Items related to Shotgun Opera: A Novel
Mike Foley can never forget the night he tagged along with his brother on a job for the mob that ended in a hail of bullets. Now his brother is dead, Mike’s making wine in Oklahoma, and life is almost as good as it gets when you’ve been hiding out for forty years. Until his past comes calling.
Mike’s nephew Andrew needs to disappear, and he needs to do it yesterday. Hanging with the wrong kind of friends, he’s seen something he shouldn’t have, and now he’s running for his life with an assassin on his trail. The consummate professional hit woman, Nikki Enders is the most lethal of a deadly sisterhood. And Andrew Foley is next on her extermination list. Unless Uncle Mike can stop her. As kill teams descend on Foley’s farm, one pissed-off ex—tough guy is about to take a final, all-or-nothing stand with shotguns blazing....
Mike’s nephew Andrew needs to disappear, and he needs to do it yesterday. Hanging with the wrong kind of friends, he’s seen something he shouldn’t have, and now he’s running for his life with an assassin on his trail. The consummate professional hit woman, Nikki Enders is the most lethal of a deadly sisterhood. And Andrew Foley is next on her extermination list. Unless Uncle Mike can stop her. As kill teams descend on Foley’s farm, one pissed-off ex—tough guy is about to take a final, all-or-nothing stand with shotguns blazing....
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author:
VICTOR GISCHLER lives in the wilds of Skiatook, Oklahoma -- a long, long way from Starbuck's. His wife, Jackie, thinks he is a silly individual. He drinks black, black coffee all day long and sleeps about seven minutes a night. Victor's first novel, Gun Monkeys, was nominated for the Edgar Award.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
1
Anthony Minelli, his cousin Vincent, and their pal Andrew Foley played five-card draw on a makeshift table in a nearly empty warehouse on the New York docks.
“Full house, motherfuckers. Queens over sevens.” Vincent drained the rest of his Bud Light, crumpled the can in his fat fist, and tossed it twenty feet. It clanked across the cement floor, echoed off metal walls. Vincent scooped the winnings toward his ample belly. Three dollars and nine cents.
“Nice pot,” Anthony said. “You can buy a fucking Happy Meal. Now shut up and deal.”
“Hey, it’s the skill that counts. I could be on that celebrity poker show on A&E,” Vincent said.
“Fuck you. It’s on Bravo. And you ain’t no celebrity.”
Andrew Foley smiled, reached into the Igloo cooler for one of the few remaining beers. He enjoyed the playful back and forth between the cousins but never joined in. He popped open the beer, sipped. He’d had a few already and was pretty buzzed. He’d also lost nine bucks at poker, not having won a single hand. But that was okay. Like the Minelli cousins, Andrew had been paid a cool grand for his work at the docks today. The money had come just in time.
Andrew was in his junior year at the Manhattan School of Music and he was always short on money. He was a week late on rent when Anthony had called with the offer. Andrew was well aware Anthony and Vincent were wiseguys in training and that a deal with them was sure to be a little shady. Andrew had known the two cousins since they were all in grade school. Andrew’s father and their fathers were pals. He balked at the thought of doing something illegal and maybe getting caught, but Vincent continued to assure him that the whole thing was easy money, a big fat moist piece of cake. Andrew needed cash. Period. Andrew’s landlord wasn’t a forgiving man.
Besides, it really did seem like a pretty easy job. A no-brainer really. Somebody (Just never you mind who. Don’t ask no fucking questions.) wanted a cargo container from one of the big freighter ships unloaded without going through the usual customs. This was a tall order, and a lot of people had to be bribed or distracted. Andrew, Vincent, and Anthony had a simple job. Shepherd the cargo container from the freighter to the unused warehouse way hell and gone down the other end of the wharf. The guy who’d set up the deal didn’t trust the usual union grunts to handle it, and anyway a lone cargo container getting that kind of attention would cause talk. Andrew was being overpaid enough to keep his trap shut. It was understood silence was part of the deal.
They’d forklifted the container into the warehouse and that was that. The job had seemed so simple and the guys were so giddy about their easy payday that Andrew forgot all about an overdue term paper when Anthony produced a cooler of beer and Vincent had pulled a deck of cards out of his pocket.
“What do you think is in there?” Vincent’s eyes shifted momentarily from his cards to the cargo container.
