Hook and Shoot Read Online Free PDF Page B

doing for an hour?”
    â€œYou like riding around with your felony? We’re stashing him.”
    â€œI know a place just over the side of the Hoover Dam. It’s perfect.”
    â€œSorry. We’re keeping your boy nice and handy.” He smiled and winked.
    I imagined squeezing his face through the steering wheel and doing donuts in the street, so I smiled back.We were miles off the Strip, rolling through an industrial complex tucked away from the tourists and cameras in the northwest corner of the city. Lots of food prep and suppliers, some fabrication shops. I saw blinking neon and perked up at the sign of civilization, but it was only a blinking neon sign manufacturer.
    Burch wasn’t searching for a spot; he knew where he was going. He pulled into a short asphalt drive that ended at a chain-link gate ten feet high. There was a hooded steel keypad next to his door. He snapped a latex glove on while his window slid down, then punched in a number, the keys clacking like an old pay phone.
    The gate shook and rolled to the side. Burch drove through and idled between the long, low storage buildings with narrow garage doors set a few feet apart. Buzzing overhead lamps and boxed fixtures along the walls knocked all the shadows out of the place and gave everything a cold, alien facade.
    Burch went to the end, about a hundred yards from the gate, and cut left across two more aisles before taking another left. He eased toward the doors on the right and watched the numbers, stopped the limo halfway down the row.
    â€œHere we are.” He put the other glove on and gotout, walked around the back of the limo.
    I said to Eddie, “Have anything to say?”
    He scowled. “Hurry up.” His voice was crusty. He sipped his water.
    I slapped it out of his hand.
    He scrambled to save it from glugging empty. “Come on. Asshole.”
    I got out of the limo and closed the door. The night air still made sweat pop on my forehead.
    Burch said, “What’s he saying in there?”
    â€œHe said I’m in charge now.”
    â€œKeep your sense of humor. It’s important in situations like this.”
    He pulled his coat aside, the butt of his pistol hanging there, reached toward a stainless steel disc on his belt, and came away with a single key attached by a cable. The key fit into a heavy padlock on the storage unit’s overhead door. He opened the lock and let go of the key. It zipped back to the disc on his belt, gone. The lock sounded like an anchor when he set it on the asphalt.
    Burch rolled the door up and hit a light switch for the single bulb in the middle of the ceiling. The storage space was bare plywood walls and exposed rafters, maybe twelve feet wide and twenty deep. There were three things inside. Near the light switch and close enough to smell were a stained box spring and mattress set.
    â€œEddie makes you sleep here?”
    Burch gave me a face I was getting used to. He walked to the back of the space toward the last item.
    I wanted to throw another dig at him, make him stop and turn around—anything to stall—but I couldn’t breathe. My throat was clamped shut, and my ribs wouldn’t expand. I couldn’t pull my gaze off the floor to look at what was back there.
    I’ve won fights during the stare down. Bored into the guy’s soul, measured him up, found him lacking. He knew it, then fought like it.
    I wanted to stare at what was at the back of that storage unit, beat it into a corner of my mind, and stomp it out.
    My eyes stayed on the floor.
    â€œAre you fainting?” Burch’s shoes were at the edge of the frame in front of the thing taunting me. The shoes turned. “Catching up to you, eh? Deep breaths, get that blood smell out your nose.”
    I straightened up, stared at the rafters, the walls, the bare bulb that left a spotlight when I blinked and forced air into my lungs. Then I looked at the back wall.
    A white box freezer as