Crazed: A Blood Money Novel

by Edie Harris

  But Ilda understood Pipe as few others did, and this was all arrogance, all showmanship. He was rubbing it in Casey’s face, puppet strings in one hand and a pair of sharp shears in the other. The subtext was all too clear.

  Your brother or your woman. Choose, motherfucker.

  Go, she mouthed to Casey, first in Spanish, then English. Go now.

  The darkness of the club couldn’t conceal the heat in his eyes, but Casey did what she said, nodded and pushed through the front door, disappearing into the night.

  A moment later, another shadow moved, following him out the door. Manuel.

  Ilda’s worried gasp caught the attention of the man at her side, Pipe shifting to stare down at her, his gaze narrowed threateningly. Fingertips digging into her elbow to the point of pain, he lifted the microphone. “Tonight’s item is Adam Ibrahim Faraday, youngest son of Frank Faraday, CEO of Faraday Industries. As you can see from the live feed, he is in perfect health, minus a few bumps and bruises.” Pipe glanced behind them at the feed, where Adam blinked in a silent scowl at whomever held the camera, his handsome face no less striking for being smudged with dirt. “The bidding will begin at two hundred and fifty million American dollars.”

  Ireland raised his hand.

  “Two hundred and seventy-five,” shouted Nigeria.

  Saudi Arabia came in with two-eighty, the bidding continuing in English colored with a world’s worth of accents as the amount left the threes and fours in the dust to enter half a billion dollars.

  That particular bid came from a compact blonde lounging at a table nestled in shadow to the right of the stage. “Five hundred,” she offered calmly, one leg crossed over the other, a hand toying with the glass tumbler filled with amber liquid on the tabletop. A bearded man in a black-leather bomber jacket sat across from her, but it was the tall, lean man in an immaculate three-piece suit who stood behind her that held Ilda’s attention, his dark hair neatly combed and, oddly, aviator sunglasses shielding his eyes. Mouth a hard line, the suited man’s head didn’t turn from side to side as with many of the other bodyguards in the room; instead, he stared straight at the screen bearing Adam’s feed. But Ilda didn’t make the mistake of believing he wasn’t fully aware of every other individual in the room, including her.

  As the bidding continued, voices raising as the number approached the seven hundreds, Ilda watched the man in the suit, unable to tear her gaze from him. He seemed...like someone she should know. Maybe it was the way he stood, or the focus he paid to the live stream, but when Ilda allowed herself to worry—just for a split second—about Casey being followed from the club by Manuel, it clicked into place.

  Faraday. The man in the suit was a Faraday, and Ilda would bet that those sunglasses were in place to hide a too-familiar set of eyes. Suspicion fully aroused, she took in the line of his sharp jaw, the shape of his ears, his darker coloring, and she knew that, should he step into the light, she’d see Arlo reflected back. Judging by his stance at the blonde bidder’s shoulder, she was with them, too.

  Ilda fought to contain her shuddering sigh of relief. She didn’t need to know the details of their plan to understand that she hadn’t been left to stumble through this nightmare alone.

  And, God, it was a nightmare that kept escalating in horror.

  “Eight-eighty,” shouted someone from one of the booths. The speaker rose to stand in front of his table, an older man who was small in stature, for all his voice carried easily to the stage. “You would be wise, Pipe, not to permit this farce to continue any longer.”

  Murmurs flew across the room as bidders turned to stare at the man. A few chairs scraped, various bodyguards tensing with their hands on their firearms. One of Pipe’s brigadiers, Juan David Guzman, shifted toward the stage, a gun in his hand.

  Pipe frowned at the speaker, squinting past the bright lights before his teeth clenched—apparently, in recognition. “Eight hundred and eighty million dollars is hardly a farce.”

  The man began to move toward the stage, sidling between the scattered tables. “But this auction is. You are selling that which does not belong to you.”

  The closer he came, the stiffer Pipe grew beside Ilda, until his grip on her arm made her wince. “Your boss reneged. Therefore, Faraday is mine to do with as I please.”

  “Don’t be stupid, Pipe.” The man stopped in the middle of the floor, some ten feet from the stage’s edge. “You should have held to our bargain. You should have been patient.” Then he said something in a language Ilda didn’t recognize, and a third of the room stopped breathing.

