Alexis said nothing.
‘But, of course, be cautious,’ he hissed. ‘I sure wouldn’t trust me either.’
He hung up.
She frantically dialled Slater off her own phone.
He didn’t answer.
She tried King.
Nothing.
She slammed a palm against the top of the wheel, then studied the GPS map and corrected course.
Headed for the San Mateo Bridge.
57
Kit pulled away from Frankie’s gym and barrelled back toward the city, leaving Hunters Point behind.
As soon as the warehouse receded in the rear view, Slater said, ‘How long you two been doing this?’
Kit said, ‘Long enough to spot a snake.’
Cold metal touched the back of his neck.
Bobby had silently redrawn his HK and fed the barrel through the small gap between the headrest and the seat-back.
Slater didn’t move an inch. He could tell by the way they conducted themselves they were practiced killers. Frankie must’ve taught them not only to use their fists. Either that or they came to his gym in the first place with previous experience, whether that be military or criminal.
Which sometimes were one and the same, as Slater knew from first-hand experience.
Slater made sure not to speak too loudly or too suddenly. Didn’t want to do anything that would make Bobby flinch. ‘Why the performance back there?’
‘Frankie means well,’ Kit said, eyes still on the road. ‘But he’s an idiot. He trusts too fast. He did it with us, too, back when we first started, and we could’ve taken advantage of it. But we liked the old fool. And he had the unique ability to fall upwards. He found jobs by just stumbling into them. So we stuck around. We still will, after this. We’ll get him back on board. He’s easily convinced.’
Inwardly, Slater was furious at himself. He’d bought their truce shtick, so they were far better actors than he thought.
Bobby said, ‘If I shoot you here it’ll be obvious we moved your body. So we gotta do it on the side of the road somewhere. Frankie won’t believe you pulled a gun on us one minute after we left.’
Slater said, ‘And I need to die because…?’
Kit said, ‘We’ve stuck with Frankie through thick and thin. But, like I said, he’s a fool. So we take jobs where we can get them. Including with other crews. Frankie’s too oblivious to know.’
Slater’s insides twisted.
Bobby leant forward and said, ‘What I want to know is where you got Pavel’s gun. That’s the other reason I haven’t pulled the trigger. We were boys with him. If I give Petr a call, I’d say he’ll tell us that Pavel hasn’t been seen in a while.’
‘Not since this morning,’ Slater said. ‘I took Pavel’s gun off his body.’
Admitting his guilt shocked them. They’d probably expected to have to torture it out of him, inflict pain until he confessed. Telling them exactly what had happened made them hesitate, which is what he wanted.
It gave him the opportunity to re-enact a story King had told him about, a tale that happened many years ago. King had been on an op in Egypt, stuck in precisely the same situation — in the passenger seat with a hostile directly behind him, the gun at the back of his neck positioned the same way. He’d escaped with the help of a unique sequence.
If Slater spent any more time mustering the courage, he wouldn’t go through with it.
So he just did it.
Jerked forward and down, putting his own head in his lap. Bobby fired an instinctive shot in response but the gun was stuck in the small gap below the headrest, and it blasted through the windshield instead of blasting through the back of Slater’s skull. Now hunched over, Slater yanked the release lever — a bar below the front of the seat — upwards, freeing the seat to slide along its tracks. He threw his weight into the seat back, sending it flying backwards. The headrest smashed Bobby in the face, who’d been leaning forward to aim the gun, and his wrist got caught in the gap he’d been aiming through. The bone snapped with a hollow crack, and before he could impulsively squeeze the trigger again Slater twisted and ripped it out of his hands, then used it to pistol-whip Kit in the face.
Kit recoiled away from the wheel, and the old car started drifting to the right. In the midst of the carnage Slater glanced out the driver’s window and saw them arcing toward an empty commercial lot, nothing more than a barren pit of dirt that would serve as an underground garage at some future date. Excavating the dirt and smoothing it out had created sloped sides that rose sharply up to street level.
Slater was holding the gun the wrong way round and didn’t have time to reverse his grip so he just whipped Kit in the face again with it, breaking his nose, then leant over and turned the wheel harder, helping the car roar off the road.
Then he fell back to his side and got his door open and fell out of the car at forty miles an hour.
He was wearing a leather jacket and jeans so it wasn’t all that important how he landed, but he took caution anyway. Tried to distribute the impact all the way down his side as he hit the asphalt, then rolled with the momentum. He completed nearly four full revolutions before he slowed enough to scramble to his feet, still holding Bobby’s gun. He was hurt badly, but in the moment he didn’t feel it.
He righted himself just in time to see the old sedan surge over the lip of the slope. It only fell ten or so feet but that was enough to pitch the nose of the car forward slightly, so when it crashed into the hard-packed dirt on the
