3 - Buffalo Mountain: Ike Schwartz Mystery 3 by Frederick Ramsay Read Free Book Online

without forty-teen people looking on.”
    ***
    Sledge dropped to the ground and rolled to his right, jerking the Kimber Executive II from his waistband in one smooth easy movement. He snapped on its custom Belgian chrome alloy noise suppressor and squeezed off two quick shots at the dark man wearing what looked like a fur yarmulke. The heavy-load “cop killers” splashed a large hole in the guy’s chest. The surprised look on his face disappeared in a puddle of Macon Blanc-Villages ’97 as he pitched forward on Sledge’s table. The fur yarmulke sailed past him like a kosher Frisbee. Its former wearer gurgled a curse in Thai and lay still.
    Scot surveyed the mess he had made of his lunch. The wine bottle had shattered on the sidewalk and its contents were now puddled up around the creep with the hole in his chest. “Good year, bad vintage,” he thought. The chicken paprika had bounced off the table and skittered six feet to the wall.
    “Too bad about that—Serbs really know how to do chicken.”
    He recognized two Manchurians in ski masks who bore down on him riding a pair of champagne Honda Goldwing Air Rides, their muffled motors huffing so quietly Sledge nearly missed their coming. He pivoted his pistol fractionally and sent another parabellum bullet into a critical half inch of the first bike’s racing Michelins. The tire blew, the front wheel twisted sideways, and the bike flipped its rider over the handlebars, arms flailing, only to land face down on the cobbled street at seventy miles an hour. He left a bloody streak for twenty meters and disappeared into a pile of African watermelons, which tumbled over him, effectively blocking the street.
    “That will keep the cops out,” Sledge muttered satisfiedly.
    The Manchurian’s Uzi skittered toward a woman in a Versace pink halter and Capri pants. She ignored it.
    The second rider hit the first bike and soared, Evel Knievil-like, high into the air, barely missing four men in Armani suits at the next table. If they hadn’t been leaning forward over their lentil soup, they would have been decapitated as the bike and its rider vanished over the low wall of the café and fell a thousand feet into the Orinoco.
    “He said something in Thai,” Scot said, knowingly. Now he knew where to look for the Prime Minister’s daughter.
    Sam threw the book cleanly across the room at the trash can next to her desk. She missed and the book sat, propped like a pup-tent, against the wall. She was not in the habit of cursing but she could not contain herself. Some pungent phrases followed the book to its resting place. She felt cheated. She’d bought the book because it promised a good read, an international thriller. Instead, she got Scot Sledge, a man described as the new James Bond. Sledge had, according to the jacket, no fewer than three black belts in as many varieties of martial arts, a Ph.D. in Ancient Near Eastern Philosophy, spoke six languages fluently, and served in the Navy SEALS. By page one hundred forty-seven, she’d had enough of the mindless plotting and idiotic actions by the equally moronic hero. Ph.D. or not, Scot Sledge had the intellectual capacity of a Pop Tart. He careened around Europe eating gourmet meals, which were described in mind-numbing detail, drinking expensive gin, and making inane remarks to his female counterpart. He left broken furniture, limbs, and hearts in his wake. He had been shot, stabbed, run over by a Mini Cooper, and changed his appearance and identity four times. It was ridiculous.
    “Can’t anyone write a decent thriller anymore?” she said to the trashcan. “Is it too much to ask for the plot to be at least plausible and the characters realistic?” She realized that this was the eighth in the Sledge series and by now the author didn’t have to work at his craft. His books were all marked, By Best Selling Author… and that was sufficient to move them briskly off the shelves. She was about to search for another