The Forever Man: A Near-Future Thriller Read Online Free Page A

police don’t recover bodies anymore. They just cancel your contract and put the balance due back into the operating budget.
    Mr. Glasses comes forward to check Lane’s pockets. As he moves into range, Lane draws the pepper spray out of his shirt and brings it front and center. Mr. Glasses raises a hand toward his head for protection, but it’s too late. Lane squeezes hard on the tube and the burning mist rockets out, bursts through the empty glasses frames, and saturates both of the Bad Boy’s corneas. As he howls in pain, Lane lets go of the tube, steps forward and reaches into the man’s coat pocket for the gun he knows is there.
    By now, the second man has come to his senses and drawn a pistol. Lane feels the gun handle in the pocket of Mr. Glasses and pulls the weapon free. At the same time, Mr. Glasses lurches in agony, cups his eyes, and spins to face the second man.
    “Shoot him!” the clerk screams at the man.
    Reflexively, the armed man obeys in a panic and fires three shots from a medium-caliber automatic. The bullets rip through Mr. Glasses’s torso, leaving foaming tunnels of wasted tissue through the lungs, heart, and liver. One bullet lodges in the spine, but two others exit out the back just as Lane starts to bring his gun up. The bullets smack his multilayered vest hard enough to knock him back a few inches, but not enough to stop him from taking aim before he loses the temporary cover of the dead man.
    As Mr. Glasses remains pitch forward, Lane fires two shots that punch through the second man’s sternum within an inch of each other. One vaporizes the aortic arch and terminates all circulation, and the second man falls backward and collapses.
    By now, the terrified clerk has run to a steel door with no handle, and is pounding on it as he drops to his knees. “Get me out! Get me out! Please, God! Get me out!”
    Lane makes a cynical note that the little asshole has suddenly got religion now that the goons are gone. He leaps over the body of Mr. Glasses, runs down the short hall and out into the open space with the queue ropes.
    “He’s out there! Get him! Kill him!” the clerk screams.
    Lane has a major problem: In a second or two, armed men will be running down the short hall and will catch him in the open room, without cover. The path to the exit is blocked by dozens of rows of ropes and posts.
    He has only one option. He sprints down one of the rows, and hurdles the rope at the rear just as he hears a shot fired and feels the shock wave of a bullet tickle the air near his head. Hemakes an airborne leap and folds into a ball as he crashes through the soaped window. A shell of exploding glass cuts the hot air and forms a brief copper mist against the setting sun. On the sidewalk, he rolls once, scrambles to his feet, and sees a trolley nearly upon him. He sprints across its path and then runs along the far side until he matches its speed, grabs a railing by the rear door, and pitches himself aboard. As he takes a seat by an Oldie, he looks back to see three Bad Boys clambering out the vacant window and looking up and down the street. He discreetly tucks his pistol away in the belt of his jeans. Before the last round of budgets, he had a cell phone with a direct connection to police dispatch. No more. He can’t deliver the location of the press until he gets back across the river.
    “You’re pretty old to be a Bad Boy.”
    The Oldie is a sweet woman in her seventies, with pink cheeks, a mischievous smile, and lively blue eyes. She issues her judgment without malice, and seems highly amused by what has just transpired.
    “You’re right,” he replies. “Maybe it’s time to try something else.”
    “Well, I suppose you could,” the woman speculates, “but there really isn’t much else, is there?”
    “No, there’s not.” Lane slumps in his seat and suddenly feels a stabbing pain in his forearm where he collided with the pavement. He tries to ignore it and think about the upside of what