Cut and Run 09 Crash & Burn (21 page)

The only place they could take Alston and the information from the files they’d gleaned was the bookstore. There was far too much sensitive information sitting around Owen and Digger’s hotel room, the row house was probably being watched, and the field office obviously wasn’t secure. And the
Fiddler
, while arguably the most secure spot in the city, was the only place the cartel wouldn’t know about, and therefore their only mode of escape if they needed to get out. They couldn’t risk either Alston or Clancy finding out about it. Ty wanted to trust them both, but he wasn’t stupid.

The bookstore, though, wasn’t in either Ty’s or Zane’s name. It would be safe long enough for them to figure out their next move.

They split up into pairs and threes so their group wouldn’t be quite so noticeable when they entered the old building. Ty hadn’t had time to work on much lately, and the building had that abandoned-in-the-midst-of-a-project feeling to it. Alston only took a few steps before halting near the entry.

“Jesus, Grady. When Garrett said you guys needed help, he didn’t mean just painting.”

Ty snorted in annoyance. “The hole in the floor is an anomaly.”

Alston gave him a dubious sideways glance.

“This is a no-judgment zone,” Ty told him.

Alston held up his hands, which were restrained with one of Zane’s zip ties. “Oh really.”

The little bell above the door dinged as Owen, Digger, and Kelly walked in, and they all stood for a few seconds in an awkward silence.

“Still no word from Nick,” Kelly announced.

“He’ll show up,” Owen said. He took a careful step into the building, craning his head to see the hole in the floor above them. “Jesus, Six.”

“Right?” Alston said with a little laugh.

Ty rolled his eyes and led them to the hidden panel in the kitchen. He’d ripped most of it down in one go, so when they’d left he’d just rested the panel against the stairwell opening. With everything else in the building a mess, it wasn’t all that conspicuous.

He made Alston go first, out of spite. The others followed with flashlights and a few portable work lights from around the space. Ty loitered at the top of the stairs until Zane and Clancy came through the back door with all the photos and information they’d printed from Richard Burns’s SD card. Only then did he breathe easier.

His relief was mirrored on Zane’s face. Zane took him by the elbow and kissed him on the corner of his mouth. Ty kissed him back for good measure, and Zane grinned almost impishly.

“Were you worried about me, doll?”

Ty barely restrained himself from rolling his eyes. “The stakes are kind of high on this one, Zane. I’m going to be worried about you until we bury the Vega cartel in a shallow grave.”

Zane slid his hand into Ty’s pocket and yanked him closer. “Likewise,” he whispered. “Hey. It’s past midnight.”

Ty frowned. “Yeah? So?”

Zane’s smile was warm, lighting up his beautiful eyes in the dim light. “Happy Valentine’s Day, killer.”

Ty snorted, lingering over another kiss. “Since when do you keep track of that kind of thing?”

“Since my brand-new husband revealed he’s a hopeless romantic,” Zane murmured into the kiss. He gave Ty a last peck on the cheek, then smacked his ass. “Get the front door, I’ll get the back.”

They locked up the building, both of them standing in the darkness and watching the exteriors for a few minutes to see if they’d been followed. Zane finally gave a low whistle. Ty turned to see his bulky shadow heading toward the stairs, and he moved to follow him.

He was halfway to the stairwell when he heard a soft, frantic tapping on the glass of the front door. He stopped, cocking his head to listen. The tapping came again, this time sounding even more urgent. Then the ancient doorknob rattled, and someone shoved experimentally against the door, like they were testing to see how easy it would be to break down.

Zane had already descended the steps, and Ty hesitated. He didn’t dare call out and give away that the building was occupied. Instead he scooted silently to the front windows, peeking through a slit in the newspaper and grocery bags pasted all over the glass.

Nick and Liam were on the stoop. Nick was tapping at the glass and cursing quietly, while Liam had his back to Nick’s, his gun out, surveying their surroundings like a hawk searching for a muskrat.

Both men were bloody. Ty reached for his gun.

