He broke off.
Disturbed by the sudden silence, Quinn said, “Hello?”
Bang!
One gunshot, followed by the soft umph of a body hitting the floor.
Bang!
A second, and Audrey screamed, “Gabe!”
“Hide!” he shouted. “Take cover!”
The call disconnected and Quinn spun toward Harvard, who removed his headphones and shook his head. The kid looked as ill as Quinn felt.
“Signal was too scrambled, boss. I’m sorry, but it was bouncing me all over the globe and I couldn’t lock on.”
“Goddammit!” Quinn threw the cell phone as hard as he could and it crashed against the wall, leaving an indention in the cheap plaster before clattering to the floor in pieces. Then he went so numb he didn’t even feel Jesse’s hands on his shoulders, shoving him into a chair, until the medic knelt in front of him with a penlight.
Gabe was in trouble. And he couldn’t do a damn thing to help.
As soon as the light hit his eyes, he snapped back to himself and pushed Jesse aside. “Get away from me. I’m fine.”
“Uh-huh,” Jesse said, but packed up his bag and stood. “Still haven’t seen those medical records, Quinn.”
Christ, he was sick to death of doctors. And cowboys who wanted to be doctors. “A little busy here, Jesse.”
The address, he thought. He may not be able to help Gabe now, but he could damn well follow orders. He shoved to his feet and rifled through the papers on the table, looking for—
“What did Gabe say?” someone asked softly behind him. It sounded like Marcus, but he was so focused on finding a street map of Bogotá under all the papers that he didn’t turn to look.
“He gave us orders.” There it was. Finally. He spread the map out and found the correct coordinates at an intersection a mere mile from Bryson Van Amee’s apartment. He tapped the spot with his index finger. “He said Van Amee might be at this location and we need to check it out.”
“But what about Gabe and Audrey—”
This time he did look up to spear Harvard with a hard stare meant to shut him up. The others didn’t need to know the details of what they’d heard over the phone or he might have a mutiny on his hands, despite the team’s newfound cohesiveness.
“Gabe’s got it handled.” He hoped. “The best thing we can do for him now is follow his orders.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The gun went off and Gabe thought, Oh shit.
Only he never felt the impact of a second bullet ripping another hole in his body. He felt blood trickling from the one already in his side, but no new damage that he could tell.
In the silence that descended on the room, he looked around, trying to get his bearings. The adrenaline surge burned off, leaving him muddled and shaky, and for a long second, he couldn’t figure out where the gunshot had come from. Or where it had gone.
Across the room, Liam’s eyes widened in shock and pain as blood bloomed on his chest and his gun fell from his hand. With blood bubbling from his mouth, he took two lurching steps toward Audrey—who held Mena’s gun in a perfect stance, ready and willing to fire again.
Gabe circled the desk and caught Liam around the middle, tackling him to the carpet. He went down easily, already half-unconscious, and choked on his own blood as his eyes rolled back into his head.
“Did I kill him?” Audrey whispered.
Yeah, she probably had, but Gabe wasn’t about to tell her that. Hearing the telltale wheeze of a sucking chest wound, he pushed himself upright and stared down at Liam’s graying complexion. Audrey had gotten the bastard square in the lung.
He looked up. Her complexion matched Liam’s, except without the blue cast of approaching death.
“I had to. He gave me no choice. I had to. I had to.” She still held the gun clenched in her shaking hands.
Gabe swore and shoved Liam up onto his injured side to protect his good lung from filling with blood. The guy deserved to rot for the rest of eternity in the innermost layer of Hell, but Audrey wasn’t going to be the one to send him there. The guilt of killing a man would crush her.
Liam moaned in pain.
“Shut up.” Ignoring his own wounds, he stripped out of his jacket and made a compress. “Audrey, honey, snap out of it and search the desk. Find me something plastic or something else I can use to seal the wound. Scissors, tape.”
She blinked and finally lowered the gun. “Wh—what? Why?” She looked at Mena’s corpse in the desk chair, then at Liam, struggling to breathe and spilling blood onto the Aubusson rug. “We need to leave!”
