Dead Six (37 page)

“Listen, asshole,” I growled, slowly backing down the alley. “I’ve had just about enough of you today. Why don’t you come out so we can finish this?”

“Yeah,” Tailor said, “we got your girl and your money bag. Having a bad day?”

We could hear police sirens in the distance. “What’s it gonna be, ace?” I asked calmly, continuing to back down the alley, pulling the young woman with me as I went. “Cops are coming.”

“Lorenzo!” the woman cried out, fear now obvious in her voice. I caught a flash of movement at the edge of the school. My revolver barked as I popped off another shot, taking another chunk off the corner of the building. Jill cried out again.

A couple of long seconds ticked by, and there was no response. Tailor and I made eye contact. I dropped the muzzle of my gun as he crossed in front of me, weapon held at the ready. He checked around the perforated corner of the school as I covered the opposite corner.

“He’s gone,” Tailor said, stepping back around the corner. He looked at Jill. “Guess your boyfriend got cold feet, bitch.”

I couldn’t help but smile at the absurdity of the situation. I yanked Jill Del Toro around and began to force her back toward our car.

LORENZO

I left her.

“Fall back, Carl. Fall back!” I ordered. The sirens were wailing. The security forces would be here any second. Everything was ruined. Jill had gotten herself captured. Dead Six had won. She was as good as dead. The mission was screwed. The only option left was self-preservation. I would have to figure out what to do about Eddie later. “Hurry.”

“
I’m almost there!
” Carl responded.

“Leave them!”

The van tore around the edge of the school. I waved both hands overhead so he’d see me. Reaper stomped on the brakes, and the van screeched to a halt. I yanked open the side door. “Back up, grab Carl, and let’s go.”

“Where’s Jill?” Reaper shouted.

“Go!”
I bellowed.

But he hesitated. “She’s one of
us
.”

I froze, half in, half out of the van. My first inclination was to reach forward and smack Reaper on the side of his stupid head. In a minute we’d be fighting half the cops in Zubara. I was a thief. You run. That’s what thieves do.

But he was right.

Something
snapped
just then.

I couldn’t leave her.

Things had changed. She wasn’t just bait. Jill wasn’t just somebody I could use and throw away anymore. Reaper was right. She was one of us. “Son of a bitch!” I grimaced. Reaper must have seen it. Instead of putting the van into reverse like I had ordered, he stomped on the gas, narrowly avoiding running down a bunch of innocent bystanders, and headed straight for the alley.

“Carl, turn around and take them out!”

He was out of breath from running. “
Make up your mind!
”

The alley was probably forty yards long, five yards wide, and their car had to be parked either in it or on the exiting street. Trying to walk down that alley would get me killed, and shooting it out down the alley would only get Jill killed, and either way the cops were going to kill all of us in a second anyway. I needed to get on top of them,
fast
. The school wasn’t very tall at all. I had an idea. “Reaper, pull right up to the front door of the school.”

“What?”

“Just do it! Then back up and block that alley.”

He did as I said, actually crashing our bumper into the front steps. But I didn’t feel it as I was already out the side of the moving vehicle before impact. I stepped onto the bumper, the hood, the windshield, and finally onto the van’s roof. I ran, jumped, and caught the edge of the roof with my hands. Pulling myself up, I scrambled onto the roof of the school.

I ran up the angled tile of the roof, parallel with the alley. This was idiotic. Half of Zubara was probably watching this moronic stunt, and I was sure that I’d be nicely silhouetted for the police snipers. The STI materialized in my hand as I approached the edge. Glancing downward, there were the assassins. The tall one was struggling against Jill, trying to force her into the backseat of a car, while she was fighting like crazy, but he outweighed her by eighty pounds. The Southerner was watching back down the alley, wearing
my
backpack, 1911 extended, waiting for me to appear at the end.

“What are you doing?” he shouted. “Cops are coming. Just shoot her already!”

The tall one grunted a response that I couldn’t understand. He was hugging Jill’s arms tight, but she just kept swinging her legs and jerking her head back into his face. I had no idea why he hadn’t already shot her. Dead Six must have decided they wanted Jill alive for some reason. There was no time to think. The second Reaper appeared at the end of that alley, that psychopath was going to light him up. I punched my gun out, sights lining up on the Southerner’s head.

