Lone Star (Dartmoor Book 7)

by Lauren Gilley

  Beyond the glass wall of the room, he heard the slap of feet, and snapped to instant alertness. Was on his feet and facing the door, hand resting at the small of his back, on the gun waiting there in his waistband, when the door rushed open and a nurse appeared in the threshold. It was the same one from before, the one who’d smiled at him and touched his hand and thought that he and Tenny were to be married.

  She looked different now, stained by panic, her eyes wild and glazed, her mouth trembling. “There’s – there’s a–”

  Reese didn’t ask for clarification. He knew that brand of panic; most often, he was the one dealing it.

  He went down the hall, to the door between waiting room and ICU, and as he reached to open it, he heard a shout, and a scuffle. After he’d gone through, he saw Agent Maddox on his feet, tussling with a large, beefy man in scrubs, while a second advanced on them, the edge of a knife winking in his hand.

  Maddox was shouting, going for his gun, but fast being overpowered. And there was that knife.

  Reese ran the possibilities in the span of a breath, and he reacted. The way he figured it: Fox had sent him here to keep watch for a reason. He was here because he would make the sorts of decisions that others wouldn’t. He wasn’t polite, wasn’t worried about manners or form.

  He pulled his gun, aimed – time moved in slow motion, as it always did in these moments. Aim, fire. Crack. The man with the knife toppled. Aim, fire. Crack. The one holding Maddox fell.

  He was dimly aware of screams behind him, on the other side of the wall. The staff would be panicking. Someone would already be on the phone with security, or with the police.

  Reese scanned the area, searching for another threat, but it was a small bit of hallway, with only the elevators and a door to a stairwell to offer a vantage point. No signs of any others.

  “What the fuck?!” Agent Maddox scrambled inelegantly to his feet, face flushed, frantic gaze searching out the still-warm bodies on the floor. Blood spread outward in a tide, slick and dark beneath the lights. “What the fuck?” he repeated, spinning to face Reese, hand fluttering to the gun he wore on his hip. “Are you insane? You can’t–”

  The door into the ICU opened behind Reese, and Tenny’s voice said, “Shut up, he saved your life.”

  Reese glanced back over his shoulder and saw that Ten was on his feet, his white-knuckled grip on his IV pole seemingly the only thing keeping him on his feet; spine bent, legs shaking, face ashen.

  Reese’s stomach tightened unpleasantly when he imagined Tenny’s knees buckling any moment. It would be so easy for the wound at his throat to reopen. “You should be lying down,” he said. “If your blood pressure gets too high–”

  “Fuck that, I’m up.” He lifted his other hand, and that was when Reese noticed that he held a gun.

  “Where did that come from?”

  “Fox left it. The nurses hadn’t found it yet.”

  “Are you kidding me?” Maddox charged toward him. “Are you – you’re both so under arrest. I can’t even–”

  “Shut up,” Tenny repeated. He turned to Reese. “We have to move. There’ll be more. If they came for me, they’ll come for – what’s the other guy? Jenkins?”

  “Jinx.”

  “He’s on a lower floor.”

  Which meant they might already be too late.

  “Do you have a car?” Tenny asked Maddox.

  The agent clenched his jaw, tight enough to make a muscle in his cheek twitch. He looked at both of them in turn – precious wasted seconds that had Reese caressing his trigger guard with one finger, adrenaline spiked so strongly he was having trouble keeping still. Then Maddox turned to look at the bodies. Sighed. “Yeah, I have a car.”

  “We need to move,” Tenny said, starting forward.

  One of his legs gave out. He swore, and the IV pole rattled and nearly tipped as he clutched at it for dear life.

  But he didn’t fall, because Reese was at his side immediately, ducking smoothly under his free arm and hauling it securely across his shoulders. He knew it was only an impression, a fiction, but he thought Tenny felt too-light, already weakened and wasted since he’d been admitted.

  “This is–” Maddox stared, glaring at them.

  “Shut up,” Reese and Ten said as one.

  “We’ll take the elevator,” Reese said, because there was no way Ten would be able to navigate the stairs like this. “Lead the way.”

