Three scary looking young guys emerged from behind a fence where they’d been drinking beer.
“What bodies are you talking about?” said the taller of the three.
Icy fear washed over Wyatt. He didn’t need to see the symbols tattooed on their hands to know who these guys were. He recognized each of them.
Feral Kids.
CHAPTER THREE
Approaching a getaway car always made Nate more nervous than it should. If someone wanted to ambush him, this was the perfect spot to do so.
Unger giving him this job, and assigning the idiot Morse to do the ground work, gave Nate pause. Maybe Nate was the job, or meant to be rolled up with it.
He tried to shrug away his doubts. Hitman jitters.
More shouts, this time from all around him.
“My God! That plane!” a man yelled from his yard, pointing. He’d been trying to start his lawnmower, but it wouldn’t cooperate.
Nate kept his head low, concentrating on the sidewalk. Can’t have people identifying him a block from a triple homicide. He needed to keep a low profile until he got some distance. Tough to do when you’re over six feet and built like a Russian shot putter, but he did his best.
Another block, and more people began to emerge from their houses and apartment buildings, adding to his nerves. Some looked in the direction of the huge plume of smoke which now spiraled upwards from downtown. Others gaped like fish in confusion.
You’d think everyone would be tired of planes crashing into buildings after New York, he mused. Yet, this was also a good thing for him. Now their focus, and memory, would be of the plane crash, not of the large hitman who tromped past their home.
He approached a T-intersection where a bunch of cars and trucks had suddenly decided to park in the middle of the street. But as he got closer, he noticed that nearly all of them were mashed up against one another, side panels and bumpers dented, headlights shattered.
Drivers and passengers yelled at each other. Small crowds formed at the street corners, ogling the mayhem.
Nate kept walking. Why hadn’t he parked closer? He shook his head. No, that would have been stupid. The rule was golden. For a stealth job, always keep your escape vehicle at least two blocks distance.
As he marched past the fender-bender carnage, a thought struck him. Why weren’t there any sirens? No emergency vehicles racing to the scene. In fact, he didn’t recall hearing any earlier after all those crashes.
He glanced southward. The thick pillar of smoke had grown larger stretching up into the sky. Maybe everyone was down there?
A half-block later he had to walk around a mini-van that had jumped the curb and was perched over the sidewalk. A man sat in the driver’s seat, his door open. He was cursing as he tried turning the key in the ignition over and over, but the engine appeared dead.
Nate noticed several vehicles similarly parked – up on sidewalks, in the middle of lawns, facing the wrong way in the oncoming lane. People cursed or looked confused, or both.
A skinny guy with a beard stood outside another mini-van which sat on the low concrete meridian in the middle of the street. Two brats cried inside. He frowned at his smartphone, pressing at it angrily.
Mr. Beard spotted Nate walking by. “Hey! Can I use your phone?”
No, but I got two bullets that’ll solve that crying problem of yours, Nate wanted to say. Instead, he shrugged, non-committal, and kept going. Mr. Beard turned to yell at his brats.
Normally, he would have been annoyed, even alarmed Mr. Beard had made eye-contact with him, noticed him. But with all the strange chaos he doubted he was the most interesting thing people would remember that day.
Consider this a gift.
He imagined a prosecutor questioning Mr. Beard and pointing in Nate’s direction. “Do you remember seeing this man on the morning of the fourteenth?”
Mr. Beard gave it some thought. “The fourteenth? The day that plane fell out of the sky? Wasn’t that just terrible? And I couldn’t get my phone to work!”
Nate chuckled at his own humor.
He spotted his car parked up ahead in the shade of some trees. Children played in a park nearby, a man threw a frisbee for a dog to chase.
No one else was around. Not anyone that might pop him one, anyway.
As he walked up to the driver’s side, he glanced around one more time. Then he quickly unlocked the door and got in. After closing the door, he placed both hands on the steering wheel and took a deep breath.
Why was he so nervous? This certainly wasn’t his first rodeo, he understood nearly every job made him a little apprehensive. But this one felt different. Was it Morse’s sloppy scouting job, or the fact he got himself stuck working for Unger the idiot?
No. Something else.
He peered through the windshield. On the opposite side of the street a couple were standing on their lawn alternating their gaze from the black pillar of smoke to the phones in their hands.
Something was wrong. An amorphous thing he could not explain. And not just with the cars…
Curious, he stuck the key into the ignition and turned it.
Nothing.
He tried again. Same result.
“Ah, come on!” he said. After several more attempts it dawned on him that the seatbelt warning light hadn’t blinked on. In fact, nothing on the dash lit up, as if the battery was dead.
Great, he thought. Now what? He was a couple of blocks from three people murdered by his own hand, with no way of making a quick escape.
He started to get angry and turning the key over and over again didn’t help.
Giving up, he fished the phone out of his pocket. It was a disposable dumbphone, not a smartphone like all the idiots used. Can’t get a GPS on a dumbphone.
He thumbed a button, but the screen didn’t turn on. He tried again. Nothing. He tried different buttons. The phone was dead. Yet, it had worked earlier.
Now he got really angry. Whatever effected everyone else had killed his car and made his dumbphone even dumber.
At least he didn’t have to put up with Unger texting him with moronic questions.
Yes, the job is done, you twit. And no thanks to your flunky, Morse!
He pictured Morse’s fat face as he bashed it in with his fist, over and over. Breaking the nose, knocking out teeth, causing his eyes to swell over and bruise. “There were people in the house!” he wanted to scream at him.
The thought made him feel a little better, soothing him.
With a sigh, he looked around. Okay, now what?
The couple across the street went back inside their house. The children kept playing, oblivious to the craziness of the day.
Feeling warm he opened the door wide and propped his booted feet up on the concrete curb. He tried his dumbphone again to no avail.
Maybe he could steal a different car? This one wasn’t even his, so why not grab another? But what if its battery was dead, too? How many cars would he go through until he found one that worked?
Could this get any worse?
The back of his neck prickled, and he scratched at it.
A shadow passed over him.
“Everything okay?” a female voice said.
Nate looked up, squinting.
Blue uniform, badge, and a holstered pistol.
Ah, crap, Nate thought.
A cop.
CHAPTER FOUR
“Did I stutter or something?” the Feral Kid asked. “When I ask a question, you answer.”
Wyatt and Ethan gaped at the three thugs. Their sudden appearance in the alley caught the older men off guard. They’d never run into the Feral Kids on their rounds before. Usually, this particular kind of scum avoided residential back alleys.
Ethan froze up, his mouth working, but without any words spilling out.