Outlaws by Matt Rogers (phonics books TXT) 📕

discreetly switching tabs. Hiding the list of transfers.

‘What was that?’ she said.

‘Hidden accounts,’ he said. ‘I’m working on the money situation.’

‘You don’t have to hide it from me.’

‘I just don’t want you to know too much,’ he said. ‘For your own safety. If this all goes bad. Maybe you could claim obliviousness if they take us in, you know?’

‘How could it go bad?’ she asked. ‘We just stick to your strategy. Order meal delivery and get them to leave it at the door each time. Order new clothes online. Order everything online. No one will see our face for as long as we need. You explained all this to me already. How the way society is set up nowadays makes it easier to vanish. Which is, you know, paradoxical, because of surveillance.’

She was saying too much — they both knew it.

The more silence she could fill, the longer it’d be until she had to ask, Why are you so concerned? What went wrong?

Notifications chimed from the other browser tab — five separate pings, only a couple of seconds apart.

Slater knew he couldn’t hide it from her any longer.

He tapped back across.

$1.00 — Where you were

$1.00 — Dropped

$1.00 — The first time

$1.00 — We met.

$1.00 — Three hours.

She read the descriptions.

She went silent.

Thinking.

After a spell she said, ‘These are your private accounts. The ones the government don’t have access to.’

Slater nodded. ‘That’s what I thought.’

She read the words, over and over again. ‘You don’t have to obey them.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid I do.’

60

Dawn also broke over the neighbourhood of Great Kills in Staten Island.

It was a glorious morning — cool and crisp and sunny — and the boats were out in the harbour. Small hobbyist yachts began drifting away from their moorings as the sun came up, filling a cloudless sky. Four blocks in from the shore, a leafy residential street home to several swanky apartment buildings bristled with life. White-collar workers stepped outside and sauntered down to ground level, steaming thermoses of coffee in their hands. Middle-class mothers wheeled prams down the wide sidewalks, and elderly residents led their dogs to Great Kills Park or trotted them toward the various marinas dotting the harbour for their morning sun and maybe a swim.

When the initial rush of activity faded to a slow crawl, a plain black sedan pulled up against the kerb below one of the apartment buildings. Its windows were tinted, but the driver’s window rolled down a crack, providing whoever was inside with a clear view across the street. There the car waited, its driver clearly surveilling the opposite apartment complex, keeping his gaze firmly fixed on the terraced balconies and the lobby entranceway.

Biding his time.

Watching.

Waiting.

Patient.

It took three minutes for two men to step out of the narrow laneway on the sedan’s side of the street. They’d come from the building the sedan was resting beside. They wore expensive black windbreakers and khaki pants and their hair was buzzed all the way down to the scalp. They didn’t gel with the quiet suburbia of Great Kills, but they didn’t need to. They were spending most of the time behind closed doors, out of sight and out of mind.

Now they moved with practiced efficiency. If they had to be seen in public, they wished to be seen for as little time as possible. Best to use their training to get this over and done with in seconds, whether it was hostile or not. They both kept a hand under their windbreakers, and there was no mistaking what they were clutching. They swarmed the sedan with deceptive speed, one man rounding to the driver’s side, the other darting to the rear passenger seat, affording him a potential angle on anyone in the rear seats as well as a clean line of sight diagonally across to the driver.

Excellent execution.

The man by the driver’s side pulled his Sig Sauer automatic handgun and tapped the barrel twice on the driver’s window.

It came down instantly.

There wasn’t a moment’s hesitation by either man. They were both in operational mode, supremely focused on neutralising the threat, ready to do whatever it took.

The driver was a plain pudgy guy in his middle-fifties with a horrific comb-over and a pair of ridiculous sunglasses covering his eyes. There was no one else in the car — at least, not in the passenger or rear seats.

The driver mumbled something.

The guy by the driver’s side ducked down, folding at the waist. Maybe to say, Sir, please leave the area. Don’t loiter here.

He didn’t get the chance.

King came sprinting out of the same laneway the two tier-one boys had come from, a two-hundred and twenty pound freight train of momentum, and he was on them before either had the chance to realise what was happening. They were expertly trained, but they weren’t inhuman. They could only focus on one thing at a time, no matter how sharp that focus was. The driver was an unknown threat, in the process of mumbling something that may or may not relate to the job they were on, so the guy on the driver’s side had his line of sight ruined as he leant in through the open window to hear the man better.

King barrelled straight for the guy on the rear passenger side and grabbed him by the back of his head with a giant palm and threw it forward into the tinted window hard enough to splinter a spider-web of cracks across the glass. It would have broken his nose and knocked him clean out simultaneously, so King disregarded a follow-up shot and took advantage of the fact that he hadn’t slowed down one bit. The sedan was low to the ground and King was six-foot-three and incredibly athletic, so all he had to do was leap off both feet and momentum did the rest. He slid along the roof on his hip and when the same momentum launched him off the other side he came down on top of the guy still