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“The fuck you doing?” Tiny says.

“Uncle salty here called me a nigger,” says Dade.

Dade’s lying. Guard’s so piss-scared he wouldn’t say shit if he had a mouthful.

“I don’t give a diddlyfuck what he’s jawing,” I yell over. “Square your shit away.”

AROUND…

Meanwhile Deacon’s emptied the cash drawers. He conducts the tellers and customers over to the vault, where they will remain locked while we make our getaway. Paul forks stacks of twenties into a Hefty Bag as fast as his trembling fingers can manage.

“Bring the guards in,” I say.

“You heard the man,” Dade hollers at the guards. “Move your asses!”

The unharmed guard complies but the other one, he of the busted face, doesn’t move. So Dade seizes a handful of hair and drags the man, thrashing and wailing, across the tiles. Tiny breaks from position to intercept.

“The
fuck
you doing?”

“Following orders,” Dade says. His eyes read like a grim weather forecast: storm clouds gathering.

Tiny says, “Gonna kill him.”

“Fucker called me a nigger! The fuck would you do?”

THE CLOCK…

They’re chest-to-chest, Dade glaring up at Tiny. Forgotten behind them, the injured guard raises his pantleg and grabs something black and snub-nosed from a cheater holster. He has the hammer cocked and a bead drawn before I holler:

“
Gun
!”

KRA-THACK
is the sound the pistol makes and
ka-chunk
is the sound the bullet makes flattening against Tiny’s forehead. The peak of his skull shears off and his eyes roll back in their sockets. His finger spasms on the shotgun’s trigger and the sound is deafening as buckshot tears his feet to shreds but it doesn’t matter because he’s dead, dead on his feet, dead on his stumps, fucking
dead
.

Dade swivels, AK riding his hip, and opens fire. The Kalishnakov kicks and the rent-a-cop’s face disintegrates in a cloud of red.

…
TONIGHT!

Screams fill the vault. Most of these folks have never heard gunshots before and they’re thinking WWIII has broken out in the foyer. I grab the Hefty Bag from Paul. Deacon smashes the emergency phone and slams the vault’s door on thirteen very relieved faces.

Dade inserts another banana clip and racks the AK’s bolt. His Converse hightops are coated in blood and chunks of someone, Tiny, rent-a-cop, I don’t know who the fuck. He’s Section-8, and maybe he’s been that way for a while now. I should’ve seen he wasn’t wired tight but I didn’t and now we’re wading through a bloodbath.

“Time to go,” I say through gritted teeth.

The sidewalk is mercifully deserted. Maybe, just maybe, we’re going to clear this tits-up. But no: we’re halfway between the bank and the van when a police cruiser fishtails around the corner at Elm and Prescott.

Deacon drops into a shooter’s stance and snaps off six shots. The first flattens the cruiser’s front right tire, the third flattens the left, four, five and six punch through the grille. The cruiser skids to a standstill, steam boiling up from under the hood.

Perfect. The cruiser’s disabled and nobody’s hurt.

Dade erases all that.

He opens up with the Kalishnikov, sweeping the barrel side-to-side like a kid pissing in a snow bank. The cruiser’s windshield implodes and the frame rocks—actually
rocks
back and forth, like a ragtop on Lover’s Lane—as copperjackets tear through it. And I can make out two bodies jitterbugging in the front seat: maybe young cops, maybe old cops, maybe single cops, maybe married cops, but the only certainty is that they’re
dead
cops, dead as disco, and the mindlessness of their deaths sickens me. Then the cruiser explodes, erupting into a furious flaming scrapheap that rains charred metal and smoking flesh onto the cold November tarmac.

I slam my hand down on the AK’s barrel. Dade stares at me with empty eyes.

“Take me home, Oddy,” he whispers. “Take me home.”

“Yeah, Dade,” I say. “Yeah, okay.”

We pile into the van and pull away, leaving four funerals in our wake. I stare out the window at the flaming scalps of radial tire and charred metal and remember…

…
The Magnificent Seven on Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol eighty klicks east of Saigon, walking a trail overlooking the South China Sea. Intel had reported the NVA was offloading three boatloads of weapons in a Mekong bay. Zippo scouted ahead and found the drop point as night fell.

We moved in. It was about ten o’clock at night. We saw people unloading long boxes we assumed were rifles. I gave the order to open up on them.

I remember the sound of wood splintering and things exploding and, like a deep-space transmission, screaming. People were running around the decks like headless chickens. A man was on fire, body an oily tower of red and black flame, and he grabbed someone else and soon they were both ablaze, fire pouring out of their mouths like flame-swallowers at the circus. I remember a man raising what could have been a rifle or a fishing pole, remember pulling the trigger and watching his face collapse into itself in a red spray, remember his features the split-second before the slug destroyed them, their flatly elegant symmetry.

Swift, silent, deadly.

Daylight came, and we discovered that we had killed a lot of fishermen and children. Intel had fucked up. I got on the blower to command. I was screaming into the handset while Tripwire knelt with this kid’s body in his lap, a body with no head, and I was saying: “We got a royal fuck-up here, Colonel. Dead kids and dead fishermen and not one gun on board.”

