in and risking a surprise. I could wait there all day. No problem.
It was January. The noon sun wasn’t going to hurt me. I could
wait until Marshall gave up. Or starved to death. I had eaten
more recently than he had. That was for sure. And if he decided
to come out shooting, I could shoot him first. No problem with
that either.
The problem was with the holes in the cinder block. In the
other three walls. They had looked the size of regular windows.
Big enough for a man to climb through. Even a big man like
Marshall. He could climb through the west wall and get to
his Humvee. Or he could climb through the south wall and get
to mine. Military vehicles don’t have ignition keys. They have
big red starter buttons precisely so that guys can throw themselves
inside in a panic and get themselves the hell out of
Dodge. And I couldn’t watch the west wall and the south wall
simultaneously. Not from any kind of a position that offered
concealment.
Did i need concealment?
Was he armed?
I had an idea about how to find out.
Never trust a weapon that you haven’t personally test-fired.
379
I aimed at the centre of the iron door and pulled the trigger.
The Beretta worked. It worked just fine. It flashed and boomed
and kicked and there was an enormous clang and the round left
a small bright pit in the metal ten yards away.
I let the echoes die.
‘Marshall?’ I called. ‘You’re resisting arrest. So I’m going to
come around and I’m going to start firing through the window
apertures. Either the rounds will kill you or the ricochets will
wound you. You want me to stop at any time, you just come on
out with your hands on your head.’
I heard a burst of radio static again. Inside the hut.
I moved to the west. Kept low and fast. If he was armed he
was going to shoot, but he was going to miss. Give me a choice
of who to get shot at by and I’ll pick a pointy-headed strategic
planner any day of the week. On the other hand, he hadn’t been
completely inept with Carbone or Brubaker. So I widened my
radius a little to give myself a chance of getting behind his
Humvee. Or behind the old Sheridan tank.
Halfway there I paused and fired. It was no kind of a good
system to make a promise and then not keep it. But I aimed
high on the inside face of the window reveal so that if the round
hit him it would have had to come off two walls and the ceiling
first. Most of the energy would be expended and it wouldn’t
hurt him much. The nine-millimetre Parabellum was a decent
round, but it didn’t have magical properties.
I got behind the hood of his Humvee. Rested my gun hand on
the warm metal. The camouflage paint was rough. It felt like it
had sand mixed in with it. I aimed up at the hut. I was down in a
slight dip now and it was above me. I fired again, high on the
other side of the window reveal.
‘Marshall?’ I called. ‘You want suicide by cop, that’s OK with
me.’
No reply. I was three rounds down. Twelve rounds to go. A
smart guy might just lie on the floor and let me blast away. All
my trajectories would be upward in relation to him because I
was down in a dip. And because of the window sills. I could try
banking rounds off the ceiling and the far wall but ricochets
didn’t necessarily work like billiards. They weren’t predictable
and they weren’t reliable.
380
I saw movement at the window.
He was armed.
And not with a handgun, either. I saw a big wide shotgun
barrel come out at me. Black. It looked about the size of a
rainwater pipe. I figured it for an Ithaca Mag-10. A handsome
piece. If you wanted a shotgun, the Mag-10 was about as good
as it got. It was nicknamed The Roadblocker because it was