Sharks, Matt Rogers [shoe dog free ebook TXT] 📗

Hispanic man wobbled into view, rounding the porch’s corner. He had to be six-six and three hundred pounds, very little of it muscle. He had puffy lips and enormous upturned nostrils that made his nose look like some kind of demented horizontal traffic light. He was the one who’d done all the talking, who’d wanted them to beg, who’d wanted to bend them over a table.

He had a huge carbine rifle in his hands, and what had to be an XXXL Kevlar vest draped over his bulging torso, and a big smile on his face.

He turned the rifle barrel toward her, and she wasn’t fast enough to respond, and he shouted, ‘Got you, bitch!’

Then his shoulder popped.

Alexis saw blood spurt from the deltoid muscle, and the guy’s four chins swung to the right to assess the damage. He had to check — he couldn’t ignore it. The bullet had gone straight in and hadn’t exited. It was bouncing around in his chest, doing all sorts of irreparable damage, and he’d lost control of his arm, so he couldn’t pull the trigger anymore.

He nearly toppled forward, then corrected course too hard and went over backward, planting himself down on his butt, nearly breaking through the porch slats.

He looked mighty stupid now.

Violetta swept into view, having come out the sliding doors and round the side, and kicked his rifle out of his limp hands.

He looked up at her like he couldn’t believe he’d been bested by a woman.

Violetta raised her Glock to point square between his eyes.

‘No,’ Alexis said.

Violetta wheeled.

Alexis went forward. Strode it out, didn’t look anywhere but deep into the guy’s soulless irises, made sure not to recoil away from his hideous complexion. She squatted down by his bulk, and realised he dwarfed her. He weighed nearly three of her. She reached up and grabbed a tuft of his hair and forced his chin off his chest, which inadvertently opened his mouth.

She shoved the barrel between his teeth, forcing it all the way in.

She looked at him. ‘Still want to bend me over a table?’

He mumbled something.

She couldn’t care less what he said.

She said, ‘How’s it feel to be penetrated?’

She shoved the barrel deeper so it tickled the back of his throat and fired once.

59

Slater was right behind them in the jeep.

Considering Vince hadn’t slowed an inch since King had forced entry, the simple laws of physics prevented him from catching up, which forced him into the role of reluctant observer.

The Crown Vic rocketed toward the base of the shipyard’s smallest crane.

Slater said, ‘Get out, King.’

Nothing.

There was no one to hear the warning but his own ears, and they barely did. The wind whipped them away as soon as they were out of his mouth.

‘Get the fuck out!’ Slater roared.

It couldn’t go like this.

Not after everything.

He couldn’t watch his best friend, his brother, the man he’d go to the grave with, remain inside a death trap of a metal frame as it plunged into steel poles and went up in a fireball.

But he couldn’t do anything. There was nothing between the accelerator and the floor. He was helpless to interfere, but at the same time he couldn’t look away. It was a horror movie unfolding on the small screen of his windshield, and there was nothing he could do to stop himself watching.

So he clenched his teeth so hard he thought they might break, and he waited.

Still nothing.

Then, many things.

The rear door flew open, maybe a hundred feet from the crane. King flew out, his chin to his chest and his shoulders hunched to prevent his head smacking against the ground at sixty miles an hour. He landed right where he should have landed — taking the majority of the hit to the chain of his upper back muscles — but it was a matter of landing right at the wrong speed. He spun like a top, disappearing in a geyser of sand and limbs. Slater knew if it was concrete the man would be dead, and gave gratitude for the presence of the granular material.

But he stopped himself short, because King could very well still be dead.

The cloud of sand went down and revealed him lying sprawled on his back, arms and legs splayed, skidding to a gentle halt.

Nothing about the preceding seconds had been gentle, though.

Slater couldn’t tell if he was breathing. Even if he was, he might not be feeling anything below the waist.

Or, Slater thought, below the neck.

He couldn’t linger on that terror for long.

Vince, madly enough, had a last-minute change of heart.

Too late.

The mobster threw the Crown Vic to the left and the hood made it twenty degrees off-course, but the rest of the car didn’t follow. He seemed to realise this and had the wherewithal to force his door open and spill out of the car, just as King had. Slater couldn’t believe the guy’s reaction time, and he found himself thinking, again, that Vince would have made an excellent special operator.

Vince’s problem was that he fell out of the car when it was ten feet from the crane.

It skidded nearly horizontally into the base and the vehicle flipped sideways into the foundations. Its roof crushed steel supports and its chassis wrapped around the crane’s base.

Then it went up like hellfire.

The crane groaned and let out an almighty death rattle.

Slater said, ‘No,’ under his breath but no one heard it.

He slammed the brakes and twisted the wheel. He waited for the geysers of sand to fall away from the jeep before throwing the door open and leaping out, still bare-chested, still covered in his own blood.

There was nothing he could do.

He put his hands behind his head, let his jaw hang slack, and watched the crane fall.

60

By sheer luck, it didn’t pitch south.

If it had, it would have landed on King. He showed no signs of movement as the whole contraption groaned and toppled north. He was a horizontal statue in the sand, staring up at the sky, but when the crane