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Zigor swings the gun around so it’s pointing at Jasper instead. He takes a few steps forward, closing the gap between them.
“You want go first, Jasper? Better odds.”
“Don’t even fucking think about—”
Jasper is cut off by the distinct click of Zigor pulling the trigger. Nothing happens—the chamber is empty. But Jasper leaps to his feet with a howl of rage, snatching the gun out of Zigor’s hand and pointing it right in his face.
“YOU THINK THAT’S FUNNY?” he shrieks. “WHAT WERE YOU GONNA DO IF IT WENT OFF?”
Without thinking, perhaps without even meaning to do it, Jasper’s finger jerks on the trigger.
Instead of the same empty click, the gun fires.
A small, dark hole appears in the center of Zigor’s forehead. Zigor’s expression is one of pure astonishment, mirrored in Jasper’s shocked face. He falls backward, crashing to the floorboards with a thud that shakes the shack.
The two Bookends look up, mouths open in surprise.
I rip my gun from my waistband and shoot them each in the head, one after the other.
Zigor’s bodyguards topple off their buckets, their playing cards scattering across the floor in a flurry of hearts and spades, clubs and diamonds.
Jasper turns to me, paler than paper, mouth open in shock. “WHAT THE FUCK?”
“What the fuck YOU what the fuck!” I shout back at him.
We’re both frozen in place, staring at the carnage around us. In less than twenty seconds we went from utter boredom to three men dead on the floor, blood slowly spreading outward in bright halos from the holes in their heads.
“This is so fucking bad,” Jasper says. “Why’d you shoot the other two?”
“ ‘Cause they would have put ten bullets in your chest and brought your head back to Lev. And if I didn’t let them do that, they’d sure as fuck rat you out.”
Jasper stares at the fallen bodyguards, absorbing the truth of this.
“You’re right,” he says at last. And then a moment later, very quietly … “Thank you.”
“It’s fine,” I say brusquely. “But what the hell are we gonna do now?”
Jasper casts a swift look down the dock, checking the time on his phone.
“We need to get out of here before the boatman shows up.”
“What about the supplies?”
“We could wait till he gets here,” Jasper says. “But then we’ll have to kill him, too.”
Neither of us particularly likes that idea. It’s one thing to cap someone who’s about to shoot you and quite another to murder the equivalent of a drug Door Dasher.
“We’ll have to leave without it,” I say. “We gotta get out of here. The longer we stay, the less plausible deniability we have.”
“And what, just leave them here?” Jasper says, looking down at the bodies.
“I’m not gonna chop ‘em up and bury ‘em. That’s a six-hour job for Zigor alone.”
Jasper seems to come to a decision. “Wipe down anything you touched,” he says. “Don’t leave anything behind.”
We look around the shack once more to see if there’s anything we missed. The wind sounds eerie and ominous in the dead quiet, no chatter from Zigor anymore. Not even the gentle flick of playing cards turning over.
“Let’s go,” Jasper says.
