I stared at the abomination in front of me, then grabbed a second box and tore open the lid. More ham and pineapple. Same with the next, and the next. Seven Hawaiian pizzas, seven crimes against taste. Somebody was going to hang for this little stunt. Behind me, Sky snickered.
“I suppose this is your doing?”
She held up both hands. “Nope, I swear.”
My gaze narrowed in on Dan and her smirk. “You?”
“No way. I value my life.”
“Couldn’t you pick the pineapple off,” Mack suggested.
“Are you kidding? The juice seeps out and gets into everything. You end up with soggy dough, fruit-flavoured ham, and sweet cheese.”
“All of which is delicious,” Sky pointed out.
“Shh!” Mack warned her. “Do you have a death wish?”
I’d just spent two days in Washington, DC acting as technical advisor to a committee that officially didn’t exist. They wanted to remove a troublesome warlord from a small African country, and it was my job to tell them whether their ideas were impossible or merely tricky as hell. One wrong move, and the simmering tensions could boil over into civil war. No pressure. While the spooks and politicians bickered, I’d been dreaming of driving home for a meal that hadn’t been cooked by Satan because right before I landed in DC, I’d spent a week surviving on wild yams and chilli-fried bugs in the jungle. And now this.
“Who ordered the damn pizza?”
Ana and Carmen both shrugged, and then I noticed Bradley backing slowly towards the door.
“You! It was you, wasn’t it?”
“Toby said you needed to eat more fruit, and pepperoni’s got too much salt in it.”
Before I could strangle him, he sprinted out of the door and turned right towards the nearest set of stairs. Hmm, if I used the other door at the far end of the living room, I could cut him off and…well, I didn’t know exactly, but it wouldn’t be pretty. I set off at a run, but the little bastard cut left into the safe room hidden behind a hideous portrait of one of my husband’s ancestors and slammed the door behind him.
“Think of the vitamin C,” he yelled, his voice muffled through the wooden panelling. “And the fibre will keep you regular.”
“Sometimes I really hate you.”
Carmen tapped me on the shoulder and held out a shiny Korth semi-automatic. “You know what to do, puta.”
Sky’s eyes widened. “Isn’t that a bit drastic? I mean, he only ordered the wrong pizzas, and what are we meant to do with the body?”
“There are six of us. Digging a hole will take about ten minutes.”
“Are you serious? I’m not helping with that.”
“Of course I’m not bloody serious. Tempting though it may be to shoot Bradley, I’m going to shoot the damn pizzas. It’s the only thing they’re good for.” I glanced across at the others. “A hundred yards? Best of six, and the loser has to pick up food that’s actually edible?”
“Oh. Good. But can I eat mine? I’m starving.”
“If you must. Do me a favour and set up the other pizzas on the range while we collect the hardware?”
Sky grinned. “This is gonna be entertaining.”
Carmen might have offered me the Korth, but that wasn’t the weapon I planned to use. The aim of the game was to destroy as much of the pizza as possible, and I needed something that packed more of a punch. A shotgun was my best bet. A hundred yards was too far for buckshot or birdshot, and deliberately so. Making things easy took the fun out of the game. Two years ago, we’d shot at thirty yards, and Carmen had incinerated the pizza with dragon’s breath—pyrotechnic shells filled with magnesium shards—which made Bradley freak out completely. He’d come running with the garden hose, then sulked when we laughed at him.
I picked out a shotgun with a rifled barrel and a handful of sabot slugs that would be accurate at longer distances. Carmen picked a shotgun too, Dan came out with a hunting rifle, and Mack chose a fifty-calibre pistol.
“A handgun?” Carmen asked.
“I don’t have a candle’s chance in hell of beating you guys, so I might as well have fun.”
Ana brought an RPG-7.
“What the fuck?” I asked for the second time that evening.
She just shrugged.
And people said I was crazy?
The RPG-7 wouldn’t be accurate at a hundred yards—it was a struggle to hit anything beyond seventy-five with those things—but maybe I’d get lucky and Ana would hit my pizza instead? I kept my fingers crossed as Sky motioned us into place. She’d pinned the pizzas to target frames on the range behind the house. We owned the land for two miles in that direction, and a small hill formed a natural berm a mile and a half away. The deer in the woods had grown smart enough to keep out of the way.
“Six pizzas?” I asked her. “You’re joining in?”
“Bradley disappeared, and I didn’t want his to go to waste.”
Good thinking.
“What are you shooting?”
She held out Carmen’s Korth. “I always wanted to have a go with one of these, but it’s out of my price range.”
“Not for long. Ready?”
“Ready and also hungry,” Dan said.
I glanced across to check everyone was wearing ear protection, which was a stupid thing to do because of course they were. This was nobody’s first rodeo. Many pizzas and even more pickled eggs had met their maker in the grounds of Riverley Hall. I saw Sky checking too and smiled to myself. I’d trained her well.
“Go!”
Even with earplugs and muffs, the noise still made my teeth rattle. I blasted a couple of holes through the pineapple and felt better than I had in days. Beside me, Sky shot a grumpy face in her pizza.
“Nice,” I shouted.
“Thanks, I learned it from Rafael.”
Then Carmen’s pizza exploded.
“What the fuck?”
I seemed to be repeating myself a lot today.
Carmen looked like a kid in a candy store. “I’ve been experimenting with explosive-tipped slugs. These are prototypes. I still need to refine the design.”
“So they’ll take two heads off instead of one?”
“Something like that.”
Not to be outdone, Ana let fly with an RPG, and the lack of accuracy turned out to be a moot point. All she had to do was hit the ground in front of her target, and every last crust of the seven of the pizzas disappeared. Which was good news and bad news. On the plus side, there was no more pineapple, but on the minus side, we had no idea who’d lost. We all stared at each other.
“Well, fuck,” Sky said.
Yes, I’d definitely trained her well. She had the swearing down pat as well.
Mack dropped the magazine out of her pistol. “Don’t worry, guys. I’ve already ordered the pizzas. Extra pepperoni, extra cheese, no pineapple, no anchovies. Plenty of chillis on Bradley’s.”
Oh, he’d love that.
Dan pointed at the house, and I saw a small white flag waving from the back door. “Bradley seems to have left his cave. We can get him to pick the food up.”
“No, we can’t because it’ll be cold by the time he gets back. I’ll drive, and Bradley can fill in Ana’s hole. Who wants to ride shotgun?”
As my Viper’s engine roared in front of me, I figured that perhaps it hadn’t been such a bad day after all. I may not have gotten my required dose of vitamin C, but I’d had fun with my friends, and that was the most important thing. We only got one shot at life, and I didn’t want to waste mine.