Chapter Sixty-Nine

NOTHING HAPPENED.

Driver waited, his breath seized in his chest. The old woman lowered the weapon, clicked the trigger again, listened to something within the instrument grinding impotently. The gun had jammed. Driver released the breath trapped in his lungs and rushed forward as Shauna Bulger tried jimmying and shoving the locked slide bolt.

The rifle went off right next to Driver’s ear as he plowed into her. He felt the bones of her rib cage crunching and twisting as their bodies came together, the air leaving her in a whoosh by his cheek as they hit the ground. Despite how small she was, she scrambled and twisted under him without even taking a second to recover from the blow. She was somehow unstoppable, unkillable, though her breath was rattling and her eyes bulged with pain.

Driver had heard people say their life flashes before their eyes as they approach the edge of death. He’d always found a similar phenomenon to be true: when he took a life, the lives of those he’d already taken came to him, encouraging reminders of conquests past. There was Georgette there in the old woman’s eyes, but also a string of other women and girls. Drug dealers and loan sharks who had crossed him, a couple of crooked cops who got too big for their boots. Shauna Bulger did what all the women he’d killed did: she reached for something, anything, to blind him with. He saw the handful of dirt coming and caught it, pinned her wrist to the ground. But a heavy boom and a flash in the distance distracted him, and he turned away at just the right moment, and didn’t see the rock she’d clutched in her other hand coming at his face. Driver caught the rock in his left eye socket. His whole face clanged with pain, the agony seeming to shimmer and echo through him, like his bones were made of iron. He got up and stumbled back, wiping blood from his face. His boots hit the dirt road, and he turned in time to be blinded by a set of huge gold headlights only a few yards away.