“You sure?”
“They wanted these bricks too bad to back out.”
I stared down at my phone again, but my thoughts drifted somewhere else before I could even process the screen.
Giani.
Again.
I hated how much space she was taking up inside my head now.
“You still thinking about that shit?” Booda asked without looking at me.
“She was around me every day.”
“I know.”
“That’s weird as fuck.”
Booda finally looked over at me then. “It is, but now you know how to handle her going forward.”
I leaned my head back against the seat and closed my eyes for a brief moment.
Booda checked the time once more before deciding, “We gon’ give them ten more minutes, then we gone. They taking too long.”
Neither one of us realized that was our last chance to leave.
Booda reached for the radio dial. His fingers touched the knob right as headlights swung into the alley. Both of us went rigid in our seats.
A black SUV crept toward us, then stopped a few car lengths away. The engine idled. No one got out.
Booda’s eyes narrowed. “Is that the?”
“I don’t know.” My finger curled around the trigger as the SUV’s doors swung wide.
The first shots punched through the windshield before my brain caught up to the sound. Glass sprayed across my face.
“Fuck!” Booda groaned, throwing himself sideways, covering me as rounds tore through the space where my head had been a half-second before.
Metal screamed. The truck bucked and shuddered under the barrage. I pressed myself against the seat, trying to make myself smaller, but there was nowhere to go.
“Booda!” I screamed as bullets ripped through the driver’s door and stitched across the dashboard, shattering the console between us.
The noise swallowed everything. Thought. Instinct. Breathing. All I could think about was surviving the next second.
I heard Booda grunt. Felt him jerk on top of me. Hot blood splattered across my face.
“Oh, my God!”
I tried to raise my weapon, but my arm wouldn’t obey. Something hot spread across my side. The passenger window burst inward, showering me with crystalline fragments that bit into my skin like teeth.
The truck was dying around us. Every surface punctured, every window gone, the seats leaking foam and fabric. And still the rounds kept coming, punching, tearing, and shredding until I couldn’t tell where the vehicle ended, and my own body began.
Another impact slammed into my back.
My ears rang.
Smoke filled the truck so thick it burned my eyes and throat, while the smell of blood and gunpowder swallowed the air around us.
