American Blood by Ben Sanders Read Free Book Online Page B

his free hand. “The specifics are irrelevant. This car. Chino. Me.”
    Frazer didn’t answer. His lips parted, a rope of spit strung between them.
    Wayne said, “Anyway. My point is that we have brought to fruition a scenario made inevitable a long time ago. You live this life, sooner or later you get clipped. It’s not difficult.”
    Frazer didn’t answer. Wayne could see his pulse leaping.
    “Last words?”
    No reply. His eyes were closed. Strange to waive the chance to shape the final moments. Although silence was, of course, a choice.
    Wayne lifted the gun. Smell of cordite in the car. Dust and Chino’s T-shirt lifting weakly as a breeze came through. He pulled the trigger.
    *   *   *
    Heading back east on the 40, he felt calm despite the blood flecks on his shirt from the blowback and the faint smell of cordite on his hands. He listened to an FM station as he drove. It helped mask the ringing in his ears.
    Western limits of the city and I-40 became the Coronado Freeway. He stopped at the first gas station he saw and pulled in beside the car wash bay and used the hose to rinse off the rental. Safer than the drive-thru and being filmed paying. He stood there as if mesmerized as water off the roof fell in clean rivulets through the dusted windows. Evidence of his morning disintegrating, top down.
    A mess of brown water at his feet. He used the hose and chased the murk to the drain until the eddies ran clear and then he turned off the water and coiled the hose neatly and set it on its cradle. Back into traffic and a twenty-minute run east to his motel just south of the freeway. A tan and low-rise neighborhood and in the east the indigo form of the Sandia Mountains, low and contoured beyond the city.
    He parked in front of his room and got out, retrieved the gun bag from the trunk, and went inside. He locked the door behind him. Cool from the air-conditioning. A breeze from somewhere rolling fold-to-fold in the blind. He set the bag on the single bed below the window. He always found the transition strange. One moment fraught with bloodshed. The next tranquil, returned to normal life and its harmless trivia: sound of children in the pool outside. TV Guide . Nearby restaurant menus. Please check out by ten A.M . The ease with which he moved from one world to the other.
    From the gun bag he removed a plastic trash liner and took it through to the bathroom. He undressed and balled his socks and bloodied garments and deposited them with his shoes in the liner and knotted the top. Then he showered and toweled dry and dressed in fresh clothes he’d left in the room and sat on the bed below the window. From the gun bag he took the SIG and slipped it in the belt holster and clipped it on his hip beneath his shirt, and then he found his blue phone and dialed a number.
    Three rings and then the pickup. “How was Mr. Frazer?”
    Wayne ran a hand through his hair, still damp with shower water. “Fine. Not quite so good now, but you’re right, he was trying to get in on the New York market. He wanted help with reducing competition.”
    “I see.”
    “Obviously he named you as a rival.”
    “Code, or my actual name?”
    “He used the term ‘Patriarch.’”
    “Right. And I take it he was proposing something fairly aggressive?”
    “Yeah.”
    “How many hits?”
    “Well. As many as it takes to stop what you’re doing.”
    “And he wanted you to do it?”
    “Yes.”
    “Has he approached anyone else?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “You didn’t ask?”
    “No.”
    “Okay. Where is he now?”
    “Same place I met him, but dead. He had a bodyguard named Chino.”
    “You killed both of them?”
    “Yes.”
    “Good, excellent. Obviously, I appreciate the loyalty.”
    “No, that’s okay.” Wayne laughed quietly. “Clearly there was a conflict of interest.”
    “Yeah. Did he give you any other information? What exactly did he have?”
    “Most of it was vague. He said you were young and that you’re operating