Dead Six

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.”

“I’m okay. Xbox is hurt. I’ve lost the cops and I’m heading to the safe house.”

“Nightcrawler, what’s Xbox’s status?” the girl asked.

“I don’t know.” He sounded worried. They weren’t just teammates. They were friends. Nightcrawler . . . so that was the name of the guy I had to kill. What a stupid call sign. “Xbox took a bad hit to the head. Some asshole hit him with a shovel!”

“Where’d you find a shovel anyway?” I shouted.

Carl shrugged. “I passed some construction guys digging up pipes. You know, knock one cold, to interrogate. Seemed like a smart idea at the time.” Good thing that the shovel was the official martial arts weapon of the Portuguese. It came from all of that dairy farming and hitting cows they had in their genes or something.

We were now listening in to Dead Six’s encrypted communications. This was huge. “Carl, have I told you yet today that I love you?”

The next voice that came on was older, gruff. He had the air of command. “This is Big Boss.