42. Mac
42
Mac
No shot I’ve ever made has been more important than this one.
Laying in the field, on my stomach, I’m transported back to a time where heat was the enemy instead of cold, and sand stuck to my face instead of whatever wet leaves are waving around in this clearcut field. Every sniper in our unit had his preferred distance for a kill shot. With a gun small enough to be mistaken for a close-range shot, mine happens to be 100 meters. It’s a good enough distance that staying low on this side of the road meant that Mayor Anderson and his goons never saw me when he rolled up to the warehouse just a minute after Rossi and Eleanor walked through the fence.
I close my eyes, center myself, focus on a deep inhale. I have one chance at this. There are too many guys, too many guns, too many factors. I have one chance, and five quick shots to make. If I don’t recover from the recoil fast enough, and they start shooting, Eleanor is very likely to catch a bullet in the crossfire. Or if I miss, and she’s standing so close to Rossi…
Nope. Not going there. I don’t miss.
The mayor is part of this. He’ll die. His guys have guns pointed way too close to my girl, so they’ll die, too. McCloskey will die for calling her a bitch. In fact, I may shoot him in the stomach so he’s in agony for a little while, too.
Rossi? He’s last. He’s going to be pissing himself in fear, then he’s going to bleed out from the blown-out hole where his dick used to be. He’s going to be fucking riddled with lead in all the peak pain places—knee caps, mid-thigh, stomach. I bet I can even get the bullet right through his femur without hitting the femoral artery, which will cause the muscles to contract and send him into a world of the worst pain a human can endure .
They’re almost squared up in my shot, but a strong gust of wind kicks up and I curse and wipe the drizzling rain from my forehead. Wind makes a huge difference in shots at a distance, and everyone’s a giant clusterfuck in there. Mayor Anderson and his two guys are silhouettes in the bright warehouse lights, and I can see straight into the back of the truck where McCloskey is elevated—he’s probably the easiest target.
“I love you, James Mackenzie.”
My heart kicks me in the ribs. Did she just…
“It was McCloskey,” Rossi accuses. “He wants Chief of Police, tried to blackmail me for it. He was probably going to try to sell our shipment right out from under—”
“What?” comes the horrified voice of McCloskey—and his face matches the tone. “I didn’t—”
The mayor calmly points the handgun he’s got at McCloskey and pulls the trigger. Eleanor’s scream fills my ears, the sound of her fear making my stomach turn over, as McCloskey staggers back into the trailer and falls to his ass, clutching the fabric that’s blooming with red on his chest.
“Shh, honey,” Anderson says to my girl. “I can see from the duct tape that you’re about as thrilled to be here as I am, but I’ll shoot you, too, if you don’t shut the fuck up.”
I grind my jaw. He won’t get the chance.
“She’s the Russian’s girlfriend,” Rossi explains. “He’s behind it all, we can use her—”
“Maybe I’m confused here—is it the Russian, or was it McCloskey?”
Rossi’s bluster is gone and now he’s just a scared, cornered deer.
“Not answering is the wrong answer, Jay,” Anderson says. “Now, the Russian will die because I don’t need the Bratva in my business. But McCloskey died because he picked the wrong side. That’s you, Jay. You’re the wrong side.”
“Kevin, I wouldn’t—”
“I saw the sale records for this warehouse. I know it’s yours. What I don’t know is why you thought you’d get away with it. You thought I was just going to let you steal from me? ”
I see the instant Rossi knows what’s going to happen—that Mayor Anderson isn’t going to listen to his version of the truth—and he starts bringing up his own weapon to make a feeble attempt to strike first.
“Dive, Eleanor! Under the truck!” I yell, frantically.
I’ll thank whatever God I need to that she reacts quickly. She’s almost under the truck when I take out the gunman on my left, who was closest to her. Simultaneously, Rossi gets a shot in Mayor Anderson’s shoulder. Anderson spins from the impact, going down, and the other gunman fires off towards Rossi.
Rossi is hit in the chest and he fires another shot, missing the gunman entirely. If I weren’t so fucking pissed, I’d laugh at how poor his aim is. I get the gunman through the temple as he turns to help his boss.
Anderson is clutching his arm, but Rossi is back up with a hand pressed to his pec. No blood is leaking through his fingers.
Fuck. He’s got on a vest.
He takes a few steps forward, approaching Anderson on the ground. He stands over the older man, who’s writhing and trying to get his gun back up in position.
“I never needed you, anyway.”
He fires off a few rounds and Mayor Anderson stops moving.
Then, like he realizes the other gunmen were taken care of by someone that wasn’t him, Rossi turns on a dime and dives. Too late, the bullet I fired off lands somewhere in the cinderblock wall 500 feet behind where Rossi was standing. When I recover from the recoil, and find him again, he’s dragging Eleanor to her feet, and using her as a shield. He has his gun pointed at her face from the side.
I see red. Every thought of torture flies out the window—he dies now.
“Show yourself, Ivanov!” Rossi shouts into the darkness beyond the warehouse, in my general direction. I can hear his elevated voice clearly in the still night air. “I will fucking shoot her!”
Generally speaking, I have enough confidence in my ability to know that if two men are 500 meters away, standing a foot apart, the one that I wanted to hit is the one with the bullet in his brain. Which is not to say that I’ve never missed, only that it’s been a while .
But no shot I’ve ever made has been more important than this one. She is… She’s everything to me. Three inches too far left, and I hit her. An overcorrection to the right to ensure I don’t hit her might go too wide and he’ll fire off in fear.
“Mac?” Wes prods. “You good?”
