by Mark Henwick
I ran up, followed by shouts and more bullets. The foam was slippery and had caused confusion and panic when they were bunched up, but it wouldn’t keep them back now.
Troy was doing a good job breaking the door—he was almost through. Morales was holding up Verdoon. I pushed Troy aside and shattered the lock with a kick.
The doors opened and slammed closed again as the downwash from the chopper caught them. I forced them back and pointed at the chopper. “Go, go, go,” I screamed over the noise, grabbing Morales’ shoulder and jerking him towards it.
Someone came around the corner below and I fired at him. Another followed him and I fired again, emptying one gun and swapping it for another. I was stuck; I couldn’t break off to get to the chopper, otherwise they’d have a clear shot at it while it was at its most vulnerable.
“Victor,” I yelled. “Take off as soon as they’re aboard.”
“Shit, woman, no one’s leaving you here.”
“Just do it, damn you. Go!”
The firing from below redoubled and again I felt the sting of chips gouged out of the walls. Then a ricochet hammered into my chest and knocked me down. Only the Kevlar vest saved me. Thank you again, Vic.
As I struggled back to my feet, they took the opportunity to sprint up the last few steps. I shot the first one and grabbed the second in the doorway, blocking it for the others behind. I heard the chopper wind up behind me and the downwash buffeted us as we struggled. A bullet raked along my leg. My gun went off again, into the stairwell, and someone yelled. Getting purchase on the doorframe, I managed to shove them back inside. Behind me, the chopper was gone.
The stairwell was a confused melee, and someone swore in panic. I heard a sound that made my blood freeze. Some idiot had dropped an armed grenade onto the concrete floor and it was the distinctive ching of the metal safety lever springing out. I tried to struggle free, but I was pinned where I was.
The stairwell exploded. The blast hurled me against the doorframe, tearing the gun out of my hand and the comms plug out of my ear. Everything went black and distant.
The place was a charnel house filled with smoke and dust. I had a dozen splinter punctures and my face and hands were leaking blood, but that was better than the guy I’d been wrestling. He’d taken the main force of the blast on his unprotected back. I shoved his tattered corpse off me and tried to get up, coughing. The others on this level were dead or badly injured as well.
A figure loomed through the swirling smoke, pointing a shotgun at my head. His foot stamped down on my chest and pushed me back.
“You should have agreed to work for me at the ball. It felt right, you know. You’d have done well.” His voice was hoarse, strained. “Now it’s your fault it’s all fucked up.”
“Tucker,” I croaked, and spat dust out of my mouth. “It’s over. The SWAT team are all around this place and your hostages are gone.”
“Except you,” he said. The edgy businessman from the charity ball was gone, replaced by an angry maniac in torn clothes. His eyes were like staring holes.
“They won’t do you a deal for me.”
“They won’t, but she will. I saw her car. That’s her helicopter that just left my roof.” He laughed, sweat glistening on his face. “I know all about you two. Half of Denver knows about you, after the ball.”
He pulled a cell from his pocket and dialed.
“Kingslund,” he yelled. “I’ve got your whore up here on the roof. You can pick her up off the ground or you can give us a ride in your helicopter.”
I shouted to stop him from hearing an answer. “You’re not getting away, Tucker. You’ll die in here.”
“I don’t care anymore. See?” He tore his shirt away from his neck, and I could see the mark of fangs. He’d gotten the full dose and he wasn’t in any fit state to be able to stand the crusis. But he didn’t know that. “I don’t care if I die today. Inez has bitten me, and if I die it just means I’ll return stronger.” He was exultant, laughing, his eyes staring and completely mad. “I just don’t fucking care anymore. You caused all of this, you interfering bitch. If you hadn’t cracked our operation at Crate & Freight, I’d have bought Kingslund out and Matlal wouldn’t have any claws in me. Now it’s all gone. And you and your Altau friends will pay for it. Matlal will make sure of that.”
