Outlaws by Matt Rogers (phonics books TXT) 📕

King nodded. Started running through possibilities, trying to determine when would be the best time to catch them off-guard.

Not for a while, he concluded. They were too spread out, too heavily armed. Violetta and Banks were still in the cabin, out of position, not ready for a quick-draw firefight. The night was hot and oppressive and rife to leach stress from pores. King shrugged off a nervous stab of energy, trying to calm himself, trying to wind down.

In stillness, he could find his opportunity.

Then he turned to make for the back of the truck and saw the Dodge’s driver door swing open.

A man stepped out.

Grizzled.

Old.

Long grey hair swept back off his forehead.

A face like steel.

Everything made a lot more sense. King thought about how odd it was that an ex-Navy vet who ran a small-time leadership company had been tasked with providing security detail for one of the wealthiest and most powerful men in the United States. Jack Coombs had never fit the bill. It should have been obvious from the start. He was being used by Sam Donati the whole time, perhaps forced to work at a heavily discounted rate. Donati must have been getting considerable expertise for pennies on the dollar to bother using Coombs at all. But why?

Because Jack Coombs had a guilty secret.

A compulsive urge he had to keep away from the public eye.

King wondered how the conversation had gone.

Donati: You’re a dirty old man with dirty wants and needs. But you’re in luck. I bring girls over from Eastern Europe. It’s part of my business. You can take your pick when they get here. You can do what you want with them. But you give me all your expertise, and all your connections, and you work for me for free. How’s that for a deal?

King looked into the old man’s eyes.

That was a deal Jack Coombs would have agreed to in a heartbeat.

But now there was a bigger problem.

Coombs was now looking at the only delivery driver on the planet he knew damn well wasn’t part of the criminal underworld.

King cocked his head, and so did Coombs.

They recognised each other.

King thought, Who’s going to talk first?

82

Neither of them said a word.

Understanding rippled in the air around them.

There were unspoken revelations hovering there, invisible and menacing.

The corners of Coombs’ mouth tilted upward.

A wry smile.

The old man said, ‘Are you going to tell them or should I?’

‘I thought we might avoid that,’ King said.

He tried to alert Coombs to the presence of the Glock at his waist, clearly visible in its holster.

The old man saw it, then said, ‘I think not.’

The wry smile amplified.

Petty revenge for King botching the Moscow job, for almost ruining Coombs’ vital connection to the pipeline, for nearly stripping him of the vice he needed to satiate.

Keeping him from a steady supply of Eastern European sex slaves.

Coombs turned to the perimeter guard, and said, ‘This man right here is—’

The rest of the speech wasn’t necessary, because there was only one potential outcome, so King fast-tracked Coombs along his chosen path by taking out his Glock and shooting the man once in the head. The long mane of grey hair snapped to the side, and his neck jerked from the whiplash, and he fell awkwardly into the dirt.

The thump of his body hitting the ground was the equivalent of a starting gun, firing a shot to initiate all-out war.

Banks had already vaulted out of the cabin and landed in the dirt beside the tractor unit. As soon as Coombs died, he brandished the M4A1 carbine rifle that had been sitting on his lap the whole time and unloaded on the sicarios in the Hermès caps.

King saw him peppering silhouettes with clusters of bullets out of the corner of his eye, and before he could blink four men were dead. He expected nothing less from a fully prepared, razor-sharp DEVGRU operative.

King in turn executed the three guards closest to him at blistering speed. He put a round through the face of the blue-eyed man — the body smacked into the dirt beside Coombs — then turned to the two men along the parapet and nailed them with shots until they both fell, one clutching a fatal wound in his throat as the other simply dropped stone dead on the spot, a cylindrical hole in the centre of his forehead.

Violetta leapt from the cabin, landed beside King, and used her Beretta to fire a trio of shots at the open front door of the ranch-style house. A shriek of either pain or surprise came from within, but King barely registered it. His hearing was reeling from the barrage of unsuppressed rounds, particularly from Banks’ carbine.

Savouring a second’s respite, King ejected the half-empty mag and slammed a fresh one into the handle.

Violetta’s covering fire had bought him precious time.

Not much.

An inexperienced combatant would waste it thinking and planning and calculating.

He simply sprinted for the front of the house.

The front deck was aproned by a thick row of xeriscaping, and King slid to a halt behind an enormous drought-resistant plant he couldn’t identify. It wouldn’t stop bullets, but it shielded his mass entirely, and for those vital seconds no one was looking. Everyone inside was cowering from follow-up shots.

King crouched and put his head down and waited.

Then shots blared from the second storey windows, only a dozen or so feet above his head. They weren’t aiming at him, though. They were aiming at Violetta and Banks, now safely behind cover on the other side of the truck.

King leant backward and saw them right above him, practically leaning out the windows. Three men — one per window.

King aimed and fired, aimed and fired, aimed and fired.

Three dead.

One body fell out and crashed into the sand in front of the house, and the other two fell back inside.

King dived laterally, crab-crawling a dozen feet along the row of landscaped shrubbery, avoiding the follow-up shots he knew would come his way. And