Half Life (Russell's Attic Book 2) by SL Huang Page A

the bartender came and cleaned up the shards of glass, frowning at him as she did so. He didn’t offer her an explanation, and she didn’t ask. Fortunately, she also didn’t see the hole in the bar a little farther down where a .308 rifle round had buried itself.
    “No,” my contact said slowly when she’d moved away, a good deal of loathing in the word. His companions had looked up when the glass went, but now they’d gone back to conversing between themselves, unconcerned. Good.
    “Who do you work for?” I said.
    The man’s left hand had started twitching. “You know the answer to that.”
    “Yeah, but I want to hear you say it, and since I have a high-powered sniper rifle pointed in your direction, I think you should answer me.”
    “You’ve made a powerful enemy in the Madre.” Venom crawled through his voice. “You won’t get out of this alive.”
    “Maybe, maybe not,” I said. “What remains to be seen is whether you and your friends get out of tonight alive. Right now I just want to talk, but I might change my mind very fast. Now go and collect your buddies and sit in the booth in the back right corner. Face away from the door and put your hands palm down on the table, all of you. If you move before I get there, or you do anything else, I will shoot you. Understood?”
    “Yes,” he said after a moment’s pause.
    “Good. Go. I’m watching. Keep your hands visible at all times.”
    He hung up and cast a malevolent look around the bar, so baldly hateful I could feel it through the distorted image in the mirror. Then, after he didn’t see me, he got up and did as he was told. I couldn’t hear what he said to his people, but they shot to their feet and one of them put a hand under his coat.
    I fired again and grazed the tip of the guy’s earlobe. He jumped and smacked a hand to the side of his head, his eyes roving wildly.
    Then he very slowly lifted his hands in the air, one of them now damp with blood, and all three of them went to the back table I had specified and sat with their palms on the table.
    It was a mark of how disreputable this particular bar was that everybody was too hunched over a drink to give them a second glance.
    I waited another seven minutes, until I was pretty sure the men weren’t going to try moving. Then I threw off the burlap with a grateful gulp of fresh, cool air, slung the sniper rifle on my back, and swung down out of the dumpster, drawing my Colt as I did so.
    I marched across the street and into the oyster bar. A patron near the door saw the weapons and stumbled back, her hand going to the small of her back, but I saw her in my peripheral vision and in one motion grabbed a full beer bottle off a nearby table and whipped it across at her. She crashed against the bar, knocked silly.
    Even at this place that got people’s attention. In the few seconds it took for me to stride to the table in the corner, everyone had turned toward me, half of them reaching for weapons.
    Fortunately, that was what I wanted.
    I launched off a chair with one foot and spun to land on my would-be assassins’ table, facing them and the rest of the bar Colt first. The same man whose ear I’d shot tried to use that opportunity to move. I made sure my boot landed on his hand, hard.
    “Hi,” I said to the silent bar. “I have business with these three gentlemen. Everyone else, leave. Don’t come back in tonight unless you want to be shot. You—lock the door behind them and turn off the ‘open’ sign,” I added to the bartender. “Now go.”
    True to form, nobody in the bar wanted to get involved in someone else’s business, especially when that someone else had a gun pointed at them. They filed out in short order, including a few people in stained white aprons from the back, and the bartender switched off the neon red “open” light and locked the door behind her.
    So far, so good. The riskiest part of this plan had been when I was hiding in the dumpster—it would have been too