Nate gripped the steering wheel and glanced at Marcus in the passenger seat.
The pepper spray had left Marcus’s face streaming with tears, his nose running as he whimpered through his throat.
His hands were bound tightly with zip ties and electrical tape, and he was curled up in the seat like a shrimp trussed for cooking.
“Stop crying,” Nate said.
“Keep it up and I’ll spray you again.”
Marcus desperately tried to hold it back, but quiet sobs still escaped him.
Nate turned his attention back to the road.
The car crossed the Brooklyn Bridge and continued south.
At four in the morning, Brooklyn looked like a dead city, the streetlights dividing the road into alternating patches of light and darkness.
After about ten minutes, Nate noticed another vehicle in his rearview mirror.
A black Ford Explorer was following about fifty meters behind.
Its high beams were off, and it maintained an unhurried, steady distance.
At this hour, on a road this empty, two cars traveling one behind the other stood out.
Nate’s heartbeat quickened.
He didn’t accelerate or change lanes.
He kept driving at the same speed while watching the Ford in his mirrors.
He turned onto a side road.
The Ford followed.
He made another turn.
It followed again.
Not a coincidence.
Nate took a deep breath.
He removed his right hand from the steering wheel, reached beneath the passenger seat, and pulled out the pistol he still couldn’t identify, resting it on his thigh.
He glanced at Marcus.
Marcus seemed to have realized what was happening too.
His eyes were filled with fear.
“Hold on.”
Nate slammed down the accelerator.
The Cadillac’s V8 engine gave a low roar as the vehicle surged forward.
The speedometer jumped from forty to sixty, then seventy miles per hour, the tires shrieking against the asphalt.
The Ford Explorer accelerated almost simultaneously.
Like a shark that had caught the scent of blood, it locked onto the Cadillac and refused to let go.
Nate floored the accelerator and pushed the Cadillac to eighty-five.
Flatbush Avenue wasn’t particularly smooth, and the Cadillac’s soft suspension made the vehicle sway from side to side over the uneven pavement.
Every time it hit a pothole, Nate could feel the tires briefly lose traction.
In the rearview mirror, the Ford’s headlights drew closer.
There was an intersection ahead.
Beyond it lay the direction of the Brooklyn Navy Yard, with a large abandoned industrial area and a complicated network of roads.
Nate didn’t hesitate.
At the intersection, he wrenched the steering wheel around.
The Cadillac’s rear swung outward, leaving two black streaks of rubber on the pavement as the vehicle nearly slid sideways into the left turn.
The Ford followed, but it was too close behind and the Cadillac had blocked the driver’s view.
He reacted a fraction too late and took the turn too wide.
The Ford’s right-side tires jumped onto the sidewalk and sent a roadside trash can flying.
The Explorer rocked violently, then quickly stabilized and resumed the chase.
Nate saw it in the mirror, and his expression tightened.
Anyone who could maintain that much control at this speed wasn’t an ordinary driver.
Nate suddenly hit the brakes.
The Cadillac’s speed plummeted, its rear dipping sharply.
The Ford driver hadn’t expected the sudden deceleration.
The Explorer nearly slammed into the Cadillac’s bumper before its driver jerked the wheel aside.
The Ford swerved violently.
Its left side mirror scraped across the Cadillac’s right taillight with a piercing screech.
That was exactly what Nate had been waiting for.
He floored the accelerator again while turning sharply to the right.
The Cadillac surged past the Ford’s left side like an enraged bull.
The two vehicles ran side by side for less than two seconds before the Cadillac’s front end pulled ahead.
The Ford driver reacted almost instantly.
He turned left, forcing the massive SUV toward the Cadillac.
Nate didn’t move away.
Instead, he turned slightly left.
The two vehicles slammed together.
The crash of metal against metal exploded through the empty street like two trains colliding.
The Cadillac’s left door caved inward.
The Ford’s right fender tore open, scattering fragments across the road.
The impact hurled Nate sideways, and the seat belt bit painfully into his chest.
He gritted his teeth, kept the wheel steady, and held the accelerator down.
The two vehicles raced forward side by side like wild animals locked in a struggle.
The road ahead grew narrower, bordered on both sides by abandoned warehouses and rusted wire fencing.
Nate spotted another intersection roughly two hundred meters ahead.
A heavy garbage truck was approaching from the road on the right, its headlights shining through the darkness like two moving stars.
An idea immediately came to him.
Nate slammed on the brakes.
The Cadillac rapidly lost speed.
Caught off guard, the Ford Explorer shot ahead.
The instant the Ford pulled past him, Nate yanked the steering wheel around and drove the Cadillac’s front end hard into the Explorer’s right rear quarter.
It was a classic PIT maneuver, using the front of his own vehicle to strike near the other vehicle’s rear wheel and force it into a spin.
The precise angle of the impact immediately robbed the Ford’s rear tires of traction.
The Explorer’s rear swung violently to the right, and the entire vehicle began to spin.
The driver desperately fought the steering wheel, trying to recover, but Nate had hit it at just the right angle.
The Ford’s left rear wheel lifted off the ground, and the entire SUV tilted.
At that exact moment, the heavy garbage truck reached the intersection.
The truck was traveling straight through at fifty miles per hour, its headlights flooding the road ahead.
The spinning Ford Explorer slid directly into the intersection, broadside to the oncoming truck.
