by Scott Blade
Widow fired his left hand down from eye level and clamped his hand down on the back of the guy’s hand, just below his wrist. He jerked the gun down and to his right. He stepped in and nailed the guy square in the face with a head-butt. Not a deadly one, which he could’ve administered—easily. He wanted the guy stunned and disoriented, not dead or broken.
The big guy had been wearing a tie, what color Widow wasn’t sure, but it was a regular tie and not a clip-on, another piece of evidence that the guy wasn’t FBI. FBI agents and Secret Service agents and anyone else in a professional position that dealt with the criminal element knew to wear a clip-on tie. A guy who wore a regular tie and planned to run the risk of being in a street fight had better be prepared to be disarmed and led around like a dog by his tie.
And that was exactly what Widow did. He gripped the guy’s tie with his left hand and jerked it far back over the guy’s shoulder. It was enough to choke him to death if Widow had wanted to.
Widow planted his feet, locked them into place like they were reinforced with solid concrete and rebar. He pulled the guy far down to the ten o’clock position and pointed the Colt Anaconda at the woman.
He said, “You, freeze!” No yelling. No shouting. Just plain English.
THE WOMAN from Kill Team B had misjudged this drifter, and she knew it. He’d disarmed her colleague about as fast as she’d ever seen anyone do it. She wasn’t even sure she could’ve done it that fast or gotten the drop on her partner. She stared down the sights on her Sig Sauer and said, “Who the hell are you?”
“Who the hell are you?” the stranger replied.
“We’re—” She started to say FBI, but Widow interrupted.
He said, “Don’t give me that FBI crap!”
She said nothing.
The drifter said, “I saw you following me way back near Rough Creek. On the interstate.”
She sidestepped back, closer to the car. She wanted to shield half her body from him and possibly dive down and retreat behind the car.
“Don’t move! Stay where you are! Answer the damn question! Why’re you following me?”
The woman didn’t answer. She didn’t know what to say. She was taking too long to come up with something, and she knew it.
The stranger didn’t wait for her to answer. He jerked his gun hand—fast—and shot her partner in the back of the calf.
WIDOW FIRED the Colt Anaconda, and the muzzle flashed as one bullet rocketed out and blew away the big guy’s calf muscle. The muscle and flesh exploded, and blood misted out, spraying across the front of Widow’s pants.
The guy erupted in a scream unlike any Widow had heard in a long while. Widow jerked down harder on his tie, both to silence him and to keep him standing up and not toppled over.
He said, “Answer me, or he gets another!”
The woman stayed quiet, but she gave Widow a confirmation that they were definitely bad guys, which he had been pretty positive of to begin with. The woman confirmed his suspicions because she was looking around the streets. She was checking to see if anyone had heard the gunshots. She was looking for potential witnesses. Only bad guys look for witnesses. In this day and age, everyone was subconsciously aware of the cell phone camera. Somebody fires a gun in an urban area, and twenty people show up with their cell phone cameras rolling. The modern smartphone made everyone a potential broadcaster.
But Widow wasn’t worried about being filmed, nor was he worried about witnesses. He hadn’t done anything wrong or illegal. At least not here, tonight, he hadn’t. But he did notice that lights were going on in the top floors of a nearby building. Most of the other buildings were commercial and mostly office spaces. They were not in use at this hour, but one of the buildings had people inside it, and they were gathering at the windows to check out the gunshot.
And then the woman did something that shocked Widow.
She shot her partner. She jumped back behind the tire of the Dodge Charger and opened fire. She shot him three times in the chest. All good shots. She had real talent. The guy kicked back and into Widow. They both toppled backward.
Widow squirmed out from under him and blind fired back. He heard the boom of the gunshots. He had fired three times. In the same second, he heard CLANG! CLANG! CLANG! Which meant that his return fire had climbed up the hood of the Charger.