The pieces kept falling into place. Matlal was cutting his losses. Tucker was a liability now. The bite was a deliberate move to force him into crusis. He was slipping into rogue behavior already. Flecks of foam had appeared at the corners of his mouth.
“Sir, we gotta get out of here,” one of his men shouted in panic up the stairwell.
He bent over me, not quite close enough for me to grab him. And the shotgun was shoved in my belly. “Tell me,” he whispered. “What’s it like? To die and come back like a god?”
Outside, I heard the sweetest sound, the thudding of blades as Victor brought the chopper back in. But I also could hear the sounds of fighting in the stairwell coming closer.
“It’s not like that, Tucker,” I said.
He wasn’t listening. “Kingslund,” he screamed into the cell. “Decision time, bitch.”
“Shit, Tucker, Matlal’s screwed you,” I shouted. “That bite will kill you. Dead is dead. I don’t know what she told you, but that’s not how it works.”
Tucker didn’t believe me. He laughed. He closed his eyes, put his head back and roared with laughter. The shotgun waved away. And I pulled the extinguisher out from beneath me, ripped the pin and set it off.
CO2 comes out of the extinguisher like jet exhaust but cold. The nozzles have double insulated layers to stop your hand from freezing solid on them. Tucker’s hand didn’t have that protection. It froze to his shotgun. The firing mechanism of the shotgun froze. I lunged up as his head snapped back upright. He gasped in pain, dragging the vapors in. His lungs and his face filled with a freezing cloud and his mouth opened in a silent scream as his men arrived.
I kicked his body towards them, turned and sprinted for the sound of blades.
Victor was holding the chopper about ten feet away from the roof. He didn’t dare land back on the roof, but he was giving me a chance. Even with Tucker dead or dying, his men were still trying to kill us. My back tensed as I ran, waiting for the blow. The Kevlar wouldn’t stop a rifle bullet. With horrible clarity, I saw holes appearing in the skin of the chopper.
I launched myself off the roof. For a heart-stopping second I fell through the air, a hundred feet above the ground, sure I had misjudged. Then my hands closed around the chopper’s skid bar. I hung on, swinging wildly while the chopper twisted on its side.
But something had gone wrong. The engine was screaming and we were falling out of the sky.
Chapter 54
We plummeted down the side of the building. At the last minute Victor slowed the fall, converting all that rotor energy into speed and we raced away, close to the ground. He’d flown the best route to get away from anyone firing at us off the roof. Not the best route for my stress levels, but I’d take that over a bullet any day. The parking lot flashed beneath me, followed by an ornamental pond and lawns, before we eased up over some trees, slowed down and then sank towards the command center we had set up.
I let go and fell the last few feet onto soft grass. Victor landed twenty yards away. The scream of the turbine and thudding of the blades changed as the chopper started to windmill down. The adrenaline subsided, leaving me feeling drained. A medic came and knelt by me, but I waved him away as I heard the yelling.
“Amber! Shit! You crazy woman.” Victor hauled me to my feet. “You did it.”
“Right back atcha. We did it, Vic,” I yelled back at him. “You crazy bastard. We did it.”
Well outside the reach of the blades, we came together to jump and bump like a pair of hotshot wide receivers celebrating in the end zone. Given our size difference, there was only one way that was going to end. I ended up sprawled on the grass again, weak from laughter.
&n
bsp; “You okay?” he said, suddenly worried as he saw the amount of blood covering me.
“I’m freaking A-okay, man.” I sat up. “Most of it’s not mine. I think.” I ripped the coveralls back and hauled off the Kevlar vest.
“Amber!”
Jen was running towards me. She skidded to a stop, unable to take those last few steps, unsure of my reaction.
Yes, she’d made a mistake and hurt me, but I had behaved like an ass. We both had some talking to do, but I had to be willing to listen. Part of the problem was that I was afraid of that, of where it might lead. And while I hesitated, the look in her eyes was like sandcastles crumbling before the sea.
