“Nope,” George said cheerfully. “Fully involved AC, two fans, and a fairly comfy stool. My bosses are nice people.”
“Where are they again?” Deputy Daily—as the name on his uniform proclaimed—sneered.
“Got no idea,” George said, which was the truth. “They’re… you know. On their day off. Sometimes they run errands. Sometimes they go to Disneyland. It’s a crapshoot.”
“Well, I don’t even know their names,” the deputy scoffed.
“It’s on their business license, moron,” Ernie muttered, and the man’s eyes practically sparkled with an excuse to escalate the situation.
“What did you say?”
“Their names are on the business license,” George told him patiently, as though he’d said it originally. “A copy of which is on the corkboard near the door, along with the latest safety protocols and factory recalls. You can see it if you move to the side.” Ace kept everything as legal as possible, for instances justlike this one.
“Don’t get smart with me!” Deputy Daily snarled. “Get your ass out of there!”
“No,” George told him, wondering what would happen to Dimitri if Daily figured out George wasn’t alone.
“Get out of there before I shoot you through the glass, you little puke!”
“And the door will still be locked, and the first responders on the scene will check the security feed andsee you, you corrupt piece of shit!” George snarled. “You haven’t given me any reason to trust you—”
Had the shot penetrated the Plexiglas, it would have gone straight through George’s skull.
George stared at the network of tiny cracks emanating from the bullet’s impact, and wondered how many of those earth-shattering stops the Plexiglas had in it, and then he realized his ears were ringing.
“Get the fuck out of there and tell me where your bosses are!” Daily screamed, and he was practically foaming at the mouth. George found his temper.
“Why?” he shouted. “What do you think they have? What are you so worried about that you brought a gun and an attitude to a garage in the middle of nowhere?”
“You know goddamned well they got that fuckin’ phone,” the man spat. “The sheriff knows it too. This place—it’s got that yellow car that nobody can catch, and we saw that green Forester that’s raising hell all over the fuckin’ desert. This place is behind it. Sheriff told me to come get the fuckin’ phone, ’cause his useless girlfriend told him it was gone.”
Ooh. Good to know. Phase One, complete.
“Why?” George asked. “What’s on the fuckin’ phone? Why would you come in here andthreaten my lifeover your boss’s phone?”
Another shot, and this one penetrated a little deeper into the Plexiglas.
George’s heart started hammering in his throat, and he thought dizzily that he’d never been this scared in his life.
Next to him, Ernie murmured, “Here, take the gun and step to the side where the Plexiglas is thicker.”
George did that, but he knew—and Ernie probably knew too—that the odds of the barrier between them and certain death wasn’t guaranteed to last one more shot.
But Daily’s hands were shaking, and sweat was pouring off his forehead in the cool of the early morning spring. It hit George that this man wasafraidof something. Whatever his errand here, he wasafraid.
George shifted the other way, so the steel-reinforced door was at his back, and hollered, “What’s on that phone, Deputy kiddie-fucker.What’s on that goddamned phone!”
Daily screamed, the gun exploding in rapid succession—and George, hidden from the Plexiglas—counted.One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight—
The Plexiglas blew inward at the eighth shot, and for a moment, all they could hear was the panicked click-click-click as the deputy fired desperately, hoping for one more bullet.
George stepped in view, stuck the muzzle of the gun through one of the large holes in the Plexiglas, and fired repeatedly, hitting the man center mass in his Kevlar, and he staggered back.
George stopped firing, and the deputy stared at him, his knees wobbly. Before he could fall to the ground, one more shot came through a hole in the Plexiglas, higher and slightly off center than George’s shots.
The man stared at Ernie, shocked, and his gun dropped from his hands as he fell, bleeding copiously from the neck into the oily dust and gravel coating the hardpan under the auto bay.
“Oh God,” George muttered, staring at Ernie standing with his own gun aimed through the glass.