Anthony picked something out of his teeth, then said, “Drugs.”
Vincent raised an eyebrow. “Oh, yeah? You got some inside information?”
Anthony said, “It’s always drugs. Gimme two cards.”
They played cards, talked quietly, drank beer.
The little explosion rattled the warehouse. They dropped their cards and hit the floor. Andrew covered his head with his arms, his heart thumping like a rabbit’s. One of the metal doors on the cargo container creaked open. A chemical smell from the explosive hung in the air.
“Jesus H. Christ.” Anthony was the first to his feet. “What happened?”
Vincent stood up too, dusted himself off. “How the hell am I supposed to know?”
Andrew stayed on the floor, but he uncovered his head and risked a peek. Smoke in the air. Then they heard something, noise from within the container.
“Somebody’s in there,” Andrew whispered.
Vincent shook his head. “That’s fucking impossible.” He’d whispered too.
The cousins were huddled together. Andrew stood up and huddled with them. They watched the cargo container expectantly. It was like a scene in War of the Worlds, Andrew thought. The guys looking at the spaceship, waiting for the aliens to come out. They whispered at each other from the sides of their mouths.
“How could anyone breathe in there?”
“Maybe there’s more than one.”
“Illegal immigrants?”
“Should we go over there?”
“Fuck that. You go over there.”
A figure emerged from the container, and they froze.
The newcomer had dark olive skin, deep brown eyes. Black hair slicked back and dirty. A thick curly beard. He wore a stained denim shirt, threadbare tan pants. Military boots. A small pistol tucked into his waistband. Over his shoulder he carried a large brown duffel bag.
Vincent took a step forward, raised a hand. “Hey!”
Andrew put his hand on Vincent’s shoulder, held him back. What did the dumb wop think he was doing?
The stowaway jumped at the voice, then fixed Vincent with those hard dark eyes. He put his hand on the pistol in his pants, didn’t say a word. Vincent held up his hands in a “no problem here” gesture. The stowaway backed toward the door, his hand on the gun the whole time. He turned, opened the door, and exited the warehouse quickly and without a backward glance.
Anthony recovered first. “What the fuck?”
Andrew let go of Vincent’s shoulder. “What did you think you were going to do?”
Vincent looked a little pale. “Shit if I know. I just saw the guy and . . . Shouldn’t we do something?”
Andrew walked toward the container. “Let’s have a look.” The cousins followed.
The three of them stood at the door and peered inside. Dark. An odd tangle of straps and harnesses. It looked like a car seat had been arranged to withstand rough seas.
Andrew examined the container door, which had been latched from the outside. There was a small hole at the level of the latch blown outward from within, leaving the metal jagged and scorched. The guy inside had known exactly what to do to free himself.
Vincent held his nose. “What a fucking stink.”
Andrew nudged him, pointed into the corner of the container at an object that could only be a makeshift toilet. Food wrappers and other debris littered the container’s floor.
Anthony shook his head. “Oh man. We just helped smuggle some kind of Arab terrorist motherfucker. What are we going to do?”
“Not a goddamn thing,” Vincent said. “We were paid to bring the container here and keep our fucking mouths shut. We weren’t supposed to hang around and play cards. We were never meant to see this. I don’t care if that was Osama Bin Laden’s right-hand guy. We’re going to keep our fucking traps shut and not do a thing.”
Fear bloomed in Andrew’s gut, but he agreed. Maybe if he kept quiet about this, never told a soul, it would all go away.
· · ·
He was known among his fellow terrorists as Jamaal 1-2-3.
He walked from the docks straight inland for five blocks, turned right, walked four blocks, then left for another three blocks. He pretended to examine shoes in a store window but was really watching the street behind him in the reflection.
No one appeared to be following him.
He zigzagged another ten minutes, found a pay phone, dropped his duffel at his feet, and dug a slip of paper out of his shirt pocket. There was a phone number. No name. No identifying markings of any kind. It was a local number, but that meant nothing. The call could be rerouted and transferred to any phone in the world. Jamaal might be calling a barbershop in the Bronx or a noodle hut in Kyoto. He dialed the number.
It rang five times before someone picked up. “Hello?”
“This is Jamaal 1-2-3.”
“One moment.” Shuffling papers. Taps at a keyboard. “What seems to be the problem?” A slight accent. Perhaps Eastern European.
