Page 30 of One Minute Out

The lookout is a woman? Why not?

Assuming she has put together the fact that I just beat the shit out of her three cohorts, I expect her to draw on me if she’s carrying a weapon. I’ve got my Glock in my waistband, and I begin to reach for it, but the lookout, standing twenty yards away, does something I don’t expect.

She turns to her left and runs, disappearing around the corner of a building in an instant.

I take off as well, giving chase.

TEN

I turn and search the darkened little square for the lady in the black raincoat. I don’t see her, but I do see the elongating shadow of a figure running through one of the side streets to the east.

I leap onto and then over a bench and I race around little trees, up a steeply angled cobblestoned street. I cross a footbridge over the Neretva, passing where I saw the shadow, which I can no longer find, although I do catch a quick flash of movement ahead and on the left.

A car door shuts quickly. The driver fires the engine of the two-door hatchback. An instant later, headlights engulf me as the vehicle lurches in my direction.

I am not one hundred percent sure this is the black raincoat lady, but I like the odds. I definitely don’t want to fire my pistol and alert the entire neighborhood, but I draw it anyway, hoping the lethal weapon in my hand will force the driver to stop the lethal weapon barreling down on me before it runs me over.

Like magic, the Glock 19 does the trick. The car skids to a halt feet away, with me standing in its path, my gun leveled at the driver’s head through the windshield.

I move around to the passenger side and get in, still keeping the barrel trained on the driver. Only now do I see that this is, in fact, the woman in the black raincoat.

Her hair is covered by her hood, but wisps of dyed red hair poke out. Her skin is alabaster white, her eyes wide, heavily bloodshot and with gray half-moons under them.

And they are locked on the weapon pointed at her.

“You armed?” I ask it in English, because I don’t speak Hungarian.

“What?”

“Gun! Do you have a gun?”

I can see in her eyes that she does. After a moment she gives a little nod and speaks through the heavy breath that came from her run through the square and across the bridge. “It’s... in my... pocket.” She has an accent, but it’s faint. Her English is flawless.

I wait a few seconds, then say, “If you tell me which pocket, then I won’t have to run my hands all over you. We just met, after all.”

She looks scared shitless, and in a voice that confirms to me she is, in fact, scared shitless, she says, “My jacket. On the right.”

I reach in and pull out a stainless semiauto that looks and feels like a piece of junk. I stick it in my back pocket, then say, “Anything else?”

She shakes her head emphatically, and I believe her. She’s so tense I worry she might spontaneously combust, and quickly I realize that she doesn’t have much of a background in this sort of thing.

Certainly not the way her three buddies obviously did.

Thinking for a moment, I decide I might be able to get some info off her about Niko Vukovic. The Hungarians probably know more about the man and his movements than I do, after all.

“Stay calm,” I say. “Just drive.”

The young woman stares at me, still breathing heavily from her run. Finally, she asks, “Drive where?”

“Let’s find someplace quiet to go talk.”

“I do not... I do not wish to go with you.”

“I do not give a shit.” Waving the pistol again, I say, “Drive!”

She doesn’t say one word while she motors her way out of the hilly town, up a dark, steep road. Nor do I, as my own heart rate is still up after the alley fight and the mad sprint. I need to focus on breathing, but through her silence I can feel the terror emanating from her.

I do nothing to calm her; her fear is a tool I can employ to earn her compliance, and I won’t give that up cheaply.

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