Third Strike

and gunshots. The shock of close-proximity live firing in a confined space took some getting used to, and he hadn’t had anything like the practice.

“Take him!” I reholstered the SIG and went back in for my mother.

Sean left me without hesitation, scooping up my father and thrusting him towards the tree line with one hand wrapped in the collar of the older man’s jacket. The Glock was out in Sean’s right hand and he kept the muzzle up all the way, moving at a sideways crab so he could cover my father’s back and still be ready for the occupants of the pickup to make their move.

I jumped into the backseat and found my mother in fullflight panic. Her seat belt had jammed and she was clawing at it uselessly, eyes wild with fear as I slid across the seat towards her. I flipped out the largest blade on my Swiss Army knife and hacked through the webbing of the belt itself, ignoring the locked buckle.

As soon as she was free, my mother nearly trampled me in her desperation to escape. If I hadn’t grabbed her, she would have scrambled right over the top of me and hit the ground running.

A man had jumped out of the driver’s door of the pickup—unscathed, I noted with irritation—and was heading round the front of the Navigator to cut us off. I almost slung my mother back into her seat and drew the SIG, bringing it up so my target’s head would appear in my gun sights as soon as he came into view.

He did so, moving in a fast professional crouch, holding a semiautomatic handgun in a double-handed grip, up and level in front of him. As soon as he had sight of us, he pulled the trigger. He was hasty and the shot went wide, hitting the headrest of the rear seat just to my right and kicking out a flurry of foam and stuffing.

“No!” my mother screamed and I realized in the fraction before I returned fire that her cry was as much to me as it was to our attacker. Ignoring her, I snapped off two rounds at the blur of moving target.

One shot went wide but I put the second through his upper thigh. He gave a yelp of pain and scuttled for cover, dragging his injured leg. Well, I had a certain amount of sympathy there.

I glanced towards the tree line but couldn’t immediately see my father and Sean, which meant they were safe in concealment. And if they’ve any sense, I thought fiercely, that’s where they’ll stay.

Then, behind us, another vehicle hove into view, a dark blue nondescript Chevy. It arrived at speed, the driver showing no astonished twitch at finding an apparent pileup half-blocking the road in front of him, which meant he was expecting this—or something like it.

The odds of successful evasion had just got longer.

“Out—now!” I said roughly to my mother before the approaching car had come to a full sliding stop. “We need to move! And keep your bloody head down.”

She looked confused, as though the new arrival might have brought assistance rather than further danger, but at least she didn’t argue.

As we jumped out of the backseat of the Navigator, I fired off another shot in the direction of the pickup driver just to keep his head down, and dragged my mother into a run for the trees.

As I did so, I heard shouts from the occupants of the Chevy. I spun, fisting my left hand into my mother’s coat and ducking my shoulder to haul her halfway onto my back, covering her body with my own as I brought the SIG up in my right hand.

I fired before my arm was at full stretch, aiming intuitively. Two figures had emerged from the Chevy, and some part of my brain registered a man and a woman. Their body language told me instantly that they were armed for immediate use rather than merely for threat. I chose the man as my primary target based purely on experience, knowing that he would likely pose the greater risk to our safety.

I sighted directly at the center of his body mass and squeezed the trigger twice in quick succession.

Running, weighted, my aim wouldn’t have won me any marksman badges, but it got the job done. Both rounds took him high in the shoulder, jerking him back and to the right. I just had time to see the mist of blood spray out, then he was falling.

Still lurching sideways, protecting my principal, I swung my arm towards the woman. She had moved into a shooter’s stance, legs spread, arms locked in front. If she’d any training at all she was in the far better position for a decent shot.

And, with shock, at that moment I recognized her—if not the face then certainly the white tape across her fattened nose.

Vondie.

So, not only training but also a damn good motive for wanting me dead. Looked like Collingwood still hadn’t managed to put a muzzle on his rogue agent—not enough to stop her from trying to take a big bite out of me, at any rate.

Suddenly, the car window alongside Vondie shattered as two fast shots from the trees put it through. She spun but clearly couldn’t spot Sean’s position. Outflanked, she jumped for the safety of her vehicle, abandoning the kill. The Chevy’s engine was still running, and she had the gearlever rammed into drive before the door was even shut, leaving her fallen colleague writhing alone on the ground in her wake.

Vondie swerved round the wreckage and, just when I thought she was completely faithless, the brake lights blazed as she anchored on and leaned over to throw the passenger door wide open. The man I’d lamed came hopping out from behind the Navigator and dived inside. Vondie stamped on the accelerator and the Chevy took off with enough anger to leave two long black streaks of burned rubber scarring the asphalt, and the bitter smell of gun smoke, blood and gasoline behind her.

CHAPTER 23

Sean came out of the trees with soft-footed caution, staring after the disappearing Chevy, eyes narrowed and the Glock still clasped loosely in his hands. He glanced at me and nodded, just once. I nodded back. That was enough.

My father ducked round him and began hurrying to the man who was jerking and twitching in the middle of the road, the blood pool widening around him by the moment.

“Wait,” Sean snapped.

We shouldered past my father and approached the fallen man, staying wide to present two difficult oblique targets. I knew he’d been carrying and I hadn’t seen him drop a weapon. Sean edged in, not letting the Glock’s point of aim waver, and kicked away a big Colt semiautomatic. He leaned down then and checked the man roughly for a backup piece, not mindful of his injuries while he was doing it.

“Look who it is.”

I moved closer, saw beyond the blood and the contortion of the pain, and realized my victim was Vondie’s partner in crime, Don Kaminski. Hardly a surprise to find them hand in hand, when I thought about it. I wondered how he felt about Vondie abandoning him when he went down.

My father brushed Sean aside then, almost with contempt, and crouched next to the injured man, who was panting with the effort it took not to cry out. Blood pulsed from one of the wounds in his shoulder in oxygen-rich scarlet spurts. Artery. He had a few minutes, maybe less.

My father ripped at the clothing around the wound. “Press there—hard,” he said to me. “We have to slow the bleeding.”

Reluctantly, I holstered the SIG, put the heel of my hand over the hole in Kaminski’s shoulder and leaned my weight into it, hearing the squelch. The acute pain that action caused sent his muscles into spasm, arching his back off the ground as his body went rigid. I had a pretty good idea that it would, because I’d once had something very similar done to me.

Kaminski’s pain threshold must have been considerably higher than mine, though. His only verbal reaction was a grunt when he should have been screaming. But I saw the almost feral panic in his eyes and knew it was fear as much as anything that kept him silent as he twisted beneath my hands.

“We don’t have time for this,” Sean said, eyes scanning the road in both directions. “We need to get out of here.”

My father threw him a vicious glance.

“We can’t simply leave him. He’ll die.”

“We didn’t start this and we don’t have time to finish it,” Sean said, equally brutal. “He knew the risks.”