Page 76 of The Battle of Maddox
The sound of a bullet pinging off the roof of the car cut him off. It had both Maddox and I sliding down in the seats.
A loudspeaker was blaring at us and Smoke waved it off. “Yeah, yeah, I know. Slow down or we’ll shoot your tires. Been there, done that, bought the run-flats.”
“He’s flippant,” I grumbled.
“They’re not going to kill us.”
Maddox snorted. “He didn’t exclude injuring us severely.”
“Can it, Doxx.” Smoke grinned. He pointed out the window to the right and ahead of us. “There. That’s Cheung’s car. Not even smart enough to ditch the hot rod red Porsche. What a bag of dicks.”
There was another ping of a bullet, and Maddox and I flinched. Two large personnel carriers started to move in to cut off the road.
“Mm, fuck. That’s a problem,” Smoke said, glancing around. He took a hand off the wheel and pinched zoomed in on the screen. “I don’t like trusting this, but here goes nothing. Can you take out the tires on those carriers?”
“I can try,” Maddox said. “I’ve got right.”
They both glanced back at me for just a second.
“Uh, I’ve got left?” I slid over to the driver’s side and rolled down the window. “I just want you to know, I’ve never had to shoot anything from this distance at this speed ever before.”
“Aim where it’s going to be, not where it is,” they chorused.
“Thanks, Starsky and Hutch.”
The two carriers weren’t very far ahead of us at this point and I decided the back tire would be better. Not that I was under any illusion I would actually hit it, but I was going to try.
I heard Maddox’s gun go off just as I felt I was as aimed as I was going to be, and let out my breath, squeezing the trigger.
BAM! The air exploded out of the tire.
“Holy shit I hit—”
The car made a hard right and slammed me in to the door, almost vaulting me out the window. Desperately, I clawed for the window button and got the window up.
“Christ!” I yelled.
Before I could say anything more, I was slammed across the back seat, into the other door, slamming my head on the handle there. And it got worse as the road became only marginally a road.
“Hang on!” Smoke yelled.
“The hell do you think I’m doing?” I yelled back.
We were still doing nearly sixty miles an hour and when I was finally able to right myself, the road was getting worse and trees were starting to close in.
Whistling, Smoke held on to the wheel and before the trees completely took over, he pulled another hard left, slamming me into the door again. He shot down a grass track to an actual patch of no-man’s land.
He drove straight across, bounded over a grass median and floored it through an opening in the trees there. We were suddenly hurtling toward a small out-building. He bounced onto the asphalt, jerked right, and rolled us forward to stop just behind another building.
There were men immediately surrounding us with submachine guns, locked and loaded. Smoke turned and smiled at us.
“Welcome to the Ukraine.”
Maddox slapped him on the back of the head.
Maddox
Sometimes, Smoke could be a real prick.
