Danny was staring straight ahead at them. His Glock was in his lap.
"You think life is gonna be the same for you when you got that kind of green?" Forty seconds.
"Yeah, I'm gonna"
"I know, spend it on hoes, Ferraris, a pad on top of a hill somewhere." He didn't say anything, 'cause I was reading his mind. Those had been my goals too. Thirty seconds.
"Well, you may not want to believe me, young stud, but you better be about puttin' your cut to use for the long term. See, you ain't always gonna be so fly that all the honeys flock to you, or have some scheme come along that'll get you over like a fat rat. This is a one-time thing." Twenty seconds. My hand gently touched the butt of the shotgun like I was pushing up on a chick.
Danny finally looked my way. "I hear you, Zelmont."
We both had a hold of our gats. But like they'd suddenly got ESP, the couple peddled down the incline and went off to the right, out of sight. I had no idea where the police or sheriffs station was and didn't give it much thought. It was two minutes to the biggest game of my life. We eased the guns back into position and waited, saying nothing. Then my pager vibrated.
"It's on," I said.
Like one, we slipped on our ski masks. We already had on our gloves. "Don't forget your goggles," I told him.
I started counting down from ninety as we'd planned. I signaled Danny to put the car in gear on 25 and he did. Once in drive, wouldn't you know it but the engine smoothed out and the Cordoba ran like a top. We came down and around the hill as the Shindar garbage truck passed by on the main road. The thing was chugging uphill like we knew it would. Nap was coming from the other direction at the top of the rise. The roadway was narrow as hell on these twists and turns.
"Easy, easy," I said. Danny was excited and giving the pedal too much.
"I'm on it." The Cordoba didn't back off enough from the rear of the garbage truck.
Nap got closer, then he brought the bobtail sideways across the double yellow lines. The garbage truck slammed into the side of the thing. We came up lurching behind, too close, but I was already moving.
"Back this short up," I screamed, tumbling out of the ride. The garbage truck was moving backward, but I had forward motion. I blew out the truck's passenger window with some buckshot and tossed a flash grenade.
"Shit," I yelled as the grenade bounced off the metal frame of the window. The grenade went off in midair, but I had on my goggles, which protected my eyes. I jumped on the truck's running board as it crunched into the grill of the Cordoba.
"Back it the fuck up," I hollered again to Danny. The driver of the truck was squinting, so I figured the grenade probably reflected off the windshield. The dude on the passenger side where I was hanging on must have closed his eyes when he saw me throw the grenade, or maybe he'd just been scared shitless and couldn't stand to see it coming.
Whatever, he blasted off a round at me, the bullet going right past my cheek as I batted his arm away.
"You're dead, bastard." He capped off another one, but I spoiled his aim by grabbing his arm. The sound made my ears ring and the right one seemed to go out on me. I yanked on the dude hard, lifting him halfway out the window. I was hanging onto his clothes to keep myself from falling to the ground.
The truck was still going backwards. Danny had finally gotten out of the car, having moved it off to one side. The boy was supposed to have done that sooner so he could shoot out the truck's tires. That's why I'd had him get Teflon loads for his piece. But I had other worries at the moment.
The gun was coming up at me and I bit down on the fool's arm like it was Christmas turkey.
"Fuck." I hadn't noticed before, but he had an accent like Stadanko. Figured.
I headbutted the chump, but he had a hard skull and didn't seem to feel it much. He hit me solid with his other hand, stunning me. The truck jerked sideways, skidding. Where the fuck was Nap?
The driver's vision was clearing and he was pulling out a piece too while he slammed on the brakes. Me and the other cat were still wrasslin'. There were some pops, then the truck fishtailed and went backwards real fast into the side of the mountain. I grabbed the strap holding the shotgun slung over my back and quickly brought the piece up over my head with one hand. It looked like Danny had finally done what we had practiced and blown out the truck's tires, but of course he'd done it too late. I got knocked loose, my back scraping against the mountainside as I flew off.
Operating on pure instinct, like I had so many times before, I let loose with the shotgun in midair before I hit the ground. I caught homeboy in the passenger seat as he was clipping off a couple rounds at me with his piece. The blast took his arm off from the elbow to his gun hand. He was screaming something fiendish as I tried to stand up and run to get around the truck on the front end. But I went right down again on one knee, my hip on fire.
The dude whose arm I'd just blown away was climbing out of the truck, blood spurting from his stump like he was a zombie in a Wes Craven movie. He was trying to pull another gun from inside his jacket, but what with it being on the same side as his good hand, he was having serious trouble. I couldn't get up, my hip was locked. I put the shotgun on him as he lurched forward and cursed at me in that goddamn language of theirs.
Fuck me if a bullet from somewhere else didn't drill itself into my chest. If not for the Kevlar body armor I was wearing underneath my overalls, I woulda been toast. On that show I'd done for a hot minute, the dude that did the explosions and firearms always had this kinda shit around. I'd got the vest from him together with the flash grenades. Now I was damn glad he'd mentioned that if I was gonna do something heavy, I'd better be protected.
As it was, the impact drove me back, knocking the wind out of me. The driver had me cold with his rod, then his head disappeared in a cloud of red. He dropped away and I could see Nap running forward, the Glock in his hand. But the one-and-a-half-armed motherfuckahwhat did this boy eat for breakfast?leaped on me, beating at me with his good hand. He lodged his stump under my neck and damned if he didn't clamp his mouth around my Adam's apple.
''Shit," I screamed, falling on my back. I hit this vampire as hard as I could in the side of his head with the shotgun's butt. His eyes got real wide, then rolled up in his head. Nap and Danny got him off me and helped me to my feet. We all listened for what seemed like forever, but could hear no cop cars or anything else on the lonely stretch of the mountainside.
"We're paid, man," Danny said in a quiet voice.
We all still had on our goggles, making us look like Outer Limits rejects. Me and Nap glanced at each other, and I knew he was grinning underneath his mask like I was. The three of us made our way to the rear of the truck. Nap carried the gas masks we'd need to use to dive into the garbage.
"Let's get the back open and then see what's what," Nap said. Using the straps of the gas masks, he put them on one of his big arms. Then he started undoing the latch so we could open one side of the large rear double doors.
"Man, that's rank," Danny cried. The smell was enough to knock you to your knees.
"For once we agree," I said, putting a hand over my nose and mouth.
"You girls can snivel if you want," Nap joked, "but I smell fortune."
Suddenly the other door got shoved open from the inside. Gunfire sputtered and Nap tumbled back into the road. The gas masks flew off his arm as he was shot.
"More marks," Danny yelled, gesturing at the three gunmen who'd been laying in wait for us inside the truck's garbage container. They were dressed in rubber suits with built-in gas masks to hide inside the garbage. Stadanko, or more likely his clever-ass cousin Chekka, had planned for an emergency.