The Drifter (Peter Ash #1)(26)

Then the flat slap of a round punching through forty-year-old truck glass, the asshole shooting Peter’s truck, and the thunk thunk thunk of punctured sheet metal right in front of him.

It’s one thing to shoot at a guy and another thing entirely to shoot a guy’s truck. Peter looked at the cracks spiderwebbed around the ragged hole in his window, listened to holes being punched in the mahogany box and the driver’s-side door, the door he’d scoured every junkyard in southern California to find, and how the hell did Mingus get on the roof of the truck?

Peter surely must have pissed off somebody, to get a shooter out here so fast.

Thinking all of this while he strode to the back of the truck and peered around the edge of the mahogany box. Lifted the .45 in a two-handed grip, left forefinger on the trigger. Pistol butt solid in the palm of his right hand, shoulder braced, knees slightly bent. Arms strong, line up the notch with the reticule, take a breath, exhale, and squeeeeeze.

The gun bucked in his hand. The man with the AK dropped to the blacktop.

The sedan lurched forward, squealing its tires, the rear door slamming closed with the sudden motion. It was an eighties Chevy Impala, jacked up high, with gleaming chrome rims. The light was dim, but Peter just caught the plate number. He put a round through the rear windshield and the rear passenger quarter-panel, aiming for the tire, then held his fire as Mingus leaped off the roof of the truck and hauled ass down the street after the car, a ferocious orange blur disappearing into the night.

The dog had heart, there was no denying it.

Peter walked to the fallen man and kicked the AK away, but it was clear already from the crumpled way he had fallen that the man was dead. Peter rolled the man fully to his back and saw the red hole in the center of his forehead.

Just like a paper target at the firing range.

But paper targets didn’t fall down.

Didn’t erupt in a pool of blood on the cracked asphalt.

Paper targets didn’t die.

He looked around for another car, a spotter, anyone. But there was nobody else. The neighbors had gone to ground, turned out their lights. It wasn’t their first neighborhood shooting.

Peter sighed.

The dead man had dark skin, late teens or early twenties. His face without lines of care or woe.

Peter had never seen him before.

A stranger had tried to kill him.

Just like old times.

Peter found his shell casings in a pothole big enough to swallow a Honda. He picked up the brass, put the .45 in his coat pocket, and set out after the dog at a fast jog.

He hadn’t known the shooter. Which meant that someone had sent him.

Only two candidates came to mind.

The scarred man in the black SUV. And Lewis.





13



The gun banged against his hip as he ran.

The gun was a problem. In addition to the fact that it was annoying, the ballistics would connect him to the dead man in the Bulls jacket. Peter knew from long experience how slowly the wheels of government turned, and how finely a man could get ground up beneath them.

The white static couldn’t handle Peter getting locked up.

Not for an hour, let alone overnight.

It didn’t matter that he had killed the man in self-defense. The gun wasn’t legal, he had no permit for it. If they didn’t get him for the killing, they’d get him for the gun. And all the while, the man with the scars prowled around Dinah’s house and Lewis’s goons lay awake at night wondering how much money she had.

It wasn’t just the white static.

Peter had shit to do.

Someone had sent that kid with the AK. Peter needed to know who.

Five blocks from the shooting, he ducked down an alley to eject the remaining rounds, wiping his fingerprints from each with his shirttail, then dropping them through the sewer grate.

On the next block he did the same with the clip, and on the next block, the slide, and on the block after that, the frame.

He stopped to wet his hands with the dew on an unmowed lawn, and rubbed them together to help clean off the gunshot residue. He didn’t know if it would help if they wanted to test him, but maybe it would. He shook off the water and wiped them dry on his socks. He’d worn those socks for three days now. He wasn’t worried about gunshot residue.

He ran for another hour, looking for a big ugly orange dog. His breath came easily as he methodically quartered the neighborhood, waving coolly at the patrol cars when they roared by. They didn’t stop to ask him questions.

He didn’t find Mingus. He tried not to worry about the dog. He told himself Mingus was the kind of animal who could find his way home.

He was more worried about the Chevy Impala sedan with bullet holes in the rear windshield and quarter-panel.

And the black SUV driven by a man with scars on his cheeks.

And Lewis and Nino and Ray.

And Dinah, with a man watching her house, and four hundred thousand dollars in a paper bag tied up with string.

Peter really didn’t want to get locked up.

But if he went back to his truck, maybe he could learn something.

—

The police had set up a perimeter. Yellow plastic tape stretched around trees and lampposts and knockdown sawhorses. It contained the dead shooter, the intersection, and part of Jimmy’s street with half a dozen shot-up cars and Peter’s perforated truck.

Uniformed policemen and other crime-scene people wandered around in the weird glare of portable lights. A few neighborhood onlookers stood in whispering knots on the sidewalk.