“They must’ve seen us going into the back yard,” Wolfe said, as he went to look through a screened air vent in the concrete wall.
He could see a Chunkie standing on the sidewalk, a Mack 10 in hand.
Men were walking past the vent, toward the back of the house. The computer was still uploading…
Voices. Whispers from outside. Footsteps. The click of a cocking gun.
The computer was still uploading…
“We’ve been getting boxed in a lot today,” Wolfe whispered calmly. “It’s a popular trend, boxing us in.”
“They got to be in there!” someone said, outside. “We got to rush ’em and shoot any motherfuckers we find!”
The computer was…
Done.
“It’s uploaded,” she said breathlessly.
“That’s good.” Privately he was thinking, But it’ll be a shame to die here anyway…
“It looks like it’s completely up and going out onto SystemLeaks,” Seline said, bending over the desk. “And from there—everyplace else.”
“Cool. I hope Verrick chokes on it.”
Wolfe walked over to the stairs, and prepared to defend Seline as best he could. He drew the .45…
“You got that .44?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“Better get it ready…”
Gunfire sounded—but from the front of the house.
Seline went to the vent and looked through. “They’re… in a fight. With one another! No… I think that’s a different bunch of gangsters! I saw your friend, Shuggie!”
Wolfe ran to the vent, and looked—he could make out Shuggie crouching behind a car, firing across the hood with the Desert Eagle. The huge handgun lifted a Chunkie off his feet and spun him around before he fell, stone cold dead, on the sidewalk.
“Yeah man,” Wolfe chuckled. “De Oppresso Liber!”
It didn’t take long. No more than three minutes of firefight, the Chunkies taking all the casualties. The surviving Chunkies took off, some of them driving away, the others, unable to get to their cars without being shot, running off between houses.
Wolfe and Seline walked upstairs and out front, hands in the air, just to defuse anyone trigger happy. “Shuggie!”
The Black Viceroys captain was standing by a rebuilt Army-green Plymouth Duster, reloading his Desert Eagle. He glanced up at Wolfe and Seline.
“Let ’em through, they’re okay!” Shuggie called, as other Viceroys—some Wolfe didn’t know—turned to stare.
“Put your hands down,” Shuggie said, tossing the massive handgun on the front seat of his Duster.
“Nice ride,” Wolfe said. “You cherry it up yourself?”
“Fuck no, man, who’s got time for that. I paid to have it done by the best.”
Seline was looking at the dead men on the street. “The cops are gonna see all this…”
“Nah,” Wolfe said. He was feeling pretty good. A Delta Force brother had come to his rescue and he and Seline had successfully uploaded the files. Verrick must have smoke coming out of his ears about now. “Remember, the cops got the area blocked off.”
“Yeah, just two blocks outside that perimeter I was at,” Shuggie said. “Don’t get my ‘hood back till you’re dead—or until I deal with this.”
“Thanks for getting my back, brother,” Wolfe said, putting out his fist.
Shuggie gave him a fist bump, the kind Special Forces do. “Hey you know, I had to deal with those Chunkies sometime. Funny thing, the cops kinda making that possible, keeping the area locked up. But you know—it’s not the Chunky Crunkies I’m worried about…”
He pointed at the sky past Wolfe.
Seline and Wolfe turned—and saw two drones skimming their way over the rooftops.
Shuggie drew his Desert Eagle and took careful aim, both hands wrapped around the big hand gun—while the drone was taking careful aim at him.
Wolfe drew Seline back behind the car, assuming the drones would soon open fire. But he already had his PearcePhone out.
Shuggie fired; the gun boomed loudly, three times. The big gun, firing .50 Action Express rounds, easily penetrated the snout of the UAV on the right—and the unmanned vehicle exploded.
The other drone was rocked by the shockwave from the explosion. Shuggie fired at it, missed, and lined up his aim again
“Don’t shoot that other one, Shuggie,” Wolfe said. “I’ve got this.”
Shuggie looked at him. “You gonna deal with that thing with a phone?”
Wolfe was already flashing his fingertips over the interface. “No ordinary phone… and above-ground these things are vulnerable to a GPS hack…”
The drone, hovering just above the phone lines, angled downward to aim its gun at the group by the car—and then it froze. It seemed to jerk about in the air for a moment like a fishing float, then angled upward, and flew overhead. “I’ve got to deal with that police barricade,” Wolfe said. “With some luck this thing’ll do it.”
“You got control of that thing with a phone?” Shuggie said, amazed. “You show me how to do that?”
“We’ll talk about that sometime, brother,” Wolfe said. “Can you drive us back to my hidey-hole… if I can get rid of the cops?”
“You’re not planning on shooting any cops around here, are you?” Shuggie asked. “I don’t need that kind of heat coming down on me.”
“No worries, dude. Come on.”
Shuggie waved the other Viceroys away, sending them back in their own vehicles to the perimeter, as he got into the Duster beside Renfo. Wolfe and Seline got in the back.
They turned left at the corner, following the drone, as Wolfe continued to direct it on ahead. A few blocks down was a police barricade, with two CPD patrol cars parked radiator-to-radiator across the street at the corner. A barricade was up—and several cops were arrayed around the barricade with shotguns.
“They got nicer barricades than you do, Shuggie,” Wolfe said.
“I sure hope you know what you’re doing, Wolfe,” Shuggie said, slowing the car to a stop a block from the police barricade.
Seline looked at Wolfe. “I hope so too, Wolfe. Christ. Those cops aren’t going to like whatever it is you’ve got planned…”
Wolfe looked up at Shuggie. “You willing to drive up on a sidewalk, Shuggie? And over a lawn? Can you do it without wrecking this Duster?”
“Man I got the best shocks there is on this beauty. My baby can slam over a speedbump at sixty miles an hour, no problem.”
“Okay. Just try to do it without running anybody over…”
Wolfe tapped the PearcePhone, thumbs working the app. He could see the street, in the phone’s screen, from the point of view of the drone’s high def digital camera. The image showed the cops and their barricade, ahead and below. The cops had just spotted the drone, pointing upward at it, open mouthed. Some of them probably thought they were seeing a UFO. All the better.
He had to aim the drone carefully…
Peering into the phone’s screen, Wolfe moved the crosshairs with careful flicks of his thumbs, got the drone’s gun sighted in on the cops… then he moved the crosshairs so that it was aimed just a few steps short of them.
He licked his lips—and tapped the fire button. Twice.
The drone fired, smacking two bullets into the street in front of the police at the barricades.
One of them fired up at the drone, the others scrambled back behind the cars. He tilted the drone toward the cop firing at it—and the guy turned and ran, joining his police pals.
Wolfe fired twice more into the hoods of the patrol cars to get the cops to back away from them. It worked…
And he sent the drone down in a crash dive.
The UAV whined down like a bomb and smashed into the hoods of the two unoccupied cars, coming down right in between them.