The clang sound hadn’t been the typical “bullets hitting metal” sound Widow had heard many times before. There was a deeper tone to it, like artillery shells hitting the side of a bridge. Then there was a whistling sound, and smoke rose from the engine. It was probably the radiator. Widow was surprised the engine was still running and hadn’t completely shut down or choked or even caught fire.
Widow had been trained to always keep track of his surroundings, but it was a quiet and dark city street. He had forgotten, and he was cursing himself for it now. Luckily, city streets are not empty things, not even at night. There was a long, full bike rack. Widow scrambled toward it and dove behind several mountain bikes. A bicycle isn’t the ideal hiding place to protect one from enemy fire, but twenty parked bikes come packed with a lot of steel and rubber. It wasn’t ideal, but when you thought about a car nowadays, if you left out the engine, they were all fiberglass. Which was no greater protection than thin metal.
The woman looked up over the hood and saw Widow. She jumped up and fired two rounds, and both clanged around in the metal of the parked bikes.
Widow shot out the nearest street light and then returned his aim to the woman. He waited for her to stick her head out. She didn’t move. He kept shifting his focus from above the car to underneath the car. He stayed down low, but on his feet, not on his knees. Under the pressure of a gunfight, it was natural for people to duck behind cover and drop down into a ball. But that was a bad idea because he needed to stay mobile and ready to bounce up out of cover.
He snapped his head to the right and to the left, fast. He saw that there was a short distance between himself and another parked car on the street. Looking in her direction again, he decided to make a break for it. Better not to be where she was expecting him to be.
He darted fast, staying behind the bikes, and scrambled to the parked car.
It was a Jetta, but he wasn’t sure about the model and didn’t care to look.
He got up behind the trunk and hugged it tight. He craned his head and looked back around the corner at the Dodge Charger. He could see the woman’s outline. She stood up and looked back at the bike rack, gun extended, ready to fire, but she didn’t fire. She saw that he wasn’t there.
Just then, they heard police sirens in the distance.
She looked around for him. She didn’t see him, but they could hear voices in the distance. People were coming out of the office building and trying to see what was happening.
The woman scanned for Widow one last time, and then she holstered the Sig Sauer and stood up. Widow watched her get into the Charger and drive forward twenty feet. She leaped back out and scanned around for him once again, but he stayed hidden.
She scrambled around the front of the car and pulled the passenger door open. She grabbed her partner with both hands and dragged him a few feet around the door. She hauled him up with all of her strength and a little adrenaline, Widow figured. Then she shoved his body into the seat and slammed the door. The guy was dead. She had killed him, but she was recovering his body. She wasn’t authorized to leave evidence behind. That told Widow she wasn’t working for someone who allowed room for mistakes.
She returned to the driver seat and hit the gas, heading in Widow’s direction.
He waited until the Charger’s front end was in line with the back end of the Jetta, and then he jumped up and took aim and squeezed the trigger. The whole thing didn’t last even two seconds. Widow was certain the woman had seen him. They’d made eye contact. But he wasn’t sure if she had tried to slam on the brakes or go for her Sig Sauer.
Widow fired once only—he wanted to wound, not kill. But firing in such a short win
dow of time when a sports car with a lot of horsepower is gunning by and trying to hit the driver and not killing her wasn’t easy.
He squeezed the trigger. The muzzle flashed, and the gunshot boomed. The sound echoed in the street and bounced between the buildings until it died in the sky above.
The woman slumped back and then forward, and the Charger swerved to the right and the horn blared. The car ran up onto the sidewalk and stopped.
Widow ran over to it. He jerked the driver door open, pulled her out. The police sirens were getting closer and closer. They were only blocks away now.
Blood seeped through of the woman’s blouse and covered her left shoulder and neck and chest in a wet blackness. He wasn’t sure where he had hit her, but it looked like her shoulder, which was good. He needed her alive. He needed to ask her a few questions. She was semiconscious.
