Today’s
excerpt is from Horace Goes Home, Book #2 of the Bader Trilogy. Shootout to take down two men now thought to
be a danger to him starts on Mob bosses secret hideout. Enjoy and have a fantastic day.
m.j.
With Hector’s
helicopter heading toward FBI Headquarters, one of Prudi and D’Alema’s men—who
had seen the lights go out in the unit Sgroi and Mosello were staying in—went
to the door, with silenced weapon in hand.
He opened it slowly. There was no
outside light, but other lights on the ranch compound made him somewhat
visible. He was wearing night vision
gear, and started looking from right to left in the front room of the
unit. Sgroi, sitting in an easy chair on
the left side of the room, raised his own silenced weapon. He shot the man in the side of the head,
killing him instantly. Sgroi then jumped
up, hurried into Mosello’s room, and shook him violently. ”Up, Tony—we gotta git.”
Early on in
their stay, Sgroi and Mosello agreed they would take turns staying up in the
dark after the lights were turned off, just in case what had just happened
occurred. Still groggy from deep sleep,
Mosello groaned, “What in the hell?”
“Hurry, while I
go shut the damned door. The hit on us
is on.”
Even before
Sgroi could move toward the door, two shots came through the open doorway,
neither of which hit either of the two murderers. Sgroi acted first, as he made for the back
room of the house, and opened the window.
He was out of it, while Mosello was catching up to him, with more shots
pouring through the doorway, hitting nothing.
Mosello fell as he went through the window after Sgroi, still trying to
buckle his pants. He swore, got up, then
followed his partner. Sgroi was peering
around the corner of the building they had been staying in, saw a man, and
fired at him. He hit him just above the
heart.
By then, Mosello
had pulled on his shoes, so was more ready to follow his friend and
co-killer. The advantage Sgroi and
Mosello had was their weapons were silenced, so it slowed the reaction time of
the other men trying to kill them. The
first man killed was the only member of the ranch crew with a silenced
weapon. By the time the attackers
figured out where the second killing shot had come from, Sgroi was no longer
there. He tugged on Mosello as he headed
straight back from the building, still well in darkness.
When they were
nearing light, being too far from the building to be shielded by it any longer,
Sgroi stopped. “Okay, the car is to the
right, so they’ll expect us to go that way.
We go left. We’ll have to run
through the light until we get behind the first building to the left. Don’t even look at anything except where
we’re headed…it’ll only slow you down.
You go to shooting, you wouldn’t hit anything, but will make yourself a
better target. Let’s go.”
Mosello didn’t
like being shot at. He was mad, but he
knew to listen to Sgroi so nodded before his partner took off on a dead run
toward the building they were trying to get behind. Mosello was right behind him, but a step
further away from where the eruption of gunfire in their direction was coming
from. Sgroi swore as a shot grazed the
back of his leg, but he kept running, until he reached the safety of the building
he had been running toward. Mosello was
right behind him. He made it without
being hit. Mosello asked, “You okay?”
“Yeah, just
grazed—hurts like hell, but no real problem.
Let’s walk down the back of this place until we find a rear door, if
there is one.”
Mosello shook
his head. “I got a better idea.” He shot out the portion of a window just
above the lock lever. Then he used the
butt of his gun to smash out more of the window. He reached in, unlatched the window, raised
the lower half, then climbed in.
Sgroi climbed in
after him. “Every now and then, you
amaze me, Tony.”
“Thank you,
Benny.”
The two men
headed toward the front of the building.
In the shadows, they saw a man walking slowly past a window. Both fired…the man fell in his tracks. He was hit by both shots. While not dead, he was unable to do anything
but lie there and moan gently. The three
men outside saw that, so figured from the sound of broken glass where the shots
that felled their comrade must have come from.
Shots started pouring through the window.
Sgroi and
Mosello, not being amateurs, were no longer anywhere near the window. Instead, they went to the front door, opened
it, and saw muzzle flashes from across the parking area. They returned fire with their silenced
weapons. Soon all three of the men shooting
at the window stopped shooting. Two were
dead, but one was on the move. On seeing
the muzzle flashes stop, Sgroi thought a second. “Come on, Tony—back the way we came.”
As he followed
Sgroi to the rear of the building, Mosello nodded, “Good idea, Benny. They’ll never think we would do that.”
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