The Last Infidel Read Online Free PDF Page A

aside and allowed the man with the battering ram to step up to the door.
    “Old Fred will have a surprise or two for these guys,” Cody said, reaching slowly around to his back pocket.  “He has those doors bolted up, down, and sideways.  By now he’s grabbing his forty-five.  But I’ll bet you two mercury dimes Fred gets thrown from the third-story window.”
    “No, they’re gonna shoot him,” Jose said.  “I’ll raise you a silver half, but only after we get under cover.”
    “I’ll see that bet,” Cody said, taking hold of his chrome handcuffs, slipping them quietly from his rear pocket so Jose wouldn’t notice.  He looked at Jose and motioned towards the door of the café.
    Jose turned towards it.
    With a quick step and the flick of his wrist, Cody, with frightening speed, locked a cuff around Jose’s right wrist.  The other cuff he locked around his own left wrist.
    Jose spun around, whey-faced and horror-stricken.  He then turned and looked nervously at Bashar’s men, who had just started to swing the battering ram against the door.  Then he turned and looked at the door of the café, and then back at Cody.
    “What are you afraid of?” Cody asked.  “Don’t you want to see who wins the bet?”
    “This . . . this isn’t fair,” Jose said, his voice high-pitched and shaky.
    Cody raised a single brow, rubbed the light colored stubble on his face, and said, “Twenty years ago this summer.”
    Jose scrunched his dark eyebrows together and said, “What the hell are you talking about?”
    The doors to Fred’s building crashed open with the second swing of the ram, and Bashar’s men ran in, yelling and screaming like Muslims always did.
    “I . . . I uncuffed you when that train was at least half a mile away, not when it was like fifty feet away!”
    “So, you do remember,” Cody said.  “Half mile?  Nah.  A tenth of a mile – and I could feel the tracks vibrating.”
    Gunfire rang out, four or five shots, loud and sharp.  A window shattered – one of the second floor windows – and glass came raining down onto the cobblestone below.
    “That would be Fred’s forty-five,” Cody said.  “Hell of a gun – I’d love to have it.”
    “But that was like a hundred years ago, man!” Jose yelled.
    “Twenty, Jose. You left me on the tracks for an hour – sixty minutes,” Cody replied, looking at his watch.  “You stand here with me for sixty seconds and we’ll call it even.  It’s a deal – you’re getting away with ten cents on the dollar!  You live for those kinds of deals, right?”
    “But Bashar’s men – they don’t take sixty seconds.  And they use a hell of lot more bullets, too!”
    Cody smiled and looked up at the sky and rubbed his strong, angular jaw.  He couldn’t remember the last time he saw the heavens.  “Maybe Fred’s wearing a bomb vest and he’s going to take out Bashar’s men – that’d be a blast, right?”  He jerked on the cuffs, dragging Jose closer to the door of the realty building like a man walking a reluctant dachshund.
    “Come on, man!” Jose yelled, tugging Cody in the opposite direction.  “You’re crazy to be joking around at a time like this!  I shoulda left you on the tracks that day!”
    “Would have been better that way,” Cody said, looking sideways at Jose. “You know?  I was just thinking.”
    “Thinking? At a time like this?”
    “Remember Dottie, the girl who’d won the beauty pageant a few years ago?  You remember she lived out on Red Mile road by the---”
    “I don’t want to remember!”
    Another two shots rang out.  Still Fred’s forty-five.
    Jose trembled, then he got down on his knees and closed his eyes.  Cody gave him some slack, and Jose put his hands together and began mumbling a prayer in Spanish.
    “A real hero, that Dottie,” Cody said calmly.  “When Bashar’s men found out she was hiding – and you remember how her dad used to use TNT to blow old stumps out of the ground – she