Ciphers, Matt Rogers [a court of thorns and roses ebook free TXT] 📗

fire lit up the alleyway, and King ducked back behind the alcove wall as chunks of old brick shattered off the corner, torn loose by bullets.

King yelled, ‘Take the kid and go!’

‘Where?’

‘He’s valuable! He has info! Get him out of here.’

King leant back out, only a few inches, as soon as he recognised a lapse in the gunfire. He squeezed off another few shots, taking careful aim and firing only when he had a precise target, and an ungodly yell rose up from a few dozen feet away. The yell morphed into a blood-curdling scream — whoever King had hit was mortally wounded, and would soon be dead. Slater had heard the same noises thousands of times before, and he was desensitised to them. But he didn’t figure the hostiles would be — even if they were the sicarios from the club, as he damn well expected them to be, they wouldn’t be used to hearing those sorts of sounds from their colleagues.

So Slater drew his own weapon, kept a tight hold around Rico’s throat, and hauled him out of the alcove into open ground.

He took off for the other end of the alley, weaving left and right, as King laid down covering fire.

He made it all the way to the opposite street when air washed past him and—

Thwack.

Searing pain, white hot in intensity, above his left collar bone. The skin burned, and the nerve endings fired.

He’d been hit.

He snarled, lost his grip on Rico, and the kid slipped away.

Slater dove for him as more rounds traced past.

It was dark. It was murky. Pain stabbed at him, clouding his vision and his dexterity. He thought he made out the shape of Rico’s silhouette nearby, but he couldn’t be sure.

Desperation struck.

He raised his gun and fired.

Missed.

But the muzzle flash lit up the street, like a momentary strobe light, and he saw the kid racing away from him, headed south.

Toward the Bowery.

Slater shrugged.

He had to end up there anyway.

He took off in pursuit of the kid, the skin around his shoulder screaming for relief.

40

Taking fire from four hostiles at once, it took King longer than usual to realise he was still in possession of both duffel bags.

He ducked back behind the alcove as bullets tore past. There was nothing quite like the feeling of being shot at. You never quite adjusted to it. There was an uncanny detachment between the roar of the gunshots and the bone-breaking, flesh-tearing ferocity of the bullets themselves. They came in silent and unseen, and if one of them struck him in the head he knew he’d be dead before he even had the chance to register the report.

Impact.

Lights out.

Nothing.

It terrified him, but he used the fear as fuel. He crouched in the alcove and waited for a pause in the uproar. Seconds passed, and it didn’t come. The four remaining hostiles were taking turns with their weapons, firing in a staccato rhythm, laying down suppressive fire of their own.

Suddenly he picked up movement right nearby. He steeled himself for a close-quarters gunfight…

…and found it immediately.

Someone bullrushed his position — from his perspective, all he saw was a big bulky silhouette tear around the corner, gun raised. He caught the slightest glimpse of a brown-skinned face twisted into a desperate grimace, but that was all he saw before he angled his Glock with trained patience and fired two shots through the underside of the guy’s chin. The grimace disappeared, replaced by a dark cloud of blood, and the body toppled forward from its own momentum.

King sidestepped it, bounced off the adjacent brick wall, and came back to his original position.

Three to go.

It seemed a whole lot more manageable than five-on-one, but realistically nothing about his circumstances had changed. He was still trapped in the alcove with nowhere to go but out into the alley. He was sure there were three gun barrels trained on the open space a few feet ahead. He tried to listen out for any trace of Slater or Rico, but his hearing was too impaired for that. There was a shrill ringing in his ears — the high-pitched whine of tinnitus. And no wonder — before the gunfight, his surroundings had been as quiet as could be. Now there was war raging on the streets of Manhattan, and he was right in the heart of it.

Then a panicked voice — foreign to King — cried out, ‘I saw Rico. He got free. He went right.’

The voice trembled and wavered with each syllable.

‘You sure?’ a deep voice responded. More measured. More composed.

‘Yeah. He—’

Rapid footsteps — a cluster of them, moving fast. King steeled himself for another Wild West-esque gunfight. First to the draw.

But it never came.

The footsteps headed in the other direction.

And he pieced it together, just like that. The wavering voice must be Samuel, Rico’s mysterious friend. The sicarios weren’t affiliated with the kid — they’d simply been using him to get hold of their treasured possession. But with Rico gone, and King a non-factor, they’d hightailed it out of there. Racing back in the other direction, figuring they could intercept Slater or Rico a block or two south.

Suddenly the alley was quiet.

King didn’t hurry. Haste had led to the death of many men, so he employed as much patience as he could muster and waited for most of his hearing to return. He didn’t even chance a look out. For all he knew, the wavering voice might have been a bluff. The last remaining hostile — Samuel, probably — might be standing two feet away from the alcove, gun trained on King’s position.

So for good measure, he reached back and clasped one of the chunks of brick torn free from the wall.

He held it tight, then threw it like a fastball out of the alcove, where it practically exploded against the sturdier brick on the opposite wall.

Half a second later, he materialised in the open space.

Glock up.

Finger on the trigger.

There was a kid standing there. Maybe twenty or twenty-one, drenched in