Mildred watched and kept herself detached. She didn’t know which would come first, strangulation from lack of air or bleeding to death.
The short man, Jackson’s father, took all of this in while firing a steady stream of lead from the dropped Uzi. He was shrieking in a terrible voice over the blasterfire, “My boy, my boy, you’ve chilled Jackson!”
Constantinople was attempting a more careful aim when he was lifted off his feet at the same time a deafening explosion came from behind the eatery’s bar. Doc had triggered the Le Mat, unleashing the terrific force of the weapon’s .63-caliber round. Doc had only a single shot of such power, but when it connected, the recipient usually knew he’d been hit.
Doc hadn’t gone for anything fancy, and had chosen to aim for a chest shot. He scored clean, wiping the smirk off the big man’s wide face and replacing it with the slack-jawed gape of the newly dead.
“Catch that thunder, you overweight oaf,” Doc called out, a hint of glee in his voice.
Ryan knew the situation had gone beyond a mere squabble when Jackson had uttered the first insult. Jak had responded to the threat without mercy, and now with Doc’s accurate aim, the second of the quartet had been eliminated. Unless the older leader could calm the fourth member of his group, and fast, there would be more killing.
“Drop it! Drop it or you’re both chilled,” J.B. called out from behind the table, but the chance at survival was given too late. For a millisecond, the quiet sec man, Briggs, looked like he was eternally sorry to have gotten mixed up in such a sorry state of affairs. Before he could try to lower his own drawn weapon to surrender, the old man at his side completely lost all control and started spraying the Uzi again.
“Fireblast. That tears it,” Ryan said.
The crack of Dean’s heavy Browning was in unison with Mildred’s target pistol. Both shots found their mark, Mildred’s in the upper left of Green’s chest, and Dean’s lower down, in the gut. The old man staggered backward, his finger locked in a death’s grip on the trigger of the compact Uzi. A spray of bullets fanned from waist level up to a ninety-degree angle, skittering like lead insects into the already crumbling ceiling panels. Bits of foam and plaster rained in a sad parody of a snowfall, flakes of white falling and landing in the crimson puddles collecting on the floor.
Briggs whirled to Green, as if he were going to try to catch the older man. Instead, all he caught was some of the lead from the old man’s Uzi. The sec man fell forward without a sound, a new red pool of blood rapidly spreading out from beneath his ruined face.
“Damn,” Dean said incredulously, breaking the sudden quiet. “He chilled his own man.”
“Not on purpose, Dean,” Mildred replied, stepping out from behind cover.
“Yeah, accidents tend to happen when you’re blasting like this in close quarters,” Ryan said. “And apparently the father wasn’t much smarter than the son.”
The rest of the group came out of their defensive positions, returning their weapons to holsters or other places of concealment.
“Once, just once, I’d like to finish a meal in peace,” Krysty said wearily as she surveyed the carnage.
“They started it,” Jak said while wiping the blade of his retrieved knife on the bottom of the fat man’s jacket.
Krysty glared down at the albino. “Don’t ‘they’ always start it, Jak?”
“Yeah, ‘they’ always do,” Ryan said, speaking for Jak. He caught Krysty’s eye and held her gaze in his own, until she turned away. “And we always finish it, one way or another.”
“Well, I don’t have to like it,” Krysty replied.
She retreated out of the eatery and through the front door, walking out alone in the rain. As she exited, the small bell gave a last jingle, then the room was quiet.
“Like tomb in here,” Jak commented.
“Don’t sweat it, Jak. We’re still alive, tomb or not,” Ryan said as he calmly ejected the spent clip from the SIG-Sauer and reloaded it with bullets taken from his cartridge belt. The rest of the group followed his lead, checking out their own artillery and reloading any fired bullets. By the time they had finished this necessary chore, Sandy had slunk out of hiding from an alcove between an old cash register and the swing doors under the coffee machine.