“Cassie…close your eyes and listen to me,” Kane’s whisper was barely audible.
She couldn’t close her eyes. If she closed her eyes the spider would get her. It would fall on her and run across her skin with all those legs. It would bite her and make her sick.
She was vaguely aware of more male voices outside the building, as if a crowd was gathering. Within minutes they would be inside the warehouse. But at the moment Cassie feared them far less than she did the awful creature that hung before her.
“Dammit, Cassie. I can’t kill it unless I pull my hand off your mouth, and I have to know you won’t scream. If you make a single sound, we’re dead. Now, close your eyes, keep quiet and I’ll take care of it.”
His words penetrated through her terror-filled brain. She forced herself to squeeze her eyes shut and bit her bottom lip as he removed his hand from her mouth. She heard a faint clap noise.
“You can open your eyes now,” he whispered.
When she did, the web still sparkled in the sunlight but without the spider at the end. She turned and looked at him. “Thank you,” she mouthed. She didn’t want to know what he’d done with the dead spider.
He grinned and nodded, but the grin fell from his face as they heard the sound of the large garagelike door opening.
A new tension gripped Cassie.
It was show time.
Both she and Kane moved forward, not leaving their hiding place but moving to positions where the floor of the warehouse was visible and they could see the activity taking place.
There was no sign of a semitruck, but there were men swarming the lower floor. As a Kansas City cop, Cassie hadn’t worked any drug details, but she certainly knew many of the drug dealers of the city by sight. She recognized many of those men now, on the floor beneath them.
There were about a dozen men milling about and anticipation screamed in the air. Kane leaned over, his mouth against her ear. “I don’t see Mercer.”
Cassie’s gaze swept the floor, looking for the man who had ordered her death, the man who was the maestro in this orchestration of death. “I don’t see him, either,” she whispered back to Kane. “Are you sure we have backup?”
“As sure as I can be.”
The two of them watched the activity on the floor. Sebastian appeared to be the man in charge at the moment. He took a seat at the desk at the front of the warehouse and the men began to form a line in front of him.
At the front of the warehouse next to the open door, several men appeared to be frisking the dealers for weapons. Cassie assumed the heavily armed men doing the frisking worked for Adam.
Apparently it was a no-weapon kind of activity. Cassie was certain Adam wanted to take no chance that somebody would use firepower to take the drugs away from him without proper payment.
Sebastian appeared to be doing the bookkeeping. As each dealer stepped in front of him, money was exchanged and Sebastian recorded the transaction on paper.
When the cash was given to Sebastian, another man took it from there and carried it into the heavily guarded inner office.
What was most amazing was that these men were ponying up the money without any sign of the product. She hadn’t realized until this moment the utter depth of the desire Adam had spawned on the street for his drug.
At that moment the rumble of a large vehicle approaching could be heard. The men in the warehouse fell silent as a semitruck pulled into the drive that led directly into the warehouse.
Kane looked at her, and in his eyes she saw the fire of steely resolve, of sheer determination and she knew what he was thinking. There was no way they could allow that shipment to leave this warehouse. They should know within minutes if there was backup, or if they were in this all alone.
Chapter 18
The truck rolled into the warehouse and the big door closed behind it. The engine shut off and there was a moment of silence among the men on the floor. The air smelled of diesel fuel, exhaust fumes and excitement.
Adam Mercer got out of the driver’s seat and climbed up to stand on top of the hood of the vehicle. At the same time armed guards got out of the truck and took up positions.
Two went to the back of the truck and two more headed for the stairs of the loft. Cassie and Kane both eased back. Farther into the shadows of the furniture as the two guards joined them on the loft at the top of the staircase on either side of where they remained out of sight.
The two men kept their backs to where Kane and Cassie were hidden, their focus on the ground below where cheers had erupted from the crowd.
Adam held up his hands, like a king asking for silence among the unwashed subjects around him. He got it. Cassie stifled a groan. She knew what came next. King Adam would make a speech. She’d never known a man who liked the sound of his own voice as much as Mercer.
“My good friends and colleagues,” he began. “This is the day we’ve all been waiting for. It’s the day that Blue will once again be on the streets. And we’re going to be the ones to put it out there.”
