THEY KEPT HIM alive him alive for almost seventy-two hours. In the end, Sinclair dispatched what was left of Howard with a bullet behind the ragged hole where his left ear had been. Still bound to the chair, the hairless, sexless husk, bruised and burned into a new species, slumped forward. The air pumped from its lungs. It sounded like a sigh of relief.
With the smoke from Sinclair’s .44 still hanging in the air, Mason stretched and cracked his knuckles. He looked at his men: sweaty, dirty, their shirts rolled up at the elbows. The three of them had been sleeping in shifts over a long three days. Mason glanced at his watch. “I miss my kid,” he said. “Let’s go home.”