I breathe in and out. In and out. I have to get out of my head.
“You want me to try to hit him from the side? I am almost in position—”
“No,” I say to Dimitri. “If he sees you, he’s definitely going to shoot.”
“You’ve got this, mate.”
“Eleanor, on the count of three I want you to drop to the ground. I know he’s got your hair and it’s going to hurt, but it’ll surprise him and you’ll be out of the way of my shot. I promise you I will not miss. Blink twice if you understand.”
A terrified expression fills her face, but she blinks twice in rapid succession.
“One…” I see her tense and I press the gun into the right spot against my chest. “Two…” her knees go soft and she brings up her hands to be in place to catch her fall as I place my finger on the trigger.
“I swear, I will shoot her—” Rossi shouts.
“Three.”
She drops, I shoot, and the hole forms right through his eye. First there’s a dark round spot as his eye blows out the back of his head, then red pours out, falling down his face and squirting from the wound.
And I’m up, leaving everything where it is in the middle of the field, sprinting for the warehouse. Dimitri has just finished cutting the tape off her wrists when I come running up. We lock eyes and the relief shining there makes my chest hurt. But as I get close, opening my arms for her to run into, she reaches up and slaps me in the face.
“‘Drop to the ground on three so I don’t shoot you’?” she shrieks at me. “You asshole!”
Wes chokes on a laugh as Dimitri hides a smile by turning around completely.
“Never do that again, James Mackenzie,” she hisses, poking me in the sternum.
In spite of the slight sting in my cheek, I grin. “Tell me you love me again and it’s a deal,” I say, not letting her get a single word out as I cover her mouth with mine.
She clutches me desperately, and the blood pounds in my veins for her—I’m so fucking happy to have her in my arms again, it makes me want to bend her over Rossi’s dead body. Maybe we’ll leave the fucking in front of corpses thing for another day…
“I hate when they monologue and try to get the last word,” Dimitri mutters, looking down at the bodies with his lip curled.
“‘You’re the wrong side, Jay,’ and ‘I never needed you anyway,’” Wes mimics. “What a pair of muppets.”
Eleanor breaks away and laughs at Wes’s terrible impression, and it’s a wet noise. She sniffles, wipes under her eyes and I pull her close to drop a kiss on the top of her head.
“The Feds are coming?” I ask.
Wes nods. “Whenever they get off their arses and dispatch someone to check the tip. My guess is sometime tomorrow morning.”
“We could just leave them for the Feds,” Dimitri—all practicality—shrugs. “They shot each other. Maybe we take these two.” I watch him toe the body of the man I shot in the back of the head and point at the other.
A Federal CSI tech would definitely be able to determine that the trajectory the bullet took through the body and way the body landed means a shot from behind. And I’ll be long gone and so will every trace of me, but the point is to remain off the radar. And a highly-accurate sniper going after civilians tends to get you on the radar.
“I’m going to go get my gear. You have your SUV, you can grab these two, right?”
Dimitri sighs and rolls his eyes. “Yes, fine, go. We will clean up.”
“We?” Wes repeats, full of false outrage. “Oh, I just remembered I… don’t want to do that.”
“Doing things you do not want to do builds character,” Dimitri argues, bending down and lifting the torso of the first man into a sitting position.
“Are you saying I’m not enough of a character already? I thought I was just some penis from the mountains . That insult is my new favorite, by the way. Even better than when you call us goat testicles.”
As they continue to quip back and forth—well, Wes quips and Dimitri meets each sarcastic comment at face value—I grab Eleanor’s hand and pull her after me. I want to have her closer than this. I’d try to carry her, if I thought she’d let me, but I’ll settle for this small contact. For now.
“Are you okay, darlin’? How’s your head?”
“It stings, but the pounding is mostly gone. I don’t think I’m concussed or anything, I feel okay. Well, mostly…”
“You sure? You’re shaking and your heart is racing.”
“No,” she says, and it’s so raw and honest that it makes me grimace. “I never want to do anything like that. Ever. Never again.”
“So, not the career change you were looking for, I take it?”
She shivers, but smiles a little at me. It’s watery, but it’s a start. “I think I’ll stick to torch guns and chef knives being my only weapons.”
I chuckle.
We reach the spot where my gear is still spread out on the ground. I was in a hurry when I set it up, so it’s not meticulous. It does make cleanup easier, though. I start unscrewing parts and laying them in my cases. She stands, watching me, trying to figure out if there’s some way she can help but finding none.
“What about whoever Rossi sold those guns to originally?” she asks. “The one who you stole the weapons from? Won’t they be, like, mad and try to come find them?”
I smile because she’s got good instincts, asks good questions. “That’s why we tipped off the Feds. No one will come looking, they’ll be in evidence lockup.”
“And they won’t find anything else? I feel like in shows, they always find hair or blood at the scene of the crime and that’s how they catch who did it. Except we’re not the bad guys in this scenario… or are we? My moral compass is way out of whack.”
When I stand, I catch her chin in my hand and scan her face. I seethe, seeing the red-purple mark on her temple that has a thin line of dried blood in the middle. “I wish I could have shot him how I planned.” I tap my ear to reconnect the line and tell Wes and Big D, “Make sure you clean Rossi’s gun. He broke the skin.”
“Already handled.”
“How were you going to do it?” she asks lightly, tilting up her chin.
I raise an eyebrow. “You really want to know?”
“As long as it was going to be painful… I think I do.”
I nearly groan as the blood rushes to my cock at her husky tone. Bloodthirsty Eleanor is a new kind of filthy delight.