The men cheered. Of course, they probably had no idea that the drugs they were going to distribute on the street would kill their customers.
They had no idea that the drug deals they made this evening would be the last they made. They had no idea they weren’t dealing highs, but rather they were dealing death.
Kane touched Cassie on the arm and motioned toward the guard on the loft to her right. She understood what he wanted. He’d take out the guard on the left and she was to deal with the guard at the right.
He reached into the duffel bag and pulled out a roll of duct tape and handed it to her. Good old duct tape, there were a thousand uses of the stuff. You could secure a lid, wrap an air vent, fix a leak and make a fine-looking miniskirt out of the strong, shiny sticky stuff.
As Adam continued to talk to his “troops,” rallying responses of cheers with his words about the pure, high-quality dope he was about to deliver, Cassie and Kane crept out of their cover and headed for their respective targets.
Cassie moved in and out of the cover of the furniture, her gaze intent on the man she needed to bring down. The last thing she wanted was for him to hear her approach and cry out an alarm.
Although she knew exactly where to squeeze on the neck to render a man unconscious, it took only one look at the man’s thick neck for her to realize that particular form of incapacitation might prove difficult.
This would take less finesse and more brawn, she thought. She pulled her gun from her waistband and crept closer, close enough that she could smell the scent of him…the unpleasant odor of an unwashed body.
No handgun for this man, he cradled an assault rifle in his arms, the barrel pointed toward the warehouse floor. There was no tension radiating from him, rather he looked relaxed.
As Adam continued to drone on from his stance on the semitruck hood, Cassie raised her gun over her head and waited.
When Adam’s speech evoked a rousing cheer from the crowd on the floor, Cassie brought the butt of her gun down on the back of the guard’s head with bone-jarring force.
He turned around and stared at her. Uh-oh, she thought. His eyes glazed over and he crumpled to the floor of the loft, unconscious from the blow. She breathed a quick sigh of relief, then grabbed him by the feet and dragged him back out of sight.
She used the duct tape to bind his wrists and ankles, then secured a strip over his mouth. God bless duct tape. She then taped him to the leg of a solid wood table, certain that even if he did regain consciousness he couldn’t raise an alarm or do much of anything.
She grabbed his assault rifle, then made her way back to the center of the loft where Kane awaited her. “Where’s our backup?” she asked. “Dammit, Kane, where the hell is our backup?”
His eyes were darkly troubled as he gazed at her. “I don’t know.”
She looked back to the floor, where Adam still held court. “Sooner or later he’s going to stop blathering and they’ll begin the distribution. We can�
�t wait any longer. We’ve got to do something soon.”
She watched as Kane returned his gaze to the warehouse floor. She could almost smell the wheels in his brain burning as they turned in his head to come up with a viable plan.
“I need to get down to the main floor,” he whispered to her. “I want to get to Mercer. If I can get to him maybe we can stop this thing from happening.”
“I can’t go down there to help you. Somebody will instantly recognize me.”
He nodded. “You’ll have to cover me from up here. I’m going to try to make my way down and blend in with the others.”
It was a dangerous plan. If Kane was identified as an interloper, he would be in deep trouble, and there was no guarantee that Cassie would be able to do anything to help him from her position in the loft. There were too many of them and not enough of her.
If they didn’t do something fast, then the drugs would be out of their control and onto the streets, and that was simply not an option.
Where in the hell was their backup? She’d understood why none had appeared before the truck had arrived, but where were they now? She couldn’t believe she and Kane were going to have to do this all alone.
She watched, heart thudding, as Kane took off his ammo belt and placed it next to her. He tucked his gun in his waistband, then pulled his shirt out so that the shirttail covered the butt of the weapon.
He leaned over and kissed her, a quick, fleeting kiss. “See you when this is all over.” With a brief look of searing intensity, he made his way to the stairs that led down from the loft.
He paused at the top and she knew he was watching, waiting for the moment that he could get down the stairs without anyone seeing where he’d come from. Thankfully all attention from the men on the floor was still focused on Mercer.
In the blink of her eye he was gone from the loft and she leaned forward and peered over the edge to see where he was on the floor.