“You have about a second to fix this,” said Tara inside my head.
I closed the gap and hugged her to me.
“I’m sorry Jen,” I whispered in her ear.
“No. No. It was my fault. I messed it up.”
I closed my eyes. It felt so good to hold her against me, to ease the pain I’d seen in her eyes. And it felt good for all sorts of other reasons. What about Alex? Oh gods, this was complicated.
“We need to talk, even more than before. But not now.”
She nodded jerkily, her face against my neck. Exactly what was I going to say to her? And Alex?
Victor gave me a thump on my shoulder and returned to the chopper to make sure everything was shut down and secured.
Jen leaned back and looked at me. “Please, honey, listen to me a minute. I’m not proud of the game I played with those jackets, but it stopped a long time ago. Believe me, I never thought of you like that. I know I should have said something. It just never seemed to be the right time.” She took a deep breath and visibly forced herself to go on. “I’m sorry. I want to make it like it was.”
“We can make it like it was, Jen.” I sighed.
Morales interrupted us. He came over, stumbling in pain and fighting off the attentions of the medical teams. He had gotten a comms unit from somewhere and was patched in to Edmunds. Troy and Verdoon were already on their way to the hospital, but Morales wasn’t ready to go yet.
I made him sit down at least, which got me some thanks from the medics. Jen and I sat by him while we followed the sounds of Edmunds and his team working their way through the building.
Whoever had closed down the central stairwell doors to trap us had also saved the other people in the building. Tucker’s men were all in the service stairs or on the roof and everyone else had left the building through the main client stairwell. A SWAT chopper was coming in now and the roof would be cleared very soon. The building was surrounded. Everything had been contained.
As the operation finished up, I took the comms from Morales and told Edmunds about Tucker and the two who had been on the fifth floor, the hit man and the guard.
“Correction,” said Edmunds. “Tucker’s COD looks to be self-administered gunshot to the head.” I nodded somberly. Tucker believed, really believed, what he’d been told by his fiancée. He must have come around from my attack and thought this was his magic way out. I wondered what forensics might turn up.
As I handed the comms set back, Morales took the opportunity to take my hand and squeeze it gently.
“Thank you, Amber,” he said. “I wasn’t expecting to get out of there.” He glanced aside, almost shyly. “I’m sorry, at the last meeting with the colonel, that your news made me so uncomfortable. That was unfair of me. I should have known you better. Trusted you. Thank you again.”
I felt Jen stiffen in interest, but he didn’t elaborate.
“No problem, José.” I smiled a little. I must have been moving up in the world—first name terms with the police captain. “Can you brief us on what Verdoon was telling you?”
“Yeah, of course. Verdoon came to me as soon as he heard what happened on Friday night. He handles all the financial contributions to the police charities from Ms. Kingslund, so we meet regularly, know each other well. He’d been down in New Mexico over the weekend and he hadn’t seen the weekend news until early this morning. He called me as I was on my way in and I went to his house.”
“We can all be on first name terms, José,” Jen said. He nodded.
“I couldn’t understand exactly the hold Tucker had over Verdoon. It was to do with his daughter’s illness and I guess something weird was involved.” José raised an eyebrow at me, and I nodded. “Anyway, he’d agreed to tie up all the cash assets of Kingslund Group. But then he caught up with the news about the ball. Well, he knew the position he would be in if Jen had been killed and he was certain it was Tucker behind the attack. That’s where we got to. I put in an urgent request for his daughter to be taken into protective custody. I was calling Jen from his house when Tucker’s men broke in and the rest of that you know.”
He pulled a piece of notepaper out of his pocket and passed it to Jen. “He said he’d kept your options open. The real financial agreements on all the cash assets are in encrypted files on his computer, and the money can be pulled out without penalty. This is the password.”