  Dread, nauseating and heavy, coiled low in her stomach. Yanking at her arm, she attempted to pull it from Pipe’s grasp. “Please,” she whispered, gaze flitting between the older man and Pipe’s unforgiving profile. “Please, let go.” Suddenly wild with choking panic, she tugged harder, twisting until she felt a wrenching pain streak up to her shoulder. Her eyes flicked to the Faraday and the blonde, both of whom now stood at the ready, arms loose at their sides.

  In her peripheral vision, Guzman moved again, gun hand lifting. But he wasn’t looking at the older man. No, he was looking at Pipe, and Ilda.

  “Bargains, contracts—we do not leave paper trails. We only have our honor. The understanding between your organization and mine, it was based on honor and a mutual understanding.” Finally, Pipe released her, but only to step closer to the lip of the stage, staring down the impertinent bidder. “We are not men of patience, amigo, but of action. Show me action, and I will quit the auction this minute.”

  The man sighed, shaking his graying head in disappointment. “You should know better than to make such a demand, boy.” Moving so fast Ilda barely had time to process what she was seeing, the man magicked a gun into his hand from somewhere and aimed it.

  He aimed it at her.

  A shot rang out, and she screamed, frozen in place and waiting for the pain to come.

  It never did.

  With a shout, Pipe threw his body in front of hers, jerking unnaturally as hell broke loose in the club. One second, one minuscule second and a bullet meant for Ilda, was all it took to stop the heart of the man who had been family, friend and lover to her. One bullet, and the monster who had terrified her was dead.

  The life was already gone from his eyes when he hit the stage, blood seeping across the pristine white of his shirt. Lodged fatally in his chest was the intended end of her existence, a sacrifice Ilda would never have thought he would make. Except he did. He had.

  Pipe had died to save her.

  Awareness of her surroundings came back to her in a rush. Her ears rang, just as they had in the dining room the night before, and she gasped as she realized the club had erupted in chaos. Tables were overturned, bidders brawling, gunshots peppering the yelling in so many languages she couldn’t begin to follow. Guzman was nowhere to be seen. She stumbled backward, toward the black curtains and the projection screen and the dressing room entrance she knew lay just beyond, but her gaze caught on the Faraday, whose shades had been tossed aside.

  He looked directly at her. “Get out of here!” Pointing toward the rear exit onto the alley, he shouted, “Go, Ilda, now!”

  Her name. He knew her name. But of course he knew her name. Just as he no doubt knew who she was to Casey, and who Casey was to—”Arlo.” Fisting the heavy skirt of her gown in both hands, she kicked off her stilettos and dashed down the steps of the stage, ducking and shrieking when a shot ricocheted overhead. Her sore shoulder slammed into the back door, her balance faltering as she tumbled over the concrete step into the darkened alley.

  The overhead lamp, usually motion sensitive, remained unlit, and Ilda halted, gasping, her senses on fire. Bad. This was bad, bad bad bad. Throwing herself against the brick wall behind an overflowing dumpster, she clung to the shadows and blinked, forcing her eyes to adjust to the blackness of the abandoned alley. The dress slithered around her legs as she fumbled beneath one side of the skirt, too long now that she was barefoot, but she couldn’t a
fford to hold it off the ground. No, she needed her shaking hands free...for the gun Casey had given her.

  Footsteps sounded inside the club, a pounding gait rapidly approaching the back entrance, and Ilda held her breath as the door flung open. A man she didn’t recognize, his skin pale even in the unrelenting darkness, surveyed the alley, obviously looking for something. Someone.

  Those searching eyes landed on the dumpster, and her vision must have adjusted because she saw him grin. Oh, fuck. He was looking for her.

  “I see you,” he said in rasping English, advancing on her hiding spot with slow steps. “I see you dressed in blue.”

  Ilda shrank back against the wall, her thumb falling to the gun’s safety mechanism.

  Clucking his tongue, he stalked closer, leering smile never fading. “Bet I can make you sing just as pretty as you did in there.” One of his hands went to the buttons of his jacket, and he stopped then, only the corner of the filthy dumpster separating them now. “What’s that you’ve got there?”

  Squeezing her eyes shut, she straightened her arms and fired.

