Page 35 of Duke
“What would faze you?” she asked.
I thought for a moment. “Me and my unit, back when I was with Delta Force, we were pinned down, surrounded, outnumbered, and running out of ammo. Andthenthe fuckers went and tried to crash a goddamn helicopter into the location where we were hunkered down. Well, they didn’ttryto, theydid. Only the L-T saw it coming, so we had to make a break for it.” I hesitated, realizing she probably wouldn’t want to hear the rest of that particular story, “That wasn’t fun. Or, the time the helo I was in got shot down over enemy territory, and me and four other guys had to fight our way out. That was also severely lacking in chill.”
Temple stared at me. “That all really happened to you?”
I shrugged. “Well, yeah. Why?”
“And you survived it all?”
I laughed. “Clearly, since I’m standing here looking all sexy and shit.” I tapped her nose. “Babe, I grew up on the streets running in gangs. First time I saw a dude get shot I wasn’t even old enough to jerk off. Going into the Army just meant I got three squares a day and gotpaidto do gnarly shit, instead of risking arrest for just trying to scrape by.”
Her expression went soft. “You were homeless?”
I felt my walls wanting to slam up, my expression tightening, my natural tendency to tell her to fuck off with her questions and sympathy rising up inside me. “Something like that, yeah.” That was as nice an answer to that question as she was gonna get.
I slipped my hand over her eyes. “We gotta go. I hear the fuzz.”
It was long past time for the cops to get here, actually. The first shot had been five minutes ago, although it felt more like twenty—the shootout in the stairwell had only taken two or three minutes at most, despite how it had felt.
“Fuzz?”
“Cops,” I explained. “And I ain’t stickin’ around for questions.”
I led her down the first flight of stairs, guided her around the first dead guy, lifted her over the second, and skirted close against the wall to avoid the third.
“Something smells funny,” she remarked, hands outstretched, as if I’d let her run into a wall or something.
“That’s the smell of death, princess. Or, more accurately, the smell of a gut shot.”
“Why does a gut shot smell so bad?”
I debated on the best way of putting it. “Um…you open up the belly, what’s inside? Guts, right? Perforate those with slugs, well…you’re in for a bit of a stench.”
She gagged. “Oh. I’m sorry I asked.” We made it down another flight, away from the corpses, before I uncovered her eyes. “How many were there?”
“Three,” I said. “Well, four, including the guy upstairs.”
“Is that all of them, you think?”
“Of this group, probably.”
“How many are there, like, total?”
I shrugged. “No clue. Countless, would be my guess. He doesn’t pay them all directly, like, on a payroll. They live their lives, run their product, and keep their cut of the profits. Situation like this, they’ll get a call from one of Cain’s lieutenants giving ‘em instructions with a promise of a reward if they catch me. So it’s not like he has this army of mercenaries sitting around waiting to his bidding, not like that at all. This is a drugs and guns and prostitution ring, these guys are mostly just your average criminals who happen to work on his behalf.” I gestured back up the stairs. “The more of those guys I take out, though, the more pissed Cain is gonna get. Eventually he’s gonna send some of his real-deal trained mercenaries, ex-Spetznaz and KSK and whatever. That’s when this shit is really gonna get fun.”
“We must have drastically different notions of fun, Duke,” Temple said. “My idea of fun is spending an afternoon shopping on Rodeo Drive, or having a long brunch with my girlfriends. Running for my life and getting shot at isnotfun.”
I paused at the entrance of the building, peering outside. It looked safe, so I grabbed the door handle, but Temple stopped me.
“Um, are you going out there like that?” she asked.
I stared at her. “Like what?”
She gestured at my shoulder holsters. “The guns? Isn’t it…a little obvious? I mean, the police take one look at you, think, huh, we just got a call about a shooting,and that guy is wearing guns right out in the open, so—”
“Okay, okay, I get your point,” I cut in. “Hold on a second.”
I jogged back up the stairs to where the three corpses were; the first guy I’d shot had been a single round to the forehead, and he’d been wearing a windbreaker, which hopefully wasn’t too messy. I found the guy in question, head hanging backward off of a stair tread, dripping nasty on the step below. And bingo, his windbreaker was brain-matter free, thank god. I stripped him of it, slid the duffel off my shoulders, and shrugged into the jacket—the dead guy was a bit smaller than me, so it was a tight fit but it disguised the holsters. I snagged the duffel and hustled back downstairs.