Plastic Smile (Russell's Attic Book 4) by SL Huang Read Free Book Online

ladder, I picked off another two goons I’d pinpointed by sound while climbing. Then I dropped the carbine again and reached down to help haul Arthur over the top of the wall. He folded over it inelegantly, scrambling with his legs against the stone so he wouldn’t fall on his head on the other side. The traffic on the freeway was a roar beneath us, beckoning us into the vortex.
    A man straightening from the shadows in my peripheral vision snagged my senses. I shot him, but too late—at the same time I pulled the trigger, Arthur jerked and almost slid off the wall.
    I heaved at him before his weight could drag us back the way we’d come, and instead sent us both tumbling over the other side into the dark roar of headlights, a tangled sprawl of limbs. I dropped my Colt so I could grope with my right hand as we went down. The wall took off five layers of my palm and two fingernails as I dragged for a crack of purchase to push our tumble halfway upright. I controlled us enough so I hit first, the force compressions crushing my flesh with bruises but any breakable bones angled out of the way. Arthur’s upper body landed on top of me, and I clenched his jacket in a death grip to keep him from spilling off and into traffic.
    There was almost no shoulder here. Horns blared as cars screamed by, the slipstream of their passage a violent maelstrom.
    “Arthur!” I rolled us into the wall, away from traffic. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck— “Arthur, how bad are you hit?”
    His eyelids fluttered. “’M okay—’m okay.”
    Relief sandbagged me so hard I almost choked. I scanned him—the seat of his pants was soaked with wet red that was almost black in the darkness, but not enough to mean an artery. Flesh wound. Thank Christ.
    “Get up. We have to move.” If I were Pourdry’s gang, I’d be racing toward a car to take around to the nearest on ramp and run us down into so much bloody road jelly. How long would that take? I ran estimates, error bounds expanding in my head. Not long enough.
    I knew without looking where my Colt had gone down—gravity only pulled in the negative y direction. I scooped it up and got a shoulder under Arthur’s arm. “Come on. Up you get.”
    Between me and the wall, he managed to stand, but leaned all his weight on his left leg.
    Shit. With both of us ambulatory, it was no problem to time the cars and race us across. Now…
    A semi came barreling down in the right lane, its headlights blinding us. “Stay here,” I said, and started running parallel to the freeway. As the truck thundered by, I jumped.
    Smacking against the door of the cab felt like running face-first into a tornado. A sixty-mile-an-hour wind tried to tear me off and my bloody hands almost slipped. I found purchase where I could jack in a boot and establish an unstable equilibrium, balancing the vector diagram so I had space to move. I got one hand into the door handle and used the other to swing my carbine around into the glass of the passenger-side window.
    The truck swerved when the pane went, but by the time the trucker realized what had happened I had the door open and was falling inside, that same carbine pointed straight at his head.
    “Hazard lights and stop,” I said.
    “Yeah! Yeah! Okay!” His hands scrambled around to find his blinkers, and he slammed his foot down on the brake with an alacrity that pleased me. He was an older guy, probably someone with a family and a lot to lose. Good.
    The truck’s brakes squealed. Velocity squared over twice the deceleration—the stopping distance would still bring us almost three hundred feet down the freeway. With a leg injury, Arthur would be too long catching up.
    “Stay stopped for one minute, then you can go,” I said to the trucker. “If you start moving before then, I swear on all that is holy, I will shoot you in the back of the head. Got it?”
    He nodded as fast as he’d slammed on the brake. “Got it. Got it.”
    “Don’t be a hero. One minute.” I half-fell,