Page 24 of Dirty Beasts: Chance

“Oh, I guess that makes sense. I suppose I sort of assumed if you got shot, you got out.”

He shrugs. “Nope. Only if the injury makes it so you can’t go back to work, basically.” He looks at me, smirking. “You wanna know, don’t you?”

I shrug. “Not if talking about it is going to bring up bad memories.”

“Nah,” he says. “First time I got hit, I was…fifteen? Sixteen? Just a minor graze, really. Ricochet hit my arm during a dumbfuck shoot-out with some dicks from a rival gang. I didn’t even have a gun at the time.” He shows me his bicep, the uninjured one, and I can see a faint white line under the ink of the tattoo. “First tour in Iraq, took a glancing round across the thigh. That one wasn’t fun. We were cut off from our transport, pinned down—a bad situation. Some asshole just got an angle on me. Bled like a motherfucker and hurt like a motherfucker, but wasn’t actually all that bad. Worst one was when I was a Recon. Took a round right to the shoulder.” He snorts. “In the movies, they make that seem like the quote-unquotebestplace to get shot, like you get shot in the shoulder, oh well, I’m a tough badass, I can still run around and shoot assault rifles one-handed from the hip and pull myself up the side of a flying helicopter and it’ll just look all bloody and cool but really, it’s fine.”

I laugh. “I’m guessing it’s not like that.”

He snorts. “Yeah, no. You know what’s in the shoulder? Muscle. You know what happens when you get a hole in your muscle? It doesn’t fuckin’ work. You take a round to the shoulder, that shoulder, shit, that whole arm is fucked. Useless. No matter how fuckin’ tough you are, you ain’t doin’ a goddamn pull-up. Not for weeks, at least. Here’s the thing—there is nogoodplace to get shot. The whole body is made up of vital, important shit, and if you get shot, it’s gonna hurt and that part is not gonna work right until it heals. And even then, after it’s healed, it may not be exactly the same. My shoulder wound was pretty bad, because the round hit bone, which meant I needed surgery, and I was out of commission for a couple months. I like Vegas because it doesn’t rain here much, and when there’s rain, that bone fuckin’ hurts.” He shrugs. “That said, when you’re on an op and people are depending on you, you do what you gotta do, even if it hurts like a fuckin’ abomination. You suck it up and you get the job done.”

A doctor comes in, then. She’s young, pretty, soft-spoken, and seems a little unnerved by Chance. She applies a local anesthetic and sews him up in short order, gives him basic care instructions, and we’re on our way.

Halfway across the parking lot, I notice a change in Chance. He slows, his brow furrowing, and he starts scanning the parking lot around us.

I follow his gaze. “What?”

He halts a few feet away from our SUV, pivoting, scanning. “Dunno. Bad feeling.” He glances at me. “Unlock the doors for me.”

I do so, the light flashing briefly, the horn blipping.

Immediately, there’s a squealing of tires from behind us, and Chance shoves me at the SUV, pushing me into a hobbling jog, his body behind me—sheltering me. “RUN!”

I do my best, which is more of a hopping and skipping motion than a real run, but it covers more distance faster than just hobbling.

POP-POP-POP!

Something buzzes past me with the sound of an angry bee inside my ear, and then the back windshield of the car to my left explodes in a spiderweb of shattering glass, a single round hole at the center of the spiderwebbing, and then the rear left quarter panel of our SUV is dented with another pocked almost-hole.

Chance yanks open the nearest door, the back left, and bodily hurls me in and onto the bench. I land on my belly, my cane thumping to the footwell. Before I’m even fully prone, Chance is in the driver’s seat, the engine roaring to life, and we’re in motion. My door isn’t even closed—I scramble in, twist on the seat, and slam the door closed. There’s a loudthunk, and the rear glass is pocked by a bullet, but it doesn’t even spiderweb, much less shatter. Another round impacts, a third, but the glass only receives two more pocks.

“Bulletproof glass?” I ask.

“And armored panels,” he responds.

“No shit.” I scramble, with supremely awkward difficulty, into the front passenger seat. “Fancy. So, who’s shooting at us?”

He snorts. “The Pope, Annika. Who you think?”

I feel surprisingly calm, considering we were just shot at. “I think I was nearly hit,” I tell him.

“What’d it sound like?” he asks, slamming the brakes and hauling the wheel around for a hard right, then gunning it—the back end slides too far, skidding and stuttering in an arc before he rights it.

“What’d what sound like?” I click my seat belt into place and grab the oh-shit handle as he yanks us around another hard turn, this one a left followed by a pedal-to-the-metal straightaway into another hard right.

“The round when it went past you. You said you thought you almost got hit.”

“Like a really big, really pissed-off hornet,” I answer.

He cranks us around another turn. “Yeah, that was pretty close, then.”

“It sounds different?”

“Yeah,” he says. “If it sounds like a snap, it’s not too close, but if it’s a hum, like a big-ass hornet, yeah, that’s close.”

He checks the rearview mirror, sucks his teeth in irritation, which I assume means they’re still behind us; I glance back and see an older model pickup a car length or so behind us. It’s a truck I recognize as belonging to Alvin.

“Yeah, that’s Alvin all right,” I say. “I’d recognize his truck anywhere.”