Shadow Of Betrayal (Margot Harris 4)

“It’s clear he wasn’t interested.”

“How about you? You interested?”

The man smiled and shook his head. “Come on, bro, we both know there’s nothing you can propose that will come close to the scratch we’re making from them.”

Mal had nothing to say to that. He certainly didn’t want to tell the man he was right.

“You know if I go with you, I’m going to go slow, right?” Mal asked.

“What do you mean ‘go slow’?”

“I mean when he kills me, he’s going to take his time about it. He’s going to torture me.”

Mal could tell the man in front of him, the oldest of the group, couldn’t care less. The kid behind him though? He looked concerned.

“Don’t look at him,” the big man directly in front of him said, “he’s not going to help you. The question is, do you want to walk out of here like a man on your feet? Or do you want us to carry you out like a little bitch?”

“Is there a third option?”

“Not really.”

Mal nodded and hung his head like he was sad about his impending demise. True, he wasn’t happy about it, but that’s not why he’d taken the stance.

“Is he going to cry?” one of the trio of would-be abductors asked.

“I hope not,” the big man standing in front of him said. He bent down so he was eye level with Mal and lifted his chin before he said, “Come on, man. I didn’t figure you to be the type to get all weepy.”

When Mal lifted his head, he’d taken the little twenty-five caliber pistol—what they used to call a Saturday Night Special—out of his boot. It wasn’t something he advertised, but he’d been carrying the little cheap five shot pistol there ever since his days as a cop.

He put it under the big man’s chin and growled, “I’m not crying. Even if I was, it wouldn’t be for me. I’d be crying for you because you and your boys need to do what I say or you’re a dead man and you don’t really look like the type who can follow directions.”

“Come on, man. What are you going to do with that little peashooter?”

“Send a bullet through the bottom of your chin and up through your brain for starters,” Mal said as he stood up.

The man with the gun under his chin stood up with him. Mal remembered that, when they had come in, the big dude had snatched his Glock 21 from the nightstand and stuck it in his belt. Mal took the gun and pointed it at the man behind him on the left while he kept the gun under the other man’s chin.

This did nothing to stop the man to his right from drawing his gun and pointing it Mal’s way.

“You sure you want to do this?” Mal asked him. “Once the shooting starts in this kind of situation, things tend to go bad for everybody.”

The man didn’t lower his gun.

Mal pulled the trigger on the Saturday night special as the man with it under his chin tried to grab it.

As Mal predicted, things went bad for everybody. Some worse than the others.