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“Then get on,” he said, and when she hesitated, added, “You can come with me, or stay here with these guys. Your choice.”
Whatever her reservations may have been, Piper must’ve gotten over them, because she practically leapt onto the back of his Harley. As he climbed on in front of her, she reloaded her pistol.
“They’re coming after us in whatever vehicle that is,” she said. “How do you want to do this?”
He brought the Harley to life with a roar. “I’ll drive, you shoot.”
With that, he turned the bike as he gunned the throttle. The two of them shot out of the alleyway like a cannonball, away from the oncoming headlights of the gunmen.
It didn’t take long for the killers to catch up. A glance at his rear view mirror told Pony that two sets of headlights were in pursuit, moving fast.
As if to confirm it, Piper leaned in close, keeping her lips close to his ear so he could hear her.
“Two vehicles,” she shouted into his ear over the Harley’s engine and the wind. “Coming in fast.”
“So shoot the fuckers,” he said.
In the rear view mirror, out of the corner of his eye, a brief spat of flame, followed almost immediately by the report of automatic gunfire. The air snapped around him as the bullets flew past. He felt Piper cringe against him for a second, gripping him close by reflex, and then she twisted, holding on to him with one arm while shooting back at their pursuers with the other.
Pony did his best to keep them a moving target, weaving back and forth on the dark road. Not too much; Piper had to hang on and also be able to shoot back, and too much weaving would slow them down and let the killers get closer.
They were headed back toward town, which Pony didn’t like. Better to keep this out where no innocent bystanders might get hit by a stray round. But it didn’t look like he had much choice in the matter.
Whatever they were being chased by, had a serious engine under the hood. Muscle cars of some sort, V8 engines that sped their pursuers closer and closer to them. The only thing holdingthem back was Piper’s sporadic gunfire, which forced them to weave back and forth to avoid getting hit.
That same weaving kept the killer’s machine gun fire from getting too close. They kept shooting at Pony and Piper, but Pony could tell by the sound that the bullets were going wild. It was hard to shoot while hanging out of the passenger side window of a moving car; add into that the car weaving back and forth, and cringing from someone shooting back at you, and all that kept the cartel killer’s gunfire wild and inaccurate.
Still. Someone sprays a machine gun at you long enough, and the odds will catch up. A lucky, random hit was still a hit, and the killers were blazing away with machine guns like they had all the bullets in the world and wanted to use them up today.
Then, Piper’s gunfire stopped. The cars pursuing them straightened out their path and surged forward toward them even faster, now that they didn’t have to dodge bullets. Piper pulled in close to him, once again shouting into his ear to be heard over the Harley’s engine and the wind blowing past them.
“Pony!” she said, holding her gun in front of him. “I’m empty!”
He could tell it was empty; the slide was stuck back. Even as Piper dropped the empty magazine out of the gun, letting it fall to the road and clatter off behind them, Pony took one hand off the handlebars and dug out an extra loaded magazine from his jacket. As Piper held her empty gun steady in front of him, he shoved the new magazine up into the gun for her. With a click, she let the slide forward, finishing the reloading cycle.
Even as she twisted again to shoot at their pursuers, even as those pursuers filled with air with the buzzing hornet sounds of automatic gunfire flying past their ears, Pony’s thoughts were filled with why he was so in love with this woman. This. This moment right here. Her, holding on to him for dear life, and the two of them acting almost as a single person while reloadingher gun, one hand each. They were two puzzle pieces that fit perfectly together. That belonged together.
But how, how, how could this ever work, even if she had some way to convince him to forgive her lying to him all this time?
A close bullet shattered the left rear view mirror of his Harley, pulling him out of his introspection and making him duck involuntarily. This was no time for those kinds of thoughts. It was time to put these bastards behind them into the dirt.
A sudden flash and glare of oncoming headlights made his eyes squint, and he saw his opportunity. Across the road, there was an oncoming entrance ramp. An eighteen-wheeler lumbered its way along it, headed towards them. Pony double checked the distance between his bike, the oncoming truck, and the on ramp on the other side of the double yellow line.
Time to do something a little reckless.
“Hang on!” he shouted to Piper.
The instant he felt her turn and grab on to him with both hands, he turned the handlebars hard, pulling across the yellow lines and all the way over to the oncoming ramp. Now he was headed straight at the eighteen wheeler, on a narrow entrance ramp that he was driving down the wrong way.
The truck, as expected, hit its horn, loud, and just as Pony’s heart began to jackhammer out of control, just as the headlights from the truck seemed to fill his entire world and he was sure both he and Piper were about to be flattened against ten tons of hurtling steel, he zipped a little further left and slid around the truck on the left side shoulder, driving the wrong way down the on ramp and away from road they’d been on.
Luckily, no other cars were coming up the on ramp, and Pony had a chance to glance backwards. The closer of the cars pursuing them had tried to follow, had realized too late that there was only room on the shoulder of the on ramp fora motorcycle, not a full-sized car, and had run off the road in desperation to not collide head on with the eighteen-wheeler.
Pony could see it clearly for a second in the headlights of the truck, a Ford Mustang with one of the gunmen hanging out of the window with a machine pistol in his hands. He dropped the weapon and threw his hands up in front of his face as the Mustang ran off the road and smashed at high speed into a tree.
Piper saw it too, letting out a whoop of glee as Pony returned his gaze and his attention to the road in front of them. He maneuvered the bike around the on ramp and onto the side road it intersected with, returning to the right side of the road.
“Is the other one on us?” he shouted back to Piper.