There was a door into the alley from the mosque. It swung open directly behind the man, and he instantly spun toward it. There was a kid, probably all of six years old, standing there, and the kid was right behind my target. I was putting two and a half pounds of pressure on a three-pound trigger when I froze, thinking of the bullet that had passed through Jalal that was still throbbing, stuck in my vest.

I couldn’t kill a kid. I’d never killed a kid.

The child looked at the Southerner, at his gun, and then over his shoulder, right at me. The Dead Six operative instinctively turned, following the kid’s gaze. He saw me, eyes narrowed, and his gun flew up. Chunks of tile erupted skyward as I moved back from the ledge. Bullets just kept tearing through the mosque, searching for me, as he ran for the car.

At the end of the alley, our white van appeared, blocking their exit. They would cut Reaper to ribbons. I had to take them out
now.

I took a few steps back, trying to remember the exact position of their car, hoped I was right, then ran forward and jumped off the edge.

VALENTINE

Jill Del Toro struggled mightily as Tailor snapped off several rounds at the man she’d called Lorenzo
.
I turned back to our Land Cruiser and, despite the girl’s thrashing, pulled the passenger’s door open. We had zip-ties in the glove box, and I was going to restrain the girl in my arms before I gave in to the temptation to
shoot her
. The terrified young child had disappeared back inside. We were out of time and had to get the hell out of there.

“Just shoot her and let’s go, Val!”

CRUNCH!
I looked up in surprise as Lorenzo fell off the roof of the school. He put a dent in the roof of our Land Cruiser as he landed. He tried to do a shoulder roll to dissipate his impact but ended up rolling down the windshield and falling off the hood of the truck. He disappeared over the truck as he hit the pavement on the other side.

He reappeared a split-second later, pistol leveled at me across the hood of the truck. He was listing slightly to one side, and blood started to trickle down his face, but he had a killing look in his eyes.

“Lorenzo!” Jill screamed again. Before Lorenzo could turn around, Tailor was behind him, pushing his pistol into the back of his skull.

“Drop it, motherfucker!” Tailor growled. Lorenzo let his gun fall. Then there was more movement as someone ran up the alley from my left. I’d been so fixated on Lorenzo that I hadn’t noticed. Neither had Tailor, who, with a metallic
CLANG,
crumpled to the pavement as he was smacked in the head with a goddamned shovel.

LORENZO

CLANG!

Carl hit the Southerner unbelievably hard, collapsing the man in a heap.

I told him to take one of them alive.

The tall one shoved Jill down as his hand flew to his gun. Carl was already diving behind the trunk as the Magnum spit flame. I hit the ground as he reflexively turned on me next. Brick dust rained down on me when he fired, pulverizing the wall where I had just been. The shooter with the hand cannon was circling the back of the car, wearing that look on his face again, like everything else in the world had just stopped, and that all that mattered was taking out the garbage.

Carl was going for his pistol but was struggling to get it out, snagged on the unfamiliar clothing. The left-handed shooter came smoothly around the back of the car, doing the math, deciding to take me out first, like he had all the time in the world, mammoth handgun leveled right at my face. Time dilated until I could see the cylinder rotate another giant hollow-point into position behind the barrel. Guns are scarier when you can actually see the bullets.

He twitched at the last possible instant, .44 slug digging a divot into the pavement next to my face, fragments raking bloody chunks from my upraised hands. The shooter jerked as another round struck him in the chest. I looked through the open door to see Jill shooting him with my pistol, then back in time to see him go down.

The police sirens were right on top of us. Reaper was honking the horn.

“Come on!” Carl shouted. He had leapt to his feet, tossed the shovel, and was trying to pick up the man he’d knocked out, pulling him by one limp arm. I moved to help but saw the man crawling around the back of the car, his buddy’s 1911 in hand. Carl grimaced as the bullet struck him in the back. “Aaarg! I’m hit!”

