The Kill Clause Read Online Free PDF

damp. The sharp smell of alcohol lingered about her face. “It’s okay. What’s that they say about rocks and glass houses?”
    Her lips pursed, not quite a smile. “Don’t throw glass houses if you live in a rock.”
    “Something like that.”
    “You need to go shoot.” She wasn’t asking; she was offering.
    He nodded. “Come with me?”
    “I need to sit here for a while and look at nothing.”
    He moved to kiss her forehead again, but she tilted back her head and caught his lips with hers. The kiss was hot and dry and edged with vodka. If he could have crawled into it and lived there, he would have.
    The garage housed Tim’s silver M3 BMW—a car confiscated by the service under the National Asset Seizure and Forfeiture Program—andhis workbench. Tim threw his ordnance in the trunk and backed out, careful to dodge Dray’s Blazer, parked in the driveway. He drove to the outskirts of town, then turned onto a dirt road and followed it up a few hundred yards.
    He pulled the car onto a flat dirt apron and left it running, angling the high beams downrange, where a cable stretched between two stakes, about five feet off the ground. Tim removed a stack of targets, a mix of color-coded Transtars and old B-27s, and strung them along the cable. Then he sat in the dirt, jammed the Sig mags, and readied the speedloaders for the wheel guns. Six bullets locked into the cylindrical base of each speedloader, tips sticking up like fangs, spaced to correspond with the caliber holes in the wheel.
    He was left-eye dominant but right-handed, so he drew from a high-ride right-hip holster. Shoulder holsters were discouraged by the service because the cross-draw presented a hazard on the firing line, but Tim preferred the up-and-out anyway, not liking the time given up on a cross-draw. They didn’t call shoulder holsters widow-makers for nothing. He started with the Sig, doing some quick-draw plinking at three yards to warm up his reactive shooting. Then he moved to seven yards. Then ten.
    His shooting was remarkably precise, having been learned in urban-warfare courses and perfected in Malibu’s Maze at Glynco. The aptly named shooting course features pop-up and swinging targets that prospective deputies attack with live ammo through a confusion of strobing lights, blaring music, and amplified screams. The vibe is so invasive, the surroundings so surreal, that grown men have emerged weeping. Once outside, deputies subdue actors playing felons; a Juilliard dropout had once gotten a little too method with Tim, jawing off and sinking his teeth into Tim’s forearm, and Tim had knocked him cold.
    His breath misting in the sharp February cold of the higher altitude, Tim shot and shot. When he’d burned through the nine-mil ammo, he switched to his .357 and toed the concrete ledge at twenty-five yards.
    He struck a modified Weaver, a forward-leaning fighting stance, his feet shoulder width with his left leg forward. The landscape reflected his mood—the barren stretch of dirt and rocks, the twinning cones of the headlights boring through the night, brief throws of light in a vast, dismal universe. The paper targets alone picked up the glow, floating rectangles of white, bobbing like fruit on a tree. The emptiness of the dark opened him up like a gutted beast, and he stared into the void. Allthat stared back was a row of eyeless, two-dimensional combat silhouettes, fluttering on the cable.
    His right hand shot down, breaking his perfect stillness, and grabbed the pistol. As soon as the barrel cleared leather, he rotated it, punching it forward, his left hand already coming, grabbing his right at its junction with the butt. He lined the sights even as his arms were extending. His right arm locked, his left staying slightly canted. The trigger split the precise middle of the pad of his right index finger so he wouldn’t group high and right or low and left, and he applied quick, steady pressure through the double action, not anticipating