Last Man Standing Read Online Free PDF Page A

spiraled downward until it had nowhere else to go, and then he had found her. His wife had been a divine
     intervention, he had always believed, saving his miserable, self-pitying carcass from oblivion. With her help, he had straightened
     himself out and fulfilled a secret dream of his to be a real-life G-man.
    He had bounced here and there in the Bureau. It was a time when opportunities for black men were still severely limited. Cove
     had found himself pushed toward drug undercover work, because his superiors had bluntly informed him that most of the “bad
     dudes” were people of his color. You can walk the walk and talk the talk and you look the part too, they had said. And he
     couldn’t argue with that, really. The work was dangerous enough to never be boring. Randall Cove had never easily tolerated
     being bored. And he put away more crooks in a month than most agents put away in their entire careers, and these were big
     fish, the planners, the true moneymakers, not the nickel-and-dime streetwalkers one bad snort from a pauper’s grave. He and
     his wife had had two beautiful children and he was thinking seriously of calling it a career when the bottom had dropped out
     of his world and he no longer had a wife or kids.
    He snapped back as the men came out, climbed in the cars, drove off and Cove once more followed. Cove had lost something else
     that he could never get back. Six men had died because he had messed up badly, been snookered like the most green agent there
     was. His pride was hurt and his anger was molten. And the seventh member of the shattered team deeply intrigued Cove. The
     man had survived when he should have been dead too and apparently nobody knew why, though it was early in the game yet. Cove
     wanted to look the man in the eye and say,
How come you’re still breathing?
He didn’t have Web London’s file and he didn’t see himself getting it anytime soon. Yeah, Cove was FBI, but yeah, everyone
     was no doubt thinking he had turned traitor. Undercover agents were supposed to live right next to the edge, weren’t they?
     They were supposedly all head cases, right? What a thankless job he’d been doing all these years, but that was okay because
     he had done it for himself, nobody else.
    The cars pulled into the long drive and Cove stopped, took some more pictures and then turned around. That was apparently
     it for tonight. He headed back to the only place he could be safe right now, and it wasn’t home. As he rounded a curve and
     sped up, a pair of headlights seemed to appear out of nowhere and settled in behind him. That wasn’t good, not on a road like
     this. Attention from his fellow man was not something Cove ever sought or encouraged. He turned; so did the car. Okay, this
     was serious. He sped up again. So did the tail. Cove reached down to his belt holster, pulled out his pistol and made sure
     the safety was off.
    He glanced in the rearview mirror to see if he could tell how many folks he was dealing with. It was too dark for that, no
     street-lights out this way. The first bullet blew out his right rear tire, the second bullet his left rear. As he fought to
     keep control of the car, a truck pulled out from a side road and hit him broadside. If his window had been up, Cove’s head
     would have gone right through it. The truck had a snowplow on its front end, though it was not wintertime. The truck accelerated
     and Cove’s car was pushed in front of it. He felt his car about to roll and then the truck pushed his sedan over a guardrail
     that had been placed there principally to protect vehicles from plummeting down the steep slope that the curve of road was
     built around. The car’s side smashed into the dirt and then rolled, both doors popping open as the sedan continued its cartwheeling,
     finally landing in a heap at the rocky bottom of the slope and bursting into flames.
    The car that had tailed Cove stopped and one man got out, ran to the twisted guardrail and