Hellhound Read Online Free Page A

doorknob. When given the command to bite the fellow, it was like an invitation to play time. He would merely be doing exactly what domestication and training kept him from doing naturally.
    The gunman sensed something coming at him from the darkness only seconds before Bones’s jaws clamped down with an average 200 psi on his right arm. He’d made the mistake of trying to aim the gun at the unseen intruder at the last moment, giving Bones the moving target he was looking for. The shepherd hit the man so hard that he fell over, dropping the gun as he hit the ground.
    Immediately, there were shouts, followed by gunfire.
    On the screen, Sergeant del Vecchio counted at least a dozen pairs of glowing eyes. Fear raced up her spine, though it wasn’t her own safety she was concerned for.
    “First squad! Go!” cried the captain.
    Six members of the tactical team swept up the stairs and onto the sixth floor. Del Vecchio, part of the second squad, stared at the monitor as muzzle flash repeatedly blinded the camera. When she could make something out, the image bounded around. Bones was clearly in attack mode. Her worry switched from the shepherd’s safety to that of the tactical team.
    “Bones! Out!!” she cried into her throat mic, unsure whether the dog could hear.
    “Second squad! Go!”
    Del Vecchio leaped to her feet and followed the others up to the sixth floor. She looked down at the monitor but couldn’t tell if Bones had stood down. Just as she entered the hallway, she caught a glimpse of a man’s eyes staring up at the camera in terror as Bones tore at his shoulder, already out of its socket.
    “Bones! Out!” she repeated.
    This time, she knew he couldn’t hear, so loud had the gunfire grown. That’s when all other noise was blotted out by the sound of a gunshot so impossibly close to her head that she felt temporarily deafened. This was followed by a numb feeling behind her eye. She looked down at the monitor and saw its screen was now obscured by a thick greasy film of blood and brains.
    Hers
.
    No one had heard the door to 632 open. The building’s records had the apartment rented to one “Erna Fowler,” aged eighty-two years. She’d been a resident since 1979 and lived alone. The idea that she would step out of her apartment with the small six-shot .357 she kept in a drawer and begin killing the officers in the hall with shots to the back of the head simply hadn’t occurred to anyone in the planning stages of the operation.
    As bullets continued to fly, the chaos allowed Mrs. Fowler, married in 1951 to Archie, who died in 1993, to reload the weapon with a speedloader and continue shooting. She felled another two members of the tactical squad and was aiming at a third when a stray bullet from a MPK 9mm entered her left tear duct and exploded out the back of her head.
    Still noticed by no one, she dropped to the ground directly beside the corpse of Sergeant del Vecchio, the .357 skittering down the hall before coming to a rest in front of 639.
    •  •  •
    Down on the street, Detectives Leonhardt and Garza stared up at the dark building as the distant, hollow report of gunfire continued, punctuated by intermittent flashes of light from three sixth-floor windows.
    Leonhardt scrunched his brow. “Weren’t they only breeching 638?”
    Garza nodded. “That’s what they said.”
    “Then somebody’s got their front door open.”
    “Fuck. Hope we don’t have any civilian collaterals up there.”
    “We do, and everybody in the precinct will be looking over their shoulder for the next year. To say nothing of how the press will take it.”
    “Shit,” scoffed Garza. “Any time these Special Ops assholes come up to 22nd Precinct, they’ve got to make things hard for the rest of…”
    Garza was interrupted by a terrified voice over the radio.
    “Something’s happened up there!” someone squawked. “We have multiple officers down! We need emergency services and backup! Immediately!”
    Leonhardt