calling for Jesus.
Hard, chill wind made the plate-glass windows vibrate. It hooted
through the shattered door.
The gunman would be coming.
CHAPTER TWO.
Jack was stunned at the quantity of his own blood on the vinyl-tile
floor around him. Nausea squirmed through him, and greasy sweat
streamed down his face. He couldn't take his eyes off the spreading
stain that darkened his pants.
He had never been shot before. The pain was terrible but not as bad as
he would have expected. Worse than the pain was the sense of violation
and vulnerability, a terrible frantic awareness of the true fragility
of the human body.
He might not be able to hold on to consciousness for long. A hungry
darkness was already eating away at the edges of his vision.
He probably couldn't put much weight on his left leg, and he didn't
have time to pull himself up on his right alone, not while in such an
exposed position.
Shedding broken glass as a bright-scaled snake might shed an old skin,
unavoidably leaving a trail of blood, he crawled fast on his belly
alongside the L-shaped work counter behind which Arkadian kept the cash
register.
The gunman would be coming.
From the sound the weapon made and the brief glimpse he'd gotten of it,
Jack figured it was a submachine gun--maybe a Micro Uzi. The Micro was
less than ten inches long with the wire stock folded forward but a lot
heavier than a pistol, weighing about two kilos if it had a single
magazine, heavier if it featured two magazines welded at right angles
to give it a forty-round capacity. It would be like carrying a
standard-size bag of sugar in a sling, it was sure to cause chronic
neck pain, but not too big to fit an oversize shoulder holster under an
Armani suit--and worth the trouble if a man had snake-mean enemies.
Could be an FN P90, too, or maybe a British Bushman 2, but probably not
a Czech Skorpion, because a Skorpion fired only .32 ACP ammo.
Judging by how hard Luther had gone down, this seemed to be a gun with
more punch than a Skorpion, which the 9mm Micro Uzi provided. Forty
rounds in the Uzi to start, and the son of a bitch had fired twelve,
sixteen at most, so at least twenty-four rounds were left, and maybe a
pocketful of spare cartridges.
Thunder boomed, the air felt heavy with pent-up rain, wind shrieked
through the ruined door, and the gun rattled again. Outside, Hassam
Arkadian's cries to Jesus abruptly ended.
Jack desperately pulled himself around the end of the counter, thinking
the unthinkable. Luther Bryson dead. Arkadian dead. The attendant
dead. Most likely the young Asian mechanic too. All of them wasted.
The world had been turned upside down in less than a minute.
Now it was one-on-one, survival of the fittest, and Jack wasn't afraid
of that game. Though Darwinian selection tended to favor the guy with
the biggest gun and best supply of ammunition, cleverness could
outweigh caliber. He had been saved by his wits before and might be
