Burning Bright (Peter Ash #2)(36)

“Gimme your ID number.”

Peter gave him the first four digits of his Social.

“That’s it,” said the man. He began to count out hundreds, five groups of ten and one group of five. He slid the larger sum into a paper envelope, pushed it through the slot in the glass, then held up the five C-notes. “Five hundred for the convenience fee,” he said, folded the bills and stuffed them into his pocket. He passed over three plastic cards in paper sleeves with the name Peter Smith embossed on the plastic. “Pre-paid credit cards,” he said. “I took the liberty of setting your PIN number. It’s the same as the ID number you gave me. Check the card balances in the reader.”

He pointed at the card reader on Peter’s side of the counter. Peter swiped each card, punched in the PIN, and checked the balance. He was loaded.

“Sign here,” said the man. Peter scrawled something unintelligible on the form and slid it back through the slot. “Pleasure doing business with you, Mr. Smith.”

“Thanks for staying open. You’re a lifesaver.”

The man’s eyes flickered with the only evidence of emotion he’d yet shown. “My pleasure.”

As the locks slammed shut on the door behind him, Peter limped across the shining wet blacktop toward the minivan, June beside him. He was carrying over twenty thousand dollars in his pocket. The thought occurred to him at the same moment a two-door sedan pulled up, an older piece-of-shit Dodge, dark blue or black with cracked plastic fenders. It blocked the path to the minivan.

The doors popped open and two men got out, trailing pot smoke and the smell of spilled beer. Long hair and armloads of tattoos, black short-sleeved T-shirts in the cool evening rain.

“Give me what you got,” the man on the passenger side said, walking out to meet them. He had a three-day beard and the whites of his eyes showed overbright under the streetlight. He held a pistol down at his side. “Give it now or I hurt you bad.”

“I hope you stole that car,” said Peter. “There are a whole bunch of security cameras covering this parking lot.”

The tattooed man walked closer, raising his pistol. It was in his right hand. “Just gimme the money, assface.”

His dumb smirk told Peter the cameras had already been turned off by the nice man inside the Fast Money outlet, who had almost certainly set up the after-hours robbery. He’d chosen the PIN on the cash cards, too.

Peter shook his head. The whole thing just made him tired.

“You want to die?” the tattooed man asked, closing in. The ink on his arms looked like smears in the rainy night. He held the gun sideways like a television gangster, stiff-armed and one-handed, right at eye level. Ten feet away, now five, now two. The driver wasn’t showing a weapon.

Peter sighed. “June, get behind me.”

It was an amateur mistake, thinking it was easier to shoot a man the closer you got to him, and easier still if you put the gun right to his head. Humans had evolved to kill each other with rocks and clubs, their brains were wired to think in those terms. With an antelope femur, closer was better.

But firearms didn’t operate like that. From ten meters, a trained shooter had plenty of time to track and fire at a moving target. The target’s arc of movement would be relatively small across his field of fire, and he’d retain total control of the weapon.

From two meters, it got harder. The arc of movement was larger and the time more compressed, but it was plenty doable.

From two feet, the shooter had to be planning to fire, committed, already depressing the trigger. Because now his weapon was within reach, and the target might move faster than the shooter’s ability to adjust his aim.

Peter moved fast.

He snapped his hand up, grabbing the pistol body and shoving the muzzle sideways to keep his body and June’s from the line of fire. Then he twisted the gun a half turn counterclockwise, breaking the tattooed wrist of the idiot who hadn’t begun to consider that Peter might not be scared to death.

The pistol fell to the asphalt.

The tattooed man howled and clutched his wrist.

Peter kicked the pistol sideways, hit the man hard with his elbow on the side of his head, then punched down on the side of his tattooed neck as he fell into a boneless sprawl.

June scooped up the gun at the edge of Peter’s vision as he eyeballed the getaway driver, motionless behind the open door of the shitbox Dodge. “We done here?”

“Shit.” The driver was shaking his head, disgusted. But he had more sense than his partner, because he slid back into the car, threw it into reverse, and got the hell out of there, leaving the other man heaped on the worn wet asphalt.

Peter turned to look at June. She lowered the gun back down to her side, her finger still on the trigger. She took a deep breath, then let it out.

“You okay?” he asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Not everyone would have picked up that gun,” he said.

Her eyes gleamed in the sodium lights. “I had an interesting childhood.”

She looked like she might be having fun.

Jesus Christ, she was something else.





16





JUNE



The hospital was in Eugene’s sister city, Springfield. It was a big modern building, brick and glass and lit up like a UFO had landed in the parking lot.