You never leave a man behind.
And here was Peter, doing the same damn thing.
Trying to find the real Jimmy. To carry him home.
Jimmy, with his suitcase full of money and four slabs of plastic explosive.
Oh, Jimmy. What did you do?
12
Stepping out into the darkened street toward his truck, with the bag of Jimmy’s papers swinging at his side and Mingus ranging ahead, Peter felt the puff of wind on his neck and heard the unmistakable zhip of the bullet passing before the flat crack of the gunshots reached him.
It was familiar, the loose rattle of an AK-47, the way the world slowed down while his mind sped up. The granular glow from the few functional streetlights. The damp autumn breeze on his exposed skin. The coppery flavor of adrenaline in his mouth. He didn’t want to like it. But there was something unavoidably delicious about that taste.
Automatically, he turned his head to look for the muzzle flash and saw the man in a Bulls jacket standing beside the open rear door of a sedan stopped at the intersection fifty yards away. The long gun was at his shoulder, but his eye wasn’t down to the sight.
With the crystal clarity of stopped time, Peter thought the guy should be ashamed for missing at that distance. Even with an AK, which was notoriously inaccurate. It was like the early days of the insurgency, deposed Baathists full of the false confidence that came from running a dictatorship, walking into the street like action heroes, firing from the hip. This was before they learned to hide, and aim, and blow shit up.
The world popped back into motion when the gunman fired again. The AK clattered and a window broke behind Peter. A car alarm howled. Out in the darkness, Mingus started barking like something out of a caveman’s nightmare.
Stepping behind the cover of his truck, Peter couldn’t see the dog, but he didn’t have time to look. The gunman paused, probably changing clips. Peter fished his keys from his coat pocket, opened the passenger door, reached under the seat and found the .45. Shoved the bag of Jimmy’s papers where the gun had been. Mingus kept barking, now from somewhere above him.
Above him? He looked up. Mingus had somehow climbed up on the roof of the truck, sounding like a demon dog.
Then the flat slap of a round punching through forty-year-old truck glass, the asshole shooting Peter’s truck, and the thunk thunk thunk of punctured sheet metal right in front of him.
It’s one thing to shoot at a guy and another thing entirely to shoot a guy’s truck. Peter looked at the cracks spiderwebbed around the ragged hole in his window, listened to holes being punched in the mahogany box and the driver’s-side door, the door he’d scoured every junkyard in southern California to find, and how the hell did Mingus get on the roof of the truck?
Peter surely must have pissed off somebody, to get a shooter out here so fast.
Thinking all of this while he strode to the back of the truck and peered around the edge of the mahogany box. Lifted the .45 in a two-handed grip, left forefinger on the trigger. Pistol butt solid in the palm of his right hand, shoulder braced, knees slightly bent. Arms strong, line up the notch with the reticule, take a breath, exhale, and squeeeeeze.
The gun bucked in his hand. The man with the AK dropped to the blacktop.
The sedan lurched forward, squealing its tires, the rear door slamming closed with the sudden motion. It was an eighties Chevy Impala, jacked up high, with gleaming chrome rims. The light was dim, but Peter just caught the plate number. He put a round through the rear windshield and the rear passenger quarter-panel, aiming for the tire, then held his fire as Mingus leaped off the roof of the truck and hauled ass down the street after the car, a ferocious orange blur disappearing into the night.
The dog had heart, there was no denying it.
Peter walked to the fallen man and kicked the AK away, but it was clear already from the crumpled way he had fallen that the man was dead. Peter rolled the man fully to his back and saw the red hole in the center of his forehead.
Just like a paper target at the firing range.
But paper targets didn’t fall down.
Didn’t erupt in a pool of blood on the cracked asphalt.
Paper targets didn’t die.
He looked around for another car, a spotter, anyone. But there was nobody else. The neighbors had gone to ground, turned out their lights. It wasn’t their first neighborhood shooting.
Peter sighed.
The dead man had dark skin, late teens or early twenties. His face without lines of care or woe.
Peter had never seen him before.
A stranger had tried to kill him.
Just like old times.
Peter found his shell casings in a pothole big enough to swallow a Honda. He picked up the brass, put the .45 in his coat pocket, and set out after the dog at a fast jog.
He hadn’t known the shooter. Which meant that someone had sent him.
Only two candidates came to mind.
The scarred man in the black SUV. And Lewis.
13