The Colonel said: “Don’t worry. It’ll spin, Sergeant. We got body count.”

So I turned to my unit and said, “Don’t worry about it. Everything’s fine,” because that’s what I was getting from upstairs. But we had dead bodies draining over bullet-riddled gunnels, bodies of children and eels and monkfish baking together in the bank’s red sands so everything was most definitely
not
fine, top brass could spin that motherfucker to the moon but the stink was going to linger.

They gave us all the Combat Infantry Badge for that action. There was an award ceremony, the seven of us standing on a makeshift platform with medals stuck on our chests for killing innocent civilians. I knew in my heart it was wrong. But we were at war and different rules applied…

…Malik cuts onto the freeway before turning back on us like an exasperated parent and asking, “What the fuck happened in there?”

“Dade happened,” Deacon says. “Dade happened
all over
that motherfucker.”

“Where’s Tiny?”

“Dead,” I say. “Got his shit scattered by some rent-a-cop packing a pistol should’ve been taken off him three seconds after we cleared the front doors—”

“Don’t you fucking pin Tiny’s death on me—”

“That guard was your cover!” Deacon shouts at Dade. “Why the hell didn’t you pat him down? Armed robbery 101, mother
fuck
!”

Malik pulls into the fast lane. Five or six squad cars, sirens wailing, speed by in the opposite lane. Between us, spilled across the van’s floor panels, are stacks and stacks of bills.

“And what about the cops?” Deacon continues. “Why’d you kill
them
?”

“Shitcan the questions,” I say. “Not here, not now. People are dead, Tiny is dead, and all we can do is deal.” To Dade: “This is the end of the line for you. No more jobs. Take your cut and run, son. Find some sunny somewhere and square your shit away.”

“I’m okay, boss,” Dade says.

“No, Dade,” I say, placing a hand on his shoulder, feeling him shiver. “You’re not okay. You need help. I wish I could help you myself, but I can’t.”

“My shit’s hardwired, Oddy. I’m watertight.”

“You’re fucking bugshit,” Deacon spits. “Killing people for no goddamn reason.”

“Say that again.” Dade’s voice is barely audible above the wind whistling through the van’s seams. “Just one…more…time.”

“What the fuck’s going on back there?” Malik asks.

“Not a goddamn thing,” I say. “Everything’s cool and the gang, isn’t that right?”

But Deacon blows any good vibes out of the water when he says, “You heard me: you’re bugshit. Section
-fucking-
8.”

“Take that back,” Dade whispers. “Take it back or I’ll shoot you in the face.”

Deacon leans forward until his face is inches from Dade’s. “Go…
fuck
.”

And now I know, now I am absolutely certain, call me Kreskin because I am fucking positive this is going to end badly.

Everything happens with the rapidity of fireworks going off. Dade reaches inside his jacket for the .38 we all know is there. Deacon claws at his waistband to free a Webley but it’s jammed, the cylinder won’t clear, and now Dade’s got the drop.

These are the decisions you’ve got to make as a leader. Who stays and who goes. I don’t relish them. I wish it didn’t have to be like this. But it is, and all I can do is make the decision, who lives and who dies, and live with it.

These are the choices that made me old when I was young.

I pull my .45 Chief’s Special from a Bianchi shoulder holster and extend to Dade the same mercy I’d offer a rabid dog.

BOOM.

The middle of Dade’s face explodes inward, the bullet blowing Dade’s teeth out the back of his skull, molars and canines pinging off sheet metal and there’s just this hole, this stark emptiness where Dade’s face used to be and the blowback throws his body against the rear doors which buckle outwards like a bomb-bay and then Dade’s body is tumbling across the highway, a dead dusky tumbleweed.

“Jesus!” Malik screams, cupping a hand over his ear. “Oddy, what the hell—?”

“Just drive, son,” I say. “Get us to that parking lot.”

Nobody says much as we pull into a
Pay-n-Park
lot and transfer the cash to a VW Minibus we’ve stashed there for days. Deacon sets an incendiary charge that’ll gut the Chevy van, torching any evidence. We drive in silence to a motel on DC’s outskirts.

The total haul, tills and vault, is $310,580. Nearly eighty grand a head, split four ways. Tiny’s got a wife and kid in Sioux Falls; Malik promises to get Tiny’s cut to his widow.

“This wasn’t the way it was supposed to end,” Malik says as I hand him his split.

“No, it wasn’t. But we don’t have script approval, son. Sometimes things just end the way they end.”

Malik opens the door. We shake hands, clap one another on the back, and fall into a half-embrace that is the closest thing to tenderness men like us can achieve. He stares towards the shrouded DC skyline, then at the unbroken stretch of blacktop leading in the opposite direction. He knows, as I know, there is nothing for us in either direction.

“I’d go over the top with you anytime, Oddy,” he says. “My life in your hands.”

He leaves. Deacon is sitting on the bed.

“I shouldn’t have said those things to Dade,” he says. “Called him Section-8. Shouldn’t have done that.”

“Not really your fault,” I say. “A man turns that way, well, there’s not much any of us can do to save him.”

“What happened?” Deacon asked. “How did he end up like that?”