A Gambling Man by David Baldacci (ebook audio reader .txt) 📕

The little man seemed to want to say something, but the words stalled in his throat. He just shrugged, lit a half-smoked cigarillo, and contemplated the dirt for a few moments.

“Take the car,” said Archer. “And we can walk to where we’re going.”

The muzzle of the cigarillo came up and pointed in Archer’s direction; like the Remington, it seemed a direct threat to his personal well-being.

Archer added, “We don’t know you from Adam. You’ll be long gone before we reach a telephone box or a cop. Why make two bodies if you don’t have to? Stealing a car is one thing. The other is something else. The gas chamber at San Quentin is a shitty way to kick it.”

Smoke curled off the end of the cigarillo and lifted to the sky like a fragment of a memory gone to Heaven. Archer looked up at the sky, and when his gaze came back down, the little man was staring dead at him.

“No can do, pal. I never did like loose ends.”

Archer felt his adrenaline actually ease for some reason. This unusual physiological reaction in the face of danger came from his fighting in the war. If you wanted to live, you had to remain calm. He moved to his left, drawing the attention and angle of attack of the thugs.

“Don’t try to run,” said the little man. “It won’t matter and you’ll just embarrass yourself, mac.”

“I don’t remember asking you for your opinion,” said Archer. “And just so you know, the outer killing range on a sawed-off is about six feet. I’m double that.” He eyed the .45. “And in the dark, that revolver is bumping up against the wall of accuracy at ten feet.”

He took a long stride backward. “And now I’m at fifteen feet.”

“Son, don’t end your time looking like a fool,” said the little man somberly. “Have some self-respect and let’s get this over with nice and clean.”

Archer moved in a slow curve, and they curved with him.

Sawed-off, perhaps sensing a loss of control of the situation, took a few quick strides forward.

“Still not enough,” said Archer. “The buckshot will sting but it won’t kill.” He didn’t really believe this, but then he didn’t have to.

Now .45 moved forward, joining his twin along the line of attack. The little man, sensing the end coming, took a step back, burned off the remnants of his smoke, and dropped it to the dirt. The orange embers winked dead in the darkness like a miniature sun burrowing into the horizon.

“Now just hold still,” said .45, his voice surprisingly high-pitched for such a big larynx. He took aim with the revolver, but Archer could see his dominant arm shaking like a twig in a breeze; .45 clearly wanted to be big and tough but maybe he was just big.

Archer kept moving for two more strides, turning the men’s attention even more fully to him.

What they hadn’t foreseen was that his movements had put their backs to Callahan. They seemed to have forgotten all about the woman. That was about to change, but not exactly in the way Archer intended.

Callahan fired and her .38’s round hit Sawed-off in the right shoulder blade. He grunted once as the slug penetrated first skin, then tendon, then severed bone and plowed right through an intersection of blood vessels.

He groped around, pawing with his free hand at the entry wound, and screaming in pain. His hat came off and landed in the pool of blood now avalanching from him, for the shot had split a fat artery right in two. Snot blew out of his nose in his rage and fear and pain. He threw up whatever he’d last eaten and drunk, fouling the air. A urine stain emerged around his zipper as the shock of the round’s hitting him overcame his ability to hold this bodily function in check.

His fingers lost their strength, and the Remington hit the hard dirt. The impact with the ground must have sprung its filed-down hair triggers, because the twin barrels of the sawed-off boomed sideways and caught .45 at both ankles with hundreds of pebbles of angry buckshot at a distance of about seven inches, severing that part of his body as neat as a bone saw and miraculously leaving him upright. At that range, the sawed-off wasn’t a gun, it was a bomb.

The big man looked down and saw that his black wingtips, and the feet in them, were resting next to him, instead of under him. He was suddenly three inches shorter and standing on twin shattered bone tips, and his mind didn’t seem able to cope with this because he made no sound. He toppled sideways but fired his gun, maybe as a knee-jerk reaction.

He killed a eucalyptus tree next to Archer.

.45 commenced dying as he lay on the ground probably not knowing who or what had killed him. Archer watched as the man turned to him, his hemorrhaging eye an inch above the forest floor. The man blinked once, then shock took over. He convulsed once, then again, and the eye closed and the man died quick and silent.

Archer knew that pulling the trigger and killing a man was easy. What was hard was everything leading up to that point. And everything coming after it.

Archer turned to Sawed-off. He, too, had left this life in a dark, burgundy spread of blood that the dirt did not seem to want, because it lay on top of the ground like water in a pool.

“Don’t,” the voice barked out.

Archer turned to see Callahan now pointing her Smith & Wesson at the little man, who, dazed by the sudden elimination of his comrades, had pulled a .22 Derringer from his waistcoat and was pointing it around, though Archer could tell the fellow had no firm idea of an actual target.

“Don’t do it,” Callahan said. Her voice was assured, in command, with an ice-in-the-veins sort of rhythm. It was like a dagger