“I was seen.” Jamaal explained what had happened.
“I understand.”
The voice asked Jamaal a few questions. Who were the three men? Jamaal didn’t know. What did they look like? Early twenties. American. Two with dark hair, one with lighter brown hair and pale skin. He described their clothes.
“I wasn’t supposed to be seen. If the authorities learn that—”
“It will be taken care of.”
Jamaal said, “But it’s important that—”
“I said it will be taken care of. You must go about your business. Forget the three men. Proceed as planned. Leave the rest to me.” He hung up.
The conversation’s abrupt end surprised Jamaal. He blinked, shrugged, hung up the phone. He stood there a full minute pondering his situation. His mission depended on his ability to blend into the scenery, where he would slowly go about collecting the materials he needed. And in a month or three or a year, when everything was in place, he would strike at the Great Satan for the glory of Allah. But if the American FBI or CIA knew an Arab had been smuggled into the country, they would scour the city looking for him. The witnesses had to be eliminated and quickly, before they could alert anyone.
All he could do was trust the voice on the phone and get on with his work. He shouldered the duffel and walked casually into the asphalt anonymity of New York City.
The man with the vaguely Eastern European accent had a name, but it didn’t matter what it was. He sat in a small room filled with filing cabinets and computers and fax machines and telephones. It didn’t matter where the room was. His office was the world.
He contemplated the problem of Jamaal 1-2-3.
It didn’t matter one iota to the man if Jamaal’s mission failed or not. What mattered to him was his own reputation and the fact that upset clients could be potentially dangerous. In this business, reputation was everything. He was a kind of broker. He made connections, put people with other people. Filled in gaps. He’d promised Jamaal’s organization a completely covert insertion. Now he had a mess to clean up. It was the bane of his profession that he had to rely occasionally on local people to execute the details of his operation. Now he had to send someone to make things right. Going local again would likely compound the problem. He needed someone good. He needed the best.
He picked up the phone, the special secure line, and dialed the number for the most dangerous woman in the world.
2
At that moment, in the middle of the night, the most dangerous woman in the world clung to the tiled roof of a villa in Tuscany, where she worked to circumvent the alarm system on a large skylight. If she could do that, she’d open the skylight, drop inside, and kill a Colombian named Pablo Ramirez.
For five years she had called herself Nikki Enders. This wasn’t her real name, of course, but she had a British passport and a ream of other paperwork that said she was Nikki Enders, and no one ever disputed her. She had a Swiss bank account that had millions of dollars of Nikki Enders’s money in it. Nikki Enders enjoyed a staggeringly expensive home in London, and another three-story house in the Garden District of New Orleans. She wished she could spend more time there. She also had a dozen passports in safety-deposit boxes scattered around the world and could stop being Nikki Enders at a moment’s notice.
But tonight, in Tuscany, Pablo Ramirez would run afoul of Nikki Enders.
Ramirez meant nothing to Nikki. Alive. Dead he was worth five million dollars. She didn’t know who wanted him dead or why. She didn’t care. This was simply Nikki’s job. She fumbled with a pair of alligator clips, squinted at the wires that connected the alarm system. She hated working in the dark.
The cell phone clipped to her belt vibrated against her hip. She flinched, reached back, and turned it off. She silently cursed herself. She was getting sloppy. First she’d left the night goggles behind in the hotel. Then she’d forgotten to turn off her phone. A distraction at the wrong moment might cost her in blood. She wiped the sweat off her forehead with the sleeve of her black bodysuit. She needed to calm down, get her ducks in a row.
Okay, go over the scouting report again. Ramirez had five men with him. It was a four-bedroom villa, and naturally Ramirez would claim the master suite for himself. That left the five bodyguards scattered about. They could be anywhere, sleeping, getting a snack in the kitchen. Nikki had staked out the villa earlier and saw no sign of the usual bevy of whores who kept the men entertained, so she wouldn’t catch any of them screwing. The dim illumination coming up from the skylight suggested they’d turned in for the night.
She checked her guns. The twin .380s hung from her shoulder holsters. She’d already screwed the silencers into place. There was a collapsible sniper rifle and a .40 caliber Desert Eagle strapped to the BMW motorcycle parked a block down the hill, just in case she needed something more formidable. The motorcycle was concealed under the low branches of a tree, but close enough for her to reach it quickly.
