Read Online Omega Dog by Tim Stevens - Free Book Online Page A

guy wouldn’t be able to hit him from up there, and if he started coming down the fire escape, Venn would at least hear him.
    The sirens were getting closer. The cops would be here any minute, and Venn was going to have a hell of a lot of explaining to do if they found him there. Especially if they’d encountered the girl, and she fingered Venn as one of her attackers, which she clearly thought he was.
    Venn rose to a stoop under the metal framework of the steps. His eyes still stung like hell, the tears were streaming down his face, and he felt as though acid was eating into his cheeks. But each time he dared to open his lids a crack, he saw a little more clearly. The blurred shapes around him - fire escape, wall, trashcans - were taking on a little more definition, bit by bit.
    The girl couldn’t have hit him squarely with the blast of Mace. The stream must have been angled so that his eyes hadn’t taken the full force of it.
    Venn ground his teeth. The man up there with the gun was the best lead he had so far. Someone who could well lead him to Professor Lomax, or at least give him an entry in. But there was no chance Venn could get near him now. Even if the cops weren’t about to arrive round the corner, guns drawn, even if Venn could somehow get up that fire escape and confront the guy, he could barely see him. The guy would put a 9 mm bullet between Venn’s eyes before Venn even heard the shot.
    Snarling in frustration and pain, Venn took the chance and began to lope down the street away from the sound of the sirens. He half-expected a fusillade of bullets to come raining down on him from above, but nothing happened. At the end of the street he glanced back, once. Through the filter of agony he saw that the cab driver who’d brought him there had long gone. And as he rounded the corner, he observed the first splash of police car lights across the walls as the cops arrived.
    Thrusting his gun back into its shoulder holster, Venn straightened and strode off down the street, losing himself in the crowd that was starting to mass there, drawn by the gunfire.

Chapter 15
    ––––––––
    D eeDee Rosetti was sixty years old, and had spent the last twelve of those years without the use of her legs.
    This was courtesy of a drive-by shooting in the Bronx by a rival crew. Her capo di tutti capo , the man she answered to in the pecking order of the mob family she belonged to, had been taken out in the shooting. In fact the only reason Rosetti had survived at all was that the capo , Rudy Cardinale, had landed on top of her as the Uzi fire had ripped through him. He was a big man, Rudy – no, a truly vast man, bloated by a lifetime of pasta and rich gravies and fine wines – and his corpse had shielded Rosetti from the worst of the assault.
    Still, a lucky shot – lucky for the other crew, not so lucky for Rosetti – had entered her spine and severed the spinal cord in the lumbar region. She lacked all movement below the waist, and had only partial sensation there.
    Which meant that knowing when she needed to piss or take a dump was something of a lottery.
    This went some way to accounting for Rosetti’s crabby outlook and explosive temper. So did the psychological effects of not being able to walk anymore. So did the fact that she was always on the verge of suffering withdrawal symptoms from nicotine.
    Mostly, though – and Rosetti would have been the first to admit this herself – she was the way she was because she came from a long line of unpleasant, antisocial and volatile personalities. Her father had been a mean, vicious asshole. Her mother had been a meaner, nastier asshole still.
    And Rosetti’s grandfather on her pa’s side had been an out-and-out psychopath.
    When DeeDee was twelve years old, an unruly tomboy on the streets of Hell’s Kitchen, she and a couple of her pals had taken her grandpa’s Buick for a joyride. There was alcohol involved, and by the time the car was dredged out of the