  And missed.

  He laughed, an ugly sound full of menacing amusement. “Oh, this is perfect—”

  Without warning, two shots rang out, echoing in the high-walled alley. The villain twitched and grunted, then fell gracelessly into an unmoving heap in a dirty puddle.

  Gun held in her white-knuckled grasp, Ilda peeked around the edge of the dumpster to peer toward the mouth of the alley. There, jogging toward her, was the blonde, pistol gripped in one hand as though it were an extension of the woman’s limb. “Ilda Almeida? I’m a friend of Casey’s.” The woman’s Spanish was more than passable, though tinged with her native accent. “Are you all right?”

  “I am.” Stepping out from her hiding place, Ilda hurriedly skirted her dead assailant before holding out the gun—safety re-engaged—to her petite rescuer. “Please take this before I accidentally shoot you. Or myself.” She felt numb to the violence she’d witnessed, her mind shuttered against the truth of her surroundings. Of Pipe’s sacrifice. “Your name is...”

  “Chandler McCallister. MI6—British intelligence.” The blonde slipped Ilda’s gun into the back waistband of her black pants. “If you’re ready to move, there’s a car down the block that will take us out of the city to our plane.”

  “My daughter—”

  “Oh, I know. Arlo, yeah?” Chandler’s mouth curved in a deadly smile then, and held out her hand to Ilda, her own gun still ready in the other. “Don’t fret. We’ve got it sorted. So let’s get you to your girl.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  “You should know better than to threaten a bad man’s wife.”

  Casey...he was a bad man. But he was a bad man for good reason. He swung the machete.

  Manuel’s lifeless body collapsed to the street in a cloud of dust as Casey drew his phone from his pocket, the machete dripping at his side. He couldn’t go back inside the club for Ilda, not with both Adam and Arlo in danger at the hacienda.

  Threat to Ilda’s life. Assailant/s unknown.

  With that text sent to Tobias inside La Jaula, trusting his brother to take care of his wife, Casey sprinted to where Finn waited in an unmarked Jeep a few blocks away. Yanking open the passenger door, he tossed the bloody machete in the backseat. “Drive.”

  Finn drove, breaking speed laws left and right as he hurried them to the city limits and toward the hacienda up in the hills. “I didn’t get everything through the comm, but I take it Adam wasn’t inside?”

  “No. They kept him offsite.”

  “Smart.”

  Casey’s jaw clenched. “Very. The good thing is, I know exactly where he is.”

  The remainder of the drive—too slow by far—passed mostly in silence, with only the occasional murmur to interrupt. He felt torn in two—no, in three—leaving Ilda behind when he knew someone was out to kill her. Not Manuel, because Manuel was no longer breathing, but there was every chance he’d sent another to do his bidding. While Pipe might hurt her, punish her, Casey had to hope that the drug lord would never kill her, despite being aware of her liaison with Casey.

  Casey had studied his rival’s face. He knew love when he saw it, no matter how warped it might be.

  But Arlo was at the hacienda, and Adam in the stables, and thank God he had Finn with him because Casey wasn’t a superhero. He couldn’t be in multiple places at once. With Pipe changing the stakes and keeping Adam away from the auction, Casey and his team were now forced to improvise. “Hold up,” he said as they approached the front gates, leaning forward in his seat. “Shit.”

  Finn echoed the curse as he slowed the Jeep, both of them eyeing the wide-open metal chain link. A trio of bodies were slumped by the guard post, lit only by the Jeep’s headlights, as the overhead bulb had been obviously tampered with.

  Someone had beaten them to the hacienda.

  “Drive.” Casey’s gut knotted as Finn hit the gas up the long drive, killing the headlights as they approached the house. Guns already in hand, they exited the Jeep prior to reaching the southern courtyard. Casey touched his comm, which would feed to not only Finn on the other side of the vehicle, but to the rest of the team back in the city, Okumura at the airfield and Della home in Chicago. “Guys, we have a problem,” he murmured.

  “Go for Vick.”

  “Busted front gate, dead brigadiers. The hacienda’s been breached.” He paused, glancing around the dark, empty courtyard. “Status report from the club?”

  “Shooting broke out, and Pipe’s dead.” Vick’s voice was grim, British vowels clipped as it became apparent he was on the move. “Chandler has Ilda secured.”

