She shot him a second time in the chest, shattering the driver side window in the process.
“Aim for center mass,” Will always said. “The biggest part of the body is your best target. Only delusional idiots aim for the head in a gunfight.”
The man crumpled to the bottom of the ditch on his stomach.
She was about to leap out of her seat (Get out of the car! It’s a death trap! Get out of it now!), when she heard glass shattering behind her, from across the front seat, and Claire screaming. Gaby twisted back in that direction. She hadn’t gotten completely around when she saw a familiar face, the same shade of red hair, leaning in Claire’s suddenly open passenger side window with a shotgun in his hands.
But she was still halfway around when the man ruthlessly shoved the barrel of his weapon against Claire’s cheek, then glared at her from behind the girl’s head. “Go ahead, see if I don’t blow this little girl’s head open like a melon before you get that gun all the way around.”
Gaby froze.
Harrison.
She stared at him, then at Claire, fastened to her seat as if she was glued to it, too afraid to even move. There was a big bump in the girl’s forehead where she had slammed into the dashboard because she wasn’t wearing her seatbelt. For the first time since she had met her, Gaby saw very real fear in the thirteen-year-old’s eyes.
“It’s okay, Claire,” Gaby said. “Everything will be okay.”
“Don’t lie to the girl,” Harrison said. “It’s unbecoming.”
Gaby gripped the Glock. It was still pointed in the wrong direction — at her steering wheel — but it wouldn’t have taken much to swing it sixty more degrees, lift it slightly, and shoot Harrison on the other side of Claire. Of course, that would require better aim than she had proven herself capable of with a handgun. And he was standing right behind Claire, using her small head as a shield.
The crying continued in the backseat. Gaby couldn’t be sure if it was still just Milly or if Donna had joined in.
Options. What were her options?
Will said there were always options. She just had to see them.
So what were her options now?
She couldn’t see them. God help her, she couldn’t see any of them.
“Don’t make me say it again,” Harrison said. “Put down the gun or I’m going to splash this little girl’s brains all over you. You know I’ll do it.”
“Yeah,” Gaby said. “I know you’ll do it.”
“So what are you waiting for?”
She threw the Glock out her window. “Don’t hurt her.”
Harrison kept the shotgun pressed into Claire’s cheek with one hand and reached down with the other. He brought the hand back up and tossed something to her.
Gaby looked down at a pair of steel handcuffs in her lap.
“Put one around your right wrist and the other around the steering wheel,” Harrison said.
“Why?”
“Because I said so.”
Options? What are my options?
None. I don’t see any.
God help me, I don’t see any…
She picked up the handcuffs and did as he instructed. The metal bit into her wrist and she instantly regretted it. “Now what?”
“You’re going to sit tight,” Harrison said.
He snatched up Claire’s rifle and tossed it into the ditch. Then he grabbed her M4, which had slid into Claire’s side of the truck, and stepped backward before disappearing completely from her field of vision. She heard him moving around the ditch, climbing up and then scrambling over to the other side, though she couldn’t see him because the truck was pointing up at the sky at the moment.
She looked into the backseat, at the weapons that Darren and his friend had brought with them. There, an AR-15, lying between Donna and Milly— “Donna, the rifle, hurry.”
Donna stared back at her as if she couldn’t understand what she was saying.
“The rifle!” Gaby said, just loud enough to get through to her.
She could hear Harrison moving around the truck, reaching the other side…
“Give me the rifle!” Gaby said again, louder this time.
Donna finally understood and reached for the rifle. She picked it up by the barrel and was holding it out to Gaby when the back passenger window exploded and showered the teenager and Milly with glass shards. Both girls screamed and the rifle fell. The girls threw their arms over their heads while Milly sank even lower into the floor behind Claire’s seat. Gaby couldn’t tell if they were hurt or just terrified, but she saw fresh blood on the upholstery in the backseat.
The loud, unmistakable sound of a shotgun being racked filled the air, then Harrison was standing next to her on the other side of her shattered window. “Nice try,” he said, then hit her in the face with the stock of his weapon.
Gaby actually heard her nose breaking, then tasted blood in her mouth as her head laid back against the comfortable headrest. She tried to shut off her senses. She wanted to go to sleep, but the sun was still beating down on her and she was able to open her eyes just in time to see Harrison pulling open the door with some effort.
He reached in and unlocked the handcuff around the steering wheel. He grabbed her by the arm and pulled her out of the truck roughly, throwing her down into the ditch. She landed on top of the short but large man she had shot earlier and scrambled to get away.
She was straightening up when Harrison hit her in the gut with a balled fist. She doubled over from the pain before falling back down to her knees in the grass. Thick blood dripped down around her in clumpy streams.
Are those mine? Yes. I think so.
Harrison towered over her, his bigger frame blotting out the sun. “You should have stayed out of my city. Everything was going fine until you showed up. Everything that’s happened, it’s all your fault.”
She looked up at him and shook her head. “No,” she said, but before she could continue defending herself, he punched her in the face — right in her broken nose. All the pain in the world seemed to come down on her at that very moment.
Someone screamed, then someone else joined in.
She heard her name just before the loud roar of another shotgun blast silenced it.
Book Three
Run and Gun
26
Keo
“That’s one nasty scar,” the woman, Bonnie, said.
“You should have seen the other guy,” Keo said.
“Worse than that?”
“He’s dead, and I’m not.”
“Hunh.”
“That’s what he said.”
The redhead (Auburn hair? Close enough) with the supermodel good looks was crouched on one knee at the bow of the eighteen-footer, as if she expected someone to start shooting at them from the shoreline at any moment. She had a Remington tactical shotgun slung over her shoulder and wore a gun belt with a sidearm, though the combination of the deadly items on someone that gorgeous struck him as somehow unnatural.
The boat they were traveling in was used primarily for bass fishing, with two seats in the middle, one behind the steering wheel, and two pedestal seats — one in the back next to the loud outboard motor and the other up front where Bonnie was crouched next to at the moment. It was also the same boat they had used to intercept Carrie and Lorelei last night. No wonder it hadn’t been much of a chase. The damn thing was fast.