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“You mean something awesome I bought off of Amazon,” Devil said.
“Whatever.”
“Seriously, man, what do we do?” Devil said. “They’ve been in there, like, forever.”
Griz scratched at his beard. “Should we go take a closer look?”
“I don’t know,” Wyatt said. “Maybe we should just get out of here.”
“And leave them?” Griz said.
“I don’t like it, Griz, but we had a plan and it’s not working out that way.”
“So we improvise,” Griz said.
“What, go in the pawn shop?” Wyatt said. “There’s going to be witnesses, bystanders… it could get messy, Griz. The kind of messy we don’t want.”
“We should at least get a closer look, Wyatt,” Griz said. “We can’t just turn back empty handed like this.”
Wyatt kept looking at the pawn shop door, out at the street, and then back at the door. Griz knew what he was thinking. Things weren’t going as planned, so they should play it safe and abort, leave, get out of the city and figure something else out.
But Griz also knew that for all his careful planning, Wyatt was as hot for revenge as he was. And he wanted Griz to have this, too, rather than have to go home with a zero in the score column.
“All right,” Wyatt said. “But we can’t carry the gauges in there, so we leave the shotguns and just take our pistols. Devil, you and Pony wait here in case these two assholes come back out and we can get back to our original plan.”
“Got it,” Devil said.
Griz and Wyatt climbed out of the van, keeping their pistols held low and next to their legs so that any bystanders would be unlikely to notice them. They walked to the end of the alley, toward the pawn shop entrance, eyes looking everywhere for any sign of trouble.
There was nothing. A few random bystanders a little way down the street, but nothing in between them and the pawn shop.
“Let’s get a closer look, I guess,” Wyatt said, and stepped out of the alley.
As soon as he did, a hailstorm of bullets make the night shatter with their reports. It seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once; bullets snapped the air around the two of them, ricocheted off of the ground at their feet, and chewed pieces out of the walls of the buildings on either side of the alley.
All Griz saw was scattered muzzle flashes in the dark, all over the place. He shrank back into the mouth of the alley to find cover from the bullets, reaching out to drag Wyatt with him, but he was too late.
“Ah, fuck!” Wyatt shouted, bending over at the waist.
“Wyatt!” Griz said, rushing to his brother’s side. He shot his pistol at the muzzle flashes until it was empty, dragging Wyatt back into the alley as more bullets filled the air around him.
Once they were past the mouth of the alley, there was a momentary respite from the gunfire, during which Griz could see that Wyatt had been hit in the thigh. He kept dragging Wyatt further into the alley as shouts filled the air across the street where the gunfire had come from.
“You still alive, motherfuckers?” one of the voices said. “We’re coming for you!”
Some more shots rang out from the pawn shop front door. Griz looked back and saw the two men they’d tracked there standing in the doorway, guns blazing. More shapes moved in the darkness on the street, until they were in front of the alley, and then more gunfire started coming from them, as well.
The bullets snapped the air around their heads. Griz was certain he and Wyatt were about to get carved into pieces, when another hail of bullets came thundering down the alley from the direction of their van.
Pony, firing his rifle non-stop to give them some cover.
“Griz!” Devil shouted, as he and Pony ran toward them, still shooting. “Run for the dumpster!”
Just in front of him, Griz could see the dark shape of a dumpster lined up against the alley wall. The heavy metal would serve as cover from the bullets snapping around him, so he dragged Wyatt the last couple of feet and got the both of them around the back of the dumpster.
Bullets slammed into the metal with heavy dings and thuds. Griz fumbled in his pockets for a spare magazine and jammed it home into his pistol, firing blindly back around the side of the dumpster in the direction of where the gunfire was coming from.
Devil and Pony rushed to his side, hunkering down behind the dumpster next to where Wyatt sat on the ground. Griz kept pulling the trigger, not in hopes of hitting anything, but just to keep the enemy back and off of them long enough to figure out what to do next.
