Crimson Waters. James Axler

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      Chapter Seven

      Time seemed to slow. Ryan shifted his left hand inside his long coat.

      Calmly yet decisively Krysty reached up and removed the hand from her breast.

      “What do you think you’re doing?” she demanded, strong but not shrill.

      Her eyes turned like emerald lasers to the table of Monitors sitting across the room. They were all watching.

      “I thought the Syndicate had laws against assault,” she said clearly.

      As one, the four sec goons turned their heads away.

      “Well,” J.B. murmured, “remember what Oldie said about some dogs being more equal than others? Reckon this gang’s the most equal of all.”

      “Right,” Ryan said, rising from his chair. He didn’t hurry as he walked toward the tableau a few paces away.

      The pirate saw him coming and showed him a gap-toothed grin. “What you want here, Patch? You triple-stupe? You think you can fuck with the Sea Wasps? You think wrong, man.”

      And he grabbed Krysty’s breast again.

      “If you don’t remove your hand,” Ryan said, “I’ll remove it for you.”

      The guy just grinned wider. His hand squeezed the full breast again quickly, then began to move down toward the flat plane of her stomach.

      Rattlesnake-fast, Ryan’s left hand whipped to the sheath on his hip, freeing eighteen inches of steel blade. Before the pirate could so much as blink it rose and slashed down.

      The panga’s razor-honed edge chopped the Sea Wasp’s hand off just above the wrist. The hand seemed to pulse on Krysty’s breast one more time and then it fell to the floor. It lay on its back in the sawdust like an overturned beetle, fingers twitching like bug legs.

      The pirate stared down at the blood jetting from his stump in slack-jawed amazement. Krysty sidestepped quickly out of the way of the pulsing blood, then she and Mildred grabbed their own weapons. As Ryan had quickly and covertly undone the peace-bonding on his weapons when the Wasps came in, they were obviously undoing theirs now.

      But not all of the party’s armaments had been sealed in sheath or holster, of course.

      The wounded man began to shriek like a horse in a burning barn. Grabbing his stump with his remaining hand, he danced in a circle, painting the patrons, the tables, the chairs, the walls, even the ceiling with arterial spray that gleamed dark in the fish-oil light.

      With startling power, Doc kicked the table. It flew across the room into the faces of the other Sea Wasps. They were too startled by this completely unexpected turn of events to react with what would surely be their normal rapid savagery.

      The Monitors, a beat slower, jumped to their feet, unlimbering their scatterguns.

      A dully glittering disk spun across the room. The black Monitor who’d come back from the first party grunted audibly as one of Jak’s concealed throwing knives buried itself in his bare, muscle-ribbed gut. It was probably only a flesh wound. As strong as he was, Jak couldn’t throw one of his relatively light holdout knives hard enough to punch through the tough abdominal wall at that range. But the man stared down at himself and shrieked in terrified surprise as if it had gutted him like a fish.

      His female companion was faster and firmer. She had a sawed-off pump shotgun with a pistol grip on its shortened forearm as well as in the back. She brought the stubby weapon rapidly online, ready to spray Ryan and friends with lethal buckshot.

      Instead, a loud bang went off in Ryan’s right ear and a red dot appeared right above the woman’s collarbone, above the neckline of her black T-shirt. More shots blasted in quick succession, forcing Ryan to squint as side-blasts from a short barrel stung his cheek.

      J.B. was half standing from his chair, his right arm locked out. His right fist clenched a little black Kel-Tec P-32 blaster. It was his latest pet holdout pistol, though it didn’t have much punch, being only a .32 ACP.

      Which was why J.B. kept shooting, walking shots up the Monitor’s chin and cheek and putting a last one through the right side of her forehead. At twenty feet, J.B. was shooting near the absolute СКАЧАТЬ