Death by Sarcasm - By Dani Amore Page 0,28
and Mary saw an opening so she went full bore right through it.
“They’ve told me. But they haven’t told the cops.”
“You’re not a cop?”
“You’re so perceptive. I love that.”
“What are you?”
“A concerned family member. And a strong believer in revenge. The cops are the least of your worries. I may just leave your blubbery brains all over Ocean Avenue. Sound good?”
His eyes flashed wildly around, panic behind them.
“Look at it this way, you can either tell me,” she said. “Or you’ve had your last In-N-Out burger.”
He let out a long breath that smelled like onion rings. It doesn’t matter how big they are, Mary thought. They all break, eventually.
“This guy said he was a friend of this Brent Cooper’s,” the man said. “I’d never heard of this Cooper guy. I was there to see Claudine - did you see her? She’s great…” His eyes got all dreamy and May could see the beginning of another fantasy come into his brain.
“Focus, Pudge. Focus.”
“Anyway. This guy slipped me a fifty and said to heckle this Brent Cooper guy. So I did. That Cooper guy was an asshole. He just went crazy saying all kinds of nasty shit.”
“What did the guy look like? The guy who told you to do this?”
“He was an old guy, I don’t know. You’ve been in the club, it’s dark.”
“We’ll come back to that. So he told you to heckle Brent, then what?”
“Then I was supposed to act like I wanted to fight him and sort of nod toward the alley.”
“Did you?”
“Yeah. But I didn’t go out there! I got scared and took off.”
“Smart move.”
“Look, I had nothing to do with all that. It was supposed to be a joke, I didn’t know the guy was going to get killed.”
“Let’s go back to the old guy.”
“Oh my God,” the fat man said.
Mary felt him jerk. “What?”
“There he is.” Mary began to look across the street where the guy’s eyes were looking, but she never finished her scan.
The fat man’s head snapped back against the brick wall and Mary felt a gush of warmth on her hand. Blood and brain matter poured from the back of his head. He slumped against her as another bullet hit him in the chest. Shards of brick bit into Mary’s neck as a bullet exploded next to her ear. She tried to push against the fat man but as his body sagged to the sidewalk, it took her with it. She found herself trapped beneath him, struggling to get free.
She looked over his shoulder across the street. An old man in a turquoise blue windbreaker was standing just behind a tree, his gun blocked from view. She saw him step to the right, saw the gun and the silencer attached and held her arm up and over the fat man, then fired a quick shot at the old guy across the street.
Mary got one leg beneath her and pushed upward, heaved with all of her strength, and rolled the fat man over. She was able to squirm out from underneath him.
Across the street, the old man’s gun spat again and glass from the art studio’s window showered down upon her. She had no choice. She got to her feet, crouched, and then dove over the art studio’s display shelf into the showroom itself. The dolphin woman sculpture exploded and pieces of metal, paper mache and wire rained down on Mary’s back. The head and shoulders of the sculpture were still intact, so she took cover behind them and fired at the old man. She steadied her hand and reeled off shot after shot, emptying her entire clip in a matter of seconds.
Mary’s ears rang and the smell of gunpowder assaulted her senses. She ducked back down and thumbed the magazine release, grabbed her spare from her coat pocket, slammed it in, then wiped her bloody hand off on a piece of curtain that had been shot off the window.
“Eewww,” Mary said, not wanting to look at the liquid on her hand.
Bullets exploded around her. The shooter had a fucking silencer. Great. She couldn’t tell where the shots were coming from now, but it seemed like he’d changed position.
Mary waited out the last of the explosions then rolled and popped up just over the display platform. The blue windbreaker caught her eye. He’d moved two trees over and was slapping another clip into his gun.
She let out a breath, and waited for him to step away from the tree.
He did.
Mary fired twice fast. The