“Dream on, sir,” Laronda told him. “Over.”
Mary Lou found Whitney’s cell phone in a pair of jeans at the bottom of her closet.
Thank God, thank God. She pulled it out, opened it, and …
Low battery.
No!
Okay, maybe there was enough to make one call …
Except Mary Lou couldn’t even tell if there was service available. She dialed anyway, but the screen went dark.
Low battery had become no battery.
Whitney’s car had a charger—the kind that could be plugged into the cigarette lighter. The kind that would let the phone be used even while it was charging.
Mary Lou ran back to her apartment, where that frigging phone had finally stopped ringing.
“I found it,” she announced. “I’m going down to the garage to see if—”
Boom!
An explosion rocked the entire house, pushing Mary Lou down onto her butt and breaking the glass in her kitchen windows.
She scrambled to her feet, ran for the bathroom.
Ihbraham was shielding Haley and Amanda with his body. The two little girls were wide-eyed.
“Whitney,” Mary Lou shouted. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” came a return shout. “What the hell was that?”
Out in the living room, the phone started ringing again.
All over the house, the fire alarms started shrieking.
“Okay,” Sam said. “Okay. Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to stop at one of these houses, and you’re going to get out and use their phone and call Noah while—”
“You go on without me?” Alyssa said. “I don’t think so.”
“I know it’s not what you want to do,” he said. “But I’m begging you, Lys. This man is my brother. He has no training, no reason to believe he can’t just drive up to that gate. They are going to kill him—”
“How am I going to call him?” she asked. “If we can’t use our cell phones, he can’t use his, either.”
“Maybe there’s coverage down where he is.”
“We’re moving farther away from civilization,” Alyssa told him. “Just drive.”
Whitney went down to the control panel and turned off the fire alarm, and Mary Lou could once again hear the phone ringing.
“There was some kind of bomb,” Whitney reported as she ran back up the stairs. “The main kitchen’s completely destroyed. If we’d been in the north wing instead of the south …” She looked like Lara Croft Junior, the way she was loaded down with weaponry. For the first time in all of the weeks Mary Lou had lived there, she saw the girl’s resemblance to her father in the hard light in her eyes. “The entire back of the house is on fire.”
Sure enough, thick smoke was already curling through the air.
Lord God, everything was so dry, it was going to go up like a tinderbox.
Whatever a tinderbox was.
“There’s one man out front with a sniper rifle,” Whitney said, “and two in the back, one with an AK-47, one with something else, I can’t tell what. Looks like they’re putting gasoline on the parts of the house that aren’t burning yet. These asswipes want us dead.”
As if a fire would need any kind of help at all in this dry heat.
Mary Lou picked up the phone.
“Here’s the deal,” the man she knew as Bob said before she could even say hello. “You and Rahman walk out the front door right now, and everyone else in the house—including Haley—stays alive.”
Oh, Lord.
“The FBI is on its way,” she said. “If you don’t want them to kill you, you better leave right now!”
“Thanks for the tip, honey,” he said. “I’ll put my men here at the gate on alert.”
No!
“They’re going to be here,” Mary Lou said, praying she was right. “Lots of them. Any minute.”
“Any minute,” he said. “That would be about how long it’s going to take for that house to become completely inescapable. If you and Rahman walk out now—”
Bile burned her throat. “So you can shoot us.”
“Better than burning. Better than watching your daughter burn.”
Mary Lou might’ve done it. If it were just her and Haley, she would have done it. But she would not let him kill Ihbraham. No, sir.
“Go to hell,” she told him, and hung up the phone.
“Perhaps we should move downstairs,” Ihbraham said. He was carrying both Haley and Amanda, and watching her from the door to the bathroom.
Whitney was watching her, too. Everyone was looking to her for what they should do next.
“Yeah,” Mary Lou said. The smoke was thick at the ceiling. “Let’s move downstairs.”
Sam didn’t slow as they went past the drive that led to the Turlingtons’ gatehouse.
