John Wick - Chapter 46: Unexpected Trouble (Patreon)

“Raise your head!”

Nate's words made the heavyset police chief visibly flinch. He meekly lifted his head.

Nate swung his arm in a wide arc and slapped him twice across the face.

Smack! Smack!

The sound cracked through the empty street.

The officers standing behind Morales froze, completely at a loss.

“Those two were for that racist crap you said.”

Red handprints quickly appeared across Morales's cheeks.

His mouth opened, but no words came out.

Nate followed with a side kick that sent him stumbling several steps backward. He closed the distance immediately and backhanded him across the right cheek, knocking him back another few steps.

Morales kept his head down and didn't fight back.

He didn't dare.

Nate stared at him without expression.

“Come here.”

Smack! Smack!

Two more hard slaps.

Morales staggered, taking another half step backward. The flesh on his face shook from the blows, while his hands hung at his sides, clenched tightly into fists.

He kept his mouth shut.

The overlapping red marks across his cheeks spread down his neck and all the way to his ears. His entire face had turned dark red.

He was visibly boiling with anger.

Nate exhaled.

Much better.

Damn, these American cops really were too used to throwing their weight around.

He shook out his hand and raised it for a third time.

Morales hunched his shoulders and squeezed his eyes shut.

Nate's arm remained suspended in the air for two seconds.

Then he slowly lowered it.

He stepped forward, straightened Morales's collar where the slaps had knocked it crooked, and gently smoothed it down.

“You know John?”

Morales opened his eyes. They were bloodshot as he looked at Nate in confusion.

“Yeah.”

“For his sake, I'll let the last one go. We're even.”

Nate stepped back, his tone casual.

“Watch yourself from now on.”

John came down the steps.

As he passed Nate, he glanced at him with a hint of surprise in his eyes.

Then he walked up to Morales and patted him on the shoulder.

“Morales.”

“Y-yes.”

Morales's voice was hoarse.

“You should work on that old habit of yours.”

John's voice wasn't harsh, but the reproach in his eyes was obvious.

Morales practically shrank into himself. His oversized uniform made him look like a cat being held by the scruff of its neck.

He nodded repeatedly.

“I understand, Mr. Wick. I understand.”

He didn't dare meet John's eyes.

He didn't dare look at Nate either.

His gaze remained fixed on the tips of his shoes.

John said nothing more.

He turned and headed toward his car, with Nate falling into step beside him.

Once they were inside, John started the engine.

Through the window, Nate saw Morales turn around and wave furiously at the officers behind him, his mouth moving as though he were chewing them out.

Nate kept watching.

Morales must have noticed him from the corner of his eye.

His movements abruptly froze.

His hand stopped in midair.

His mouth snapped shut.

Then, looking thoroughly awkward, he gave Nate a salute.

John stepped on the gas, and the car pulled away from the parking lot.

After they had gone a couple of blocks, Nate leaned back in the passenger seat and looked out the window.

“You know that fat police chief?”

John was silent for a moment.

“I saved his life more than ten years ago.”

Nate turned to look at him.

For some reason, John seemed more talkative than usual.

“He was investigating a drug case. He dug into people he shouldn't have and got himself kidnapped and taken to a dealer's hideout.”

John kept his eyes on the road, his voice as calm as ever.

“I had a job involving the same group, so I got him out while I was there.”

“He saw you work?”

John nodded.

“So that's why he's afraid of you?”

“Maybe.”

“He wasn't like this before that happened,” John continued after a pause. “Back then, all he cared about was solving cases. He wasn't afraid of anything. But later...”

His eyes remained on the red light ahead.

He didn't finish the sentence.

“What happened later?”

“Later, some states legalized drugs,” John said quietly.

“Because of the High Table?”

“Yes.”

Nate didn't answer.

He didn't really know what to say.

Outside the window, streetlights slipped past one after another, their orange glow washing rhythmically across their faces.

“You don't need to regret what you did,” John continued. “Why he became the way he is doesn't matter.”

“Racism deserves a beating. You did the right thing.”

John gave him an approving look.

Nate was silent for a moment.

“The High Table has that much power? Enough that we can even beat up cops?”

John kept both hands on the wheel and his eyes on the road.

He nodded.

“More than you think. Our respective standing isn't that different, but in certain areas, we have far more authority than they do.”

“Got it.”

Nate turned back toward the window as the city flashed past.

Suddenly, an image appeared before his eyes.

John's car exploding twenty meters ahead.

“Sto...”

Nate didn't even finish the word.

John had already wrenched the steering wheel aside.

He had sensed the danger too.

The car skidded halfway around and came to a stop in the middle of the road.

Nate looked through the windshield.

Just over a meter ahead lay a chain of landmines.