“Run!” I shouted. The shooter ducked back down as Jill started punching holes in the trunk. I grabbed Carl by the vest and tugged him along. “Back to the van!” Jill kept shooting. “Jill, move!” She finally complied and ran after us. We reached the van a second later, and I shoved Carl in first. Jill leapt in after him. A new .45 caliber hole magically appeared in the sheet metal next to my hand. My opponent stood up and reflexively dropped the empty magazine from the .45 in his hands. He cursed as he realized he didn’t have a reload. I made eye contact with my nemesis.

This isn’t over.

There were flashing police lights coming up behind him. He tossed the empty gun into the car and went back for his friend, who was still wearing my backpack. I dove into the van and jerked the door closed. “Drive, Reaper, drive!”

Reaper did his best to get us out of there and managed to scrape all the paint off our passenger side on an approaching police car. The screech of metal on metal filled the compartment. Carl grimaced.

“How bad?” I asked.

“You know how hard it is to get a clean, untraceable, vehicle? How much work I put into this engine? I’m gonna have to burn it now. I didn’t want to have to use the spare yet. It ain’t as nice—”

“I meant the bullet.”

“Vest stopped it, bet I piss blood tonight, but I better drive before
galinha
-boy kills us all.” Carl crawled forward and started yelling at Reaper to get into the passenger seat. There was a brief lull as Reaper got out of the way; then the van really started to roar. Even kidney-punched with a .45, Carl was the best getaway driver in the business. We still had a chance.

I was lying on the floor of the open cargo area, breathing hard and sliding about as Carl took us around corners on two wheels, sirens screaming right outside our back window, when I saw Jill looking at me strangely. “You okay? Are you injured?”

She didn’t answer for a long enough time that I started to worry she’d taken a blow to the head. Then she finally spoke. “You came back for me. You weren’t going to. You were going to save yourself, you could have, but then you came back.”

“Yeah.” That made me uncomfortable. Of course I had been ready to ditch her. I don’t know why I’d changed my mind, but she had ended up saving my life, not the other way around. “Can I have my gun back?” She realized that it was still in her hands, then passed it over. “Go take a seat and buckle in.”

“Thank you,” she said softly as she moved forward.

Every cop in Zubara was going to be looking for our van. “Reaper, get on your computer and get rid of this pursuit. I want zero security forces communication. Screw with them however you want.”

“All of them?” he asked, opening his machine. He sounded eager. I didn’t normally just turn him loose like that. It was kind of scary.

“Use your imagination.” There were two police cars directly behind us on the narrow street. “Carl, you want a hand losing these guys?” I shouted.

“If you don’t mind me doing
all
the work!”

That sounded like a yes. I pulled up the rug in the back and opened a secret compartment, took out the stashed carbine, turned on the Aimpoint, and pulled back the charging handle. One thing I liked about this particular type of Toyota van was that you could open the back window. The muzzle cleared the window as I took a sight picture. It was difficult with the swaying of the shocks, but this wasn’t rocket science.

Unlike Western police agencies that relied on communication, tire spikes, and road blocks, Zubaran cops hung their guns out the windows and randomly started shooting, which was a whole lot more dangerous to the neighborhood than it was to the people they were pursuing. I was doing the populace a favor. I pumped half a dozen rounds through the radiator of the first car before the cop panicked and jerked the wheel to the side, spinning out of control. The second car T-boned them.

I rolled the window up and sank to the floor. Reaper was clicking away like mad, destroying thousands of man-hours’ worth of Zubara’s communications programming, Carl was driving like a Formula One champion, and Jill was just watching me with this indecipherable look on her face, probably thinking about how, for the first time in her life, she’d just shot somebody, and it had saved a life. My life.

It had been a long afternoon. And it had all been for nothing.

“
Control, this is Nightcrawler, we’ve got a situation
.” I recognized that voice, even distorted over an unfamiliar radio. He sounded like he was in pain.

“
Go ahead, Nightcrawler
,” said an unfamiliar woman’s voice. “
Are you alright?
” I could sense a note of
personal
concern slipping through the professionalism.

“Where’s that coming from?” I asked quickly.

Carl took one hand off the wheel long enough to hold up a small radio. “It fell off the one I knocked out.” He risked a look back at me. “Told you I do all the work around here.”