“There’s no physical gate, just a guardhouse with one of those flimsy arms blocking the driveway. I saw no cars stopped,” Alyssa reported. “No sign of Noah and Claire, no sign that anything is wrong at all.”
The brush at the side of the road already concealed them from the gatehouse. It was jungle-thick growth, typical of this part of Florida but definitely suffering from the recent lack of rain.
Sam pulled off the road and got out of the car. Jesus, he was wearing a freaking white shirt. He yanked it over his head. Better to be half naked than a flipping neon target. He kicked off his shoes and stripped off his socks, too, preferring bare feet to slipping around in the underbrush.
Alyssa, too, was attempting to cammy-up. She’d opened the trunk and pulled a green T-shirt out of her bag, changing into it right there by the side of the road.
They had one little handgun between them. Sam handed it to Alyssa. It was hers, after all. She gave him a Swiss army knife in exchange.
“Gee, thanks.”
Was that smoke he smelled? He started through the brush. The ground was soggy, parts of it brackish puddles of stinking mud. If not for the drought, this entire area would have been a knee-deep or even hip-deep swamp.
Alyssa followed, slipping her shoulder holster on and securing the weapon. Yeah, jeez, don’t drop that thing here.
But she wanted her hands free for a different reason. She reached down into the thick mud and grabbed several handfuls, smearing the tar-colored substance down his back and arms. “Hold up, white boy,” she said. “I need to get your front.”
“I’m tan,” he said.
“Not tan enough,” she told him, streaking his chest with black and rubbing both his face and hers with the dirt, too. “I like your body just fine without any bullet holes in it, thanks.”
Then they were moving again, this time with her in the front, weapon back in her hand.
“Alyssa—”
“I’ve got the weapon that can do the most damage,” she told him. “I’m on point, unless you can throw that Girl Scout knife faster and farther than a bullet.”
“No,” Sam said. “I wasn’t going to … I just wanted to tell you that I’m glad you’re here.”
They’d reached a chain-link fence.
“And to be careful,” he added as he quickly plucked what looked like a long strand of grass from the surrounding vegetation. He held it against the fence to see if the thing was electrified. But there was no jolt.
“Aha,” she said. “Well, you be careful, too.”
“Always am.”
It was just a regular old fence with a little barbed wire at the top. Pretty flipping ineffective in terms of security.
Both he and Alyssa were over it in a matter of seconds.
And, in moments, there they were. Within sight of the gatehouse.
From this angle, things didn’t look quite so normal. Two bodies—the guards, Sam presumed—had been dragged outside the door. He could see bullet holes in the windows.
The entire building was about the size of a one-car garage. There were windows all around, so you could see clear through it, almost like a ranger station or an air traff
ic control tower. Anyone inside had a 360-degree view of the surrounding area. And not a whole hell of a lot of cover should an army of terrorists attack.
Sam needed to have a serious talk with the owner of this compound about the clown who had designed his security.
Two men were inside the structure, both of them armed with what looked like some kind of room brooms.
The range on that type of little semiautomatic wasn’t that extensive, but up close it was deadly.
There were quite a few yards of clearing between the brush and the guardhouse—enough so that they would have to step out of hiding in order to get close enough to make Alyssa’s little popgun anything more than an annoyance.
“We need a diversion,” she whispered.
Sam nodded. “Okay. I’ll go back and get the car—”
But she’d started running forward, because—holy fuck—a car already was approaching the gatehouse.
It was—Jesus, no—Noah and Claire.
The smoke was just as bad down on the ground floor.
Both Amanda and Haley were coughing and crying. The heat was incredible.
Ihbraham had filled the bathtub with water and had soaked towels that they all draped over their heads.
“If we opened a window,” he said, “we can get some fresh air.”
“They’re not going to let us anywhere near the windows,” Whitney said.
All three of the men with the guns were out front. Mary Lou hadn’t seen Bob’s golden hair, though. Wherever he was, he was keeping out of sight.
