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

voice from the other end of the house called. ‘Where you at?’

Slater stalked out of the study with his own gun up.

King followed.

72

Slater made a subtle mistake.

He got a hard dose of reality when he rushed into the living room en route to the kitchen — where the second voice had come from — and found a third hostile aiming a SIG Sauer at his forehead.

Just because you thought you heard two men enter, doesn’t make it the truth.

He scolded himself as he locked his own aim onto the guy’s face.

He said, ‘You shoot, I shoot.’

The guy said, ‘Likewise.’

The short conversation got the attention of the guy who’d called out ‘Shane,’ in the kitchen, because he came stumbling into the living room with his own pistol raised, making a trove of tactical errors in the process, but Slater couldn’t exploit them because he was locked in a Mexican standoff with the surprise guest.

Two on one.

Two pistol barrels aimed at Slater’s face, one of his aimed at one of theirs.

The newcomer said, ‘You’re outnumbered.’

‘Congratulations,’ Slater said. ‘You can count.’

‘I wouldn’t be so cocky.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘Because you two can keep up your little standoff and I can call my boss and get reinforcements. Then you’re really fucked.’

Slater said, ‘You won’t do that.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because you would have done it already. You know if you go for your phone I nail this guy between the eyes. There’s no guarantee he’ll hit me with his reflexive shot as he dies, so you’ll have to be completely focused on finishing the job. Which will require both hands, because if you miss…’

Slater cocked his head and sent a death stare in the second guy’s direction, silently saying, Well, that’ll be bad for you.

The guy from the kitchen said, ‘So what’s your play, then?’

‘Let’s say we all put down our weapons and talk about how to split up the two million dollars I just stole from Teddy Walcott. I’d rather everyone win than no one wins.’

The guy cocked his head. ‘Is that the truth?’

‘No,’ Slater said. ‘I was just stalling you.’

He let his legs go out from underneath him, dropping behind one of the armchairs. He wouldn’t have gotten away with it if he wanted to land with his wits about him, ready to fire, but he didn’t need to do that.

He only needed their first shots to miss.

He sprawled to the floorboards in an ungainly heap, nearly face-planting in his haste, but it meant the gunshots ripped over his head and took chunks out of the plaster behind him instead of sinking into his skull.

Then two more shots came from the kitchen.

Slater didn’t need to wait around to be sure whether they’d hit or not.

He stood up and looked at two fresh corpses with holes in the sides of their skulls.

King stepped out of the kitchen. ‘Close call.’

‘Not really.’

King said, ‘This isn’t going to stop.’

‘I know.’

‘So we take the fight to Dylan.’

‘Do we?’ Slater said.

He looked at his surroundings in a new light.

King said, ‘What does that mean?’

‘This is a family squabble. What do we have to do with it?’

‘Do Teddy’s lies change who Dylan is?’ King said. ‘He’s still the man who funded Icke’s operation. He’s still the man who launders money for damn near every criminal in America, who loans that dirty money to desperate people at predatory interest rates.’

Slater clenched his teeth.

King could see how conflicted he was.

‘Forget about Teddy,’ King said. ‘Get him out of your mind. Walcott, Barrow, it doesn’t matter what or who he is. Look at Dylan Walcott objectively.’

‘Of course Dylan deserves to die,’ Slater said. ‘But what happens then?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘We have two choices here. We go back and make sure Teddy is still chained to that desk, or we go after Dylan. We can’t juggle the entire puzzle at once. If we go after Dylan, it gives Teddy time to escape, and then what? He’s got the same DNA as his brother, no matter how much he wants to deny it. All that talk about cults and social conditioning … he was right. If we overthrow Dylan, who’s to say the other Walcott won’t just take his place?’

‘You think that’s who Teddy is?’

‘I have no fucking idea who Teddy is. Do you?’

King thought about it.

Realised he didn’t, and shook his head.

But he slipped his phone from his pocket in the meantime. ‘You got one thing wrong.’

‘What’s that?’

‘We can definitely juggle the entire puzzle if we try hard enough.’

He put the phone to his ear, waited for it to connect, then said, ‘Violetta? There’s something you and Alexis need to do.’

73

It took Theodore Walcott thirty-six minutes to get the cuff off.

There was no strength he’d been hiding away. He didn’t have ten secret black belts. He wasn’t a proficient marksman. All he could do was pretend to be someone he wasn’t, which he didn’t think was all that special, but apparently it was.

He pulled out one of the desk drawers and smashed it against the chain connecting the two cuffs, over and over and over again. He counted every second that passed. His worst nightmare wasn’t King and Slater coming back for him. It was Dylan stepping into the room, laughing at him, deriding his weakness.

It was getting humiliated one last time.

In comparison, death was nothing.

When his wrist was raw and bloody and his old tired muscles swelled with lactic acid and his body begged for relief, he put the mangled drawer down and took a deep breath.

He gave up.

Then he heard something.

A car approaching.

There was no passing traffic out this way, only the dull drone of the silo plant’s machinery churning away, floating over the sandy plains. An engine was indistinguishable.

It gave him newfound determination.

It was right then, at sixty-three years old, that Theodore Walcott discovered the power of the human mind. He couldn’t believe what he was doing when he picked up the desk drawer again and smashed it into his wrist with renewed vigour, maybe even breaking the bone, but none of it seemed