Brian Freeman - Stripped

When the door swung open, banging against the wall, Blake knew she was smart.

He recoiled and almost fired. His finger twitched on the trigger, instinct taking over, and he realized at the last instant that she wasn’t coming through the door. She wanted him to fire, betraying his position.

His bullet, then her bullet, and he would be dead. A nice ruse.

He knew enough to respect his enemy.

He didn’t fire. She didn’t know where he was. Now, he knew, she had to choose.

D amn. He didn’t fire.

Left or right , she thought.

She had to make a choice. Either he was on the left side of the door or the right. Or he was running, getting away, and each second she hesitated gave him more time to escape.

She would roll through, pivot, and fire. Make the right choice and it was even odds for both of them, gun to gun, man to… woman.

Make the wrong choice, and she was dead. Simple as that. Left or right.

Left was the only direction that made sense. The door opened left. On the right, he was exposed. To the left, the door gave him cover, blocked her view for a crucial millisecond, gave him an advantage. She had the edge if he was on the right-and he knew it.

Unless he could see into her head and anticipate what she was thinking and realize that being on the right gave him the edge if she went to the left first, offering him her back. A gamble. A risk. Vegas.

She couldn’t overthink. She was up against a tactician. He’d give himself the maximum odds for survival. That meant he was waiting for her on the left.

Or running.

She needed to move.

Amanda thought about Bobby. She could taste his last kiss.

Then she kicked the door a second time, and as the light spilled out, she dove and rolled onto the pavement and came up in a crouch to her left with her gun aimed. She had just enough time for the image to reach her brain, to see the empty stretch of wall behind the door, to realize her mistake. She reacted instantly. Didn’t fire. Began to twist, turn, duck, shift.

Fast Blindingly fast. But not fast enough.

He waited for her on the right, his gun poised. She had to go left, because all her training told her to go left, and cops were creatures of training. There was no surprise, no pleasure, no sadness, when she did. In every fight there was a winner and a loser, and it was no disgrace to lose with dignity.

She was very fast. He was impressed.

Most cops would have frozen, hesitated, but she turned seamlessly, recovering from her mistake and spinning back the other way. If she had gone right, she might well have gotten the first shot.

But no.

Blake pulled the trigger.

It was such a short moment, but it felt so long.

Amanda was on a precipice, a slim tower of rock. Around her were other peaks, a chessboard of granite kings, many of them grand, cloud-swept mountains climbing into the sky. She stood on the edge and looked down, but there was no bottom to the world, no emerald earth, just mist. She knew she could fly.

When she glanced behind her, Bobby was there, tears streaming down his face, and she didn’t understand how he could be so sad when there was such joy to be had here.

Amanda smiled at him and blew him a kiss. Then, with her arms spread wide, she stepped into the air.

Blake ran. The night gave him cover. He sprinted through the empty lot, feeling broken glass crunch and scatter under his feet. When he reached Eighth Street, he headed northeast, toward the downscale neighborhood surrounding the overpass for Highway 95. He slowed to a walk as he crossed Stewart Avenue, then ran again when he was beyond the glare of lights from the street.

He abandoned his car, which was parked three blocks in the opposite direction, but it was stolen, and he could readily steal another. His apartment was only half a mile away, and it was safer now to get there on foot.

There were a handful of strangers around him. It was after midnight, and they were mostly ducking the law themselves, selling drugs or using drugs. They glanced in his direction as he ran, to make sure there were no cops in hot pursuit, but otherwise they didn’t care about him. The deeper he penetrated into the neighborhood, the fewer people he saw, until he was alone. He walked again.

He saw the concrete overpass ahead. The houses around him were sunk into decay, with collapsing fences, cracked pink stucco, and gates hanging open. A few dusty cars were parked haphazardly in the yards. He passed a couple of old shopping carts on the sidewalk, their wheels stripped off.

Sirens erupted in the surrounding streets. Blake ducked back into the shadows near one of the houses. He eyed the traffic behind him and saw the flashing red lights of a patrol car as it streaked toward the cafe. Word was out It wouldn’t be long now, just a few minutes, before the neighborhood was engulfed by police trying to lay out a net around the area.

He walked faster. When he passed a house with laundry hung out on a sagging clothesline, he slipped inside the fence and grabbed a jean shirt off the line and shrugged it over his white T-shirt. A baseball cap was lying in the dirt, and he put it on. He began peeling at the false beard on his face. He kept a small bottle of spirit gum remover in his jeans for emergencies, and he tried quickly to get as much of the hair and glue off his face as he could. It wasn’t perfect, but at least at first glance, he was again a man without a beard.

Blake thought about strategy. He had always expected the police to get close to him eventually, but he had been hoping for a couple more days and a little more breathing room to put his plans in motion. He didn’t have that now. He had to move immediately. Tonight.

That was when he realized the crush of police searching for him in the dirty streets could actually work to his advantage.

He only needed a few hours.

Blake made his way under the overpass. The freeway traffic roared overhead, creating a thunder in his ears and a constant vibration that rumbled under his feet. His eyes darted around the concrete superstructure, on the hunt for muggers or gangs. It was easy to get trapped here, with no way out to the sides and an easy path to block in front and behind, but he didn’t see anyone except a young hooker, sitting with her back to one of the pillars.

He didn’t know why she was there. There was no business to be had in this area. Then he saw she was smoking a cigarette and taking an occasional snort of cocaine from a wrinkled piece of tinfoil. Blake stopped and looked at her, his mind grinding and coming up with a plan. She was young, trying to look twenty-one, but he suspected she was no more than fifteen. She wore knee-high boots and a fake leather jacket and had poorly applied lipstick and platinum blond hair that was almost white. She saw him watching her and gave him a drugged smile. When she spread her legs, he saw that she was naked underneath her skirt. She reached down with two fingers and spread her pink lips.

’Twenty bucks, baby,” she murmured.

Blake reached down, grabbed her by her blond hair, and yanked her to her feet. Her cigarette fell smoldering to the pavement.

“Hey!” she screamed. “Fuckhead, that hurts!”

He slapped her hard. “Shut up.”

She took a look in his eyes and tried to run, but he had a lock on her shoulder and spun her back around. Her face filled with fear, and she touched her red cheek tenderly. Her voice became like a kid’s again, weak and scared. “Don’t hurt me.”

“I’m not going to. Shut up and listen. I’ve got two hundred bucks. It’s yours if you spend the night with me.”

The expression on her face changed. Greed took over. She smiled a fake seductive smile at him. “Two hundred bucks? Sure, baby, you got it. But look, I don’t do ass, okay? I do everything else, but not that.”