but must have considered him unlikely to have anything worth taking. He went on to the store unmolested.
Raylan came out of the store with bags containing seventeen more flash drives of various capacities and other items he had purchased with one hundred dollar bills from the money belt he left in the trailer with Carla. He headed back to the car. At the second intersection, he observed that the thug convention had doubled in size from three to six. Several had heavy pants that hung down more on one side than the other that they kept pulling halfway up their buttocks but never up to where normal men wore their pants. He stood there seventy-five yards down the sidewalk and waited for a break in the traffic while they conversed and glared at him. When a break presented itself, he darted across the street.
He continued on, catching them out of the corner of his right eye, as they darted across the road behind him. Horns blared, because they didn’t wait for a real break in the traffic. He kept moving and showed no sign he had noticed. He walked at the normal pace of a man of the age he appeared to be – Carla’s makeup and gray beard taken into account – but they rushed at him like a pack of wolves on the hunt.
He barely had time to swerve into a wooded vacant lot and screw the suppressor on his pistol before they were on him. He stepped behind a cluster of heavy brush and turned to wait for the trouble he knew was coming.
“Give it up whitey,” one taunted, brandishing a pistol. “We see you hidin’ back there, pissin’ your pants.” Like true wolves, they split into two groups, one heading around the left side of the brush, the other the right. He didn’t like the odds of waiting until they came at him from opposite sides, so he rushed the three on his right and killed them so fast the other group hadn’t processed what happened until he had already turned to come at them, his pistol in both hands. Their eyes rounded. In an instant, they flushed like a covey of quail, flying through the woods.
Yep, the old man’s got a gun. Raylan calmly unscrewed the suppressor and put it in the inside pocket of his vest, then picked up the bags. I’m not going to play with street thugs. He emerged from the woods and continued on. A heavy black woman with a small boy sitting next to her at a bus stop had seen the thugs rush into the woods after him. “I see you still got your stuff and your life,” she said. “I expect those boys got what was comin’ to them.”
Raylan tipped his hat to her. “Nice day, but a little warm.”
The woman laughed.
~~~
When Raylan drove up to the trailer, the door was open, letting the July heat and humidity in. He backed out of the lot and parked down the little dirt road behind a vacant trailer. He got out and locked the car. Approaching their trailer from the side, he made his way to the door and peered in. Someone had ransacked the place. His pistol came out on its own volition.
Carla yelled out from the edge of the woods, “Over here!”
He darted across the twenty yards of poorly maintained yard, stopping behind a tree.
From ten feet away, Carla said, “We had visitors. I took a stroll and happened to see them drive up to the office. Four of them. Looked more like Mob thugs than company personnel to me. Anyway, I had time to get back and hide our stuff out here in the woods before they were through in the office. I checked after the goons left. The old couple running this low-rent place are dead.”
Raylan kept his eyes busy looking for trouble. “So they went through the place and left?”
“I could hear a little of what they said. They thought we had already skipped out, since there was nothing in the trailer.”
“When did this happen?”
“They left only about ten minutes ago.”
Raylan moved to where she hid in some brush. “We need to get our stuff in the car and hit the road.”
Five minutes later, Carla sat behind the wheel of the Crown Vic, racing down the
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