Just as she’d hoped, recalling the scouting report and rechecking her equipment helped her focus. She returned to the alarm system and the alligator clips. She fidgeted, rolled to her left, trying to readjust herself to a more comfortable position.
Floodlights flared to life, poured harsh light onto the villa’s roof. From within, a shrill alarm pulsed.
Goddammit!
There must have been some kind of roof sensor that hadn’t been in the scouting report. What should have been a stealthy execution was now going to be a gunfight. It couldn’t be helped, and she didn’t have time to hesitate.
She stood, jumped, brought her feet down hard on the skylight. The glass shattered as she fell through, the shards raining. She landed and rolled, the glass still falling, a glittering shower. She leapt up, drew the silenced automatics.
Two of the Colombians were already coming at her from one of the bedrooms. Their hair was disheveled. Boxer shorts. Sleepy eyes. But they each gripped a little Mac-10. Standard goon armament. Not original but very deadly.
The machine pistols spat fire, rattled nine-millimeter slugs six inches over Nikki’s head. The bullets shredded plaster, knocked a painting off the wall, and obliterated a lamp.
Nikki went flat, rolled along the floor, pistols stretched over her head. She squeezed the triggers, and the silencers dulled the shots to a breathy phoot. She shattered anklebone, and both men yelled and fell. When they were on the floor, she shot each of them in the top of the head.
She leapt to her feet and spun just in time to meet two bodyguards storming her from the other direction. Automatic pistols barked at her. The room filled with streaking lead.
Nikki bolted left, ducking under the fire, turn- ing to the side to make herself a small target. She jumped, fired as she flew through the air, emptying both pistols with a rapid-fire series of phoots, and landed behind an overstuffed couch. She ejected the spent magazines, slapped in new ones. She hunched low against the back of the couch as a fresh flurry of gunfire flayed the cushions. The air fill...
Anthony Minelli, his cousin Vincent, and their pal Andrew Foley played five-card draw on a makeshift table in a nearly empty warehouse on the New York docks.
“Full house, motherfuckers. Queens over sevens.” Vincent drained the rest of his Bud Light, crumpled the can in his fat fist, and tossed it twenty feet. It clanked across the cement floor, echoed off metal walls. Vincent scooped the winnings toward his ample belly. Three dollars and nine cents.
“Nice pot,” Anthony said. “You can buy a fucking Happy Meal. Now shut up and deal.”
“Hey, it’s the skill that counts. I could be on that celebrity poker show on A&E,” Vincent said.
“Fuck you. It’s on Bravo. And you ain’t no celebrity.”
Andrew Foley smiled, reached into the Igloo cooler for one of the few remaining beers. He enjoyed the playful back and forth between the cousins but never joined in. He popped open the beer, sipped. He’d had a few already and was pretty buzzed. He’d also lost nine bucks at poker, not having won a single hand. But that was okay. Like the Minelli cousins, Andrew had been paid a cool grand for his work at the docks today. The money had come just in time.
Andrew was in his junior year at the Manhattan School of Music and he was always short on money. He was a week late on rent when Anthony had called with the offer. Andrew was well aware Anthony and Vincent were wiseguys in training and that a deal with them was sure to be a little shady. Andrew had known the two cousins since they were all in grade school. Andrew’s father and their fathers were pals. He balked at the thought of doing something illegal and maybe getting caught, but Vincent continued to assure him that the whole thing was easy money, a big fat moist piece of cake. Andrew needed cash. Period. Andrew’s landlord wasn’t a forgiving man.
Besides, it really did seem like a pretty easy job. A no-brainer really. Somebody (Just never you mind who. Don’t ask no fucking questions.) wanted a cargo container from one of the big freighter ships unloaded without going through the usual customs. This was a tall order, and a lot of people had to be bribed or distracted. Andrew, Vincent, and Anthony had a simple job. Shepherd the cargo container from the freighter to the unused warehouse way hell and gone down the other end of the wharf. The guy who’d set up the deal didn’t trust the usual union grunts to handle it, and anyway a lone cargo container getting that kind of attention would cause talk. Andrew was being overpaid enough to keep his trap shut. It was understood silence was part of the deal.
They’d forklifted the container into the warehouse and that was that. The job had seemed so simple and the guys were so giddy about their easy payday that Andrew forgot all about an overdue term paper when Anthony produced a cooler of beer and Vincent had pulled a deck of cards out of his pocket.
