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

time to practice my throwing technique. Which was good. I could nail a target at six feet, no problem. Hard. I could get that point buried into soft wood. I knew the weight of that knife like an extra limb of my own body. Like what the scientists call proprioception.

But that would not be necessary here. Which was too bad, I’d never taken down an enemy that way.

I could see the dark hulking form against the darker background. I was close enough to the tree that he didn’t see me there. The guy was breathing heavily. I could hear his teeth chattering. He was condition black, panicking, not seeing anything clearly. I was condition orange. On the spectrum of combat awareness, the precise opposites.

Condition black, the world converges into an impenetrable morass of chaos and fear.

Condition orange, the world divides into discrete and intelligible elements, harmony.

I was able to weigh and judge with care. I stayed patient and let him come. The knife was up and out. My thumb on the butt for added force. Once he was close enough that I could recognize his face, I stepped forward and stabbed down diagonally through his left clavicle, otherwise known as the collarbone.

It’s the only horizontal bone in the body, and it takes a slim and long blade to get in there. But once you do, there’s nothing left but quick death from the internal bleeding of severed arteries right up close to the heart. I wasn’t completely sure that the fishing knife was going to do the job. So, I used extra force. The collarbone snapped under my fist. I felt the collapse and the extra penetration, gaining maybe two inches or more. The knife went right past the clavicle and did its work in there.

I took his weight down and lowered him into the undergrowth nice and easy. My other hand covered his mouth and I kept it there until he was well into his death rattle. Up close I recognized the prison guard’s face, eyes bulging and staring at me. With what he’d done to the moose, I figured the guy deserved to enjoy the rest of his death alone.

I picked up his fallen gun. The contours and shape were familiar, a Remington Breacher.

I slipped back through the woods to the trail. The moose wasn’t any happier. I’d have to take care of that and ease his suffering. But first the human threat. I walked around the struggling animal and looked for the guy I’d shot, the one named Gavin.

For a moment I couldn’t find him. Then I did. He was pinned under the moose. Only a leg and an arm stuck out. The phantom limbs looked permanently out of commission. Gavin must have slumped after I’d shot him, slid under there and been finished off by the restless beast. If he wasn’t already dead, the weight of the animal would have been enough to suffocate him. I waited for the moose to shift. When he did, I pulled the body out by the arm and leg. It was Gavin alright. He had a surprised expression on his face. But he wasn’t surprised anymore. He was dead.

I was focusing my mind on the others. Safe in their vehicle, up the trail. I was angry. Not in any unfocused way, and not because they wanted to kill me. Fair game. I was pissed off because of the moose, who hadn’t asked for any kind of trouble, he’d just been minding his own business. Or worse, he’d been hit by a car and then used to try and trap me. The more I thought about it, the angrier I got.

The moose looked at me, eyeballs pale in the moonlight. I put a hand on his head. The eyes blinked. I said, “Give me a minute, buddy.” I hoped that the tranquilizer was still working.

Forty-Eight

I figured it was Deckart and Willets up there, and that they deserved a terrible and surprising end.

The Toyota’s engine was still going, had never stopped running. I pulled the vehicle around on the narrow trail, carefully performing a K-turn. My mind was firing off orders to my driving hands and foot. At the same time, it was making other calculations. They’d have heard the two shotgun blasts, and the four little popping sounds from the Glock. So, they’d be thinking about what might have happened. I wondered how they were judging it. Two shotguns, one shot off each. One handgun, two sequences of two shots. Bang-bang twice. That would be hard to call.

I drove slow at first, not wanting to make any more noise than the Toyota had already been making. The noisiest part of a vehicle is the tires on the road. Engine hum pales in comparison. My goal was to reduce the sound of tires on the trail.

I crept up the track for a sixty-second count. I estimated that they would have stopped close by, no more than a half mile. The Toyota had no working headlights, and I didn’t want to use the brakes because the taillights would give away my position. I wanted nothing but darkness. After that first sixty count, I stopped trying to navigate consciously and went on pure instinct. I counted another thirty seconds slow creeping. Then it was time to make the magic happen.

I hit the accelerator and shot the Toyota up the trail.

I had a dim memory of that part being pretty straight. I must have hit sixty going up the small gradient. The engine was whining maniacally and the Toyota was definitely making noise from all aspects of its locomotion. Which is why they did exactly what I figured they might do. They flipped on their headlights to see what was coming at them.

I saw the Subaru in a blinding flash of white. Much closer than I had estimated. I was really right on top of them. I almost drove right by them. But I used the fraction of a second to twist the wheel