Godsend 6: All Jokes Aside by K. Elliott Read Free Book Online

at the driver as he pulled on the door handle.
    Locked.
    Echo said, “Open the door or take a head shot.”
    The 68-year-old slender man unlocked the door from the driver’s side.
    Echo jumped in and closed the door. “There’s a black Cherokee Jeep up ahead. Catch up with it.”
    The old man eased the Pathfinder out of the parking lot then picked up speed. He said, “I can get out and let you drive if you want.”
    “You’re doing fine. I might need to use my right hand when you catch that Cherokee. If I put you out, you’ll call the cops and they’ll look for this vehicle sooner that I want them to.”
    The old man was now speeding down Lake Tahoe Boulevard, at least as fast as possible under the snowy conditions. The main roads had been cleared starting at 5:45 this morning, but the light snow was starting to add up to a thin blanket. “My name’s Jacob Truesdale. I don’t suppose you wanna tell me yours.”
    Echo said, “I’ll call you Old Man and you can call me Young Fella. Now switch lanes and get behind that van.”

Chapter 19
     
    THE CHEROKEE was coming to a stop at a traffic light ahead. Breno was relieved. He’d lost the black man who was running after the Cherokee on foot, but he knew he still had problems. Whittier, California, was more than three hundred miles away, and he couldn’t risk driving a hot-wired vehicle that far with a duffle bag full of x-pills. Not only that, the cold air whipping through the broken driver’s window would become unbearable.
    He stopped for the light and began wiping more broken glass bits from his seat. He looked up and spotted the black man again, four vehicles back, on foot again and trying to creep up to the Cherokee. Breno panicked and looked for a gap to drive through, but the vehicles ahead make it impossible. He grabbed the black duffle bag and the Mac-10, turned in his seat and sprayed the back window of the Cherokee with bullets, piercing windows and grills on two other vehicles and making Echo disappear.
    Echo duck-walked around the shot-up van then saw Breno running toward the intersection with a gun and a duffle bag. He gave chase and thought about lying-ass Travis and his claim that the bag was blue and gray. Echo fired four silenced shots as Breno was swinging the Mac-10 around to spray more bullets.
    Breno was hit in his lower back and leg, and as he was falling to the street a burst of his rounds found their way into the windshield of a Camaro, sending its three occupants ducking out of view.
    Echo fired six more shots as he closed in on Breno, hitting him four more times. Cars were sliding to a stop, and sirens had grown much louder now. Several spectators were snapping pictures and video recording the scene.
    When Echo caught up with Breno, he could hear the labor in his breathing, but otherwise Bruno wasn’t moving. “Your first-class trip to hell is paid for by the woman you raped at the Gold Creek Inn.” He snatched the duffle bag from Breno’s weakening grip. “She was hoping I kill you, and this is how I keep hope alive.” Echo fired a single shot to Breno’s forehead at point-blank range. People screamed, car horns blared, sirens were only a block away, and Echo was now sprinting toward the tree line again.
    Less than a minute later he was in the rear parking lot of the Genuine Platter on Emerald Bay Road, a half mole down the road from the Tahoe Grove Inn. He approached a pregnant white woman who was getting out of her Honda pilot. The SUV had tire chains and a California license plate. He showed her a gun before she could even speak to him.
    “I need a driver who wants to live. Eighty miles south and you drive away safely; no harm to you or the baby. I’ll be in the backseat area, and if we get stopped by the police, or you try to jump out and run, you’ll never meet your unborn.”
    The woman got back inside and unlocked the rear passenger’s door without saying a word. She was only six months pregnant and desperately wanted a