“What do you think is in there?” Vincent’s eyes shifted momentarily from his cards to the cargo container.
Anthony picked something out of his teeth, then said, “Drugs.”
Vincent raised an eyebrow. “Oh, yeah? You got some inside information?”
Anthony said, “It’s always drugs. Gimme two cards.”
They played cards, talked quietly, drank beer.
The little explosion rattled the warehouse. They dropped their cards and hit the floor. Andrew covered his head with his arms, his heart thumping like a rabbit’s. One of the metal doors on the cargo container creaked open. A chemical smell from the explosive hung in the air.
“Jesus H. Christ.” Anthony was the first to his feet. “What happened?”
Vincent stood up too, dusted himself off. “How the hell am I supposed to know?”
Andrew stayed on the floor, but he uncovered his head and risked a peek. Smoke in the air. Then they heard something, noise from within the container.
“Somebody’s in there,” Andrew whispered.
Vincent shook his head. “That’s fucking impossible.” He’d whispered too.
The cousins were huddled together. Andrew stood up and huddled with them. They watched the cargo container expectantly. It was like a scene in War of the Worlds, Andrew thought. The guys looking at the spaceship, waiting for the aliens to come out. They whispered at each other from the sides of their mouths.
“How could anyone breathe in there?”
“Maybe there’s more than one.”
“Illegal immigrants?”
“Should we go over there?”
“Fuck that. You go over there.”
A figure emerged from the container, and they froze.
The newcomer had dark olive skin, deep brown eyes. Black hair slicked back and dirty. A thick curly beard. He wore a stained denim shirt, threadbare tan pants. Military boots. A small pistol tucked into his waistband. Over his shoulder he carried a large brown duffel bag.
Vincent took a step forward, raised a hand. “Hey!”
Andrew put his hand on Vincent’s shoulder, held him back. What did the dumb wop think he was doing?
The stowaway jumped at the voice, then fixed Vincent with those hard dark eyes. He put his hand on the pistol in his pants, didn’t say a word. Vincent held up his hands in a “no problem here” gesture. The stowaway backed toward the door, his hand on the gun the whole time. He turned, opened the door, and exited the warehouse quickly and without a backward glance.
Anthony recovered first. “What the fuck?”
Andrew let go of Vincent’s shoulder. “What did you think you were going to do?”
Vincent looked a little pale. “Shit if I know. I just saw the guy and . . . Shouldn’t we do something?”
Andrew walked toward the container. “Let’s have a look.” The cousins followed.
The three of them stood at the door and peered inside. Dark. An odd tangle of straps and harnesses. It looked like a car seat had been arranged to withstand rough seas.
Andrew examined the container door, which had been latched from the outside. There was a small hole at the level of the latch blown outward from within, leaving the metal jagged and scorched. The guy inside had known exactly what to do to free himself.
Vincent held his nose. “What a fucking stink.”
Andrew nudged him, pointed into the corner of the container at an object that could only be a makeshift toilet. Food wrappers and other debris littered the container’s floor.
Anthony shook his head. “Oh man. We just helped smuggle some kind of Arab terrorist motherfucker. What are we going to do?”
“Not a goddamn thing,” Vincent said. “We were paid to bring the container here and keep our fucking mouths shut. We weren’t supposed to hang around and play cards. We were never meant to see this. I don’t care if that was Osama Bin Laden’s right-hand guy. We’re going to keep our fucking traps shut and not do a thing.”
Fear bloomed in Andrew’s gut, but he agreed. Maybe if he kept quiet about this, never told a soul, it would all go away.
· · ·
He was known among his fellow terrorists as Jamaal 1-2-3.
He walked from the docks straight inland for five blocks, turned right, walked four blocks, then left for another three blocks. He pretended to examine shoes in a store window but was really watching the street behind him in the reflection.
No one appeared to be following him.
He zigzagged another ten minutes, found a pay phone, dropped his duffel at his feet, and dug a slip of paper out of his shirt pocket. There was a phone number. No name. No identifying markings of any kind. It was a local number, but that meant nothing. The call could be rerouted and transferred to any phone in the world. Jamaal might be calling a barbershop in the Bronx or a noodle hut in Kyoto. He dialed the number.
It rang five times before someone picked up. “Hello?”
