Free The Dame Did It by Joel Jenkins

longshot. The round instead blew the cash
register off the front counter, causing the horrified employees to
scream in terror as they fled into the kitchen.
    However, this guard proved to be of stern
stuff, forcing himself not to lose the grip on his Colt as he went
down on one knee. Channeling his will into initiating a counter
shot, he managed to strike Ira in his left shoulder blade, knocking
him off of his feet. He landed on his back, the impact causing him
to drop his gun.
    Shouting her lover’s name, Gia came to her
senses and released her hold on her father’s corpse. With
prodigious speed and determination she leapt out of the guard’s
line of fire, successfully dodging another shot from him. Landing
on the floor towards Ira’s lost firearm, she grabbed it, aimed it,
and blew a round directly in the opposing guard’s gut. A spray of
crimson erupted from the hole cruelly blasted into his stomach,
while his small intestines spilled messily onto the floor a second
later. The man’s expression took on a combination of horror and
confusion just before he collapsed as a heap of dead flesh.
    “Shit!” Vito shouted at the sight of his
defender’s execution.
    He first considered drawing his own firearm
to inflict his share of destruction on the still breathing members
of his hated rival clan. He then thought better of it, and decided
to flee the premises. After all, Gino was dead, and surely the
Provenzo Family could no longer be a viable threat to his planned
coup without the big man. As he turned towards the door to flee, he
managed to almost reach it before he heard a loud blast and felt
his left leg go numb.
    That bitch! he silently shouted to
himself as he realized that Gia put a bullet through his limb.
Focusing his inordinate willpower, he forced himself to jump back
up on his single good leg and push himself out the door. Once
outside, his indomitable will enabled him to limp across the
parking lot towards his vehicle at surprising speed, leaving a
trail of blood behind him as he did so. While uttering a string of
obscenities in Italian, he drew his gun and shot two of the
Provenzo car’s tires, rendering the vehicle un-drivable.
    He then clambered to his car as quickly as
he possibly could considering his serious albeit non-lethal injury.
Forcing himself into the vehicle, he managed to key the ignition,
and drive himself away while using his single usable leg to operate
both the brake and the accelerator. You’re dead, bitch, you’re
dead! he repeatedly shouted to himself as further motivation to
get to a place of treatment without passing out at the wheel.
    Back to the present moment, Fido continued
his exchange of fire with the sole remaining Gambino guard. After
the leader of the Provenzo security force successfully blasted away
the top of the table protecting his adversary, he realized that he
was out of ammo. But the Gambino guard managed to reload his Colt
faster than Fido could.
    Spurred into a sense of confidence, the
Gambino trigger man decided to charge Fido. The latter ejected the
spent cartridge and reached into his belt for another magazine. But
before he could reload, he noticed the other guard standing in
front of him with the barrel of his gun pointed downward at his
temple.
    “Say ‘hi’ to the Devil for me, willya?” the
guard said as he squeezed the trigger. The loud reverberation of a
Colt being fired was heard, and Fido’s body was covered in a thick
spatter of blood.
    However, the trembling man quickly
discovered that he could still see and hear the surroundings of the
familiar world. He wiped the thick cover of stinging blood off of
his eyes as he looked up just in time to see his opponent’s body
fall to the ground. A gaping hole leading from the back of the
fallen guard’s head and out the front of his mouth was the source
of his demise. The blood that spattered all over Fido was not his
own.
    Pushing himself cautiously to his feet, he
saw that the bullet had been fired from