Stacked Deck. Terry Watkins
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Many of the young guns of poker were so flush with cash that it had become commonplace to go into one of their houses and see it everywhere. Money was the new drug of choice.
Beth settled back, her mind preoccupied with how to handle backing out of the Oracle assignment.
They dropped quickly down past the Mormon church that stood on the side of Sunrise Mountain looking down on Vegas like a condemnation. It was her father who told her the Mormons provided the casinos with their most valuable employees, as they had long ago proven to be honest and trustworthy, a highly sought after quality in a casino.
Without warning, Curtis swerved and braked hard, the car’s headlights framing a black car that was blocking the road. “What the hell’s this?”
He brought the Vette to a skidding halt.
Two men on the far side of the black car raised their arms and extended from their hands the unmistakable glint of gun metal.
“Get down!” Curtis yelled.
He reached for the glove box, pulled out a weapon and at the same time started to back up. Bullets slammed through the windshield.
Another car pulled out of a side street behind them, its high beams flooding the Vette and blinding her when she turned to look.
The ambush was perfect. The trap doors closed at both ends. And when she looked at Curtis to see why he wasn’t doing anything she saw blood on his face.
Chapter 2
“Get out, run!” Curtis said as he fired his weapon first one way, then another.
She snapped off her seat belt, grabbed the door handle, opened the door and he pushed her out onto the road.
The firing was from guns with silencers that made little spitting sounds. She rolled over the side of the embankment, her small shoulder bag tangling around her neck as bullets kicked dirt and rocks around her.
When she stopped rolling, she pushed herself up and started running. Glancing back as she ran, she saw Curtis get out of the car, still exchanging gunfire. He was trying to get away, but then he fell, face first onto the pavement.
A sickening feeling clenched her stomach.
Two men came after her, scampering down the hill, fanning out. Then she spotted a third running down the road.
The money was in the car. Why were they after her? Did they think she had the money in her shoulder bag?
Then the frightening thought raced into her mind that it wasn’t the money. It was her they were after.
They wanted to kill her.
The houses along the hill were in uneven rows and the men were trying to cut off her escape routes.
She darted into what looked like a narrow lane between two large buildings, only to find that it was an alley that had been dead-ended by a high wall connecting the structures.
Trapped.
She turned and retreated the way she’d come in, but then heard someone running. Frantically she looked for a place to hide and found nothing. She tried a door but it was locked.
Everything slowed to a near halt. She felt the pulsing of her blood through her veins, the intense weight of the air, the granulated texture of the wall her hand brushed against, the push of the stones beneath the feet.
Her gut became a knot of cold, sickening fear.
In panic and desperation, Beth snatched up a large rock and waited at the entrance of the narrow alley.
It wasn’t in her nature to die passively, trapped like a rabbit. Her reflexes and reactions had been honed in the tough backstreets of Vegas as the daughter of a down-and-out gambler, and later she’d been trained as a teen in martial arts and survival combat tactics at the Athena Academy.
She heard the gunman before she saw him, his breathing heavy, footsteps crunching gravel as he rounded the corner.
Beth crouched in the blackness, coiled tight as a cobra. She struck, driving up and swinging the rock with everything she had.
Startled, he had no defense other than to raise his hands a split second too late to shield his face.
The rock met skin, bone, teeth and nose with a sickening thud. Blood sprayed across her pink T-shirt, her neck and arms. The man went down hard and stayed there.
She yanked his weapon from his hand, then racked it to make sure a round was chambered as she ran. Curtis had trained her at a firing range, but firing at targets was one thing, firing at people, another. She’d never shot at someone before, but had often wondered what it would be like because she knew one day, when she caught up with the man she was hunting, it just might come to that. Would she hesitate, and because of that, be the one to end up dead? Curtis’s words echoed in her mind: When it’s your life, you will fire.
Her peripheral vision picked up a second man coming toward her twenty yards away.
Without hesitation, she took aim and fired right at him. The gun didn’t buck much. The silencer seemed to barely make any sound. But it was effective.
Her pursuer vanished around the corner of a garage behind one of the tract homes and in that instant she knew the exhilarating power of a gun in all its deadly reality.
Beth darted in the opposite direction, cutting down a narrow path.
She caught a view of the third man as he tracked her from one street over, a blip of movement in the dark, sliding fast on her right as he tried to cut off her downhill escape.
She charged through one open backyard gate, then another, past a startled woman and her small white dogs barking with tiny fury in her wake.
Her pursuer cut across below her.
She tried to find another route, but already he was rising over a wall that separated two houses, the man moving with the agility of a gymnast.
She fired. He twisted awkwardly, landed with a yelp and she didn’t know if she’d hit him, or if he’d twisted an ankle. She didn’t hang around to find out.
In that instant she thought she understood something about soldiers in combat. Bone-chilling fear can paralyze if you don’t squash it quickly.
Sprinting toward another street that bled down the mountain, she came upon a young guy straddling a blue motorcycle, the engine rumbling as he talked to a girl on the curb.
They both glanced at Beth as she ran toward them, utterly unaware of the chaotic battle that had unfolded up the hill.
“I need your bike,” Beth said. She’d dated an air force pilot on and off for two years and he’d introduced her to motorcycles. She’d owned a much beloved Harley for a while, but an accident and the increase in traffic had changed her mind about the joys of motorcycle riding in Vegas.
Maybe he didn’t see the gun, didn’t believe it, but in any case he told her to fuck off.
She was fully in the persona of the tough Vegas kid she’d once been. And her life was at stake. Beth pushed the astonished girl aside, and leveled the semiautomatic at the motorcyclist. “I said I need your motorcycle.”
“Ron, get the hell off and give it to her,” the girl said. “She’s fucking crazy.”
He abandoned his machine, hands up. “It’s all yours. Don’t shoot me.”
Beth said, “You have a cell phone?”
He nodded.
“Then call the police and tell them somebody has been shot up on Peaceful Lane. Send an ambulance. Tell them there are three men with guns running around up there. I’ll call in the location of your motorcycle in an hour. Sorry, but I have to get out of here.”
She mounted the bike, heeled the kick stand and roared off into the Vegas night.
As she