Water Dogs Read Online Free PDF

Julian competed for different reasons. He was both a pacifist and a hedonist, a guy whose idea of the perfect afternoon was getting stoned and reworking dessert recipes at his restaurant, thinking about pasta specials and new keg beers for the bar. Most people who knew him would never have guessed he was a top-shelf paintballer—not exactly an instinctual marksman, but a sneaky, ruthless, no-conscience killer. He played because he hated to lose.
    The urchiners didn’t wait around to shake hands. When they sawtheir opponents arrive, they started walking to the west side of the field. Julian and Bennie still needed to pick up their rented guns. Gendron Knight, the overweight ex-con who ran the Dutchman, knew they were coming, and he lumbered out of his shack and handed them two semiautomatic markers without a word. They hadn’t been to other paintball courses, but they knew the Dutchman was a no-frills enterprise. It had banged-up rental guns and a wire-mesh fence containing an un-manicured thirty-five-acre plot of land with just about every possible New England geological variation: thick woods, fields, sand pit, low scrub, stream, pond, boulders, swamp, though the snow flattened everything out a bit. Even the man-made obstacles, plywood bunkers tall enough to stand behind in summertime, were half buried.
    The rivalry with the urchiners was the worst kind, because the urchiners didn’t consider Bennie and Littlefield and Julian much of a challenge. Once the game began, Bennie and his teammates moved around the course, sweating, squinting their eyes, searching the woods for any suspicious movement, wondering whether or not they’d get shot in the back. Bennie felt the urchiners’ presence behind every tree, every bunker, but catching sight of them was rare. On a small paintball course, games lasted five or ten minutes, but on the big open course at the Dutchman, with practiced, paranoid soldiers, games lasted much longer. For the first hour, Julian and Littlefield and Bennie stuck together, and they didn’t once glimpse the urchiners. They suspected the urchiners had taken hold of the interior, so they trudged their way along the fence. Littlefield didn’t make any sprinting forays. He was usually a good one for the kamikaze mission, swooping through enemy territory at full speed, making kills or flushing meat out into open ground for Julian and Bennie, but everyone was more tentative that afternoon. Because of the urchiners’ new guy, LaBrecque, Littlefield said they had a real chance to win.
    Boak and Shaw, the mainstays of the urchiner team, were glass-eating gorillas, burly and tough and unpredictable. They were cousins, and both of them had military training, which helped with the game,but what made them better than most teams was that they didn’t mind sitting in a snow hole for hours. They’d keep a man out front—in this case, LaBrecque, the rookie—and Shaw and Boak would bunker in the deep snow or camp out in the big plastic tunnel at the center of the course: “the snake.” They’d had a few matches with the urchiners in which Littlefield had gotten shot by both Boak and Shaw, from either end of the snake, the barrels of their guns pointing up through the snow. What these gorillas did for a living (maneuvering a small boat in shallow waters during the wintertime; diving with two tanks on their backs in the surge around the shoals in a dry suit that kept you just warm enough to stay alive, gathering sea urchins) got them accustomed to being patient and weathering pain. The best strategy with the urchiners was to do whatever possible to spring them from their little rat tunnels.
    The paintballer’s credo is to kick ass. To blast hard and fast and to kill indiscriminately, to model yourself after soldiers or Indians or gangbangers acting fiercely in battles you haven’t had to fight. Bennie tried to be fully compliant with the paintballer’s credo whenever he was at the Dutchman. It was guys like Shaw