“Let’s get to the garage,” Mary Lou decided. The phone charger was there, in Whitney’s car. Like the girl said, there was no guarantee there would be cell service, but, Lord, they had to try.
Alyssa was up on her feet, weapon out, moving swiftly toward the gatehouse.
She heard more than saw Sam follow—he angled away from her, running hard, shouting at the top of his lungs.
He was trying to draw the gunmen’s fire away from Noah’s car, away from Alyssa, trying to buy her the time she needed to get within range, to aim and shoot.
She kept her eyes on her targets as she squeezed off one shot and then another, but she heard the gunfire and she knew she’d been just a heartbeat too late.
She saw Noah and Claire ducking, she saw her targets punched back and falling.
She saw Sam get hit, too, saw the force of a bullet spin him full around before he slammed into the ground.
“No!” The word was ripped from her, even as she did her job the way she’d been trained and moved toward the gunmen to make sure they weren’t going to pop back up. But she’d taken head shots and no one was going anywhere.
Noah was out of the car, running toward Sam.
Alyssa beat him over there.
“Fuck,” Sam said.
She had never heard a more wonderful word in her entire life. All she could think was Thank God. Thank God he was alive, thank God he was talking, thank God.
“Fuck!” he said again through clenched teeth.
“Ringo!” Noah said, down on his knees beside them. “Holy shit! Holy shit!”
“Give me your shirt,” Alyssa ordered Sam’s cousin, and he stripped off his jacket and his white dress shirt. He had a T-shirt on underneath, and she pointed to it. “That’s even better.”
Sam had been hit in the side of his abdomen. He was bleeding badly, but the entry wound was clean and small, and there was no gaping exit wound in his back. Which was either good news or bad news. Either the bullet that hit him was spent, or it had ricocheted around inside of him, doing serious damage to his internal organs, possibly even hitting his spine.
“Can you move your legs?” Alyssa asked him as Noah gave her his T-shirt. She folded it up and was hesitating to press it against Sam’s wound. She knew from experience how much that was going to hurt.
He answered her by pushing himself onto his hands and knees and then standing up. “Fire,” he said.
She looked up. Whatever was burning was huge. Thick black smoke rolled up into the sky.
Sam took the T-shirt from her and pressed it against himself.
“Fuck!” He staggered slightly, and Alyssa put her arm around him on one side, Noah on the other.
“We need to get him to the hospital,” she said.
“Like hell we do,” Sam countered, shaking them both off. Noah had put his dress shirt back on and draped his tie around his neck, and Sam now pulled the tie off of him. He used it to bind the makeshift bandage into place. “We need to get up to that house. Haley’s probably in there.”
Claire was out of the car now, too.
“That’s not going to stop the bleeding,” Alyssa told Sam.
“It’ll do for now” was his terse reply.
“What the fuck is going on?” Noah asked, sounding remarkably like Sam.
“Are those men dead?” Claire asked.
Noah was staring after Sam, who was heading toward the gatehouse. “And, Jesus, what’s with the bare feet?”
“The bad guys got here first,” Alyssa told them. “Yes, they’re dead, and Sam didn’t want to wear dress shoes in the woods—he was afraid he’d slip.”
“Hey,” Sam shouted from inside the guardhouse, and she dashed over to join him. He had a phone handset to his ear. “There’s a direct phone line to the house. At least that’s what the little label says this is. Everything else is out but … Hey, Mary Lou. Halle-fucking-lujah. It’s Sam. We’ve taken back the gate. What’s your status up there? Where’s the fire? Is Haley all right?”
“There’s no phone line going out?” Alyssa asked as she picked the semiautomatics up off the floor. “Ask if they have a working phone up at the house.”
“Mary Lou, do you have a phone with an outside line?” Sam looked at Alyssa and shook his head no.