He pulled the door open, pulled her to the backseat and dumped her on the back bench. She squirmed and cried out but didn’t fight him back.
He reached in and felt around where her gun had been holstered. Finding it, he jerked it out. He stepped back out and slammed the door. He tried to get into the driver seat but couldn’t fit. The woman had pulled the seat all the way forward. He reached down and racked it all the way back. Her knees in the backseat bent up with it. He dumped himself down and was amazed that the car was a stick. Then he figured that was why it had stopped on the curb so easily. She had jammed the gear into park when he shot her.
He slammed the door and tossed both guns up onto the dash. He pushed in the clutch, shoved the gear into first, hit the gas and gunned it, and then made a quick shift to second.
Within moments, he was down the street and turning onto a busy highway. He turned a corner just after he saw two sets of police lights behind him slam to a stop where he had been just moments before.
CHAPTER 10
THE WHITE DODGE CHARGER ran for another two miles and then stalled out just before Widow could pull onto the highway. He wasn’t familiar with the city he was in, but the Charger had an onboard navigation system built into the dash. He punched the button for the map on the home screen, and then he hit a special emergency button and selected the “Nearest Hospital” feature.
He had shot the woman in self-defense, but he didn’t want her to die. He still wasn’t sure what was going on. He didn’t know why they had been following him or why they had tried to take him alive, but Widow was far from dumb. He may not have been the smartest guy in the world, but dumb wasn’t his style. He knew they weren’t FBI, and he knew they didn’t intend to take him alive and keep him alive. He also knew they had been following him at least since he was in the SUV with Leon. After he had parted ways with Leon, they hadn’t continued following her. Therefore, they had been following him.
He looked back over the seat at the woman. In the streetlights that passed overhead, he could see her face clearly. Right now, she looked to be in great agony. A .44 Magnum through the shoulder was exactly that—through the shoulder. A .44 Magnum never diddled around in a person’s body. It wasn’t a stoppable bullet. It always went through someone. The only thing that could stop an unstoppable force was an immovable object. And this woman’s shoulder hadn’t been immovable. It was possible that much of it wasn’t there anymore. Widow had no idea because he hadn’t had the chance to look.
His first priority was to get away from the cops because he figured these two killers weren’t after him for something he had done. And if they weren’t after Agent Leon, then they must’ve started to follow him way back when he had met Claire Hood. Which, he could guess, meant they were after James Hood. And James Hood had possession of his six-year-old daughter, Jemma. And that concerned Widow. Because now her life was in danger.
Now that two professional killers had revealed themselves to Widow, he could safely assume that Jemma’s and James’ lives were in grave danger, and that was why James ran with her.
Widow looked back once more at the woman, bleeding to death in the backseat, and he recognized her. She had been in the family-owned diner. She had been sitting there, a few tables away from him. She was good. He hadn’t made her as a tail.
Widow said, “I’m bringing you to a hospital. Just hang on.”
He had a flawed plan. He would simply drop the car off near the emergency room and then walk away. On foot, he was good at disappearing. He knew that once the cops got hold of her, they’d try to get answers as to what the hell was going on, but she wouldn’t give any. Widow wasn’t afraid of her giving an eyewitness account of him or telling the cops she was part of a kill team tracking a runaway ex-con or that she had a boss. Widow wasn’t afraid of her talking because whoever had hired her wasn’t the kind of guy you snitch on. Widow knew that because the woman had killed her partner to achieve the mission. Once Widow had immobilized the big guy by shooting him and there was no more use out of him, she had killed him.
That was when the Charger’s engine had gone as far as it could. It started to spurt and cough and groan. Smoke burst out faster than a teapot. He veered the car over to the shoulder of a virtually deserted on-ramp and killed the engine so as not to allow it to catch fire.
He said, “Well, I guess this is as close as I get. Got a cell phone? I’ll call you an ambulance.”
