“Hold it right there, bud,” the cop said, still not too worried, but with his hand now touching the Glock’s plastic butt.
So okay. Here it was. The cop was alert, had his hand on his piece, and was looking straight at him. Fair enough.
Junior stopped. He held his own hands low, by his hips, palms forward, to show they were empty. The ready position from which he had practiced drawing his guns a thousand times.
Junior said, “So, how’s your sister?”
The cop frowned, and while he was thinking about that, Junior cleared the vest and grabbed his revolvers.
Time slowed to a crawl.
The hard rubber grips felt alive under his hands as he pulled the short-barreled guns and swung them up.
The cop reacted. He jerked his Glock out at Junior’s sudden move, but Junior was faster, a half-second ahead. He brought both revolvers up and on target even as the cop cleared leather.
It was like he was in a trance: Everything but the cop vanished, sounds, lights, everything, and the cop was moving so… slow…
Junior cooked off two rounds, the right a hair faster than the left, and he would swear that he
The cop fell, still in slowmo, his pistol pointing at the concrete parking lot, not a chance of tagging Junior even if he fired, which he didn’t.
He hit the ground like a chainsawed redwood tree, dead or most of the way there when he landed. The Glock fell, bounced, and clattered away. Junior heard that, the Glock against the concrete. He couldn’t remember hearing the shots, but he heard the Glock land. Weird.
His heart raced like it was on speed, like a shot of Angola meth right into a vein, and after what seemed like years, he finally remembered to breathe. He had a little trouble doing that, and his breaths came and went real fast.
It seemed very quiet all of a sudden.
He looked around. Nobody in sight, but even the little.22s made noise this late at night. Somebody would have heard. They’d be looking around. Cop cars were like magnets, they pulled in the looks.
He felt like he had just screwed his brains out. He was flushed all over, and limp, but in a good way. What a rush!
No need to look at the cop. The man was worm food, no question about it.
He reholstered the Rugers, turned, and walked to the north. A brisk walk, but not a run. His car was parked a block over, on a residential street, in front of some apartments. He had swiped a set of license plates from a little pickup truck that was parked outside a repair shop a couple miles away, and put those on his car. If anybody noticed it there — and they wouldn’t in that neighborhood — it wouldn’t come home to him even if they wrote down the plate number.
If the dead cop had had any smarts, he would have called Junior in before he got out of his car. When he didn’t report back, somebody would come looking. By then, though, Junior would be miles away in a car nobody had seen. And an hour after that, he’d be having a beer in his kitchen and replaying it all in his mind.
They probably wouldn’t get anything off the bullets. Those itty-bitty nonjacketed lead ones were bad for ballistics. But just in case, Junior would change barrels on both revolvers when he got home. He had three spare sets for each gun. Even if they somehow found him later and tested his guns, which wasn’t going to happen, but if they did, the grooves in the new barrels wouldn’t match. No way was he going to keep carrying guns that would ID him as a cop killer, no matter how much he loved ’em.
As he drove off, the body rushes just kept coming. He had never felt so
Like a god!
7
Toni had planned to go to the supermarket to pick up a few things before Alex got home from work. It was almost dark and she wanted to get back before he did, so she was in a hurry to get going — until she opened the front door and saw the mob of reporters on her front walk.
Well, okay, it wasn’t really a mob. There were maybe seven or eight reporters, but it sure looked like more. As soon as she opened the door, they started yelling at her, creating a babble that was loud and only partially understandable:
“Mrs. Michaels, Mrs. Michaels! Is it true you were one of the agents who killed workers on the
“Mrs. Michaels — how you do feel about your husband being responsible for the deaths of those innocent men?”
“—true that you are a martial arts expert who has killed several people with knives or your bare hands —?”
“—fair to the taxpayers…?”
Guru came to the door behind her. She looked out at the men and women charging up the walk. She stepped past Toni to face the onrush of reporters. “The baby is sleeping,” she said. “You must leave.”
The first woman to reach Guru, a television reporter, shoved a microphone into her face. “Who are you, ma’am?” she demanded to know. “What do you know about this?”
Pushing the wireless mike into Guru’s face was perhaps not the wisest thing the woman had ever done.
Guru caught the outthrust instrument, twisted, and removed it from the reporter’s grip. Adding her other hand, the eighty-five-year-old woman gripped the thing securely and snapped it in half. Then she dropped the pieces.
The clatter of the broken sound gear falling upon the walk was quite loud.
“You must be quiet,” she said. “The baby is asleep.”
Apparently none of the reporters had ever before seen an old granny break an expensive, hard plastic and steel microphone as if it were a bread stick. They all stopped talking. They looked like a herd of grazing deer suddenly caught in headlights.
Toni grinned.
Guru shooed them with her hands. “Go, go.” She took a step forward.
The reporters nearly fell all over themselves backing away.
Guru turned around, gave Toni the smallest of smiles, and went back into the house.
The woman reporter said, “I’m going to send you a bill for that, lady! You can’t just destroy equipment like that!”
Toni said, very softly, “Who are you going to send it to?” Then she turned and went inside. She wasn’t going to the market now, not and leave Guru and the baby alone with these jackals outside.
When Michaels got home, he saw the gaggle of reporters on the walk out front. Son of a bitch. This wasn’t right. If they wanted to come to HQ and interview him, that was fine, but no way should they be coming to his
He pulled the company car into the driveway and hit the remote for the garage. Normally, he left the car