“This is Jamaal 1-2-3.”
“One moment.” Shuffling papers. Taps at a keyboard. “What seems to be the problem?” A slight accent. Perhaps Eastern European.
“I was seen.” Jamaal explained what had happened.
“I understand.”
The voice asked Jamaal a few questions. Who were the three men? Jamaal didn’t know. What did they look like? Early twenties. American. Two with dark hair, one with lighter brown hair and pale skin. He described their clothes.
“I wasn’t supposed to be seen. If the authorities learn that—”
“It will be taken care of.”
Jamaal said, “But it’s important that—”
“I said it will be taken care of. You must go about your business. Forget the three men. Proceed as planned. Leave the rest to me.” He hung up.
The conversation’s abrupt end surprised Jamaal. He blinked, shrugged, hung up the phone. He stood there a full minute pondering his situation. His mission depended on his ability to blend into the scenery, where he would slowly go about collecting the materials he needed. And in a month or three or a year, when everything was in place, he would strike at the Great Satan for the glory of Allah. But if the American FBI or CIA knew an Arab had been smuggled into the country, they would scour the city looking for him. The witnesses had to be eliminated and quickly, before they could alert anyone.
All he could do was trust the voice on the phone and get on with his work. He shouldered the duffel and walked casually into the asphalt anonymity of New York City.
The man with the vaguely Eastern European accent had a name, but it didn’t matter what it was. He sat in a small room filled with filing cabinets and computers and fax machines and telephones. It didn’t matter where the room was. His office was the world.
He contemplated the problem of Jamaal 1-2-3.
It didn’t matter one iota to the man if Jamaal’s mission failed or not. What mattered to him was his own reputation and the fact that upset clients could be potentially dangerous. In this business, reputation was everything. He was a kind of broker. He made connections, put people with other people. Filled in gaps. He’d promised Jamaal’s organization a completely covert insertion. Now he had a mess to clean up. It was the bane of his profession that he had to rely occasionally on local people to execute the details of his operation. Now he had to send someone to make things right. Going local again would likely compound the problem. He needed someone good. He needed the best.
He picked up the phone, the special secure line, and dialed the number for the most dangerous woman in the world.
2
At that moment, in the middle of the night, the most dangerous woman in the world clung to the tiled roof of a villa in Tuscany, where she worked to circumvent the alarm system on a large skylight. If she could do that, she’d open the skylight, drop inside, and kill a Colombian named Pablo Ramirez.
For five years she had called herself Nikki Enders. This wasn’t her real name, of course, but she had a British passport and a ream of other paperwork that said she was Nikki Enders, and no one ever disputed her. She had a Swiss bank account that had millions of dollars of Nikki Enders’s money in it. Nikki Enders enjoyed a staggeringly expensive home in London, and another three-story house in the Garden District of New Orleans. She wished she could spend more time there. She also had a dozen passports in safety-deposit boxes scattered around the world and could stop being Nikki Enders at a moment’s notice.
But tonight, in Tuscany, Pablo Ramirez would run afoul of Nikki Enders.
Ramirez meant nothing to Nikki. Alive. Dead he was worth five million dollars. She didn’t know who wanted him dead or why. She didn’t care. This was simply Nikki’s job. She fumbled with a pair of alligator clips, squinted at the wires that connected the alarm system. She hated working in the dark.
The cell phone clipped to her belt vibrated against her hip. She flinched, reached back, and turned it off. She silently cursed herself. She was getting sloppy. First she’d left the night goggles behind in the hotel. Then she’d forgotten to turn off her phone. A distraction at the wrong moment might cost her in blood. She wiped the sweat off her forehead with the sleeve of her black bodysuit. She needed to calm down, get her ducks in a row.
Okay, go over the scouting report again. Ramirez had five men with him. It was a four-bedroom villa, and naturally Ramirez would claim the master suite for himself. That left the five bodyguards scattered about. They could be anywhere, sleeping, getting a snack in the kitchen. Nikki had staked out the villa earlier and saw no sign of the usual bevy of whores who kept the men entertained, so she wouldn’t catch any of them screwing. The dim illumination coming up from the skylight suggested they’d turned in for the night.