“Break it down,” Liam ordered, loud enough to carry inside.

Nick nodded, turning and dropping his shoulder. Ty knew exactly what kind of damage Nick could do to his fucking irreplaceable antique glass door if he put his shoulder into it.

“No, no, no!” he hissed. He threw the dead bolt and cracked the door open, lips parted to ask what was going on, but Nick reached through the crack and grabbed his shirtfront, then yanked him onto the stoop.

“What the hell, Irish?”

“Call them, get them out here,” Nick demanded.

“What—”

“Six, get them out!”

Ty knew that tone of voice. He didn’t ask another question, just snagged his phone and hit Zane’s number.

“Are you seriously not going to come down here?” Zane asked when he answered the call, sounding both amused and exasperated.

“Zane, evac right now.” Nick was nodding and rolling his hand through the air as if that might make the world spin faster. Even as Ty spoke, Nick took his arm and started pulling him away from the building, right out into the street. Again, Ty didn’t question or argue, and he spoke over Zane when he asked what the hell was going on. “Nick’s here. Get everyone out!”

If Zane responded, Ty didn’t hear it. His world was encompassed by a wave of heat and sound, sound so loud it became nothing at all to his ears save for a high-pitched whine. He was shoved forward into the asphalt, his forehead hitting, pain blooming behind his eyes like white-hot pokers in his brain. Heat and debris blew over him. The sound faded, then came roaring back like some dragon sweeping down on them.

Ty pushed himself up, confused by the flames, the screaming, the panic. Little bits of debris littered the street, most of them on fire or steaming in the freezing night air.

He rolled until he was sitting on his ass, staring at what used to be the front door of the building. It felt like forever before he was able to process what had just happened. He blinked away the blurs in his vision and struggled to his hands and knees.

“Zane,” he gasped. He pushed himself to his feet, wavering as the street beneath him seemed to tilt.

A hand grabbed his elbow, steadying him.

“Zane!” Ty cried again as the fire within the building raged. He took an impulsive step forward, wobbling. The grip on his elbow tightened, and he tried to jerk out of it.

“No, Six!” someone yelled, their voice so far away it might as well have been coming from Boston.

“Zane!” Ty shouted back. “God, no. No! It doesn’t happen like this!”

He got free of the hand and struggled toward the ruined façade. Arms encircled him once again, dragging him away from the building. “I’ll get them out, I promise!”

“He’s in there!” Ty cried. Tears streamed down his face, and smoke filled his lungs as he gasped for more air to shout. “Let me get to him, I have to get him!”

“You’ll kill yourself!”

Ty jerked away and pitched forward onto his hands and knees. “I don’t care!” He scrabbled over twisted metal and heated bricks, his palms and knees taking the brunt of the punishment. The heat was so fierce it felt like the skin of his face was melting off. Sirens came from somewhere in the distance, but their meaning didn’t register in Ty’s mind.

“Not like this,” he said, over and over, trying to make his way through the rubble and flame. “Please, Zane. Not like this!”

Hands wrapped around him again, strong hands, hands made of iron. Two men in firefighter uniforms picked him up off the ground. “Come on, man,” one of them said, his voice distorted by the breathing apparatus on his face.

“No! Zane!” Ty sobbed as he tried desperately to get away from them. The fire filled his entire field of vision. It sounded like a banshee’s wail as it ate through the old building like dry tinder. His knees went weak. He could get to Zane, he knew he could if they’d let him.

And if he couldn’t get to him, at least he’d spend his last minutes knowing he had tried.

His vision began to blur and darken. His body was giving out on him, and the two firefighters were dragging him away.

“Don’t make me leave him.” His pleas fell on deaf ears, though. “Don’t make me leave him like this!”

The inky darkness of unconsciousness finally blotted out the blaze. As Ty gave in, a part of him hoped—prayed—that it would be the last thing he ever saw.

