Broken Read Online Free PDF Page A

heard the subtle sound of a safety coming off a weapon just behind my left ear, and then a barrel prodded me in the back of the head—only once, and then he backed out of my reach. “Put it on the ground and slide it away, slow. Just like I taught you—consider it a test.” His voice dragged, only slurring a little—not nearly drunk enough for me to beat him on the draw. “You’ve got til the count of three, and then I’m gonna pepper my wall with your brains. And you know— you know —unlike you, I’ll actually do it.”

5.

    I ground my teeth as I lay my pistol down exactly as he had said and slid it across the room.
    “ Got a backup?” he asked, leaning against the kitchen wall a good ten feet from me. Not close enough for me to get to him before he cut me in half with a shotgun blast. I kept my head turned away from him, still looking at the red easy chair I had sworn he would be in. I should have known better. Should have suspected something. Parks was paranoid. I should have assumed he’d have claymore mines wired on every door and window, video security hidden all around the perimeter, motion sensors and every trick I could imagine (and a few I couldn’t) to keep his personal security inviolate.
    I cursed myself; I had let the ragged farmhouse and my desire to get this over with sway some of the operational instincts he had burned into me like a brand on my skin. “No backup,” I said. “I wouldn’t be carrying a Walther as my primary if I’d had something higher caliber.”
    “ This is what happens when you lay an operation on too quick and you’ve got too much personal stake in the outcome,” he said, lecturing me, still slurring only a little. “You got hasty, impatient. Should have done more scouting. If you’d been on your game and cased the place in the daylight, you would have seen the places where I hid the video surveillance and the motion sensors.” He sniffed. “I saw you before you even got out of your car, before you started crawling across the muddy ground. I thought I’d given you situational awareness that could beat what you’d find in professional soldiers.” His face fell only a little. “I thought I taught you better than that.”
    “ Did you?” I asked, keeping my hands up in the air, not looking at him. “I don’t remember.”
    “ Don’t give me that,” he snarled, sounding much like the animal I knew he was. “You know better than to do it like this. You tried to breach my back door. Mine . If I hadn’t unhooked the claymore before you got in here, it woulda turned you into stew meat!” I turned my head slightly right to look; sure enough, just above the frame rested a claymore mine, the small straps unplugged from ties where they attached to the door, the ultimate in home security. Anyone coming in through that door would die horribly, a spray of pellets propelled by an explosive charge turning their body to a mush like the ultimate shotgun blast.
    “ And I care why exactly?” I turned, slow, rising from my knees to face him.
    He couldn’t take a step back as he was already against the wall, but I saw a subtle change in his posture, as though he wanted to recoil but was hiding it. “Because you don’t want to get killed.”
    “ I don’t care if I die,” I said, staring him down. His eyes had always been somewhat warm before, at least to me; now they barely met mine and were coldly assessing. His pupils were beginning to dilate; I could see them even at this distance. “All I care about is making sure I settle accounts before I go.”
    I saw him start to reply to that, then stop. He kept the shotgun aimed at me, level with my head. A simple pull of the trigger would end it, I knew. The chorus in my head was silent, though I could feel their nervous emotion within. Strangely, I felt none of my own.
    “ Go on,” I said. “You’ve got the gun, you’ve got me dead to rights. I’m in your house, I came to kill you—”
    “ You can’t kill