Frankie’s face was purple, like an overripe fruit set to explode.
He clawed at the forearm, fingers scraping skin, but it was like trying to pry away a steel two-by-four attached to his windpipe.
Alexis had to check back on Heidi to make sure nothing had changed, and Heidi did the same. It freed them both up for a second glance, which they took in unison. Alexis noticed further details. The young man was missing an earlobe, blood crusted all over one side of his face. His teeth were bared, his wide eyes locked on the back of Frankie’s head.
But his eyes were wet with tears.
Frankie managed to splutter some garbled words. ‘Danny…please…it’s me.’
The rear naked choke was perfect. Flawless technique, zero room for a reversal. Alexis knew enough jiu-jitsu to understand when a position was final. If this truly was Danny, the young man King had told her about, then Frankie had taught him the very technique he was using.
Hence the tears.
Frankie got that look in his eyes, that faraway stare as the world starts to roll back into darkness, as the lack of oxygen to your brain reaches crisis point and your body starts to shut down to keep you alive. If Danny kept on squeezing, Frankie would go out and then thirty, forty seconds later would be unrevivable.
There was nothing Heidi could do but watch.
Nothing Alexis could do, either.
If Frankie died it’d terrify Heidi into submission. Alexis was sure of it. She’d put the gun down, beg for mercy, ask for anything but a repeat performance. Frankie’s eyes were bugging out of his head, his face dark purple now, saliva spraying from his mouth as he gasped…
Heidi let out a small whimper.
Frankie only managed a single last word, practically whispered. ‘Danny…’
Danny let the choke go.
Alexis shouted, ‘No,’ but there was no stopping Frankie falling forward, onto his hands and knees, free from the hold. He gasped and blinked hard four or five times in a row, staring vacantly at his own fingers splayed on the concrete. Blood from where he’d scratched Danny’s forearm coated his fingernails. He probably couldn’t see, needed time for his vision to return, for his face to return to a normal colour.
Danny stood over him, trembling.
Alexis said, ‘Danny, he’s nothing to you.’
Frankie kept blinking, mouth wide. A long strand of spit fell from the corner of his mouth.
Alexis said, ‘He’s poison.’
All Danny could do was shake his head, squeezing his own eyes shut.
You can’t shirk conditioning.
Not all at once.
She watched Frankie’s gaze suddenly focus, latching onto a singular point between his spread fingers. He could see again. He looked all around, somewhat surprised he’d remained conscious, then picked his gun back up. There was nobody to stop him. Heidi and Alexis were locked in a stalemate.
He sighed as he got up and turned around. ‘Danny, Danny, Danny…’
‘I’m sorry.’
Frankie shrugged, started to raise his weapon. ‘Won’t miss this time, at least.’
69
King made it back to the dead-end street in record time.
He screeched to a halt, decelerating from nearly eighty miles an hour to zero in the space of a few seconds, the momentum throwing his weight against the seatbelt. He parked where Frankie had parked.
No one left to fight.
No one but the main players.
He pulled Carter’s Glock as he threw the door open and forced his way out of the old car. Under the hood, the engine groaned. It had done its job, served its temporary owner’s every need. King ran to the tree line, silencing his footsteps as best he could. He forced his way under the foliage and burrowed through the undergrowth, batting leaves and branches and twigs aside in his haste to make it through to the San Lorenzo Creek.
Halfway through, he heard someone choking.
It was faint, but in the hushed night the sound carried easily.
He crawled harder, practically bursting out the other side of the bushes, and the stretch of flat dirt came into view, bordering the manmade valley of the flood control channel.
King soaked it all in.
The scene was a snapshot in time, shrouded in darkness, like a grotesque Renaissance painting.
Alexis facing off with a small woman who could only be Heidi Waters, both pointing gun barrels at each others’ heads. In front of them, Frankie on all fours, hunched over, panting like a dog. Danny standing above him, also panting, his shoulders heaving like he was sobbing.
It took a moment to compute.
King missed his window.
He could’ve fired between Danny’s legs and hit Frankie in the back of his head as he was hunched over, but the scene was so strange, so macabre, that he needed time to process it. Only a couple of seconds later Frankie was upright, twisting on the spot, a gun in his hand. The barrel drifted from Danny’s stomach to his chest to his head. King heard something like, ‘Won’t miss this time.’
He thought about trying to get a beat on Frankie or Heidi, his trigger finger twitching against the Glock.
But what was the end result?
If he shot Frankie, Danny would die, and if he shot Heidi, Alexis would die.
An impossible puzzle.
Only one solution for these sorts of situations.
Chaos.
Frankie circled Danny around so the kid’s back was to the lip of the flood control channel. It made sense if Frankie didn’t want to waste needless energy dragging the body to the edge of the slope, sending it tumbling over. But it put Frankie’s own back to the tree line.
King made sure he was clutching his Glock tight.
Then he rose up from the shrubbery and took off like he was coming out of the starting blocks.
He was two hundred and twenty pounds of fast-twitch muscle fibre, and if he needed to condense all that power into a single explosive burst, he absolutely could.
Frankie heard something coming, but he wasn’t going to turn around in a hurry. He was holding Danny at gunpoint, after all, and had no idea where the kid’s allegiances truly lay.
But he looked over his
