The Nightlife San Antonio: (Urban Fantasy Romance) (The Nightlife Series) (20 page)

Crying, the barman’s hands shook as he stuttered, “I don’t know! It’s on Rittiman. They got her there, I swear! You’ll see some bikes out front. It’s the white building next to the HEB warehouse, you can’t miss it!”

That seemed about as good as it was gonna get, but wait … “What are
they planning to do with her?”

“Oh shit
, man, I don’t know. It’s a meeting. They’re meeting somebody.”

That would have to do. Adrian smashed
the tire iron down across the top of the man’s skull with a sickening crack. His head flopped over to the side and his hands dropped. Out cold.

Breathing heav
ily with the adrenaline rush, Adrian jetted out the front door and around to the alley, to his truck. The pool players had vacated the premise, entirely. That scene went about as well as it could have, but the warehouse was going to be messy, very messy.

He looked forward to it.

He sped east down I-410, eighty-ninety-a-hundred miles an hour. Amazing how fast you can get somewhere at one in the morning when there’s no traffic on the highways. He found Rittiman, no problem. There it was, next to an HEB office, a white warehouse with several street bikes parked out front. Whad’ya know. He wasn’t lying. No black van anywhere in sight.

“Son of a bitch!”
Adrian slapped the steering wheel as his truck slowly rolled to a stop in the parking lot. No movement. No one out front. No one to be seen. He noticed the truck loading doors at the far end of the building. If they drove the van inside, that’s where she’d be.

He grabbed the tire iron, slid it into his belt, shoved his knife and sheath into
his back pocket. Just about any weapon was welcome right now, even a cast iron skillet. Anything to conserve on his limited ammo. He took off at a slow jog for the loading doors.

As he approached,
the office light turned on, spilling a yellow beam out onto the ground.
Bingo
. His heartbeat kicked up a couple notches. This was one of those moments he lived for, the intensity of a live combat situation. All the military training fell into place, like riding a bicycle.

He checked the safetie
s were off on both his pistols. A gun in each hand, he crept up to the window. Crenshaw and two others were there, all standing around the office.

Adrian recalled t
here were four of men at the Alamo, and who knew how many more might be inside. As he contemplated how to gain entry and still maintain the element of surprise, a car squealed down the access road, and swerved into the parking lot, tires squealing with the sharp turn.

“Fuck!”

Adrian raced to the end of the building and ducked around the corner. Hopefully no one had seen him. He peeked around the building as they pulled to a stop right in front of the double doors. Four Hispanics bailed out of the car and headed straight for the smaller door to the office. They had to be La Eme.
Fuck
.

At least four inside, and another four in the car –
eight on one
. Not good. Not good at all. His chances of walking away from this alive dropped to about nil.

Bang, Bang, Bang
. They knocked on the door and stood waiting, silently.

The door opened and Crenshaw greeted them. “Good to see you bo
ys. Got your package ready.”

“Que bueno. I hope you got her u
nder wraps. That bitch is loca.”

Crenshaw
grunted. “We got what you want. You bring the money?”

“Right here.” The man standing in front
slapped the side of a nylon bag that was slung over his shoulder. “But we need to see her first.”

He must be the boss.

Crenshaw nodded. They all filed into the warehouse and the door shut behind them. Adrian dreaded what this might mean, what he’d have to do, but he pulled out his phone and dialed the number from the business card he had kept, just in case he needed it.

The call rang five times before a sleepy sounding Dete
ctive Coronado answered. “Hello?”

“This Coronado?’

“Yeah…”

“This is Adrian Faulkner. You need to get out of bed and move, now. The woman you’re looking for, La Reina, s
he’s at a white warehouse on Rittiman, the one directly to the right of the HEB offices. Look for the Harley bikes out front, you can’t miss it.”

“Wait a minute. You’re telling me she’s there right now, right this minute?”

“Yes, and if you don’t get there soon, she’ll be dead. The Aryan Brotherhood and Mexican Mafia are trading money for her life right this minute. Bring the fucking cavalry.”

“Oh shit. Adrian, are you there? If you are
, get the hell out! Now! Let us deal with this. Do you hear me?”

Adrian disconnected the call and turned his cell to silent. Couldn’t have that thing going off in the middle of all this. Coron
ado had better bring the whole San Antonio police force down on this place.

In his heart he knew it was
too little too late. The mafia could shove Samantha in their car any minute now, and there’d be nothing to stop them.

“Fuck it. Nobody lives forever.”

He slipped past the window, peeking in to see who was in the office. No one. They had gone deeper into the building for their transaction.

He slipped up on the door, pistol in h
and, and tried the knob. Locked. Dammit!

He shoved
his pistol in his jacket and slipped his credit card from his wallet. Once in a while, if people forgot to use the deadbolt, a plastic card could slide in between the door and jam, and pop the lock. Credit card was maxed to the limit anyways, might as well get something useful from it. He jigged and shoved, cursing under his breath until that little click sounded. He tugged and the door opened.

Somebody, somewhere must be
looking out for him. “Thank you, God.”

A pistol in each han
d, he slunk through the door low in a crouch and moved down the hallway past the empty office. He crept into the warehouse, straining for the slightest noise to indicate where it was all going down.

* * * *

Samantha had waited an agonizing half hour while the bastards stood around the van, making plans to spend all the money they would get for her. The idiots had left her tied in the back of the van, with nothing more than rope. Five seconds after they had stepped out of the vehicle, her razor claws sliced right through her bindings. She had crept around the windows, impatient, peeking out into the dark warehouse. They eventually walked away and left only one man standing in the bay ‘guarding’ the van.