  Maddox’s face said he wanted to argue, but he turned and punched the down button.

  ~*~

  Jinx had broken his arm as a kid, and as an adult he’d had some cuts and scrapes; stitches a time or two, especially after that one knife fight…

  But he’d never been injured like this. Never overnighted in the hospital. Never been held hostage by his own body. The pain was sharp, and the temptation of morphine was great, but in this moment, as it started to unfold in horrifying slow-motion, he was glad for the pain, and for the sharpness of his mind.

  Gringo realized what was happening a heartbeat after Jinx did, but he was healthy, and whole, and not laid up bare-assed in a hospital bed. He was already on his feet, and Jinx saw him tense in his periphery.

  The man who’d entered threw the tray he was carrying at Gringo’s head.

  Gringo brought up an arm and deflected it, sent it crashing into the wall. He reached for his gun, after, but the thug already had his in his hand, was already lifting it. He’d won the draw. He wouldn’t hesitate.

  Jinx held the TV remote in his hand, and he threw it. It struck the man in the forehead, and bounced off.

  It didn’t slow him down for long – his eyes shut on instinct, and he grunted, and fell back a half-step, more startled than injured – but just long enough to give Gringo a chance to act first. Jinx was already braced for the gunshot, the way it would sound deafening in the confines of this tight, tiled room.

  But Gringo didn’t shoot. He lunged forward, cracked the gunman’s hand with the end of his own weapon – a satisfying crunch, and the gunman’s hand opened on a spasm, and the gun clattered to the floor – and chopped him in the Adam’s apple with the side of his hand.

  The man choked, because anyone would have. His eyes bugged, already tear-slick, and he let out an ugly wheezing bellow. But the attack didn’t drop him like it might have with a smaller man. He reached up with both his bear-paw hands, and then he and Gringo were grappling, shoving at one another. The thug tried to wrench Gringo’s gun away, even as he gasped, and stuttered, and coughed.

  Idiot! Jinx thought. He should have shot him, consequences be damned.

  He started to reach for the call button on his bed, but that would draw innocent nursing staff into the chaos. He spotted the gun on the floor, only a few strides away – a few normal, uninjured strides away.

  Shit.

  The gunman got a hand on Gringo’s neck, his own throat bulging, the veins distinct. His face was red, and he didn’t seem able to breathe, but he had his other hand fisted in Gringo’s shirt, and it was only a matter of time before he took total control of the fight.

  Jinx clenched his teeth, braced himself, and rolled onto his good side.

  Even that small, ordinary movement sent bolts of pain shooting through his pelvis, and down his leg. Fierce, fiery pain that traveled up through his stomach, radiating through his chest, shooting down to his toes as it lit up every nerve pathway with fresh agony. Black spots crowded his vision. His stomach rolled; he tasted salt under his tongue. Throwing up or passing out were distinct possibilities.

  He pushed through it; he had to. His body screamed, and his throat closed up tight on a real scream. He gripped the bed rail, and swung his good leg down. It trembled, and was weak; his knee threatened to give.

  There was still such swelling and damage in his hip that he couldn’t swing the bad leg down – not on his own. He grabbed his thigh with shaking hands and forced it over. Everything went white a second, the pain vibrating at an audible frequency, a high whine in his ears li
ke a bad motor. When his toes skimmed the floor, the pain crackled all the way up the limb, took breathtaking hold in the ruined crater in his hip.

  This was terrible, so terrible. His body sent him every kind of warning signal. Stop, you dumbass! Stop, you can’t do this!

  But he could hear Gringo and the cartel thug shoving at each other, shoes squeaking on the tile, grunting and hissing and, in the thug’s case, gasping wetly.

  Jinx marshaled every bit of strength, kept his teeth gritted, held tight to the bedrail, and lurched out of bed.

  He lost his vision a moment, the black of unconsciousness pressing against the white of agony. His legs wouldn’t hold him. It felt like something gave way in his hip; swore he felt things tearing and snapping and breaking. He went down, but it was a controlled fall. He managed to pitch forward, and catch himself with his hands. As his sight was fizzing back to life, his gorge rising up his throat, he grabbed the gun, and made one last agonizing twist onto his side so he could aim it.

