Chapter 89
I DID THE only thing I could think of, ducked and threw myself back into the car, hearing the spit and ping of the suppressed round shattering the driver’s-side window of the Touareg, then another, smacking the door as I yanked in my legs, adrenaline surging, trying to get to my gun.
But I couldn’t reach it, and I could hear footsteps. Lying across the bucket seat and the central console, I saw the emergency brake lever, released it.
The door was still open as the heavy Touareg almost immediately began to drop back down the steep drive, slapping the side of the guy trying to kill me.
He swore in Russian, wild-eyed, trying to stop my vehicle and get a clean shot at me. I slammed the shift into reverse, kicked the gas pedal, pinned the shooter against the door, dragging him as we went flying backward into the street, hurling him from my sight when we crashed broadside into his car with a sound like a dump truck dropping its gate.
On impact I’d been slammed back against the seats, but I came up fast, dug for my pistol, kicked my way out through the door and up into a squared-off shooter’s stance, sweeping the …
He was sprawled, grunting, on the road beside an older Pontiac Trans Am that was making coughing noises and backfiring. His gun lay eight feet from him. I kicked it farther away into the gutter, noticed that his right leg was grotesquely broken, and now bright blood bubbled at one corner of his lips. Behind me I could hear Joy and Luck, Justine’s terriers, barking wildly inside her house.
“Why’d you try to kill me?” I asked.
“Fuck you,” he rasped.
I kicked him in the broken leg, barely aware of people coming out of their houses, happy to hear him scream, or at least try. “Why?” I asked again. “Or this time, I’ll stomp on your leg.”
“There is no why,” he said in a thick Russian accent. “I do job. Hired.”
“By who?” I demanded. “Who wanted me …?”
The Russian got a look of disbelief on his face, coughed up a gout of that bright frothy blood, and died there in the back-streets of Santa Monica, right in front of Justine’s house.