Nick sat on the flybridge of the
Fiddler’s Green
, a beer in one hand, an ice pack in the other. He had slathered aloe all over his hands and arms, and used the rest of his little aloe plant on the survivors they’d pulled from the smoldering rubble of Ty and Zane’s building. All that remained of the bookstore was a pile of bricks, and all that remained of his plant was a stub in a pot down in the galley.

The aloe plant would grow back. But everything else that had been lost tonight? It was lost for good.

He stared off into the night, but he wasn’t seeing anything. There was nothing left of the bookstore but the foundation, which was a stroke of luck any way you looked at it. The rescuers had found the survivors in the basement, all but one of them still struggling for life. Nick had no idea who the unlucky body was, and no one had been able to tell him because they’d all been overcome by smoke by the time he and Liam had broken into the hidden basement.

Kelly. Owen. Digger. Ty. Hell, even Zane. A single bomb had almost taken out nearly everything Nick loved. He’d never felt this helpless in his life, not even when he’d been crouching on the basement stairs of his childhood home, disabling the light switch with a pilfered pocketknife.

A sound jolted him out of his spiraling thoughts, and he was almost to his feet before he even realized it. He held his ice pack out like it was his gun.

Liam put both hands up, his dubious gaze going to the ice pack. He had two bottles of beer between his fingers, and they clanked when he shook them. “Just me, mate.”

“Is he awake?” Nick asked, still hovering half out of his seat and brandishing the dripping ice pack like an idiot.

Liam shook his head. He handed Nick one of the beers and threw himself into the seat across from him. They stared at one another for a long, tense moment, broken only by the slapping of the water on the
Fiddler
’s hull and the whine of the cold wind as it whipped through the plastic that was supposed to protect them from the elements.

“Some crack rescue team we are,” Nick finally muttered.

“You did what you could, mate.”

“Don’t.” Nick popped the beer top on the table next to him. “At least one person is dead. Ty’s missing. Johns and Digger were headed to a hospital burn unit the last time I saw them, and I’ve got two people unconscious downstairs that we
should
have let the EMTs take. Zane’s going to be pissed when he wakes up. And Kelly . . .”

Liam waited for him to finish.

Nick jerked his head away. And Kelly might never forgive him. “There aren’t words that make this okay, so don’t try.”

For once, Liam seemed to have no jaunty retort. He settled into his seat, curled up as if protecting himself, his chin resting in his hand. “Nicholas.”

Nick forced himself to meet the man’s eyes.

“With Tyler and Zane both gone, you don’t have any stake in this now. The cartel is finished with them.”

“But we’re not finished with the cartel.”

A slow, crooked smile spread over Liam’s face. “What do you suggest?”

“I have some favors I can pull. Call in some backup.”

“From?”

“Guy I helped out last year. Good in a fight. He knows Grady and Garrett, probably owes them his life. Might be up for some destruction if he’s gotten bored enough.”

“Might? We’ll need more than that, what else do you have?”

Nick exhaled carefully, plucking at the label of his beer. “I . . .”

The scuff of a shoe on the stairs behind him had Nick lurching to his feet again. Liam stood with him, and Nick peered down the hatch into the main cabin, holding his breath.

Kelly sat on the steps, his head hanging.

“Kels?” Nick huffed, and he shoved his beer into Liam’s hand and hustled down the hatch to kneel in front of Kelly.

He put a gentle hand on Kelly’s cheek, but Kelly jerked away with a loud inhalation. “Don’t touch.”

Nick balled his hands into fists. “What are you doing?”

“I thought I could make it up there,” Kelly muttered. “My head is pounding. Did I hit it?”

“No.” Nick got his arm under Kelly’s and helped him stand.

“Oh my God, don’t touch it.”

“Okay. Come on.”

Kelly didn’t fight as Nick helped him toward the sofa in the salon. “I heard you talking,” Kelly told him. He shook his head and lowered himself carefully to the cushions. “The others?”

“Digger went with Johns to the hospital,” Nick answered. “He had minor burns and a broken arm, Digger wasn’t even bruised. He called not long ago, said they’re about an hour away from discharge. They’re coming here when he’s out.”