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freeway wall would box us in. Hopefully the bad guys would, too, and wouldn’t bother trying to cut us off that way. If we could get to it before the trap sprung, they’d never know how we slipped their noose.
    “How’s your climbing?” I said.
    “You gotta be kidding.”
    “I’ll give you a boost.”
    We angled into the darkness, toward the deceptively distant sounds of whizzing traffic, slipping from one edge of cover to the next. Arthur kept his vision and gun barrel sweeping in a wide arc behind us as he followed me, and I stayed alert for a whisper of movement, a glint of metal…
    We almost made it.
    It’s hard to win in a gunfight against me if I know where you are. But if you’re smart, if you’re the type of person who shoots before ever revealing your position…
    A suppressed report echoed against the concrete at the same time Arthur went down like he’d been kicked in the chest by a mule.
    I didn’t hesitate. The time between the gunshot and the shooter’s death was less than a quarter-second. My Colt roared and smacked my hand, and somewhere out in the darkness there was one less goon.
    “Arthur!” I stayed covering him, not daring to take my eyes off our surroundings and look down. I swung up my carbine with my other hand and let loose a volley of suppression fire into the darkness while I scanned. There: a dark rustle, a flash of skin. I fired again, and this time I saw the body sprawl out of the shadows. “Arthur, get up!”
    Arthur was an ex-cop. I was pretty sure he’d been wearing a vest. And that he’d been hit where the vest was covering.
    Asshole. He better have been wearing a vest.
    I popped off some staggered suppression fire again, and two more unlucky would-be assassins gave away their positions by trying to fire back. They didn’t get anywhere close, and signed their own death warrants by trying. I yelled at Arthur again, and he finally answered by joining the fight, his Glock barking as he stumbled to his feet. His gun wavered in wide figure eights and he almost fell into me, but someone behind one of the bridge pylons screamed as one of Arthur’s bullets found its mark.
    “Back!” I suited action to words as I pushed us into a reverse stagger. Reaching any decent cover would take us toward our assailants, and the freeway wall was only a short open stretch behind us…but now we’d be easy targets for the seconds it took us to go over.
    And Arthur would be slower after taking the kinetic energy of a bullet. Shit.
    “Change of plans!” I called the words between bursts of gunfire as we reached the wall, backs against the barrier. “You’re giving me the boost first. Cover me!”
    I’d been counting down and knew he needed to reload. I let off a few more rounds while he slapped a new magazine in, then dropped the carbine to dangle from the sling, said, “Brace yourself!” and spun into a jump.
    One boot levered off the wall, rocketing me high enough to drive the other down on Arthur’s shoulder. He grunted and half-buckled, but his gun didn’t drop, keeping up the cover fire. My free hand smacked against the unyielding roughness of the top of the wall, and my fingers clamped down through the pain and became a pivot. All of my momentum went angular to swing my feet in a quarter circle and let me flip onto my stomach as I hit and balanced. The six inch thickness of the freeway barrier socked me in the sternum.
    Ow.
    I swiveled to sit up and let loose with both weapons again. My left hand was bleeding all over the carbine, making the trigger slick. “Grab on!” I yelled at Arthur, kicking my boot at him above his head.
    “Are you kidding me!” he yelled back, but he was already holstering his Glock. Arthur didn’t hesitate when under fire, even when I was telling him to climb me like a jungle gym and pitch himself into traffic.
    The wall might make us an easy target, but it also gave me a good vantage point. Even with a hundred-sixty-five-pound man using my leg as a