The Warrior. Dinah McCall

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СКАЧАТЬ cursed and turned. The bank guard was pulling out his pistol and coming toward him on the run. Without thinking, Wallace grabbed the nearest customer by the arm and put her in a choke hold as he pulled out his own gun and fired a shot into the ceiling.

      “Everyone on the floor! Now!” he screamed.

      The bank guard stood his ground, still aiming his weapon and shouting, “Drop the gun! Drop it! Drop it and let her go!”

      John groaned. The hostage was none other than Lisa Doggett, the young woman with the two little boys who’d been in line in front of him.

      Bad move. Bad, bad move.

      The young mother’s panic was evident as she cast a frantic, wild-eyed gaze at her little boys. Trevor, the youngest, began to cry and started toward her.

      “Don’t anybody move!” Wallace roared, waving the gun at the guard, then at the kids and back again.

      John knew the man was a hair’s breadth away from shooting someone, whether he meant to or not, and Trevor Doggett’s determination to get to his mother was putting him in harm’s way. There was no time for John to think about the wisdom of his actions.

      In one swift move, he pulled a knife from his boot and leaped forward, desperate to draw the gunman’s attention away from the boys, his hostage and the guard with the gun, knowing full well that he was going to get shot. Knowing full well it was going to hurt like hell—but it wasn’t going to kill him.

      That was the edge he had over everyone else in the room. He’d faced death and cheated it countless times over the last five hundred years and had every confidence in the world that he was going to cheat it again.

      When Wallace Deeds saw the movement from the corner of his eye, he swung his pistol. A man was coming at him on the run.

      “Son of a bitch!” he screamed, then fired.

      The shot went straight into John’s chest. He felt the impact and a sharp, searing pain, but he didn’t go down.

      When Deeds’ hostage fainted and went limp, she became a liability instead of a shield. Disgusted, he shoved her aside and squeezed off another shot. But it was the knife suddenly protruding from his chest that sent his second shot into the ceiling next to the first.

      A collective gasp rose from inside the bank, followed by a silence so stark that everyone froze.

      Lisa Doggett had come to and was on her knees, shielding her children with her body.

      The tellers had ducked behind the counter.

      The people who’d dropped to their bellies when the shooting started were staring but not moving.

      No one ran.

      No one spoke.

      But the ones who could see were staring in disbelief at the two giants standing in the middle of the lobby—both bleeding profusely—waiting to see who dropped first.

      The pistol slipped out of Deeds’ hand as he reached toward the bone handle of the knife stuck in his chest. But the moment he touched it, he shuddered. Had someone poured hot oil into his chest? He looked up. People’s faces were blurring.

      “How…” He sighed, then staggered backward.

      John groaned as he put a hand to his own chest. The warm gush of his blood was already slowing as he watched the gunman fall. Wallace’s head hit the tile with a sickening crack, but he never felt it. He was already dead.

      The bank guard holstered his weapon and started toward John.

      Lisa Doggett was shaking, but she was alive and her children were safe.

      People were getting up and yanking out their cell phones, anxious to tell their loved ones what had just happened. While on his belly, one customer had videoed the whole thing with his cell phone, and now he was in the act of forwarding it to his brother. The image of what had transpired would be all over the Internet before nightfall.

      Horace Miles, the bank president, was moving through the crowd, making sure everyone was okay. When he saw the blood on the front and back of John’s shirt, he gasped and yelled for someone to call 911.

      John was anxious to be gone before he had to explain why the bullet hole in his chest was already nearly closed. He pulled his knife out of the robber’s chest, then wiped the blood off the blade onto the man’s jacket before slipping it back into the sheath inside his boot.

      The bank guard reached John and took him by the elbow.

      “You need to sit down, son,” he said. “You’ve been shot.”

      “I’m okay,” John said.

      “The police are coming!” someone said.

      Sirens could be heard in the distance. John sighed. He needed to leave—now. He started toward the door, but Horace Miles cut him off. Like the guard, he took John by the elbow and tried to usher him to a chair.

      “Please,” Miles said. “You’re bleeding. Let us help you.”

      “I’m all right…really.”

      But the bank president would have none of it.

      Lisa Doggett came toward him, hugging her little boys to her legs as she stared at him in disbelief.

      “You saved my life. You saved all of us,” she whispered. “Thank you. Thank you.”

      “Yeah…sure,” he said, then gave in to the inevitable. He was caught now, and there was no way out of it.

      The two little boys stared at him—silent now in the face of what they’d witnessed.

      “Mama’s okay, boys,” John said softly.

      Brandon nodded. “You stopped the bad man,” he said.

      John just winked and nodded. The pain in his chest was fading swiftly, but the sirens were also getting closer. Moments later, a half-dozen police cars were on the scene, followed by two ambulances. A paramedic team followed the police inside, then, at the guard’s direction, headed for John.

      He sighed. How the hell was he going to explain his way out of this?

      “I’m okay,” he said as the paramedics dropped their bags and began to cut off his shirt. “I said…I’m okay,” he repeated, and to prove he was right, he pulled up his shirt, revealing the wound that was almost closed.

      Both paramedics rocked back on their heels, staring at John and then at each other.

      “Mister…how in—”

      “Er…uh…I studied with the Dalai Lama,” John said. “Learned how to control bleeding and heal myself with my mind. Ever hear of it?”

      They looked at each other, shrugged, and then began packing up their gear while sneaking curious looks at him.

      But they weren’t the only ones staring. The bank president was in shock. СКАЧАТЬ