Winter Moon

them, holding a weapon in both hands, before Luther and Jack had even touched their revolvers.
        Automatic gunfire hammered the day. Bullets pounded Luther's chest, knocked the big man off his feet, hurled him backward, and Hassam Arkadian spun from the impact of one-two-three hits, went down hard, screaming in agony.
        Jack threw himself against the glass door to the office. He almost made it to cover before taking a hit to the left leg. He felt as if he'd been clubbed across the thigh with a tire iron, but it was a bullet, not a blow.
        He dropped facedown on the office floor. The door swung shut behind him, gunfire shattered it, and gummy chunks of tempered glass cascaded across his back.
        Hot pain boiled sweat from him..A radio was playing. Golden oldies. Dionne Warwick. Singing about the world needing love, sweet love.
        Outside, Arkadian was still screaming, but there wasn't a sound from Luther Bryson.
        Luther was dead. Jack couldn't think about that. Dead. Didn't dare think about it. Dead. Wouldn't think about it.
        The chatter of more gunfire.
        Someone else screamed. Probably the attendant at the Lexus. It wasn't a lasting scream. Brief, quickly choked off.
        Outside, Arkadian wasn't screaming anymore, either. He was sobbing and calling for Jesus.
        Hard, chill wind made the plate-glass windows vibrate. It hooted through the shattered door.
        The gunman would be coming.

CHAPTER TWO.
        
        Jack was stunned at the quantity of his own blood on the vinyl-tile floor around him. Nausea squirmed through him, and greasy sweat streamed down his face. He couldn't take his eyes off the spreading stain that darkened his pants.
        He had never been shot before. The pain was terrible but not as bad as he would have expected. Worse than the pain was the sense of violation and vulnerability, a terrible frantic awareness of the true fragility of the human body.
        He might not be able to hold on to consciousness for long. A hungry darkness was already eating away at the edges of his vision.
        He probably couldn't put much weight on his left leg, and he didn't have time to pull himself up on his right alone, not while in such an exposed position.
        Shedding broken glass as a bright-scaled snake might shed an old skin, unavoidably leaving a trail of blood, he crawled fast on his belly alongside the L-shaped work counter behind which Arkadian kept the cash register.
        The gunman would be coming.
        From the sound the weapon made and the brief glimpse he'd gotten of it, Jack figured it was a submachine gun-maybe a Micro Uzi. The Micro was less than ten inches long with the wire stock folded forward but a lot heavier than a pistol, weighing about two kilos if it had a single magazine, heavier if it featured two magazines welded at right angles to give it a forty-round capacity. It would be like carrying a standard-size bag of sugar in a sling, it was sure to cause chronic neck pain, but not too big to fit an oversize shoulder holster under an.Armani suit-and worth the trouble if a man had snake-mean enemies.
        Could be an FN P90, too, or maybe a British Bushman 2, but probably not a Czech Skorpion, because a Skorpion fired only.32 ACP ammo.
        Judging by how hard Luther had gone down, this seemed to be a gun with more punch than a Skorpion, which the 9mm Micro Uzi provided. Forty rounds in the Uzi to start, and the son of a bitch had fired twelve, sixteen at most, so at least twenty-four rounds were left, and maybe a pocketful of spare cartridges.
        Thunder boomed, the air felt heavy with pent-up rain, wind shrieked through the ruined door, and the gun rattled again. Outside, Hassam Arkadian's cries to Jesus abruptly ended.
        Jack desperately pulled himself around the end of the counter, thinking the unthinkable. Luther Bryson dead. Arkadian dead. The attendant dead. Most likely the young Asian mechanic too. All of them wasted.
        The world had been turned upside down in less than a minute.
        Now it was one-on-one, survival of the fittest, and Jack wasn't afraid of that game. Though Darwinian selection tended to favor the guy with the biggest gun and best supply of ammunition, cleverness could outweigh caliber. He had been saved by his wits before and might be again.
        Surviving could be easier when he had his back to the wall, the odds were stacked high