Gabriel Hunt - Hunt Through Napoleon's Web

More gunshots blasted out, increasing the panic in the room. Gabriel didn’t know how many civilians had been hit so far, or whether any had been trampled in the stampede. But it was too optimistic to hope either number was zero.

From the street outside, he heard the sounds of police sirens approaching—but they sounded far away.

He started shouldering his way through the crowd in the direction of Michael and Mariella. He was still several yards away when one of the waiters appeared next to Michael and chopped at his head with a tightly held automatic. The blow landed with a hollow impact that Gabriel could hear even over the din in the vast room. Michael’s knees unhinged and he fell, letting go of the woman and dropping the bundle.

“Michael!” Gabriel roared. He fought his way forward.

Mariella screamed as another waiter grabbed her and started dragging her away. She twisted in his grip and punched him, a nice solid right hook. The blow was enough to knock her assailant back a step. She lunged toward the bundle Michael had dropped.

Before she could reach it, a fleeing woman passing by kicked the bundle and sent it rolling across the floor. The cloth unwrapped as it rolled. Gabriel caught a glimpse of the object the cloth had been protecting.

A whiskey bottle.

Mariella threw herself after the bottle, grabbing for it. The waiter who had pistol-whipped Michael was after the bottle, too. He threw people aside to get them out of his way. The automatic rose and fell as he used it to batter a path through the crowd. Mariella was about to snatch the bottle from the floor as the man reached her, grabbed the back of her dress, and hauled her up and shoved her away.

Gabriel finally made it to Michael’s side, bent to take hold of his brother’s arm and lift him to his feet. Michael was groggy but conscious, a trickle of blood worming down his face from a deep cut in his scalp.

“Can you stand?” Gabriel had to shout to get his attention.

Michael nodded, wincing at the pain the motion must have set off inside his head. Gabriel helped him lean against a pillar and told him to stay there, then headed for Mariella.

The crowd was beginning to thin a little, and Gabriel realized that one purpose of all the shooting had been to herd the throng of guests toward the museum’s front entrance, leaving more room for the waiters to go after Mariella. Several bodies lay crumpled on the floor and a few guests crouched cowering in the corners, but much of the high society crowd had already escaped and most of the remaining guests and museum staff were pressing and fighting to get out the doors.

Mariella was just fighting, period. Two more waiters had grabbed her, but they had their hands full holding her while the first one went after the whiskey bottle. She stamped on their feet and kicked at their legs and writhed in their grasp. Before Gabriel could get to her, she tore loose from her captors for a second and tackled the other waiter from behind. As he fell, his hand just missed the bottle he’d been reaching for.

“Get her off me!” the waiter roared to his associates.

The other two men latched on to her again, but by this time Gabriel was there, clubbing his hands together and smashing them into the back of one man’s neck. The man went down hard, as if every muscle in his body had gone limp.

Mariella twisted and clawed at the other man’s face, leaving red streaks on his cheeks. He threw his hands up as she feinted at his eyes, then she lifted a knee into his groin. He doubled over in agony.

That left only the waiter who was trying to retrieve the bottle, and unfortunately it left him free. He grabbed for it once more.

Mariella cried, “Stop him!” as Gabriel ran past her.

The waiter scooped up the bottle and turned with a satisfied smirk on his face. The expression didn’t last long because in the next second Gabriel’s fist crashed into his face.

As the man teetered, Gabriel got his first good look at him. He was big, well over six feet tall, with massive shoulders that strained the seams of the uniform jacket. He hadn’t gotten those shoulders carrying trays of champagne, nor was waitering likely to be how he’d acquired his broken nose or the network of scars along both cheeks and around his eyes.

The punch had momentum and all of Gabriel’s weight and strength behind it. Despite being bigger and heavier than Gabriel, the man reeled from the impact. His hands went up in the air . . .

And the whiskey bottle flew out of his grip, turning over and over as it soared high and then came crashing down to shatter on the marble floor in an explosion of glass and liquid.

Mariella Montez had just seen several men beaten and several more shot, and she’d watched it all without showing any abnormal distress, any grief. But now, as she saw the glass shatter and its contents lost, she screamed, a low, plaintive wail, as if her heart had been ripped out.

_____________________________

DORCHESTER PUBLISHING

August 2011

Published by

Dorchester Publishing Co., Inc.

200 Madison Avenue

New York, NY 10016

in collaboration with Winterfall LLC

Copyright © 2010 by Winterfall LLC

Cover painting copyright © 2010 by Glen Orbik

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

GABRIEL HUNT was created by Charles Ardai and is a trademark of Winterfall LLC.

ISBN 13: 978-1-4285-1130-9

E-ISBN: 978-1-4285-0943-6

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Printed in the United States of America.

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