“He’ll die if we do.”
“I don’t care.” Color rushed back into her cheeks. She hurried to his side and tried to tug him to his feet. “Better him than you. You’re bleeding everywhere. You need medical attention. Let’s go!”
Gabe grabbed Liam’s gun and lumbered to his feet. Shit, he was weak as a kitten from blood loss, and getting weaker. Still, he met her stare, wanting her to understand. “If we leave and he dies, you’ll have killed him. Are you prepared to live with that?”
Her chin hitched up. “I wouldn’t have picked up the gun if I wasn’t.”
So strong. He flicked away one of the tears he didn’t think she was even aware were running down her cheeks. “I wish I could have gotten to it first.”
“But you didn’t. I did, and then did what I had to do to keep us both alive.”
“And you’re okay with that?”
She hesitated, gazed down at Liam, then firmed up her trembling lips and nodded once. “You were right. Sometimes, with people like him, violence is the only option. Now, let’s go before someone comes looking for one of them.”
God, he adored her. He gripped that stubborn chin and lifted it, giving her a quick, hard kiss. “All right. We’re outta here.”
Grasping her hand, he pulled her toward the door, but his legs went out from under him after the first step. One minute he was on his feet and the next, his hands and knees. His mouth felt like cotton and tasted like blood, and his visual acuity was way off.
Oh man, he was crashing. Pushed himself too far for too long.
He shoved away Audrey’s helping hands. “Go.”
“Are you insane?”
He let go a huff of laughter. “Only around you, honey.”
“This isn’t a time to joke.” She yanked hard on his shirt and managed only to tear it. “C’mon, Gabriel. Move.”
He tried, but his head suddenly weighed a hundred pounds, each of his limbs at least a couple thousand a piece. He collapsed and, hard as he fought it, consciousness became nothing but a good memory.
That is, until her palm connected smartly with his cheek. He jolted awake to find her in his face, eyes sparking with fear-fueled anger.
“Don’t you dare do this to me, sailor,” she said through her teeth as tears choked every heated word. “I killed a man for you, and you are not going to make me leave you behind. You are going to pick your sorry ass off this floor and get us to safety.”
Yeah, forget adoration. He loved this woman.
“Yes, ma’am.” Weakness plaguing his every movement, he struggled to sit and managed to get upright. Sitting there on his butt, panting and shivering, with sweat dripping off his temples, the realization struck that he couldn’t do this under his own steam.
He looked up at Audrey. So tough, so stubborn, and almost as demanding as he was.
He held out a hand. She released a huge breath of relief and clasped his palm. “On the count of three, big guy. One, two, up ya go.”
With her help, Gabe hauled himself to his feet. He staggered a little, and took a moment to draw a deep breath and regain his bearings. He touched his fingers to the seeping wound in his side.
Messy. A lot of torn flesh and a whole lot of blood, but he didn’t think anything vital had been hit and, with adrenaline coursing through his system, he couldn’t feel the pain. Yet. But that would change real damn fast, and they had to be well a
way from Mena’s estate when his brain caught on to the fact he was probably bleeding to death.
“We need to bandage you,” Audrey said when his fingers came away smeared red.
“Later.” Nausea threatened to choke him, but he swallowed it down and shuffled to the door. “Search the desk, their pockets. We need money, car keys, an AK-47. Anything that will help us get the fuck out of here.”
“Okay,” Audrey said.
As she scrambled through the desk drawers behind him, he cracked the door open enough to peek into the hallway. Two guards stood there with their backs to him. They must have been told to expect gunshots, which played to his advantage, bought him some time to strategize. Too much longer, though, and those guards might start getting antsy.
Gabe quietly shut the door, leaned his forehead against it, and thought back a year to all of SEAL Team Ten’s plans for raiding Mena’s estate. They’d had intel on the servants’ and the guards’ shifts, on the placement of all the cameras and motion sensors. He knew the house, the grounds, and the security system’s strengths and weaknesses like he knew his own name. Escape would have been difficult if he was in prime condition and had his SEAL teammates for back up. Escape while seriously wounded with an untrained woman in tow…
Fuck.