He turned all the way around in his seat and looked down at her again. Blood was now everywhere—on her face, her neck. Her shirt was soaked in it. There was nothing left to prove she was a white woman. Not a hint of skin that wasn’t completely red.
She was dead. Widow didn’t need to feel for her pulse to see that. She had that lifeless expression on her face. One he’d seen a thousand times, and that was probably not an inflated number.
He reached down and checked her pockets, looking for any information. He found nothing but her cell phone. Which was a burner—a good quality iPhone burner, but a burner nonetheless. It didn’t have a passcode on it, which meant she had either been sloppy or hadn’t had the chance to lock it yet. Both scenarios seemed plausible to Widow. They had been good, but sloppy. And really, this wasn’t a testament to how bad they were. The truth was that the big guy had been the sloppy one. He had carried that Colt Anaconda, a dead giveaway. And then he had let himself get taken down. The woman alone would’ve been a better opponent. If she had come on to Widow and made it seem natural, he might’ve fallen for it, for a while. But that hadn’t been the case. And now they were both dead, and the only answers Widow had—were the easy ones.
He sifted through her phone for any information that might help him. Outside the Charger, cars passed, entering the highway. He could see the silhouettes of the occupants of each car look over at the Charger, but no one could see details of his face, and so far, no one had decided to stop and help. Good Samaritans were few and far between these days, which was good for Widow. He wasn’t going to harm an innocent civilian, not even to protect his own identity.
He continued to search through the phone and found two things of interest. The first was a photograph of James Hood. Which only confirmed what he had suspected—they were after Hood. The second thing of interest was actually two separate things—phone numbers. Only two numbers had been both called and received by her phone. He slipped the phone into his pocket. Then he checked the big guy. He found six more .44 Magnum bullets and another burner phone. His was a cheaper one. It was one of those old flip Nokias. There was nothing of interest in it. It looked as if he hadn’t made or received a single call on it.
One thing the big guy had that the woman hadn’t was a wallet. Widow checked it and found over a hundred bucks in cash money and an Ohio driver’s license. He really hadn’t been the best money could buy. But he was a big guy, so Widow figured he must’ve been the muscle. Maybe he was used for heavy lifting and the intimidation factor.
The guy’s real name had been Francis—Francis Mahoney. Which Widow heard himself pronounce in his head as MaHONEY. That made him smile. Francis MaHONEY. But Widow was certain the big guy had told everyone hi
s name was Frank and not Francis. Too bad no one would call him either anymore.
Widow left the wallet and took the money. He took the .44 Magnum and the Sig Sauer, which turned out to be a Sig Sauer P227, a good and reliable weapon.
Widow stepped out of the car and looked both ways for oncoming cars or any other witnesses. Three cars were coming up the ramp and onto the highway. Widow turned casually, like he was going to look under the hood, and faced away so they couldn’t see his face.
The cars passed.
He turned and looked back down the on-ramp. No one was coming. No headlights as far as he could see.
He went back to the driver side door and opened it. He popped the trunk and went back to inspect it. Once there, he stopped cold. There were two black body bags. They looked like the kind he’d seen in Naval hospital morgues. Only these weren’t stamped with any official labels as to whose property they were.
Not much riled Widow anymore because he had been all over the world on all seven continents—if you could count a cold three months in Antarctica investigating the crew of a nuclear submarine, where he had only stepped on land once. He had seen all kinds of atrocities man was capable of. He had experienced the worst kinds of treason and betrayal from being undercover with NCIS, but this was more unsettling than a lot of those things. Because the body bags were of two sizes. One adult. One child size.
There was one for James Hood, and there was one for Jemma Hood.
CHAPTER 11
WIDOW REALIZED he had had James Hood all wrong. Hood wasn’t trying to abduct his daughter. He was trying to rescue her. Whatever he had gotten involved in, or whoever he’d gotten involved with, Widow could see the scenario now. Claire had said her son wasn’t a bad guy. She had said he’d just been mixed up with the wrong people.
