Deadline(138)
Twenty seconds later, he got “Frankie.” And then, “I’ll break him out.”
Virgil tried to type “No!” but he’d only gotten the “N” typed in when a side window on the cabin flew open and Johnson bellowed into the night, “Hey! Vike! You’re surrounded! Everybody knows you’re out there. Give it up, you fuckin’ cocksucker!”
There was a moment of dead silence, then a six-inch flame reached out toward the cabin and blew out a window, and Jenkins and Shrake opened up on the muzzle flash, and were rolling away from their own flashes when there were three fast shots from the same point, or a little left, then a woman started screaming, and Jenkins and Shrake and Virgil opened up on the muzzle flash point, and the woman kept screaming, and Shrake screamed at Jenkins, “He’s got cover, go to slugs,” and Virgil emptied his shotgun at the point of the incoming muzzle flashes and rolled off behind a tree, and the woman kept screaming, and Virgil wished she’d stop doing that and wondered in a very thin stream of curious thought in the middle of a gunfight if Johnson and Clarice had been getting it on in the cabin. . . .
—
JENKINS’S FIRST SLUG knocked a hole in the bottom of the boat that Laughton and Barns were using for cover, and also took a piece of Jennifer 1’s ass, and she dropped her shotgun and started screaming for help, and Vike said, “Sorry about this, Jen,” and he slid backward on his belly down the bank toward the river and then scuttled away in the dark. Incoming slugs were knocking holes in the boat and Jennifer 1 began screaming, “No no no no no . . . I give up give up give up . . .”
Virgil shouted, “Stop, stop, stop . . .”
—
WHEN THE SHOOTING STOPPED, Virgil shouted, “Vike, throw out your gun. There are a whole bunch of us here. All you’ll get is killed, if you keep shooting.”
A woman’s voice: “Vike ran away. I’m shot, I’m hurt bad, I’m dying. Get me help, get me an ambulance, help me . . .”
They took a good two minutes closing in on her, and found her hiding behind Johnson’s upturned jon boat. She was bleeding heavily from a wound in the buttocks, and Virgil said to Jenkins, “Get an ambulance.”
Jenkins stepped back to call, and Virgil moved around behind the boat and picked up a shotgun and put it out of reach, and asked, “Who are you?”
Before she could answer, a light hit her in the face, and Johnson, standing behind the flashlight, said, “Hey, it’s Jennifer Barns, the honorable school board chairwoman or -person.”
“Where’d Vike go?” Virgil asked.
“He went down the river . . . down the bank,” she groaned.
And Johnson said, suddenly louder, “Hey, hey! That’s my boat. Jesus Christ, look what you assholes did to my boat. It’s all—”
“Shut up!” Virgil shouted.
Johnson shut up, and Jenkins came back and said, “Ambulance is on the way. They said they know the place, they’ve been here before.”
“I’m dying,” Barns screamed. “Get me a doctor. I’m dying . . .”
Jenkins said, “I got a little issue here myself. I might have caught some buckshot.”
Virgil: “Aw, shit. How bad? Where’re you hit?”
“Right in the calf. Could be gravel or something, but there’s some blood.”
Shrake said, “Let me look, get up on the porch . . .”
—