The garbage truck driver slammed on the brakes.
Its tires screamed against the pavement as white smoke billowed from beneath them.
But at fifty miles per hour, with tens of tons of weight behind it, there was no way the truck could stop in such a short distance.
The front of the garbage truck smashed into the Ford Explorer.
BOOM!
The deafening sounds of twisting metal, shattering glass, and bursting tires ripped through the street.
The Ford Explorer crumpled beneath the tremendous impact like a sheet of paper crushed in someone’s fist.
It rolled two and a half times through the middle of the intersection before crashing onto the asphalt upside down.
Debris covered the road.
Fluids leaked from the shattered engine, spreading into a dark pool across the pavement.
The garbage truck finally stopped, its front end badly mangled.
Its driver crawled from the cab with blood covering his face, then staggered to the side of the road.
Nate stopped the Cadillac on the far side of the intersection.
Taking the pistol he couldn’t identify, he crossed the street, stepping over broken glass and twisted pieces of metal as he approached the overturned Ford Explorer.
He held the pistol in his left hand and summoned the boning knife into his right.
Its tip gleamed coldly beneath the streetlight.
The Ford had been severely deformed.
Its roof was crushed, the windshield had shattered into a spiderweb of cracks, and the driver’s door had been torn away entirely, exposing the interior.
The driver was trapped.
His seat belt was still fastened, but the seat had been folded forward by the impact.
The steering wheel pressed hard against his chest, while the dashboard and seat pinned his lower body between them.
He couldn’t move.
His face was covered in blood.
A deep gash on his forehead exposed the bone beneath, his left eye was swollen shut, and blood trickled from the corner of his mouth.
But he was smiling.
He bared teeth stained red with blood and gave a hoarse laugh.
“Cough… cough… Not bad.”
Nate raised the pistol and approached slowly, studying the hitman.
He was a white man around fifty years old, with short gray-white hair, a square face, and an old scar across his chin.
He wore a black tactical jacket over a bulletproof vest.
His left hand was twisted at an unnatural angle.
His right hand still clutched a pistol, but the slide had been warped by the crash, leaving the barrel crooked.
“Who are you?” Nate asked.
“My name is… Victor.”
The man coughed up another mouthful of blood, spraying bloody foam across the back of Nate’s hand.
Nate checked the time.
4:37 a.m.
“My bounty isn’t active yet. Why are you trying to kill me?”
“Cripple you… first. Then when the bounty… goes active, I kill you. Same difference, isn’t it?”
Nate said nothing and waited for him to continue.
“I’m the only one… willing to make a move before the bounty starts.” Victor struggled to curl the corner of his mouth upward.
“Those good little rule-followers… they’ll wait until six… Six o’clock before they start hunting you.”
He coughed.
“I prefer… eating early.”
Nate’s gaze hardened.
“Smart. Anything else?”
“Nothing.”
Victor spat out a mouthful of blood.
“That’s it.”
He raised his head and looked at Nate through the one eye he could still open.
There was no fear in his gaze.
No anger either.
Only a strange hint of admiration.
“You’re a good driver,” Victor said.
“That move… was precise. Losing to you… doesn’t bother me.”
“Luck,” Nate replied.
“Do it.”
Victor closed his eyes.
Nate raised the pistol and aimed between Victor’s eyebrows.
Then he stopped.
“Wait. Do you have any gold coins in your car?”
Victor opened his eye again and looked at him.
“Gold coins… If I give them to you… do I get to live?”
Bang!
The gunshot still made Nate’s ears ache.
“Of course not.”
[Ding! Host eliminated a High-Threat Target and earned 257 Resource Points! Resource Points: 523/1000]
Victor’s head snapped backward against the mangled steering wheel.
A hole appeared between his eyebrows, blood running down the bridge of his nose.
The eye that had remained open lost focus as the pupil dilated.
All right.
Now for the exciting part.
Looting.
Nate finally managed to drag Victor’s body out of the vehicle.
He searched him thoroughly and found four gold coins and several thousand dollars in his pockets.
Then he went back to the wrecked Ford and searched through it for a while.
Inside the passenger-side glove compartment, he found a small black box and twenty thousand dollars.
Nate opened the box.
Inside was a neatly stacked pile of gold coins.
He counted them.
Twenty-four.
He’d hit the jackpot!
[High-Value Items detected. They can be exchanged for Resource Points after returning to the Operations Base.]
There didn’t seem to be anything else worth taking.
Nate searched the vehicle once more and found two guns, but both had been badly deformed in the crash and were basically useless.
He left them behind.
When Nate returned to the Cadillac, Marcus was curled into a ball in the passenger seat, trembling uncontrollably.
His pants were wet.
The way he stared at Nate was as though he were looking at a demon that had crawled straight out of hell.
Nate started the engine.
The Cadillac roared back to life, and its headlights illuminated the blood and debris scattered across the road ahead.
He glanced into the rearview mirror at the overturned Ford Explorer.
Victor’s arm hung motionless from the mangled window.
The Cadillac passed through the intersection and returned to the empty predawn streets.
Nate glanced at the clock on the dashboard.
5:11 a.m.
Forty-nine minutes until the bounty went active.
The Cadillac’s headlights carved two straight beams through the Brooklyn night, its engine humming low and steady.
Its battered body looked like a wounded beast returning to its den after surviving a brutal fight.
And The Continental was just ahead.