Deluge (The Best Thrillers Book 2) James Best (best e book reader .TXT) 📖

the front seat, he laughed that it would be parts by morning. Baldwin guessed that her husband would not approve.

She made out a check, and Jemmy accepted it as if it were his due. Baldwin agreed. Without Jemmy and his stolen semi, she would probably be treading water. He could have passed them by, so in her mind, the unassuming brawler was a hero. Then she remembered that he had put a man in the hospital. Well, hell, until she learned otherwise, she would assume that the other man had instigated the fight.

In short order, they said their goodbyes and called a car service. As promised, the rain was lighter on the coast, but it had not stopped. Traffic remained surprisingly heavy in the wee hours of the morning, which meant that the fortunate were still fleeing the inland regions. Despite the congestion, it felt good to be stuck in normal urban traffic. Their first destination would be Sherrell Wilson’s flat, which was conveniently close to the city center, in a neighborhood called Duboce Triangle. As they crawled over the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge, Smith tried unsuccessfully to find them rooms, or even one room, in any hotel. Wilson again invited them to use her floor. After the night they had experienced, even a single bathroom and a hard floor sounded like the lap of luxury. In fact, anything dry that wasn’t moving would be a treat.

Baldwin thought about calling the lieutenant governor or his chief of staff, but at this hour, it would rub salt in the wounds. They had started to drain the reservoirs and hopefully followed their recommendation to open all impediments to water flowing freely to the sea.

They arrived in front of a tiny market that probably made most of its money off booze, milk, and bread. Wilson pointed out her place in a sublevel below the market. Baldwin felt immensely weary. She had only her computer bag, in which she had stuffed one change of undergarments and a few toiletries. Everything else remained in Sacramento, locked in her Mercedes, or on the side of the road in an abandoned Land Cruiser. Oh, well, she’d buy a change of clothes in the morning. All she wanted right now was a few hours’ sleep. While Wilson gathered her few belongings, Baldwin stepped down three steps into a tiny courtyard protected by a wrought-iron gate.

A dark-clad man leaped at her, screeching bloody murder.

She screamed!

Chapter 33

Evarts was brave, not foolish. Before entering the lobby, he had removed his body armor because he believed that the benefit of surprise outweighed protection against being hit in the upper torso. The opportunity for surprise had disappeared with the shooting in the lobby. He raced back into the hallway, put on his shoes, slapped on the body armor, and grabbed his shotgun. He also took a fully loaded magazine from his belt and then dropped the belt back on the floor. As he moved toward the front door, he exchanged the partly used magazine in his Glock for the fully loaded one and then tucked the handgun into his front waistband. He was ready.

The shooting in front had abated but not ceased. One side was winning, or both sides were running out of ammunition. Considering the amount of shooting, Evarts worried that it could be both. Just as he reached the front door, two gangbangers came bursting in, dragging a wounded man-boy whose pants had fallen around his ankles. Evarts raised the shotgun and ordered them to drop their weapons and lay the wounded man on the floor.

Everyone froze.

Damn it, these punks were going to go for it!

“Drop it, now!” Evarts yelled.

“Fuck you!” one of them yelled as he raised a pistol-gripped machine gun.

Evarts shot, pumped, shot, pumped. Then the wounded man pulled a tiny revolver from his jacket pocket. Evarts shot, pumped.

All three gangbangers lay dead.

Stupid shits.

As he reloaded, Evarts stepped over the bodies and exited the lobby door into a windowed vestibule. The right side incorporated a short section of the exterior stucco wall, and the waist-to-ceiling windows on the left had been shot out, along with the glass front doors. Shattered glass lay everywhere, shards strewn across the floor, making Evarts thankful he had taken the time to put on his shoes. The space was empty of people except for one obviously dead body. The waist-high wall showed numerous bullet holes, which meant it provided only concealment, not protection. Evarts bent low and peered into the parking lot. What he saw alarmed him. Six or eight gangbangers milled around squad cars, pumping their arms in victory.

His first instinct was to charge out and shoot the assholes. That idea didn’t last long. He enjoyed living too much to commit suicide. He pulled his phone out of his pocket to call his department’s dispatcher. Before she answered, he saw trouble. The gangbangers had surveyed their victims and now turned their attention back to the lobby. They had probably heard shooting from that location. One of them yelled an expletive in Spanish, and they all charged the entrance. Evarts glanced through the glass door and saw the night staff still huddled together in the lobby’s central seating area.

He continued crouching for a few beats to allow the gangbangers to get closer and then yelled at the hotel staff.

“Run!”

To punctuate his command, he rose up enough to aim and shoot the closest charging gangbanger. He got off one more unaimed shot before dropping below the level of the concealing wall and duckwalking toward the outer glass door. Right move. Automatic fire shredded the wall closer to the lobby. They hadn’t expected him to move away from there.

Someone appeared at the door and started to jerk the handle open. From less than five feet away, Evarts fired the shotgun, splattering the gangster’s shirtfront with nine holes. He immediately waddled over to the opposite wall, bracing in anticipation of bullets tearing his back apart. He flipped around and put his back against the stucco