Free Slash and Burn by Matt Hilton Page A

also has offices here?’
    ‘Yeah.’
    I fired another round the other side of his head.
    ‘Let’s speed this up a little, shall we? Give me the address.’
    There was murder in Larry Bolan’s eyes but he told me the address. Some office block in the affluent central district. Above a restaurant, he said.
    ‘Why does he want the woman?’
    Larry Bolan must have known the consequences of lying because he told me enough to make a considered guess. I shook my head in disgust: people dying for greed was nothing new.
    When he was done, I saw Larry glance down at Trent and there was tenderness in his gaze not normally associated with hard-asses.
    ‘You going to let us live?’ Larry asked me.
    ‘Would you let me live if the circumstances were reversed?’
    ‘Sure, I would.’ A smile crept over his face, and fleetingly I wondered if he’d seen something I was unaware of. Maybe a confederate sneaking up behind me.
    But it wasn’t that at all.
    It was resignation.
    ‘I’d keep you alive while I ripped your arms out of your sockets. I’d gut you and make you watch as I stamped your guts all over the floor.’
    ‘Sounds entertaining.’
    I knew it was coming before he even moved. I could see the tightening of his hands, the creases appearing next to his eyes, the slight dip of his body. He was coiling for the attack. Larry had realised he was going to die, but he wasn’t about to give in without a fight.
    Squaring my SIG on his chest, I prepared for the tell-tale widening of the eyelids.
    Then my peripheral vision caught a flicker of movement. Trent rising up, his hand whipping towards me. A wrench he’d snatched off the floor spinning at my head. Despite myself, I ducked, and the wrench missed me. But it had also pulled my aim a fraction of an inch. As Larry charged and I pulled the trigger, I already knew it wasn’t enough to kill him.
    The bullet hit his left shoulder, too high up on the meat to even stop him. He was massive and all the power of his driving legs covered the short distance between us in a little over a second.
    He loomed over me like the proverbial barn door. Only barn doors don’t come equipped with piston-like limbs intent on rending you apart. He snatched at my gun with one massive hand and grabbed me round the throat with the other. It would be a waste grappling for the gun because it was a fight I couldn’t hope to win. I drove my knee into his groin instead. Wind huffed out of him but it didn’t stop him.
    Larry picked me up, his fingers digging into my throat and wrist and he swung me and slammed me against the roof of the parked SUV.
    ‘Bastard!’ he snapped into my face. ‘You should have killed me sooner.’
    ‘Yeah,’ I grunted, my back bent tortuously over the roof of the car. ‘I should have.’
    Larry laughed, picked me up and then slammed me down again. My kidneys felt like they’d been mashed and black flickers of non-light span across my vision. His arms were too long for me to strike at his face with my free arm, so I brought down my fingers, digging for the radial nerve in the arm holding my throat. I’d have been as well trying to sink my fingers through oak. To show me the error of my ways, Larry dug his hand into my throat. Luckily for me his hand was so large that it wasn’t putting all his pressure on my trachea. If that had been the case, the cartilage would have easily popped and I’d have choked on my own blood. Still, the pressure was making me black out.
    With compressed blood pounding in my skull, I brought up my knees, getting my feet wedged into his pelvic girdle. I strained, trying to push his weight away from me, using my legs to gain distance.
    I was aware of Trent’s voice in some recess of my mind. ‘Kill him, Larry! Kill that motherfucker!’
    He didn’t know, but his baying was actually my salvation. It made Larry realise that he was going to finish me too soon. He’d told me he wanted me to live while he ripped me apart and eviscerated my body.