Once Kyle was ten steps from the back of the pickup, the man’s expression changed. A grin spread across his face, freezing Kyle in mid-step as he tried to interpret the look. Time stood still, each man assessing the other. In the next instant, the man extended his right hand forward and fired. Kyle spun to his right and dove back for the cover of the truck as multiple gunshots rang out. Twisting in the air, Kyle felt a bullet strike his left arm, knocking his gun from his hand and tossing it in the air. He screamed as he dropped to the ground behind the truck, the sound of his rifle clattering on the highway ringing loudly in his ears.
Panic stricken and wounded, Kyle lay behind the back wheel of the pickup. He could see the blood flowing down his left arm as it pumped from a wound three inches above his elbow. He squeezed his fist and saw that, despite the pain, his fingers worked.
Kyle heard the shooter laughing at him across the highway and could see, as he peered underneath the truck, that the man was coming across the median towards him, walking with a bounce in his step, almost a sense of excitement. Kyle knew the man had heard him scream and had seen his rifle knocked away. As he lay on the ground bleeding, the faces of Jennifer and his kids flashed across his mind.
His rifle lay fifteen feet away from him, its stock splintered where a bullet had struck it. Blocking out the pain, Kyle scrambled for his gun, staying as low as he could. He expected to hear a shot and feel a bullet tear through him at any moment, but he reached his rifle unscathed, grabbed it, and scrambled back to the cover of the truck. Glancing under the truck again, he saw the feet of his assailant in the other lane, approaching the front of the pickup. Kyle, still crouching, scurried to the front of the truck.
CHAPTER 21
Central Colorado
Stan walked victoriously across the median towards the red Ford half-ton that shielded his newest victim from view. For him, taking a life was sport, not anything that affected his conscience. The truth was his conscience had died a long time ago, probably back when he was spending time in jail instead of finishing high school. A fight at a party one weekend had ended with a kid dead. Stan, no stranger to violence, had used the leg of a chair to beat to death a football player from a rival school who was flirting with his hoped-to-be girlfriend. His memory of the event was vague, clouded by a haze of drugs and alcohol, but the weeks after the killing were clear, with judges and lawyers hustling around him. On the weekends, friends from school had visited him in jail and regaled him with tales of his growing reputation, and he, a trouble-making, fifteen year old, freshman punk that no one had ever noticed before, had been the talk of the school. He liked it.
His appointed lawyer, an ambitious climber who was more focused on padding his resume than seeking justice, had convinced Stan to avoid trial by pleading guilty, and Stan’s youth, combined with the judge’s sympathy for his having been raised in a broken home by an alcoholic mother, had resulted in a sentence of thirty-four months in a juvenile detention facility. On his eighteenth birthday, six months before his friends graduated from high school, Stan had been released from jail with a clean record.
By twenty-one, Stan was in jail again, this time for trafficking drugs, although it could have been worse had the grand jury indicted him for murder two, the crime he’d been arrested for in the first place. With no weapon, and unreliable junkies as the only witnesses, the DA had decided to prosecute Stan for the lesser charge, the one that would guarantee a conviction. That was the first in a series of offenses that had kept Stan behind bars for fifteen of his next twenty years.
He had been two years into a twenty-year sentence for rape and torture in a facility near St. Louis when fate had smiled on him in a big way. The prison had lost power, and for four days the prisoners were locked in their cells like animals, with little food, smelly toilet water to drink, and a rapidly dwindling number of guards to monitor the inmates. A hundred hours into the ordeal, with only a handful of staff left at the prison, Stan’s cell had been unlocked by a conscience-racked corrections officer, and Stan had wasted no time in evacuating the facility. The last thing Stan remembered before leaving the prison was the screams of that softhearted guard as ungrateful prisoners repaid him for their years of incarceration. Whether the entire prison population had been released or some had been left to die in their cells, Stan didn’t know and didn’t care. He was free and in an environment in which he excelled, a place where strength had become the law of the land.
During his most recent years in prison, Stan had missed the company of women, his girlfriend never even paying him a visit, and once free he’d wasted no time in leaving a trail of devastated lives as he made up for this lost time. Stan was on his way back to Vegas, the last place he had heard his girlfriend and son were living, and after acquiring weapons from acquaintances in St. Louis, the trip had been relatively easy. So far he had found the people he met along the way to be most cooperative, the lack of any effective law enforcement a huge factor in their compliance. Stan prided himself in so completely overwhelming his victims that the only things they could offer in their defense were screams and unheeded pleas for mercy.
There was one woman he’d let live though. After killing her husband, he hadn’t felt right about killing the two small kids, babies really. Children were Stan’s soft spot, his one real weakness he’d decided, so after spending a few hours with the mother, he’d left without taking her life, knowing the kids wouldn’t be able to fend for themselves. She would have been quite easy to kill, especially since she’d cried too much and hadn’t given him the satisfaction he desired, but he’d just given her a good beating and moved on.
This newest victim would mean nothing to him beyond the fact that this guy was the first one who had made it somewhat interesting and managed to get some shots off at him, a fact that had irked Stan as this silly game played out.
Stan realized now that he should have killed this latest pain-in-the-ass yesterday. He’d found the guy’s cart parked under a truck with trash blown up against the wheels and would have left it, but at the last second had decided that the cart would be useful in some of the more deserted areas he’d be traveling through. He’d even looked through the window of the cab, seen this guy on death’s doorstep, and figured he didn’t need to waste the ammunition. Now, as this pathetic game of cat and mouse was about to wrap up, he was ready to invest some extra bullets.
Stan appreciated the man’s guts, the way he stood out in the open and begged for mercy. Handguns were far too unreliable from a distance, especially against a rifle, so exposing himself like that had been a great help. He thought it was his second shot that had hit the guy, but it didn’t matter. The fool no longer had his gun and was injured, possibly already dead if his squeal was any indication. Now it would just be a matter of finishing him off, if he was still breathing, probably in a slow and painful manner, and then continuing on to Denver.
Looking forward to having some fun, Stan walked towards the front of the truck, his guns hanging loosely at his side.
Kyle sprang up from behind the pickup, acting on instinct, fear, and rage. He didn’t know how many shots he had left, but he planned on using all of them. As soon as his rifle cleared the hood of the pickup, he began to squeeze the trigger. The hollow grin on Stan’s face morphed from businesslike indifference to shocked surprise with the first crack of the rifle.