Darkening Dawn (The Lockman Chronicles Book 5) (26 page)

“Get on into my van,” he said.

She flat ignored him and ran over to her bodyguard, dropped to her knees beside him.

Horns and screams and now the sound of sirens crackled in Earl’s ears. He grinded his teeth together as he felt that control he thought he had slip away. He aimed for the bodyguard’s still body and let loose a short burst. The burst caught him in the leg, chunking apart his kneecap. His body jerked and his scream cut through all the hubbub.

Tough bastard. Earl had thought sure he’d dropped dead.

The girl shrieked and drew back from her bodyguard as if he’d burst into flames. She fell back on her bottom and crab-walked backward on her hands and heels. Then she threw Earl one hell of a nasty look. If she had any kind of magic in her, she would have cut him down with that glare alone.

She didn’t, though. She didn’t seem to have a lick of power. Which made Earl wonder all the more why Dolan was so eager to put himself inside her.

“You bastard,” she screamed.

But Earl’s attention snapped toward movement from the SUV she’d been riding in. A man, forehead cut and bleeding, staggered out of the passenger seat, a pistol hanging in his limp hand. His other hand he had up to his head, as if he was trying to remember something.

Poor son of a bitch had stepped out into his own death.

Earl shot him with a fair grouping of rounds and pounded the fella right back into the SUV. He bounced off the side of the passenger seat, then flopped forward onto the ground. His gun skated off under the vehicle.

New movement drew Earl’s attention back to the girl. She was charging at him with something in her hand.

A gun.

She’d taken it from her bodyguard.

Instincts, as normal as any animal built with a survival mechanism, took control of Earl’s hands. He pulled the trigger without a single thought about what Dolan wanted.

The unexpected move from the girl didn’t give him a chance to aim right, though. His gunfire went wide, blowing apart a store window far beyond his target.

The girl never hesitated. The fright in her eyes had disappeared. But anger hadn’t replaced it. The look on her face spoke of cold experience. And in that instant, Earl knew the girl could use that gun and use it good.

Then she fired.

The bullet struck him in the chest. His vest took the brunt of the shot, but he still flailed backward, his rifle nearly—just nearly—slipping out of his hands.

The girl kept coming.

She fired again.

Earl heard a buzz go by his ear.

Again, she fired, still marching forward.

Another hit to his chest. He felt something crack beneath the vest. Breastbone maybe. The pain shot right into his heart. For a second he thought it might stop beating.

They were losing.

The control.

Just Tony and himself left.

How had this gone so wrong?

The girl had stepped up to only a handful of feet from him. She had the pistol aimed dead to rights in his face.

“I’m the fucking Return, you old cocksucker. And I’m sending your wrinkly ass to hell.”

She pulled the trigger.

The gun did nothing.

The slide was still forward, so the pistol had at least another round left. Jammed maybe?

Earl didn’t waste time on pondering. He swung the butt of his rifle and knocked the gun out of her hands, probably breaking some knuckles in the process.

The girl cried out and drew her hand against her belly, face pinched in a wince, but that dead cold look still in her eyes.

He wanted to knock that look clean off. He jabbed the rifle’s butt into her face.

Her nose crunched and blood flowed freely down over her mouth. Her eyes rolled into the back of her head and she collapsed.

“Tony,” Earl shouted. The noise around him had muted some. Except for the sirens. They had swelled up too damn loud for comfort. “Get your ass out here and help me with her.”

Tony leapt out the side of the van like a good little black boy, grabbed the girl under the arms, then draped her over his shoulder. “This is seriously FUBAR,” he said. “We’re cuttin’ this too damn close.”

“Just get her in the fucking van.”

And, again, like a good little black boy, Tony grunted his way back inside the vehicle and rolled the door shut.

Earl got behind the wheel.

As he wrenched the van into reverse and weaved backward between a pair of cars, Earl happened to glance at the girl’s bodyguard. The sucker had rolled onto his side and watched as Earl backed over the curb, knocking aside a parking meter in the process.

