Last night, Samson sat with his father in the dark pet shop. Together they fed the store’s thirteen dogs with treats taken off the rack, throwing them across the room and watching the dogs run.
“Promise me you’ll get her back,” Avon said, not looking at his grown son. The bandages patching him up were already soaked with blood.
Samson threw a handful of treats. “We’ll get her together,” he said.
Avon thought about this. They sat in silence as the others loaded the vehicles. Neither father nor son had shaved in six days. Samson remembered standing on the toilet when he was small, watching his dad run the disposable razor over his face. It was still so surreal for him, having his father here in this place at this time. And yet of course this was how the story had to end.
“Dad,” he said.
Avon looked at him. It had been over a decade since Samson called him by anything other than his Christian name, or motherfucker.
“Do you ever—” the boy asked, for in this moment he looked like a boy again, small and scared. “Do you ever feel bad—about what we did.”
Avon turned back to the dogs, who were crowding around them in a frenzy. He threw another handful of treats.
“No,” he said.
Samson nodded. Not a day had passed since Blountstown when he didn’t relive the moment, didn’t see the troopers’ faces as he fired, didn’t feel the flush of adrenaline and the wave of shame and despair.
“I do,” he said. “I think we made a mistake. Me.”
“You protected your father,” said Avon, “as God intended.”
Samson sighed, not wanting to descend into another rabbit-hole conversation with the old man about Bible codes and Constitutional cabals.
“They were just doing their jobs,” he said.
“They were agents of oppression.”
“Dad.” Samson put his hand on his father’s arm. “They were somebody’s sons, too.”
Avon stiffened, pulled his arms away. He threw the bag of treats itself, hurling it away from him, as if renouncing the whole facade.
“All that matters now is your sister. Understand?”
Samson nodded. He thought about arguing, but there was no point. He scratched a golden retriever between the ears, got to his feet. Some divides are too big to cross.
“I’ll get her back,” he said.
Now, on the tennis court, he and Story lift the ball machine into the truck bed. Story removes the lid, and Samson pours gasoline over the pile of balls. The smell of it hits them—that semi-sweet toxic waft. Story coughs as Samson uses a plastic funnel to fill the Soakzooka.
“Surf’s up,” he says.
They settle on a forty-five-degree arc, dialing in the angle on the ball launcher. They’ve agreed that Story will stay up here for the first ten balls, to make sure nothing goes wrong, and then head for the rendezvous point. Samson has a different journey to take. He jumps from the tailgate, takes a gas lighter with a telescoping nose from his pocket. He sets it under the mouth of the ball launcher, rigging it with duct tape to ignite the balls as they fire.
They stand for a moment, staring at the tiny blue flame. It dances in the low morning breeze.
“I’ll see you soon,” he tells her.
She nods, thinking of her mother and stepfather, now dead, who used to make chocolate chip pancakes with smiley faces on them. And somewhere out there her half brother, the orphan. If she lives, she will find him and never let him go.
“Nobody else,” she says. “We don’t lose anyone else.”
He nods, then grabs the Soakzooka and runs to the cypress tree that’s closest to the compound wall. The water cannon came with a nylon strap, and he hooks it now over his neck, starts to climb. Ten feet up, he hugs a fat branch, peers over the lip of the wall.
The guest house is a two-story building, about one hundred feet wide, that sits a stone’s throw from the wall. It has a tiled, Spanish-style roof and a balcony on the second floor, where the master bedroom must be. The sliding door to the master is open, and there is a guard sitting in a recliner on the balcony, his assault rifle leaning against a glass table. He appears to be dozing. In the distance, Samson can see other guards walking the property. He counts to five on the roof and balconies of the main house, another dozen on the grounds.
Samson looks down at Story and gives a thumbs-up. He works his knee into a depression in the tree, securing himself in place, and raises the Soakzooka. The smell of gasoline is overwhelming. Were someone to light a match near him, Samson would go up in a whoosh of flame, taking the whole tree with him.