  Gringo and the thug looked like they were dancing, roughly, swaying back and forth, pushing and then pulling, trading the upper hand. They were trying to choke one another, and he would have laughed about it if circumstances were different.

  “G, play dead,” Jinx shouted.

  For maybe the first time in his life, Gringo listened. He went totally limp, and the thug, surprised, lost his grip on him.

  Jinx pulled the trigger, and blood showered the sheetrock of the wall in bright droplets. The shot bounced off the walls, obscenely loud. The Chupacabras hadn’t thought to equip their muscle with suppressors.

  The thug went down hard, not dead yet, but dying, big legs kicking uselessly, making a few last gasps for breath.

  Gringo scrambled to his feet and kicked the dying man. “Fucking shit.” He looked up at Jinx. “Aw, shit, dude, did you fuck yourself up?”

  “Big time. Help me up.”

  Beyond the door, he could hear shouts, and running. Someone called some sort of code over the PA system, a crackled voice calling for calm. Heard a scream. Heard a male voice bark, “FBI, move! Get out of the way! Stay down!”

  “The feds,” Gringo said, going to a knee beside him on the floor. “Shit, this is bad. This is really bad.”

  Jinx didn’t know if he meant the situation, the dead man, the feds, or Jinx’s pathetic body lying prone on the floor, but clarification didn’t matter; it was all bad.

  “Move!” the voice in the hall shouted again, and then the door opened.

  Jinx glanced up, and was startled to see Reese, one of Fox’s little proteges, in the threshold, a gun in his hand. Behind him, he spotted Fox’s brother, the one who should have been upstairs in the ICU, leaning on a young guy in a suit, clutching a wheeled IV pole, bandaged and looking like death warmed over.

  Reese glanced over at the dying thug, his gaze as flat and spooky as Jinx remembered from a few days before. Some guys looked hard, some looked impassive, so many brothers who’d cultivated inscrutable expressions they wore like weaponized masks. But this kid didn’t even look human.

  He glanced back at Jinx and said, “We need to leave.”

  “Yeah, no shit, Sherlock,” Gringo snapped at him. “You gonna just stand there, or help me get him up? He’s fucking crippled.”

  “I’m not crippled.” But his effort to sit up left him gagging.

  “Right. We need a wheelchair.”

  From the hallway, Fox’s brother asked, “Where’s the Menendez woman?”

  “Other end of the hall,” Gringo said, distracted, a hand on Jinx’s shoulder. Then his eyes widened. “Oh, shit.”

  ~*~

  Jinx wasn’t the largest and heaviest of the Lean Dogs, but he was well-muscled, and more or less dead weight given the extent of his injuries, so it took Reese, Gringo, and Agent Maddox to wrestle him into a wheelchair while Tenny sat on the edge of the bed, shaking. Maddox had flashed his badge when they came off the elevator, and told everyone to take cover. Nurses and doctors and patients had ducked into rooms, and behind counters, but a voice continued to call codes over the PA. Reese knew they were dealing with a matter of seconds before security arrived, or the local police. Maddox could get them out of the building, but that didn’t mean complications wouldn’t arise.

  Jinx’s IV had pulled loose from the crook of his elbow, little pearls of blood running down his forearm, staining his gown.

  “He needs morphine,” Gringo said, tone grim.

  “There’s a pump attached to his IV,” Tenny said from the bed. “Same as mine. Get a fresh needle in him and then hit him with two presses.”

  Reese could have done it – he’d administered his own first aid in the field for years; he could stitch a wound neatly as a seamstress on his own body – but he could hear the clock clicking away in the back of his mind. “Can you do it?” Reese asked Gringo, and earned a grimace.

  “Probably. Maybe.”

  “I’ll talk him through it,” Tenny said. “Go.”

  Reese headed for the door.

  Maddox stepped in front of him before he got there, brows nearly fused together over his slender nose.

  “We don’t have time,” Reese said.

  Maddox’s mouth pressed to a flat, colorless line, because he knew they didn’t, and that Reese was right, and that Maddox was the least-equipped to handle this situation. It rankled, though.