“Okay,” she said to Noah and Claire as she went outside, “here’s what we need you to do. Find the nearest neighbor and use their telephone. Call and ask for Max Bhagat or Jules Cassidy. Give them a status report. Tell them we’ve taken the gate, but we’re going to have to leave it unattended so there might be trouble again when they arrive. Tell them there’s a fire at the house—my guess is the tangos are trying to smoke Mary Lou out. Tell them that Sam and I can’t wait for backup.”
She took a pen from her pocket and, using Sam’s technique, took hold of Noah’s arm, writing both Max’s and Jules’s names and phone numbers right on his forearm. He already had this address on his hand, and Alyssa had to smile. “Guess you are Sam’s cousin.”
“We really should take Ringo to the hospital,” Claire said in a very no-nonsense voice as Noah sat down on the ground and took off his shoes.
Alyssa glanced at her. Noah’s wife could have passed as her own sister. Wasn’t that interesting? She wondered inanely if Noah liked chocolate.
“Sam’ll go when he’s ready to go,” she told them. “Wait by the phone for an all clear before you return. Do not come back here until you know it’s safe. You’ve got to promise me that.”
Noah nodded, back on his feet. “That’s not a hard promise to make. Give these to Ringo. They’ve got rubber soles. And promise me you’ll take care of him.”
“If he dies,” Alyssa told them as she took Noah’s shoes, “it’s only going to be because I’ve died, too.”
CHAPTER
TWENTY-SIX
“Alyssa, I could use your brain over here,” Sam shouted, and she came running into the gatehouse.
Outside, Noah and Claire were getting into their car and backing out, onto the street.
“They’re going to find a phone,” Alyssa reported as she set Nos’s shoes—he still wore Hush Puppies—on the table. “And then they’re going to stay where it’s safe.”
“Thank you,” he said. Good thing someone here was thinking clearly.
Throughout his life, pain and Sam had never stayed strangers for any great length of time. He was always walking around dinged up, as Dot had called it, one way or another. Twisted
ankles, sprained knees, black eyes, split lips, broken collarbones, and cracked ribs.
They all hurt to some degree.
Getting shot, however, fucking hurt.
It made it a little hard to concentrate.
And Alyssa had been right about the bleeding. It wasn’t stopping. He had to apply pressure, which he hadn’t been able to do with one hand holding the phone and the other drawing a layout of the house and the yard as Mary Lou described it to him.
“Thank you for taking care of them,” Sam told Alyssa.
She didn’t even glance at the bodies on the floor—her whole attention was on his little pencil drawing. “What’s the situation?”
“We’ve got two shooters, formerly three, up at the house. One’s been taken out, if you can believe that. Mary Lou’s boss is a gun collector, and his teenage daughter’s up there with Mary Lou and Rahman. They’re all hunkered down over here—” He tapped on the right side of the drawing. “—in the garage right now. Rahman went to open the window because the smoke’s thick, and he got shot for his trouble. Whitney—the daughter—actually returned fire. She’s some kind of marksman, and Mary Lou thinks that shooter is dead. And they did manage to get a little air. But just a little.
“Rahman’s alive,” Sam told her, “but he’s bleeding and immobile. Whitney’s daughter, Amanda, is also with them, and she and Haley are having trouble breathing. The heat’s getting intense.
“Mary Lou says the two other shooters faded back into the trees. She doesn’t know where they are, but they’re definitely still there because she stuck a rake up in front of the window and it was shot at.”
“Good thinking,” Alyssa said, looking up at him.
“Yeah,” Sam said.
“So what’s the plan?”
“We go up there,” he said, “and we do the same thing. Only this time we make them shoot at the rake in the window with you in position on the second floor, ready to snipe the snipers.”
“Okay,” she said. “And there’s a rifle and ammunition up there? Because the weapons we have here won’t get that job done.”
“As far as I can tell,” Sam said. “Yeah. We just have to get there. I’m thinking we’ll just drive like hell, right through the front door.”
Gone Too Far Page 48