They had been deliberately painted to match the asphalt.

At high speed, there was almost no way to spot them unless you knew exactly what to look for.

John started turning toward the roadside, preparing to circle around and head back.

Pfft! Pfft!

Two muffled shots.

Nate felt the car shudder.

Then the entire vehicle began to tilt slightly.

Both tires on the left side had blown out.

They'd been shot.

“Fuck!”

Nate's expression changed immediately.

John yanked the wheel hard.

The car swung through an arc, its rims scraping against the asphalt in a shower of sparks and a piercing metallic shriek.

He didn't turn back.

There were mines ahead, and whoever had set this ambush had probably blocked the road behind them too.

John cranked the wheel to the right.

The nose of the car pointed toward an abandoned two-story building several dozen meters away.

With two blown tires, the car couldn't pick up any real speed.

The rims grinding against the pavement sounded like fingernails scraping across a blackboard.

Nate gripped the handle tightly as the car lurched beneath him.

His other hand had already drawn the P30L.

The rear windshield suddenly shattered.

Bang!

A bullet.

It had come from far behind them.

John didn't even look back.

His hands made rapid corrections on the steering wheel, forcing the crippled car into an uneven S-pattern across the road.

In the rearview mirror, Nate saw another bullet strike the pavement where they had just been, kicking up a spray of gravel.

Bang!

Another shot.

This one struck the right-side mirror.

The mirror exploded.

Shards of glass flew toward Nate's face.

He turned his head just in time, and the fragments grazed past his temple.

John didn't react.

The car kept grinding forward.

Several dozen meters.

Normally, it would've taken a single press of the accelerator.

Right now, it felt like they were crawling.

Nate twisted around and looked through the shattered rear window.

[Eagle Eye] Lv4 went to work.

On the rooftop of a six-story building far in the distance, he could just make out two blurry black figures.

A pistol was completely useless at that range.

The car jolted violently and finally lurched onto the gravel beside the road.

John drove straight into the side of the abandoned building.

The exposed rims carved pale semicircular scars across the ground.

Both men threw open their doors at the same time and crouched against the wall.

The bullets followed them.

Rounds hammered into the car, the metallic impacts exploding beside their ears.

Another bullet punched straight through the passenger door, exited the other side, and buried itself in the wall.

Nate hunched lower, gripping the P30L without raising it.

At this distance, a pistol was a toy.

“Give me the rifle,” John said.

Nate moved toward the trunk as though he were retrieving something from it.

In reality, he pulled the HK416 from his Loadout and handed it over.

John took the rifle, dropped to one knee, leaned half his body past the corner, and aimed.

Bang!

The enemy fired first.

The round struck the edge of the wall beside John's face, blasting brick fragments across him.

John didn't even blink.

He squeezed the trigger.

Three-round burst.

Five hundred meters.

The optic on the HK416 only offered 2x magnification.

It was nighttime.

Even for John, making that shot was extremely difficult.

John ducked back, shifted position, then leaned out again and fired another series of short bursts.

Nate saw the two blurry figures on the distant rooftop disappear.

“Hit one,” John said.

The words had barely left his mouth when two shots struck the walls on either side of them at almost the same time.

Brick fragments rained down.

Both men immediately pulled back into cover.

Shit.

He hadn't killed him.

Two men.

Two sniper rifles.

More than five hundred meters away.

None of Nate's other equipment could reliably reach them, and under these visibility conditions, even John was struggling to engage them with a 2x optic on the HK416.

“Fuck!”

Nate punched the wall.

He'd screwed up.

He had assumed they wouldn't need a sniper rifle for urban combat, so he hadn't equipped one.

Nate pressed his back against the wall and glanced at the sky.

It was still dark.

But at this rate, they wouldn't last until sunrise.

“Any signal?” John asked.

Nate pulled out his phone.

Zero bars.

They were jamming communications too.

John said nothing.

He shifted the HK416 into his left hand and flexed his right wrist.

Only then did Nate notice blood on his hand.

He had no idea when John had scraped it open.

Then came the sound of engines in the distance.

More than one vehicle.

Nate pulled the magazine from his P30L, checked it, and pushed it back in.

Then he took out the suppressed Rattler and his throwing knives from the [System Backpack].

John remained perfectly calm as he watched Nate pull equipment seemingly out of thin air.

He had probably figured it out a long time ago.

“If we make it back alive...”

Nate produced several more magazines and handed them to John with a grin.

“You've got to try my cooking.”

He picked up the Rattler and worked the charging handle.

“Now this is what a four-million-dollar bounty looks like.”

John didn't answer.

A faint smile appeared at the corner of his mouth as he rested the rifle toward the corner of the building.

“Yeah.”