  There wasn’t time for Casey to experience any relief. “Finn and I need backup. You, Henry, and Moreno get your asses to the hacienda as fast as you can.”

  “On it. Let you know when we’re there.”

  Then Casey was moving, quickly and silently, Finn at his six as they clung to the shade trees bordering the edges of the courtyard. A dark lump lay still on the cobblestones, Pipe’s colors evident around the arm of the dead brigadier, and Casey looked up to the nearest security camera.

  No blinking red light. The system had been tampered with.

  “Clear the house,” he whispered to Finn. “Start downstairs and work up. Nursery is the second level, second door.”

  With a nod, Finn entered the hacienda, and Casey headed through the open-air portico dividing the two courtyards. No moon shone tonight, cloud cover thick in the night sky, but his eyes had adjusted without trouble. He didn’t risk pulling the penlight from his pocket and alerting whoever had taken out the brigadiers to his presence.

  In the back of his mind, he knew there was a possibility that Adam wouldn’t be there, but that would mean Casey had failed. Casey couldn’t fail, not in this. This was his family being targeted, continuously and from every quarter, or so it appeared. He had no business holding the position he did, doing the work he traveled the world to do, if he could barely protect his own family at home.

  Adam should never have been taken in the first place. This week down in Colombia, the days bleeding and blurring together in a rollercoaster rush, had prevented Casey from hunting down who was responsible for leaving his siblings vulnerable. But as soon as he was out of here—as soon as Adam was safe, and Arlo and Ilda settled—nothing would stop him from turning the tables on their enemies and running them to ground. Nothing.

  The windows of the barracks were dark, the door wide open, another body fallen haphazardly across the threshold. Casey guessed that Pipe had left a dozen or so brigadiers behind, but already there were five down, probably more inside the house itself. Whoever had taken down the guards had done so efficiently, probably with silenced pistols, sneaking up on the brigadiers unawares. A tac team of at least three, if Casey had been the one in charge, which meant he and Finn were likely outnumbered, and by professionals.

  He spoke into the comm. “Vick?”

  “Yeah.”
/>
  “You said there was shooting at the club. Who started it?”

  “Older man, affiliation unknown. It sounded like perhaps he was the one who’d initially made the deal with Pipe for Adam, or at least worked for the dealmaker.”

  “Nationality?”

  “Couldn’t tell you, but his accent indicated he’s spent a great deal of time in England. When we’re home, I’ll have Della pull the audio from our comms and—”

  “Already on it, handsome,” Della’s voice crackled in their ears as she finished Vick’s thought. “Running a voice analysis now.”

  “Thanks, cuz.” Making a judgment call, Casey left the barracks uninvestigated and crossed the courtyard, keeping low to the ground as he headed toward the stables. “Finn, I think—” The toe of his boot brushed something. Something with mass. Something that whimpered.

  Kneeling, Casey ran his hand across the heaving side of Pipe’s faithful old terrier mutt, fingers coming away sticky with blood. “Shh, boy. It’s okay,” he whispered, stroking soothing fingers over one soft, floppy ear. Cerdito struggled to rise, and again Casey shushed him, taking in the agitation of the horses in their stalls, the Dutch doors open on the top to let the beasts look into the courtyard. Something was happening inside the stables.

  Casey left him where he was and crept toward the main door to the stables, hanging open on its hinges. Faint light emanated from within, and, gun in hand, Casey edged inside, avoiding the wide aisle as he crouched down, leaning against the wooden side of one of the box stalls.

  Voices sounded, indistinguishable and hushed, from the end of the aisle that led toward the leg of the barn housing Adam’s cell. On quiet feet, Casey rounded the edge of the stall—

  And saw Isobel sprawled in the middle of the aisle, a hole in her forehead and one hand clutched around the strap of a child’s bright-orange backpack.

  No. Fear unlike any Casey had ever before experienced swept through him, a hurricane of terror and panic and blinding, sickening rage. Arlo. If Isobel didn’t have Arlo... “Finn,” he hissed, words choked by his pounding pulse, and he crept past Isobel’s body toward the end of the barn. “Go to the nursery. Look in places a scared three-year-old might hide.”