Audrey returned to his side with a roll of Colombian bills. “No keys.”
“Doesn’t matter,” he said and shoved the roll into his pants pocket. “We can’t get to the garages from here. Hallway’s guarded.”
“What are we going to do?”
Gabe pushed away from the door and, ignoring his lightheadedness, weaved across the library, out onto the terrace, all the while scanning, searching for an out. Hallway was a no-go unless he took out the guards, but where there were two, there would be more. Could he take them all in his weakened condition? Maybe if he got lucky. Was he willing to risk Audrey’s life like that? No fucking way.
So his only option was the terrace. He leaned over the railing and scanned the ground below. The pool glowed a soft blue-green two stories down, but jumping was out of the question. The terrace overlooked the pool’s shallow end, and any miscalculation on his part would send him slamming into the concrete deck. He was already in enough pain and didn’t need to add the possibility of breaking every bone in his body to the equation.
“What’s that up there?” At his side, Audrey pointed to the roof one story above them. He straightened away from the railing and gazed up.
Well, shit. Why didn’t he think of that? They might just have a shot at escaping yet.
“Mena’s chopper.” He grinned and grasped Audrey’s face in his hands, planting a hard kiss on her open mouth. “You’re brilliant, honey. Can you climb?”
She gave him a look that said duh and started unbuckling the straps on her high heels. “Can you fly?”
“It’s been a while.”
“Good enough for me.” She handed him her shoes and stood on the balcony railing to grip the edge of the flowered trellis overhead. In one smooth move, she pulled herself up and flattened herself to the wood, then stretched out her hands to help him. He climbed onto the railing and, reaching up for the trellis, he sucked in a fortifying breath.
This was going to hurt like a bitch.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The address Gabe had given them was a hideous two-story house shaped like a sideways T with balconies at each of the three ends. Sure, it screamed money, but it also shouted, “no taste.” Quinn was no architect, but even he knew the Greek-like columns out front clashed horribly with the post-modern vibe of the rest of the house.
It sat on a fenced-in property surrounded by foliage. A gated entry to the brick driveway provided some security, but it was mostly for show, because Quinn and the team got through without breaking a sweat. The back yard boasted a BBQ pit and bar on a tiled patio shaded by a wood pergola. A sunroom entirely made of glass opened up to the patio from the back of the house and shielded a Jacuzzi, which was currently in use by a scrawny kid of about sixteen and a very friendly older man. The man disappeared under the water and the kid sat back with a look on his face that only came from oral sex.
“That is disgusting,” Marcus whispered beside him.
Laying belly to the ground in the bushes at the edge of the property, he frowned, thinking of Gabe’s brother. “Keep your derogatory comments to yourself, men. I have friends that are gay.”
“Not that.” Marcus sounded completely insulted. “What do you think I am, a far right wingnut? I don’t care they’re gay. More power to ’em. I meant that kid’s not even close to legal. The guy’s what, at least forty? That is disgusting.”
Quinn focused his night vision goggles on the hot tub again and winced. Things had progressed past oral and into BDSM territory. Yeah, it was disgusting and disturbing, but with the brutal way the kid acted, he was obviously the dom in the relationship.
And where in hell were the kid’s parents?
“Man,” Marcus muttered. “I can’t sit here and watch this. I’m gonna sneak around front, see what I can see.”
“Careful,” Quinn warned. He couldn’t watch what was happening in the Jacuzzi either, so he scanned over the upper floors of the house. The lights were out and he didn’t see any movement inside. Had to wonder if there was a basement. Gabe sounded very sure when he said Bryson Van Amee might be inside this address.
“Incoming,” Jean-Luc said. Stationed by the front gate as a lookout, he rattled off the details of the approaching vehicle. “Red four-door Mercedes convertible. Bogotá license plate, mike-xray-uniform-two-niner-eight. One occupant.”
“Copy that,” Quinn replied. “Visual on his face?”