She looked
down at the sandals on her feet, a gift from her fool bloodslave who didn’t understand that a single night without her would be his equivalent of a living hell.

Adrian, I can’t believe you did this to us both.
She wanted to cry, but that wouldn’t solve anything. The only way out was to cut straight through the problem, guts and all.

She
hardened her resolve to do what was necessary and abandoned the sandals. They would be useless for the job ahead. She needed to be able to move, fast.

The assholes locked the door, as if that would keep her insid
e. The lone remaining man stood on the driver side of the van, so she opened the passenger side door and counted three seconds.

“Hey, what the hell are you…” He came around the backside of the van, his gun pointed up
in the air, but she wasn’t up. Down on all fours, she dove at him, coming in underneath his gun hand as she hit him hard enough to lift him off his feet.

His frail wrist in her left hand tried to muscle the
gun in her direction as she slammed him on the concrete floor. Cutting into his forearm with her strong grip, she twisted hard and was rewarded with the crunch of broken bone. He would have screamed if not for the fact she had sunk her razor claws into his trachea and squeezed a tight fist, feeling the flesh give way inside her hand.

She had
always enjoyed tearing out throats, made for a nice, quiet kill, and a juicy meal. She gorged herself, drinking her fill.
Finally, a real meal
. Those little nips off Adrian were never quite enough to satisfy.

One of t
he first lessons her master had taught her was that it takes several donors a night to feed properly, or only one donor who wouldn’t survive the ordeal. Her master never really cared which way it went, as long as he filled his belly. His bloodslave collection always needed to be restocked.

Slurping up the last of her meal, she heard footsteps coming her way. Just in time for the party.

“Holy hell! What’d you do to Reinhart? Hey guys get over here, now! Reinhart’s down!”

She stood up from her meal and eyed the man who couldn’t even hold hi
s gun steady. In a flash she zig-zagged left, then right, and was on him. She snatched the gun from his hand like taking candy from a baby. “Fools.”

She latched onto his neck an
d chomped through bone, flesh and gristle. She spit out the chunk of flesh and watched him make gurgling noises as he fell to the floor. She hated to waste all that good blood, but his cries had already brought several men running. No more time for food.

Flash
-bang, she flitted off into the warehouse, flying over boxes, diving between pallet stacks, past the Hyster, and ever deeper into the thirty foot high shelves loaded with pallets of boxes. Those fat, greasy bastards had no chance of catching up to her. One of them sent a shot flying, but they couldn’t even see her.

She could see them perfectly.
La Reina was on the hunt.

* * * *

Adrian heard shouts, men running. Something was happening, and he hoped to hell she had sunk her teeth into at least one of those assholes. He kept moving forward, tracking the sounds. He slipped up to the edge of a stack of boxes, watching the men milling about. Their hair-trigger anxiety floated thick across the room. Something had gone very wrong here.

Adrian counted
only two white guys, and four Hispanics. Thank god for that woman and her teeth, she’d downed a couple of them already.

Crenshaw stood up from one of the bodies o
n the floor. “Who is this crazy bitch? She tore out their throats!”

The Black Hand
s exchanged nods and pulled out their pistols, checking the loads. One man spoke, probably the boss. “Que malo! We heard the stories, but, we thought it was just rumors. You know how they tell stories down there in Chihuahua. They say she kills men with her hands and teeth. I seen mafiosos that like to cut off hands and feet, but I never seen this shit.” Looking down on the bodies, he crossed himself and said a prayer in Spanish.

“I want my money, now.” Crenshaw had a pistol in hand, and he looked like he was ready to use it on anyone. Adrian had never seen him when he wasn’t smiling, jovial, talking shit. The man was scared, and like
most men, that translated to aggression.

The lead soldier
pointed towards the darkness of the warehouse. “Go get the bitch, and I got your money.”

“Fuck you. I brought her here
for you, and now I’m burying two of my friends. She’s your problem.”

They looked back and forth, attitudes flaring and more cursing in Spanish. “You want the
money? You gotta help bring her down. Dead or alive, no importa. Just get the bitch.”

Adrian didn’t care for the sound of this negotiation. He took his chances to slink in closer, trying to get positioned to take out at least three of them initially. As he sighted in on Crenshaw, the whole gang moved as on
e, guns in hand, heading deeper into the warehouse. Adrian recognized the lone man who ran back to the office, baseball cap with a goatee. The man passed within five feet of Adrian’s crouched hidey spot, never even noticed him. A series of switches kicked on and the overhead lights came up, bathing the warehouse in an eerie, pale light. It wasn’t the brightest lighting system, but it certainly changed the game.

The man jogged back
, his eyes focused on the central corridor where the others went. He didn’t see the tire iron until it connected with his face. He went down, hard, with no more than a grunt. Adrian buried his knife in the man’s throat until the blade scraped concrete. This white-trash bastard was not getting back up, ever.

Adrian grinned.
“Feels good to be back in action.”

He wiped the blood off on
the man’s shirt and sheathed his blade. That one was a freebie. The rest of them wouldn’t be so easy.

But, he could retake the advantage. He jogged
over and turned off all the light switches. Lights only worked in their favor. Men called out as soon as the lights dropped, and Adrian couldn’t help but smile to hear their distress. They had good reason to fear the dark.