Nothing the poor bastard could do, all chewed up like that. That didn’t stop him from making a hard promise with his eyes. Earl knew the message behind the look. He’d given it a few times since finding Kit run through by the unicorn.

It was a promise of death.

Too bad for the bodyguard, the only death promised was his own.

Earl threw the van into drive and turned it so that he lined up on the sidewalk. Then he hit the gas, using the sidewalk as a road. It got him out of the snarl. Then he dropped back onto the street proper and sped toward the planned escape route.

Chapter Forty-Three

I
T’S GOING TO HAPPEN
again. You have to be ready. It’s going to happen…

“Again,” Jessie whispered as she tumbled out of another dream about her dad and that weird phrase.

What’s going to happen again?

Stupid dreams. They never made any sense, and once they let you go, you had to deal with the real world, which often made even less sense. And, like now, real life could really hurt.

Her face felt as though someone had smashed her nose in with the butt of a gun.

Oh, yeah. That’s exactly what had happened.

As she came to, it didn’t take long for her to remember the whole cluster fuck. The crash. The pair of Ronald Reagans. That weird fish weapon.

Ree.

Something obscured Jessie’s vision, giving her mind’s eye the perfect black screen to project these memories in vivid detail. Especially that moment where she knelt beside Ree’s bullet riddled body, listening to the wet wheeze coming out of one of the wounds, and that scratchy gasp he kept making as if he was breathing through a mouthful of gauze.

Then his knee exploding when that old fucker shot Ree while he was down for no good reason.

She willed the visions away. Time to focus on the here and now.

First observation—they had blindfolded her. Besides the blackness, she could feel scratchy fabric tied tight around her head. The pressure made her temples pulse from the cut to her circulation. The blindfold also squeezed down on her nose, giving a constant feed of pain jabbing into the center of her face.

Second observation—they had her hands bound behind her, her arms wrapped around a padded seatback, like an office chair from the feel of it underneath her. They also had her feet tied together, but she could otherwise swing her legs freely. She kicked backward and felt the post supporting the seat. She lowered her heels and kicked again. Her shoe knocked against a caster and the chair shifted a couple inches.

They had put her on a chair with wheels, and she had enough range of movement with her legs that she could theoretically shove herself around across the floor. Of course, for all she knew she would push herself down a flight of stairs.

Obviously they weren’t too worried about her getting away by skating on the chair.

Neither did they care if she moved at all. Which meant they were probably watching her.

Leading her to observation number three—she heard faint breathing, steady and calm. From that she thought she could feel the presence of someone standing not too far behind her. Could have been her imagination filling in the blanks.

Like it mattered anyway.

She was blindfolded. Tied up. And her brain felt like it had been pickled.

She couldn’t even smell anything except for the metallic tinge of the blood impacted up her nose.

Her lips had a tacky crust over them that had to be her blood. A trickle ran down the back of her throat—probably more blood—but her tongue felt as dry as a sidewalk in the sun. She worked up as much saliva as she could and peeled her lips open. Her coagulated blood had a texture like Jell-O left in the fridge for too long.

A check with her tongue offered a small bit of relief—she had all of her teeth.

She cleared her throat, bringing forward some of the trickle in back. The penny flavor confirmed that her busted nose was draining back there.

Great.

“Hey,” she said. God, her voice sounded like she had the worst cold in world history. The one word came out like a strangled honk. “Hey. I’m awake. Can we get on with the dastardly plan?”

A minor change in the rhythm of the breathing, but otherwise whoever was with her didn’t respond.

“Look, there is a whole army of government agents tracking me by now. They’re going to rain down on you any minute now. Why don’t we skip all the shooting and screaming, huh?”

Nothing.

On a whim, she decided a different tack.

She took a deep breath, centered herself, and whispered, “Return.”

Nada.

So whoever was watching her was mortal. Good to know.

“Come on,” Jessie said, voice pitching up in frustration. “What’s the point of all this? Are you trying to bore me to death?”

More silence from Mr. or Ms. Breath.

She had no intention of waiting for the other Doc Martin to drop. This watcher of hers didn’t want to interact, she would force a reaction of some kind.

