Page 31 of Lone Wolf

He popped to his feet and something sliced past him, the station wagon’s hood crumpling. A split second later he heard the delayed crack of a sniper rifle. Spinning, he caught a glint of a scope from the low-slung roof of the Burger King diagonally across the intersection, noted the balaclava-hooded head tilted to the buttstock.

The driver of the station wagon was screaming, hands clamped to her cheeks with Munchian horror. Two toddlers lolled in car seats in the back, drool-slick chins and whale-spout ponytails. At least three different police sirens wailed in the surrounding blocks, their sounds morphing ventriloquially off the corridors of buildings.

Evan put distance between himself and the family, running into the open, zigzagging across the street. Sniper rounds chewed the blacktop at his heels, grit pattering against the calves of his cargo pants. He dove behind an empty bus-stop shelter, the supporting wall turned opaque by an action-movie one-sheet featuring an oiled-up green-screen hero. To his side, a graffitied sheet of plywood boarded up an abandoned storefront.

Replaying the sounds in his head, he registered the supersonic crack of the projectile. There’d been no trailing boom, which meant the rifle was suppressed, giving him less to work with. But the divots in the street, the secondary pieces of dislodged concrete, and the spalling of the projectiles meant he was dealing with a 7.62x51 mm at a minimum.

His mouth was dry and bitter, jaw clenched. Sprawled on his stomach, he hacked and spit, the glob of saliva laced with street grime. Then he risked a glance behind him. Cop cars were screaming up the alley, but the Suburban had embedded into the opening, stopping it up, the hood buried in a landslide of collapsed edifice. The driver’s window had spiderwebbed on impact, clouding white.

The crumpled door shuddered once, twice, kicked from within, and then it flew open. The driver in the army trucker hat stepped out and stared across the four lanes of traffic at Evan.

He looked uninjured, unrattled. Lacing his fingers, he thrust his palms outward, and even over the din of the collective mayhem, Evan heard the brisk rat-a-tat of popping knuckles. The man’s smile was yellow and jagged, teeth missing. His face said this was the most fun he’d had in years.

His finger rose to his ear and Evan read his lips as he spoke into the radio: Tanner to the Wolf, I’ve got visual. Behind the bus shelter.

Rolling to his side, Evan pulled his ARES from the appendix holster and aimed across the street. Panicked civilians swarmed his field of vision, running to safety, abandoning their vehicles. No clear shot.

Through the strobing bodies, Tanner looked at him. And smiled.

An incoming round snapped crisply, and then the bus shelter wall cracked like a wrenched ice-cube tray. Evan’s hands stung. It took a moment for him to realize what had happened, that the bullet had penetrated the movie poster and knocked the ARES right from his grip. Above him, the pane held its shape for a single confused moment, unsure which law of physics to obey, and then cascaded down in shards across his shoulders.

He was exposed, his 1911 lying mangled in the gutter.

He moved fast, leaping across the sidewalk, crashing into the plywood covering the storefront. The nails on one side gave, the wooden rectangle rocking inward like a crooked pivot door. He scraped across it, drawing splinters; tumbled into the dusky interior; and landed belly-down on a concrete floor sticky with filth. A big square of a room, perhaps a former lobby.

When he lifted his head, he sensed movement at the desecrated lobby’s perimeter. Dirt-blackened faces, glinting eyes, caved cheeks. And the smell —human waste and untreated infection, urine and the vinegar stench of meth. The tilted plywood door had freed a blast of daylight to enter the squat house, and Evan had to blink to acclimate his eyes to the severity of the contrast.

A water leak laid a bruise-colored amoeba across a third of the ceiling, a steady drip tapping a soggy jaundiced couch. Sleeping bags bulging like larvae, a plastic pink child’s vanity and stool set, black trash bags and white paint buckets, a row of ragged Christmas stockings nailed to crumbling Sheetrock, red Solo cups, rat nests, a legless teddy bear adorned with a tattered red bra. A squalid underworld less than a hundred meters from Dr. Hill’s airy three-story retreat. That’s what happened when poverty outpaced prosperity, crowding on top of it, leaving affluence nowhere to flee.

The squatters rose like zombies, black maws punctuated by peg teeth, and shuffled into the adjoining room, melting into darkness. The taste of ammonia coated the inside of Evan’s mouth, and he coughed hard, trying to clear his windpipe. As he got his hands beneath him, one palm pressed down into something squishy. Shaking the fog from his head, he forced himself upright.

The shaft of light through the mangled doorway laid a spotlight on the rear wall. As Evan rose, his shadow seemed to rise before him, stretching up the crumbling Sheetrock.

Then he noticed the shaggy outline of facial hair, the brim of a trucker hat, a curved spike held in one hand at the thigh, like a meat hook or tent stake.

Tanner standing in the doorway, his form thrown in a distorted shadow-puppet silhouette.

Evan wiped the grime off his hand onto his pant leg, clenched his teeth, drew a breath.

And turned to face what was coming.

18

Back to Lethal

Tanner stepped across the knocked-askew plank of plywood, through the ragged gullet into the onetime lobby, nose wrinkling at the smell. His discordantly pretty amber eyes held the light. From outside came shouts and cries, earsplitting sirens and radio blasts, flashing lights and car horns. Evan hadn’t had time to pull his shirt on; he felt it bulging in his back pocket, the tingle of cooling sweat across his bare shoulders.

Once more Tanner pressed his finger to his ear and spoke to the Wolf. “Through the plywood door. Got him cornered. Any cop comes near, put ’em down.” A pause. “I know, I know. No loose ends. I got him. Deal with the girl.” Then: “I said I got him. I don’t need backup.”

He hung up, then lifted his hat by the brim, swiped a forearm across his brow, lowered it back in place. Then he and Evan stared at each other. His skin had a sun-battered orange tinge from sleeping on the streets, his face like a pork rind.

“Former army?” Evan said. “And you’re okay killing cops and girls?”

“Ex, not former,” Tanner replied, relishing the pejorative. “Chewed on that Afghan dirt, cashiered out, big chicken dinner.”

Big Chicken Dinner: Bad Conduct Discharge. No health care. No pension.

“Plus for two hundred K,” Tanner said, grinning, “I’d kill anything.”