Chapter 332: A Million Dollars

Lucas did not know the full shape of it yet.

He only knew the bar had turned into bodies and blood, one man had run, and the street had gone quiet in the worst possible way while he fought to get Rechelle into the car. She was dead weight against him, laughing at nothing, missing the seat, slipping on the curb. Every second he spent forcing her inside was a second he could not watch the dark.

What he did not know was that Rechelle had never been random.

Her husband wanted her dead, and he wanted it done tonight. The contract was already paid at a million dollars. That kind of money did not hire careful men. It hired men willing to empty magazines in a public street and keep coming until the job was finished.

While Lucas was still wrestling her into the passenger seat, another squad had already been moved into position.

The fourth man from the bar had done his part the moment he cleared the door. He hit the black jeep half a block down on broken legs and pure panic, slammed a hand on the window, and gave them everything in a rush of breath and blood. Target still alive. Male with her. Still outside the car.

That was all they needed.

Magazines were checked. Slides racked. A second team peeled off to cut the street while the jeep’s nose swung toward the only car that mattered. By the time Lucas finally got the door shut and dropped into the driver’s seat, the trap around him was already closing.

He turned the key.

The engine came alive.

And the night opened with gunfire.

The first shots came as he straightened out of the turn.

BANG.

BANG-BANG.

The sound slapped flat off the walls of the street. A round sparked off a parked car to his left. Another cracked past the roof close enough that the air itself seemed to flinch. Lucas fed the La Voiture Noire more throttle and let the big engine climb, weaving through a gap that should not have been wide enough, forcing a taxi to brake hard behind him with a long angry horn.

In the jeep, someone shouted.

They fired again when the lane opened.

BANG~BANG~BANG~

Muzzle flash stuttered in his mirrors. A round punched into the rear deck with a deep metallic THWACK, the whole back end shuddering. Another scraped the right rear quarter and screamed away in a bright spray of paint and carbon. Rechelle cried out more from the violence of the car’s movement than from understanding. Lucas shoved her lower in the seat with one hand and kept the other locked on the wheel.

He drifted the next junction.

The long black body rotated hard, tires screaming, headlights cutting across shopfronts and wide-eyed pedestrians. For a second the world was only sideways force and engine noise. Then the rear hooked up, the nose found the exit, and he punched out of the slide into a clearer stretch of road.

The jeep overshot the angle.

It bought him seconds.

Only seconds.

---

They came back into the mirrors sooner than he wanted.

Traffic thickened ahead ~ a clot of cars at a light, brake lamps blooming red in a broken chain. Lucas saw the trap forming and refused the lane they expected. He cut right too early, mounted the edge of the shoulder, and scraped past a delivery van close enough to tear the right-side mirror clean off with a sharp metallic snap. Sparks jumped. Rechelle’s hands flew up on pure instinct.

"Lucas~!"

"Stay down."

The jeep tried to follow the same line and lost time grinding against the van’s bulk. Someone inside leaned out the passenger window anyway and fired into the gap.

BANG.

BANG.

One round raked the rear flank and left a long raw gouge through the black finish. The next rang off the trunk like a hammer on steel and skipped high into the night. Lucas yanked the car left through a narrow cut between bumpers, ignoring the chorus of horns, and used a side alley that forced him to scrub speed to survive the walls. Brick blurred past both sides. A trash bin went over and spun away behind them. When he dumped back out onto a wider road, the jeep was still there ~ farther, but not gone.

They had stopped treating this like a clean grab.

Now it was a hunt.

---

Inside the black jeep, the mood shifted when they realized the driver was not panicking the way a normal man should.

Every time they lined up a shot, the car ahead changed angle. Every time the lane seemed to pin him, he found a gap that should not have existed. One of them cursed, reloaded, and braced against the door.

"He’s good."

"Then stop playing."

The heavy case came up from the floor.

An RPD, belt-fed and ugly, the kind of weapon that did not belong in city traffic. The man who took it braced the barrel on the window frame, let the belt settle, and waited for the next clear stretch.

When it came, he opened up.

The sound was different from the pistols.

Not sharp single cracks.

A deep, rolling BRRRRRRT that chewed the night into pieces, a continuous hammering roar that made the earlier shots sound small. The stream of fire walked across the road behind the Bugatti, sparked off asphalt, stitched a parked sedan into sudden ruin, and reached for the rear quarter in a violent rain of impacts.

BRRR-BRRR-BRRRRT~

Lucas felt the car take hits. The bodywork shuddered. Something in the rear went soft and wrong. The steering gained a pull he did not like. He threw them into another slide before the gunner could settle the stream on the cabin line, using a bus as moving cover for half a block while Rechelle pressed herself into the seat with both hands over her ears, finally scared in a way alcohol could not fully blunt.

The RPD roared again when the bus drifted out of line.

Windows in a storefront to Lucas’s right starred and collapsed. A streetlight sparked and died. People on the corner dropped flat or ran without direction. The jeep kept coming through the smoke of burned rubber and the echoes bouncing between buildings.

Lucas’s world narrowed to angles, speed, and the next place a bullet should not be.

He kept the nose working ~ left, right, early entries, late exits ~ never giving the gunner a clean tracking line down the length of the car. When the belt-fire came again, he dropped a gear and cut under it, letting the burst walk high across where the roof line had been a half-second earlier.

---

Congested traffic nearly ended it.

A cross street jammed solid with night cars ~ taxis, private vehicles, a slow truck blocking the best exit. Lucas had to scrub speed or kill them both on someone else’s bumper. The moment the needle dropped, the jeep closed.

Pistol fire returned first, faster and more personal at the shorter distance.

BANG-BANG-BANG.

Then the RPD found space over the roof line of the cars between them and swept again, a thunderous tearing burst that walked sparks across metal and road. Lucas’s rear tire blew out with a heavy WHUMP and the car lurched. He caught the skid with violence, shoulders locked, and forced the wounded machine through a gap barely wide enough for the frame. Paint screamed off both sides. A hubcap peeled away and rang into the dark.

Rechelle was crying now without quite knowing why, breath hitching, words broken.

"I don’t~ I don’t understand~"

"You don’t need to."

He took the next turn on the ruined tire and felt the rim bite asphalt. Sparks sprayed behind them in a bright ugly fan. The jeep swung wide to set up another pass with the machine gun. Lucas saw the barrel shift in the remaining mirror and did the only thing left ~ he killed his lights, cut hard into a multi-level car park entrance, and plunged them into the concrete maze on three good tires and pure nerve.

The RPD’s roar followed them in a delayed echo, bullets stitching the ramp mouth and chewing concrete dust into the air.

Then the ramp took them out of the direct line.

For a few seconds there was only the sound of his engine, the grinding rim, and Rechelle’s shaking breath.

Lucas did not relax.

Above or behind, engines were still hunting. Men who had been paid a million dollars did not stop because a ramp got in the way. They would come in after him, or cover the exits, or call in more bodies.

He drove deeper into the structure, looking for height, for blind corners, for anything that turned their heavier vehicle and their bigger gun into a disadvantage.

In the passenger seat, Rechelle finally turned her face toward him, eyes wet and lost.

"Who... who are they?"