She checked her guns. The twin .380s hung from her shoulder holsters. She’d already screwed the silencers into place. There was a collapsible sniper rifle and a .40 caliber Desert Eagle strapped to the BMW motorcycle parked a block down the hill, just in case she needed something more formidable. The motorcycle was concealed under the low branches of a tree, but close enough for her to reach it quickly.
Just as she’d hoped, recalling the scouting report and rechecking her equipment helped her focus. She returned to the alarm system and the alligator clips. She fidgeted, rolled to her left, trying to readjust herself to a more comfortable position.
Floodlights flared to life, poured harsh light onto the villa’s roof. From within, a shrill alarm pulsed.
Goddammit!
There must have been some kind of roof sensor that hadn’t been in the scouting report. What should have been a stealthy execution was now going to be a gunfight. It couldn’t be helped, and she didn’t have time to hesitate.
She stood, jumped, brought her feet down hard on the skylight. The glass shattered as she fell through, the shards raining. She landed and rolled, the glass still falling, a glittering shower. She leapt up, drew the silenced automatics.
Two of the Colombians were already coming at her from one of the bedrooms. Their hair was disheveled. Boxer shorts. Sleepy eyes. But they each gripped a little Mac-10. Standard goon armament. Not original but very deadly.
The machine pistols spat fire, rattled nine-millimeter slugs six inches over Nikki’s head. The bullets shredded plaster, knocked a painting off the wall, and obliterated a lamp.
Nikki went flat, rolled along the floor, pistols stretched over her head. She squeezed the triggers, and the silencers dulled the shots to a breathy phoot. She shattered anklebone, and both men yelled and fell. When they were on the floor, she shot each of them in the top of the head.
She leapt to her feet and spun just in time to meet two bodyguards storming her from the other direction. Automatic pistols barked at her. The room filled with streaking lead.
Nikki bolted left, ducking under the fire, turn- ing to the side to make herself a small target. She jumped, fired as she flew through the air, emptying both pistols with a rapid-fire series of phoots, and landed behind an overstuffed couch. She ejected the spent magazines, slapped in new ones. She hunched low against the back of the couch as a fresh flurry of gunfire flayed the cushions. The air fill...
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Book Description Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. Mike Foley can never forget the night he tagged along with his brother on a job for the mob that ended in a hail of bullets. Now his brother is dead, Mike's making wine in Oklahoma, and life is almost as good as it gets when you've been hiding out for forty years. Until his past comes calling.Mike's nephew Andrew needs to disappear, and he needs to do it yesterday. Hanging with the wrong kind of friends, he's seen something he shouldn't have, and now he's running for his life with an assassin on his trail. The consummate professional hit woman, Nikki Enders is the most lethal of a deadly sisterhood. And Andrew Foley is next on her extermination list. Unless Uncle Mike can stop her. As kill teams descend on Foley's farm, one pissed-off ex'tough guy is about to take a final, all-or-nothing stand with shotguns blazing. A retired hitman gets back into the game to help out a nephew, but soon finds himself up against a hot young female assassin and a whole new set of rules in this new work by the Edgar Award-nominated author of "Gun Monkeys." Original. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability. Seller Inventory # 9780440241713
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US$ 11.95
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Shotgun Opera
Published by
Random House
(2006)
ISBN 10: 0440241715
ISBN 13: 9780440241713
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Softcover
Quantity: 3
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Book Description Condition: New. pp. 305. Seller Inventory # 26766117
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US$ 9.17
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Shotgun Opera: A Novel
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Book Description Condition: New. Seller Inventory # V9780440241713
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US$ 12.66
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Shotgun Opera: A Novel
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Book Description Condition: New. Seller Inventory # V9780440241713
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US$ 14.21
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Shotgun Opera: A Novel
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Book Description Paperback. Condition: new. New. Fast Shipping and good customer service. Seller Inventory # Holz_New_0440241715
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US$ 21.19
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Shotgun Opera: A Novel
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Book Description Paperback. Condition: new. New Copy. Customer Service Guaranteed. Seller Inventory # think0440241715
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US$ 26.80
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Shotgun Opera
Published by
Dell Pub Co
(2006)
ISBN 10: 0440241715
ISBN 13: 9780440241713
New
Mass Market Paperback
Quantity: 1
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Book Description Mass Market Paperback. Condition: Brand New. 320 pages. 7.00x4.25x1.00 inches. In Stock. Seller Inventory # 0440241715
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US$ 19.71
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