Free Bones Omnibus by Mark Wheaton

started, she did what Kenny had always told her to do and hid in the hall bathtub. She pressed herself flat against the base, her nose touching the drain. The gunfire sounded far away, but she knew it was right outside the door. It alternated between machine gun fire and single shots, the singles sounding much louder than the others, echoing like thunder. She tried focusing on something else, finally settling on singing a song to herself. She ached to remember more than a couple of lines of this song or that and simply couldn’t do it.
    Finally, she settled on Tupac Shakur’s “Keep Ya Head Up” and discovered that she could recite it from beginning to end. She did this four times.
    By her final time through the song, the gunfire had stopped for a few minutes and she thought it safe to clamber out of the tub. She eased her way through the apartment to the front door. She could barely look through the peephole without standing on a chair but had no intention to do so. Instead, she was just looking for a better vantage point from which to hear the proceedings. She knew a stray bullet could still punch through the wall at any moment, but didn’t think it likely.
    The silence was broken by the sound of someone moving down the hall. Becca went to the door to try to figure out if it was a police officer or one of the bad guys. She paid attention to the goings-on in the building so far as she needed to avoid them. The people moving in and out of 638 didn’t speak English, and she seldom saw any of them more than once. That is, except for Chiedozie and a couple of his crew. He’d glared at her a couple of times when she came up the steps, interrupting whatever conversation he was having with a “tenant.” But she’d just glared back until, unable to get a read on the situation, Chiedozie had gone back to his chat.
    When Becca cracked the door, it was his face that she saw first. Illuminated in dim light trickling in from his apartment windows, the Nigerian gangster was flat on his back, staring at the ceiling through dead eyes. Surrounding him were the dead bodies of several people, police officers and folks she took for Chiedozie’s men alike.
    That’s when she saw movement at her feet. Looking down, she saw a large dog peering up at her, his snout black with blood.
    “Oh, my God!” she cried.
    Bones glanced up at her, took a couple of sniffs to register her heightened levels of fear, and resumed sniffing the gun that had landed on her doorstep.
    When Becca saw that the dog wasn’t particularly fazed by the goings-on, she bent down and offered him her hand to smell. Bones did so and followed it up with a quick couple of licks.
    “It’s not safe out there, boy,” Becca whispered.
    Bones looked up at her as she held the door open. The shepherd peeked in, took a couple more sniffs, and entered. Becca’s gaze returned to the gun at her feet. When she suddenly heard voices on the stairs, she bent down, picked up the gun, and closed the door, locking it behind her.
    She hadn’t seen the pair of eyes at the end of the hall that had watched Bones’s egress from the scene. In fact, no one had seen it, but this wasn’t surprising, given the darkness.
    But Bones hadn’t seen the lurker, either. Hadn’t smelled him, hadn’t heard him, and hadn’t detected him in any of the myriad ways his handlers over the years had used to support a claim that the shepherd had a sixth sense.
    The lurker moved down the hall towards the fallen body of Mrs. Fowler, eyed it for a quick moment, but then disappeared just as the second wave of tactical responders appeared at the top of the stairs.

III
    T he lights were back on fifteen minutes later.
    When the police came by knocking on doors to reassure residents that everything was “in hand” but to “stay in their apartments and let the paramedics do their jobs,” Becca kept the door locked and didn’t respond.
    The knocker hadn’t tried that hard anyway, giving up after two rounds