Page 92 of Chad's Chase

SIXTEEN

I shall possess within the veil…

Taking quick action, Chad shoved my head down, forcing me off the seat and to the floor.

“Stay down, baby.” He flipped open the glove compartment, took out a .44 Magnum Desert Eagle and thrust it into my hand.

Shifting over back to his side of the car, he reached under his car seat and came out with another handgun. Setting the gun on his tensed thigh, he jerked the gear into drive just as another bullet slapped into the back window, only to find itself stuck in the impenetrable glass, causing a spider’s web of cracks.

“You bulletproofed your car?” I asked over the rush and race.

“I bulletproof everything.”

Another explosion. But there was no impact on the car. A miss.

“How about your brain and heart? Bulletproof those, too?”

I got a fusillade of shots for an answer.

The car suddenly jerked to a sharp halt as Chad stomped his foot to the break, then made a swift, tire-screaming U-turn.

“Wha-what the hell are you doing?!” I shouted from down below. “This is a one-way street!”

“Yeah,” Chad muttered, foot hard on the pedal. “Makes it easier for me to kill the stupid motherfucker who’s shooting at us in broad fucking daylight.”

I straightened up from the ground and plopped my ass back onto the car seat, readying the Desert Eagle Chad handed me, finger on the trigger.

“What the fuck, Jhay?” he barked at me, his tone a mixture of fury and frustration. “I said stay down.”

I scoffed, cocking my hand with the gun on the dashboard. Oh, so he could U-turn on a one-way street like a freaking madman, yet I was supposed to stay down? “I’m trained to kill. I’m not gonna crouch down and hide in a car like some screamy, witless blonde.”

He speared me an exasperated glare but didn’t ease up on the gas as he sped straight ahead in the opposite direction of the one-way street. Car horns honked loudly, idiotic drivers yelled with angry red faces, and sensible drivers swerved their cars aside to get the hell out of the way.

A tinted, pitch-black Escalade slammed to a screeching halt as Chad raced toward it. And there were our shooters.

The Escalade tried to make a quick U-turn, but with all the other cars trying to escape getting hit by the stark raving R8 tearing up the one-way, the Escalade didn’t have enough space or grace to successfully make the turn.

Moving fast, I powered down my window, aimed at their windshield and fired, then another immediately, then another, never missing.

Unlike Chad’s car, their Escalade wasn’t bulletproofed, so the three successive rounds of shots shattered the windshield to bits and pieces, leaving their heads wide open.

Both the driver and passenger doors on the Escalade flew open, and two men in black jumped out and started runningawayfrom us instead of firing at us.

“Fucking amateurs,” Chad muttered.

Hitting the brakes, he maneuvered the gear in park. “You take the driver, I take the passenger,” he ordered, wrenching his door open to get out.

“Why do I get the driver?” I argued. “Because the passenger is bigger?”

Chad frowned at me like I was a galling mental case. “Okay, Tweety Byrd. Take the fucking passenger.”

I grinned. “Spasibo.”

We hopped out and charged forward, but had to do a criss-cross when we got to the front of the car because the driver was on my side, and the passenger was on Chad’s side, so it would have been easier if we’d done what Chad suggested…but, of course, I had to be a stubborn nut.

The driver was a big sonuvabitch, a white-skinned Barnie, which meant he was intimidating, but slow and unwieldy. The fucker had a rifle in his hand, yet he was running like an overused pussy. Who were these clowns, though?

Instead of chasing the dummy, I steadily lowered down to one knee, aimed, then blasted him through the back of his tree trunk thigh. Like a heavy load of lumber, he tumbled to the ground with a great shout. Monumentally pissed at being shot, he turned and aimed his rifle at me, but I was quicker on the trigger as I fired again and blew a bullet through the bicep of his arm holding the rifle. Like a pregnant woman grinding her teeth through contractions, he squeezed his big bug eyes shut and dropped his weapon.