Soul Full of Guns: Dave vs the Monsters Read Free

loudly, to cover the terrible noise of epic urination. Stakeouts were hard for a man with a weak bladder. All the Comeau men were cursed with weak bladders. And that monster cup of soda hadn’t helped. “Any sign of the target?” Rudy called out.
    “Clocked her twice through the windows on the second floor, workin’ the room,” said his partner, Special Agent Dee Madigan. “She’s really good, Rudy. I don’t know whether she takes her cover super serious, or whether she actually needs a second gig because the GRU pays like shit…”
    She paused and reached up to thumb the button on her headset.
    “Overwatch Three,” she confirmed. “Another four entrants, two Caucasian female, one Asian female, one African-American female. I make that 147 civilians. Over .”
    Comeau rejoined her at the window.
    “Did you wash your hands?” she asked.
    He held up a moist towelette from KFC. He always carried a couple with him. Special Agent Comeau might be comfortable pissing into a paper bucket when the need arose, as it did with inconvenient regularity in this job, but he was quite fussy about his personal cleanliness.
    “I dunno how you eat that stuff,” said Madigan, taking her eyes off the gallery across the street for a moment.
    “I only buy the wraps,” Comeau retorted, a touch defensively.
    They were perched a few floors above the event which their boss was intending to raid and ruin in a couple of minutes. Double-height windows afforded them a good view of at least a third of the gallery’s floor space. Just as importantly, the added elevation—they were on the fourth floor—gave them good tactical coverage of the whole block.
    “Fucking Trinder,” said Comeau. “We could have grabbed this babushka this afternoon when she was setting up. Or when it’s all done. He just wants the media.”
    Madigan did not disagree.
    “They’re four minutes out,” she said. “What the hell is that?”
    Comeau glanced where she was pointing, just in time to see an unmistakable surge pass through the crowd in that part of the gallery.
    “What the—”
    Gunshots cut off whatever he might have been about to add. Screaming and cries of alarm and distress reached them, muted by distance and glass and the low rumble of the city.
    Madigan was already reacting.
    “Overwatch Actual, this is Overwatch Three, come in. Overwatch Actual, this is…”
    Comeau moved quickly towards the door, leaving her behind to report in, and to seek new orders. He wasn’t running towards the sound of the guns, just down to the next office, also vacant, which they had taken over as a second observation point. It afforded a slightly better angle on the main gallery floor, but didn’t have aircon or comfy antique office chairs to sit in. He could hear Overwatch Two downstairs and a little further along the corridor. Or rather he could hear the hammering of somebody’s shoes along the bare wooden boards of the corridor. Had to be Two.
    The door to the empty office stood wide open. A small video camera rested on a tripod, angled down across the street, its red “Record” light glowing steadily. He hurried to the window, resisting the natural urge to stop and rewind the video, to see if the cam had captured anything. Comeau gave the recorder a good two feet of clearance. It’d be his ass if he knocked it over at this point.
    Instead he tried to use this slightly better vantage point to see if he could pick out what was happening.
    Nada.
    In the few seconds he’d taken to move to this office, whatever was happening had spun even further out of control. The pressure wave he’d seen surge through the party had broken up, and with it the coherence of the crowd. People now ran in every direction. He heard more gunfire and screams.
    OSCAR had two agents in there. Both armed. The mission brief identified only two GRU operators: Varatchevsky and another woman, name unknown. They were not expected to be armed, although it was assumed they would have