Breacher (Tom Keeler Book 2) by Jack Lively (reading well TXT) 📕

I said, “Rebirth. Renewal. The cycle of life.”

Mustache said, “Well I don’t know about that.” He pulled a straight-backed wood chair from a desk in the corner and placed it in the center of the room. “You’re invited to sit. And let’s see some ID.”

I said, “It isn’t going to go down like that.”

The guy with the gun sniggered. “Oh yeah? How’s it going down?”

I spread my hands open and spoke in a quiet and reasonable tone. I had in mind something like the emotional tone of a statement of terms and conditions. I said, “We are at a juncture right here. A key moment in the cycle of your lives. Right now, I’m more curious than interested. Curiosity is temporary, it speaks of a fleeting attention that isn’t yet in the realm of interest. Broadly speaking, it can still go two ways. Either I’m interested in you, or I’m not. If I’m, very bad for you. If I’m not, much better for you. That’s my intuition at the moment, not knowing much about you. I have to tell you that I’m leaning on being interested. But you tell me. Should I be?”

The guy with the AR-15 was confused. “Should you be what?”

I said nothing.

Mustache looked at me seriously for a moment. Then his concentration lapsed and he said, “What’re you, like a poet or something?”

The barrel poked me again. The guy with the AR-15 said, “Sit.”

I don’t like being poked with anything, but being poked with a gun barrel is up there on my list of the worst things to be poked with. The man with the mustache picked up a roll of duct tape. He started to unravel a length. I like duct tape. It is an important thing in the world. I’ve had a lot of uses for it, and plan on using it in the future. But I don’t ever plan on having it used on me.

I said, “I’m not going to sit down, and if your friend doesn’t stop pointing that thing at me, I’m going to wrap it around his head and then feed it to you.”

He laughed. “I’d like to see that.”

I turned and looked at the AR-15 guy. He wasn’t smiling. I looked at the weapon, it was still pointed at me. I looked back at him. He said, “What?”

I said nothing.

Mustache was watching. He said, “My ice cream-eating friend, let me give you another piece of advice. Willets here is an actual real-life government-trained killer. So, if I were you, I’d just sit the fuck down. But it’s a free country.”

I looked at the man named Willets, who was looking pleased at the description. I shrugged. “Well, you could have said so from the beginning, would have saved all of us this brief moment of tension.”

He allowed a thin smile. “Good man. Now sit your ass down.”

I moved toward the chair and noticed that the barrel of Willets’ rifle had lowered a pinch. Which was what I was waiting for. Flattery never fails. I took another small step and put a hand on the chair back, like I was going to sit down on it. But instead of sitting on it, I whipped the chair around and hurled it at Willets. He used the rifle to block the chair, which had the effect of radically adjusting his line of potential fire. From me, to the ceiling. That was the whole point, because then I could follow up on the distraction with something more kinetic. In this case, a knife edge strike into Willets’ windpipe.

The edge of my hand went into his throat. Hard, fast, like a snake bite. I stood back and watched him. I also looked at Mustache, who didn’t react. Willets was silent for a half second, kind of standing there looking lost, then he wasn’t silent anymore. When you feel like you might suffocate, nothing else really matters. So, Willets stumbled around for a while coughing and sputtering, turning red and paying no attention at all to the gun.

I stepped over to him, took the weapon in one hand, and kicked him into the sofa with my foot. I was closer to the big window now. Down below, the bearded giant was repairing the smokehouse door. He looked up at me through the window and we made eye contact. Then he looked away. By then, Mustache had a pistol up. He said, “Who the hell are you?”

I inspected the AR-15 copy. One in the chamber. I ejected the round onto the carpet. Then I thumbed the magazine release and tossed it into the kitchen, heavy with ammunition. I was aiming for the sink, but a couple of beer bottles got in the way and there was a clatter. I dropped the gun onto the sofa next to Willets.

I said, “As I have already said, you should think of me as someone who doesn’t like guns pointed at them.”

Mustache said, “I asked you who you are.”

“None of your damned business.”

“I like to be the one who decides on my business.”

I said, “I bet you do.” I turned back to the window. Willets was getting to his feet. I said, “I think your friend will live. I can’t guarantee how long.”

Willets coughed. He said, “That was a sucker punch. I’d like to see you in a fair fight.”

Just then, a dark-haired thin guy walked into the room from further back. He seemed startled, like he had just woken up. “What’s going on?”

The mustache man put up his hand like a stop signal. Didn’t even look at the guy. “Get back to your room, Jerry.”

Jerry backed off. I heard a door close down the hall. Mustache didn’t say anything for a moment, and I could almost smell him thinking hard, like he was burning out the clutch. He looked at Willets. Willets looked at him. He shook his head, as if he were sad. Willets said, “What?”

Mustache lowered the pistol. He said, “No,