Page 174 of The 6:20 Man

Devine glanced at Montgomery, but didn’t respond.

Cowl shook his head, grinning. “You got nothing to deal with and you’re sure as hell not getting a dime from me. That’s what this is about, right? You shaking me down? Or trying to get a confession? Well, forget it.”

“Then I guess we’ll be going,” said Devine.

Cowl shook his head. “Oh no, that’s not how this is ending.”

Four men edged from the shadows.

Karl Hancock eyed Devine, his face still battered from being hit with a car tire. He had his pistol out. Two other men had shotguns. The fourth man held an MP5. They had brought a howitzer to a knife fight. But that was okay. Devine didn’t have a knife.

Cowl said, “Instead of waiting for you to try and make trouble, we decided to do a preemptive move. You saved us from chasing you down by coming here.”

Devine said, “There’s an army of people waiting right downstairs. If we don’t show, they come up.”

Hancock said, “There’s no one down there. I’m having the whole block monitored. You came here because you thought you could roll Cowl over. Well, you were wrong.”

Cowl said, “I’ve been playing this game a long time. I’ve seen it all. And now, so will you.”

“Okay, Devine,” said Hancock. “You and the lady are going to get jacked. Taken to a really, really bad section of the Bronx, robbed and killed, and your bodies dumped in an alleyway for NYPD to find and lots of forensic evidence that a particularly violent gang did the honors. And the cops will also find evidence tying you to Chilton’s murder. He was in love with the lady here, and you cut him out. You and he previously fought over another chick. He tried to get the lady back, and you decided to end it and put him in the pool to try and implicate poor Mr. Cowl here. That was easy enough to do since the lady here has a key to the place and she told the staff to leave. We know you met up with Chilton the night of his death outside the place where his grandfather lives. You made arrangements for him to meet you at Mr. Cowl’s home. And he did. And you killed him. All while Mr. Cowl wasn’t even in town.”

Devine wasn’t listening to any of this because it didn’t matter. He was focused on the business of combat. In his mind the dimensions of the room shrank down into a close-quarters battle zone.

The four men became numbers in his head. Their positions, the accuracy and potency of their weaponry, their sight lines, the obstacles to getting away, the issue of having Montgomery with him, the proximity and possible use of Brad Cowl were also assigned numbers in his brain. The MP5 he could see was on two-shot selector, not full auto. Shotguns were side by side, not pump action, so twin barrels and two rounds each. Hancock had his Glock, with a standard magazine. Cowl was four feet away, drink in hand, no weapon that he could see. Shooting angles and obstructions thereto were observed and dialed into his combat brain. Possible scenarios were spit out. None of them were good. But they never were.

His battle plan now set, it was time to play a game that was not in any way a game at all. Cowl might be really good at making money illegally. But, courtesy of the United States Army, Devine was maybe one of the absolute best at what was about to go down.

Three . . . two . . . one.