  The agent finally nodded and stepped aside, and Reese took long strides down the hall, his gun at the ready. A nurse peeked out of a door, gasped, and retreated. He passed a cracked door and heard loud sobbing on the other side. People were frightened – civilians. That was normal, in his line of work, but he didn’t normally have to show his face to them – naked and without paint, unmistakable, a gun in his hand for all the security cameras to see.

  That wasn’t how it was done. That wasn’t the way to maintain ghost status.

  His pulse ticked up a notch, and it had nothing to do with the situation at hand, but the situation to come, maybe, if the FBI didn’t wipe the slate clean after all of this.

  Melanie Menendez was in room 203, Jinx had said. It was second to last on the left; he could see its door from here – its open door.

  He approached with all the required caution, kicking the door in, hands tight on his gun. But it was too late. Melanie was gone – in a hurry, if the way the blankets hung down off the bed was any indication.

  Reese turned and bolted.

  “What?” Maddox shouted, when he reached the nurse’s station.

  “Gone,” Reese said, already shouldering his way into the stairwell. “Tell them to lock the building down.”

  “Fucking shit…” Maddox murmured, before the door closed, and cut off the sound. Then Reese was pounding down the concrete stairs as fast as he could go.

  When he pushed through the door at the bottom, he had to dodge past a security guard, an out-of-shape young guy who shouted for him to stop. He wasn’t armed with anything but a baton, though, so Reese ducked, and kept running. Down a hall, doctors and staff members flattening themselves against the walls to avoid him. Everyone he passed wore a variation of the same expression: stark, knee-shaking terror.

  It was the only way anyone had ever looked at him. Save for Kris. And his first master. And his new masters – who called themselves brothers, and who weren’t masters at all, and for whom he was doing this, so he could go home, and be around people who didn’t look at him like he was a ghost streaking down their hallways.

  The guard didn’t pursue him, though Reese could hear him speaking over his radio. He hit a set of double doors, uncontested, and burst through into the emergency room, full of confused patients, some sitting, some standing, some demanding to know what was going on while the intake nurses waved their hands and called for quiet and order.

  Everyone turned toward him when he entered, and everyone froze the moment they spotted the gun in his hand. In the second before the screaming started, he spotted his quarry: the flash of Melanie’s blond hair,
and the back of a tall, thickset man as he hustled her out through the sliding doors. The man’s hand, Reese noted, was at her elbow, like he was helping her, rather than gripping tight at her upper arm.

  She glanced back over her shoulder, briefly, when the shouting started, and it was only once she’d spotted him that her eyes widened, and her mouth dropped open.

  She wasn’t being kidnapped; she was leaving with the cartel under her own power.

  Reese took off.

  He saw the man moving to intercept him from the corner of his eye. A citizen, someone who’d been waiting with a loved one in the ER. Middle-aged, fairly fit, his face set in lines of petrified determination. He’d decided Reese was a gunman, a threat to civilians, and he was going to throw himself on the figurative grenade. Try to take out the threat.

  Reese admired his spirit, but he didn’t have time for the distraction.

  He paused, and let the man get closer; he was unarmed, and came at Reese with bare hands open and ready to grab, to grapple.

  Reese feinted, brought a hand up, and hit the man right in the sternum with the heel of his free hand. The man’s forward momentum, and the perfect strike, sent him staggering backward with an explosive breath, all the air rushing out of his lungs. Part force, part shock.

  “Move,” Reese told him, dodged around him, and kept going.

  Melanie and her escort were out the door. A car sat idling beneath the porte-cochere.

  Reese hit the threshold just as Melanie was being bundled into the car. If he shot now, there was a high chance of striking her. Did it matter?

  Personally, no. She was involved, clearly; he thought it would be easiest to clear the board of players.

  But the club would want to question her. Candy had known her; he would want answers.

  Reese made an on-the-move decision, and when he reached the open car door, he had his knife in his other hand. The man had his back to him, and he stabbed him, quick and clean, in the kidney. The man yelled, and toppled forward into the backseat of the car. Melanie screamed from inside.

  Reese struck again, this time in the man’s calf, and earned another scream.