Chapter 8 - The Shadow Dossier
"No!" Clara screamed.
In that fraction of a second, Marshal Bradley made his choice.
Torn between a decade of complicity and the ghost of the young man he had mentored, Bradley stepped into the line of fire, driving his shoulder hard into Richard Vance's chest.
*BANG!*
Vance’s heavy revolver discharged into the ceiling, obliterating a halogen light in a shower of sparks. Vance roared in primal fury, swinging the heavy barrel of the Magnum across Bradley’s skull. The older marshal collapsed heavily against the desk, blood pouring from his temple.
Vance turned the weapon back toward the terminal screen.
Maya emerged from cover, her right leg dragging, her gun empty and locked back on an empty chamber. She dropped the useless weapon, lunged across the four-foot gap, and grabbed Vance’s wrist with both hands, driving the gun barrel toward the ceiling.
They crashed into the metal desk together, knocking over monitors, paper trays, and forensic equipment.
Vance was fifty-two, but he was fueled by the desperate, psychopathic adrenaline of a man facing a lifetime in a maximum-security federal penitentiary. He slammed his elbow into Maya’s injured thigh, tearing the bullet wound open further.
Maya gasped in blinding agony, her grip slipping.
Vance threw her off, sending her crashing across the concrete floor. He raised the pearl-handled revolver, aiming straight between Maya’s eyes.
"You and your brother," Vance hissed, his face twisted in psychotic triumph. "A family of pathetic, righteous martyrs. You think the world wants the truth? The world wants order! And I am the order!"
From beneath the desk, a tiny figure bolted.
Five-year-old Leo didn't cry. He didn't scream.
He ran forward and threw his small arms around Vance’s left knee, biting down with all the strength in his little jaw through the billionaire’s tailored trousers into his calf.
"Aaargh!" Vance howled in shock, involuntarily stumbling backward, his aim pulling wide.
He looked down in fury, raising his heavy hand to backhand the five-year-old off his leg. "You little parasite!"
"Leo, move!" Clara shrieked.
Maya didn't think. She didn't feel the bullet wound in her leg. She didn't feel the torn muscles in her shoulder.
Propelling herself off the floor like a coiled spring, Maya lunged forward, grabbed the heavy iron bolt-cutters lying on the floor, and swung them with every ounce of kinetic leverage left in her body.
*CRACK!*
The hardened steel jaws of the bolt-cutters struck Richard Vance squarely across the side of his knee joint.
The billionaire’s leg bent sideways at an unnatural, sickening ninety-degree angle.
Vance let out an ungodly shriek of agony that shattered the silence of the courthouse, collapsing onto the concrete floor like a felled oak, clutching his shattered leg as his pearl-handled revolver clattered across the floor into the shadows.
Maya stood over him, chest heaving, blood dripping from her leg onto the concrete.
She didn't pick up the gun.
May you like
She stepped over the writhing billionaire, reached out her trembling, blood-stained hand, and slammed her open palm down onto the flashing red `BROADCAST` key on Terminal 09.
***