“Negative. The top’s up—wait. He’s opening the door. All right. Got visual confirmation. The driver is Jacinto Rivera. Repeat, I have visual confirmation on Jacinto Rivera, and he is armed.”
Excellent. A thrill chased through Quinn’s blood. Finally, they were getting somewhere. “Hold your positions. Let’s see where he goes.”
…
Jacinto Rivera shoved through the front door of his cousin’s house, cursing. That stupid negotiator Giancarelli was jerking him around by the cojones, claiming they needed more time to secure funds. What bullshit. The funds sat right in Bryson Van Amee’s bank account, ripe for the taking. He knew. He’d seen the bank statements.
They also wanted more proof of life or they were calling the whole deal off.
And if that wasn’t bad enough, Rorro, the perverted little fuck, had been wandering about the city doing God knows what to God knows who instead of watching Van Amee. Anyone could have strolled right in last night and plucked their golden goose out from under their noses.
Jacinto cursed and stalked through the house. First thing, he crossed to the basement door and flipped on the light. The ripe odors of shit and urine and unwashed man assaulted his nose as he descended three steps. Van Amee sat up from the cot in his tattered, bloody business suit and blinked owlishly at the light. Several days’ worth of beard covered his jaw, and his black and purple left eye had swollen shut. He looked and smelled more like a street bum than the owner of a multi-million dollar empire.
“Water,” he whispered through cracked lips. “Agua. Por favor.”
“What did you want to name your son if he was a girl?” Jacinto asked in Spanish and then again in English.
Van Amee blinked his one good eye. “Please. I need water.”
“Answer the question.”
“I—I—don’t know. Which son?”
“Ashton.”
“I—God, I can’t remember. It was…something Susan. After my mother. Uh, Adelaide. Addie Susan.” He winced. “Please, I need something to drink.”
Jacinto shook his head and went back upstairs to the kitchen. Trusting his cousin to help with this had been a stupid idea from the start, but he couldn’t have asked his brother without getting the EPC involved. The plan was only to make it look like the EPC was involved. They took enough people
hostage that sliding one more under their belt shouldn’t raise suspicion.
Or so Claudia said.
She said if they made it look like their brother’s doing, nobody would cast them a sideways glance. He wasn’t sure about that, because if Angel found out they were setting up him and the EPC, kin or not, he’d kill them both and lose not a wink of sleep over it. Angel Rivera was one scary cabron, and Jacinto wanted nothing more than to be free of him.
Soon. Once they got the ransom money, he could go somewhere Angel would never find him. Hollywood, maybe. He’d live the good life with women and booze and drugs. Maybe act in a movie or two. All he needed was his cut of Van Amee’s ransom.
Jacinto found a bottle of water in the fridge, crossed to the basement door, tossed it down, and heard a scramble of limbs. Like a rat. That’s all Van Amee was. A wealthy, well-dressed rat, who didn’t need even half the money he had. Claudia said so. But even rats had to drink, and it’d do no good if he died of thirst before they got their money.
Jacinto shut and locked the door and, hearing sounds on the back patio, headed that way. He had to talk to Rorro, though he really didn’t care to see the little pervert going at it with his flavor of the day.
And wasn’t it interesting that this flavor was a younger replica of Jacinto’s uncle, Rorro’s not-so-dearly departed father? No wonder the kid was being especially brutal tonight. Jacinto could hear the flesh on flesh action from the kitchen and waited outside the solarium doors until the sounds faded into heavy breathing. Then there was a gasp, a gurgle, and it was over.
Jacinto stepped into the room and tried his hardest to keep his eyes off the battered man hanging limply over the side of the Jacuzzi. Blood dripped from his throat onto the tiled patio. Rorro sat in the bubbling water, smoking a joint and looking very satisfied with himself. The knife he’d used to slit the man’s throat lay near his elbow on the edge of the tub.
Bile rose in Jacinto’s throat. He’d never had the stomach for murder, which was part of the reason he’d called Rorro in the first place. Bryson Van Amee had seen both of their faces, knew at least his name if not Rorro’s, and had to die tomorrow after they got the money.
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