“That must be why the rates are so odd,” I said. “He put them in long term with an option for early retrieval. But all Tucker would see was Jen’s purchasing power tied up.”
“So Tucker’s been funding Beacon secretly from his criminal organization,” Jen said. “And when Amber broke up their Crate & Freight smuggling operation, that put him in such a bad position his only way out was to kill me and take over my company by making Verdoon sign it over.”
“Kidnapping Troy was just his first attempt to try and get you to sell,” I said. “When the drugs were seized, his options came down to killing you or losing everything to Matlal.”
The comms unit squawked and I could hear Edmunds saying the building was secured.
“Edmunds is good,” I said to José. “He’s seemed more than willing to go the extra distance on trust.”
José smiled. “You wouldn’t have recognized him under the helmet, but he led the SWAT team last year.”
“Emily Schumacher?” I said, and José nodded.
The medics had left us alone for a few minutes, and he leaned over, wincing with pain.
“Look, I’d really appreciate a full report from you, but you probably want to get out of here right now.” He glanced at his watch. “I’ve lost sight of you in the confusion. I’d give it another ten minutes and the FBI are going to be all over this place.”
I’d gotten all relaxed in the glow of a successful mission and that woke me up. He was right, I didn’t want to talk to the FBI right now. I had a feeling that when I did, I’d be their guest for a while.
“I’m gone,” I said. “I’ll send you a report.”
Jen walked with me to my car.
“Thanks for the loan of the chopper,” I said awkwardly. “I’m sorry about the bullet holes.”
“I don’t care about the helicopter. I care that you got Troy and José and Bernard back. Most of all, I care that you came back,” she said, blinking. “I realize I have to rebuild. But I mean it when I say your suite at Manassah is there, always.”
“Jen, we’ll work it out.” I opened my arms and she flowed in like she was meant to be there. “I have some stuff to do now. ‘Weird’ stuff. I don’t know exactly when I’ll get back. There are things going on this week, but I promise, I swear, we’ll talk after that. I’ll answer any questions you ask.” And risk losing you.
We parted and I drove off before the FBI could grab me.
I’d cracked Jen’s case. Tucker was dead, Jen had her company back under control, Troy was safe, the Weres would leave her alone and, between Morales and the FBI, ZK was finished. True, Frank Hoben was still out there and I would sleep easier when he was caught. But he was more my problem than Jen’s and I had no illusions as to who was the bigger threat between him and Matlal.
Somehow, I had to get back to earning money doing everyday investigations. Sigh.
On a personal level, I had to find out what it meant to balance my spirits, what that woul
d make me, and why I was none of the things they would say I was. I had to work out what it meant to be Mistress of my own Athanate House, including getting David through crusis. And, in the long term, I had to figure out how to get Diana in front of the president.
But I knew, long before that, things would come to a head with Matlal at the Athanate Assembly. And it would get bloody.
I wasn’t, yet, what I might become. What I had feared, I no longer fought.
It had been a couple more weeks, and I was still neither dead, nor undead, which I still ranked as an achievement.
I’d be happy if I could say the same in a week’s time.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For a supposedly lonely profession, you sure need a lot of help to write a book.
The Totally Barkin crew; for shouting encouragement from the sidelines, and Stella and Shelley for coaching us.
The cover image team; Claire Curtis, Ian Wilson and Maria Askew.
My major feedback readers; Jessica, Gail, Peter and Patricia. Also Sue, Ann and Steve.
My editor; Lauren Sweet, the lady of the samovar and the eagle eyes.
And, without which nothing, my wife and family.
Patricia La Barbera : www.PatriciaLaBarbera.com – author, editor
Ian Wilson : www.WeAreMash.com – branding, marketing
Lauren Sweet : www.LaurenSweet.com – author, editor
Maria Askew : www.MariaAskew.co.uk – actor, model
Claire Curtis : www.ClaireCurtis.co.uk – cover art
Reviews, schedules & news on
www.athanate.com
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