She planted her heels to the floor, then pushed her legs straight.

The chair coasted backward, casters rattling. Without any visual markers, a wave of vertigo came over Jessie as if she floated through outer space. As she rolled along, her feet held up off the floor, the chair swiveled, totally throwing off her sense of balance and space. This was the professional level equivalent of getting spun around under a piñata.

Something stopped her coasting abruptly. Not a wall. She didn’t so much as collide as just stop. But she felt pressure against the seatback. She guessed that her watcher had grabbed the chair to stop her.

“Nice to finally meet,” Jessie said.

A soft grunt. Barely audible. But a reaction nevertheless.

“I’m guessing you must be a lackey,” she said. “Why don’t you run and get your boss so we can get the party started?”

“Ain’t no lackey. Ain’t got no boss.”

The edge in his voice told Jessie she’d poked a tender spot. Which also tipped her off to an opening.

“Sure you have a boss. Who told you to stand here and watch me, and…” she waited a beat. “…
commanded
you not to talk to me under any circumstance?”

“Ain’t got nothing to say no how.”

Despite how messed up her day had gotten, Jessie smirked. If she had to go down, she’d go down pissing off everyone she could with her acerbic wit. (What Ree had referred to as her attitude problem.)

Don’t think about Ree.

The slick feel of his blood on her hand as she leaned over his body to grab his gun snuck under the wall she tried to slam down between her and the memories.

“But even if you did have something to say, you couldn’t. Boss’s orders.”

Her chair shook. He’d given it a hard shove, but hung on to keep her from rolling away. “Shut up.”

“Are you allowed to tell me that?”

The chair spun in a one-eighty before snapping to a halt. Her head whirled in the darkness.

The breath she had only heard before she felt brush her cheek now.

She waited, but he only let her hear his angry breathing. He was trying to hold back. More than just words. A violent energy pulsed from him.

Pissing off someone in a duel of words was one thing, but she had a feeling his comeback wouldn’t come through his voice.

“Easy,” Jessie said, dialing down her sarcasm without coming across as a total wimp. She hoped. “Take it easy.”

The coarse skin of his palm slid down her cheek and to her throat where he gave a gentle squeeze, his touch a strange mix of tension and tenderness.

“That’s the only way I take anything,” he said, with the creepy lilt of a serial rapist. His version of romance, of course.

She almost said that out loud, but choked down the words before they spurted out her smartass mouth. She kept that troublesome mouth shut.

“Been a lot of time since I had a sweet piece of—”

“What the hell you doing?” a familiar man’s voice asked. The old dude who had shot Ree.

Killed Ree, Jessie. Might as well face facts. You got all your real friends and family killed. Now you’ve started in on the kinda-friends.

She closed her eyes behind the blindfold. Barely noticed the difference in the quality of dark.

Her watcher’s hand slid off her neck and left behind a rash of gooseflesh across her throat.

“She’s mouthing off,” her watcher said.

“I told you to leave her alone. That so hard to understand, nigger?”

Hearing the N-word made Jessie cringe. She didn’t care what kind of creep her watcher was, there were plenty of better insults than bigotry. It said more about the old guy than it did his lackey.

The guy was a certified prick.

But she already knew that. It was hard to judge anyone who shot a person in the leg after he was already down and bleeding to death as anything but. Actually,
prick
didn’t go far enough. A few choice words tried to tap off her lips. She did all she could to hold back. With her heart racing the way it was, she’d probably fumble them anyway.

“I don’t take orders from you,” her watcher said.

The old guy chuffed a laugh. “Since when?”

“This whole thing’s gone to hell. Whole crew’s gone expect for us because of your stupid ass plan.”

“Great.” The old guy made a disgusted noise from the back of his throat. “Why don’t you tell her exactly where we are and what we have planned next?”

“She ain’t going nowhere.”

“Get the fuck out of here, Sambo. I need some time alone with her. Go watch the other one.”

The other one. He must have meant the woman that had been tailing them before the armored van crashed into her car.