Free Blood Howl by Robin Saxon and Alex Kidwell Page B

good little soldier. He didn’t even flinch when the barrel of Jed’s gun pressed into the back of his neck.
    “Howdy.” Jed grinned. It wasn’t a pleasant expression. “Whatch’a lookin’ for?”
    Now see, Jed was suffering from quite a case of blue balls. He’d left Redford at home with all those fucking conflicting emotions and the wondering and the fact that he really wanted, more than anything, to just drag Redford into bed and forget the rest of the world completely. All of that was percolating back at the apartment, and he honest to God had no idea what to do with it. So he might have been a little enthusiastic when he hauled the sniper up and slammed his head into the concrete a few times. But damn him straight to Alabama if it didn’t make him feel just a tiny bit better.
    Shoving the guy up against the wall, Jed smiled at him, slightly crazed, bracing him up with his arm across his throat, the gun shoved very neatly in under his chin. “Now, I’m only going to ask you once, because I’m kind of having a day. I really want to shoot something off, if you catch my drift, and since I didn’t do the one, you may be the recipient of the other. So why don’t you do us both a favor and cut out any crap and just answer and we’ll both go trotting on home, okay?”
    Mr. Handlebar—seriously, he had a mustache that looked like it’d be more comfortable tying a buxom blonde to some train tracks—met his eyes in a steely gaze. Sadly, the sane so very rarely knew what to do when met with the full force of what Jed was packing. Eventually he looked away and nodded carefully, jaw working in what might have been fear. Or maybe he was chewing gum. Who the hell really knew?
    “Who’s your boss?”
    Handlebar hesitated, then answered, with a faint Hispanic accent, “Mr. Fil.”
    Mister Fil, now. Well, wasn’t he fancy. “He in town?” Jed asked, lightly tracing the barrel of his gun along Handlebar’s jugular.
    Another long pause before he gritted out, “Yes.” Jed was guessing his new best friend was from El Salvador region. He’d spent a couple of months there one night. Nice people. Great food. Excellent revolutions.
    “And if I were going to add Mr. Fil to my Christmas card list,” Jed mused, arching an eyebrow, “where would he receive his Feliz Navidad ?”
    Grunting, Handlebar nodded him closer. Jed leaned in, wondering if it really was going to be that easy. Which, of course, it wasn’t. What was this, a fairy tale? Handlebar hocked one right in his eye, raising his knee at the same time to catch him, hard, in his little soldier.
    Oh, poor Winston Churchill. A crueler fate was never known.
    Jed stumbled a moment, just long enough for Handlebar to elbow him across the jaw, sending him sprawling with a low grunt of pain. Jed rolled over and started firing, cursing as the other man took off running across the roof. Struggling to his feet, he chased after him, looking for his shot. Handlebar darted around the corner to the edge of the roof, Jed hot on his heels, and….
    He jumped. The nutty bastard jumped off the goddamn roof, straight into the back of a pickup truck, which burned rubber right the hell out of there. Jed emptied the rest of his clip in their general direction, more of a therapy thing since all he managed to do was blow out the back window, shouting curses after them.
    Well, shit.
    Wiping blood out of his eye from where he’d scraped his face against the stones that lined the roof, Jed huffed an annoyed sigh and stared at the road where the truck had disappeared. It hadn’t been there before, and the sniper didn’t get a chance to call for help. Which meant that he’d been followed. By people eminently better at it than the first five.
    Fil had done a staffing change. Bully for him.
    The motherfucker wanted them to know he was around. He wanted Jed to know that he was close enough to reach out and touch him whenever he got in the mood. Now Jed still knew next to nothing, and he