Next Day of the Condor Read Online Free PDF Page B

Didn’t notice her mother not cry.
    Machinegun roars sliced the air.
    The second grader looked back to where she’d been.
    Whispered: “Run, Johnny.”
    The shooter slapped fresh ammo into the assault rifle.
Seen it
. He’d seen running snot nose kids scramble onto the shutdown school bus across the parking lot.
You can’t hide from me.
He machine-gunned the bus. Bullets banged through the yellow metal.
    Malati held her cell phone above their parked cars cover.
    “He’s turning toward—I think he’s going to go into the building, the food court!”
    Risk it:
Condor peeked over the car. Saw the black robot at the facility’s main doors. Saw the dead vet in his wheelchair. Saw bodies heaped at the bottom of the ramp: bus driver who smoked, women. Saw the food court’s bullet-holed tinted dark windows.
    He glared at the little girl with the big brown eyes. “What’s your name?”
    “Phyllis Azar seven years old live at—”
    Create focus.
    “You’re here. Now. With us.”
    The seven-year-old girl nodded: The silver-haired guy sounded like a principal!
    Empower your asset to gain their trust.
    Condor said: “What do you want me to call you?”
    Bam! Bam! Bam!
Paced steady rhythm shots hit the building.
    Suppression fire as the black clad shooter neared the main doors.
    “Daddy calls me
Punkin
.” She shrugged at the orange plastic pumpkin bucket she’d looped to herself with her belt
special
so
no way
would she lose it.
    “Punkin, I’m—
Condor
,
Vin
, doesn’t matter, she’s
Malati
.”
    A bullet ricocheted off a car roof.
    Punkin said: “We going to be OK?”
    The big girl woman nodded
yes
as Mr. Silver Hair said: “We might get hurt.”
    “Might get
dead
.” Punkin shook her head. “That would suck.”
    Malati watched her cell phone: “He’s standing at the main doors!”
    In the canyon of car metal next row over: a side mirror of an SUV dangled upside down, its cracked glass captured the reflection of a trapped man, woman, child.
    Malati inhaled that sight of yesterday, today, tomorrow.
    “Condor!” yelled Malati: “Smell that
oh my God!
Why didn’t it it’s going to—”
    Like a piano chord
exploded the meds’ weight on his mind.
    A lightning flash of seeing.
    He grabbed the belt around the little girl NEVER NOBODY ‘POSED TO and he’s jerking it undone saying: “’Fifty-fifty shot at next to no chance in Hell and
Punkin!
”
    She locked on him as he said: “We got one chance to save anybody!”
    Punkin gave him a nod from her bones.
    “But you gotta do one thing you’re not ’posed to.”
    Punkin didn’t blink.
    Condor told her: “You have to say a bad word.”
    The shooter paused outside the main doors. To his left were a heap of bodies he’d dropped with his pistol—
good fucking shots
. Behind him near the top of the ramp was the listless wheelchair full of some dead older guy wearing an Army jacket.
    Crucial question:
Which gun?
    Level up
cool
. Now it’s your game.
    Nothing like a shotgun for close quarters tactical situations.
    He let the black military-cool rifle dangle on its sling, wrapped his right hand around the pistol-grip of the black steel and plastic Italian-made shotgun manufactured after America’s 1994
assault weapons ban expired.
    And just for a moment, felt regret.
    While he loved the high-tech look of his semi-automatic 12 gauge that fed new shells into the chamber after each shot, the
ratchet-clack
of pumping a fresh shell into an old-school “regular” shotgun was
epic
. But besides slowing his rate of fire, a pump shotgun made him clumsy, so as much as he appreciated cool, he knew he’d been smart to go semi-auto, out with the old, in with new.
Right tool, right job
.
    Like he expected, he saw no one standing beyond the closed glass doors.
    There’s the wall with doors to the bathrooms. There’s that stupid plaque.
    ‘Good as Bruce Lee , he stomped his discount store black sneaker out to his side, a kick that smacked the circular aluminum