy and Fellows came to you for help, and I respect that. I don’t want to kill you for no reason, nor do I want to kill the others who are in there with you.”

  “But…”

  “But — and you know this now — I absolutely will. I will kill each and every one of you, Dixon. One at a time, if I have to. I will get to Billy, with or without your help.”

  “Then why all the shenanigans? I thought you weren’t interested in negotiating? Why call me now?”

  “Because I’m going to sweeten the deal. To prove to you that I’m less interested in killing you all than I am in getting what I want.”

  “And what does ‘sweetening the deal’ look like?” I asked.

  “I’m going to pay off your bar,” Rafe said.

  “You’re —”

  “If you give me Billy and Fellows. Billy needs to be alive. Fellows… I just want his body.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut. My head was spinning. I was the man in my dream now, once again. I had answered the phone, I had received the request, and I was now considering the offer. I was considering the offer.

  I stopped, actually pulling the phone away from my ear.

  Am I really?

  The bar — my bar — was still wrapped up in a mortgage, and even with my father’s halfway decent estate there was more left on it than I felt comfortable with. My goal all along had been to earn enough to pay down the loan, own my place outright, and retire by making classy drinks for classy people. I could do what I wanted, when I wanted, and I even had a nice yacht I could use for those extended escapes I’d long since dreamt of.

  It wasn’t everything, but it was everything I didn’t already have. Paying off the bar was the end goal for me — either because I was terrible at deciding what my end goal really was or because it was just that simple.

  “You’re — you’re going to pay off my bar?” I asked.

  “If you give me Billy,” Rafe said. “Alive. And it has to be before midnight.”

  "Why midnight? You turn back into a pumpkin?"

  “Cute,” he said. “But like I said, you’ve got one hour. That’s it. One hour before midnight, we’re coming in and taking him. No one else will survive.”

  16

 

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