She held the assault rifle ready as she spied Kane drifting toward the semi. Nobody seemed to be paying any attention to him. But Cassie would shoot the first person who threatened Kane in any way.
“This will be an Independence Day to remember…the day Blue hit the market once again after months and months of inferior product.” Adam continued to drone on and Cassie sensed the growing impatience of the men who awaited the moment when they could get their hands on their share of the drug.
Her heart raced and she knew most people under these circumstances would be feeling fear. She didn’t. No fear. She welcomed the cold calm that overtook her, recognized it as a familiar friend who always visited her when in the center of the storm of an assignment.
The calm held the calculation of intelligence without the messiness of emotion. Emotion was dangerous, emotion made mistakes. She had to remain cool and calm in order to do what needed to be done.
Her heartbeat accelerated just a notch as she lost sight of Kane in the group below. She was comforted by the fact that nothing had changed among the men. No cries of an intruder, no scuffle indicating trouble.
Still, she wanted to find him. Where was he? How could she cover him if she couldn’t find him? Her gaze swept the floor, finding far too many dark-haired men, yet not the one she sought.
Where are you, Kane? Her finger quivered over the trigger of the gun, ready in an instant to fire if necessary.
She sensed Adam coming to the end of his spiel and knew the moment of truth was at hand. The men began to move restlessly, paying less and less attention to the man on the hood of the truck.
She gasped as Kane appeared like a magician on top of the truck hood behind Adam.
Before anyone could react to his bold move, Kane had an arm around Adam’s neck and his gun to his head. “Speech is over, Mr. Mercer.” Kane’s voice rang out in the sudden tense silence that fell over the warehouse.
“Well, well, what have we here?” Adam’s voice held no fear, only a frightening amusement.
“I’m the party pooper who has come to ruin your party. Tell your men to drop their weapons,” Kane commanded. “This party is over and the contents of this truck aren’t leaving this warehouse.”
Cassie held her breath. Every gun in the place was now trained on Kane. Tension snapped and crackled in the air. For a moment nobody moved.
“Call off your goons, Mercer,” Kane commanded. “Tell them to drop their weapons or I swear I’ll blow your head off.”
“I don’t think so,” Adam replied. He grimaced as Kane’s arm tightened around his neck, then suddenly he laughed. The sound, so unexpected, so out-of-place, sent chills up Cassie’s spine.
“Do you really think these men care if you blow my head off?” Adam asked. “There’s no honor among thieves. They will do nothing to save my life. All they care about is the drugs. I’m afraid you’ve put yourself into a no-win situation here. You shoot me and they all shoot you and the drugs will make their way into the streets.”
At that moment the warehouse door opened and dozens of Kansas City’s finest rushed in. “Police…freeze!”
Shouts filled the air, angry curses and frantic yells as the men scattered to all four corners of the warehouse.
Finally, Cassie thought with in relief. Backup had arrived, and not a moment too soon. A gunshot rent the air. She had no idea who fired the first shot, but it ushered in a new chaos as men ran for cover.
More shots rang out and she lost sight of both Kane and Adam in the fracas. Frantically she searched for them, but couldn’t find them in the swarm of men.
A firestorm resulted. She backed away from the loft edge as bullets ripped through the air. Dozens of guns delivered their payload. Shouts rang out, curses and cries filled the air and Cassie frantically tried to find Kane or Adam in the melee below.
She lay down on her stomach and inched toward the edge of the loft, knowing that she could pick off the bad guys from this vantage point. She laid the assault rifle aside. She couldn’t take a chance that she might hit a cop with a stray bullet. She would do much better at precision shooting with her handgun.
Before she could get into position, the firefight was over and the police had control of the situation. However, she didn’t see the man who had orchestrated this entire debacle.
She wanted Adam.
Where in the hell could he be? And where was Kane? She was afraid to study the bodies on the floor too closely, afraid she might see Kane’s lying there. Deep in her heart, she knew that this would be the way Kane would want to die…going down in a blaze of glory, fighting to keep the world a safe place for the innocent.
She didn’t know how long she remained there, on her stomach looking for Kane, looking for Adam, when she heard a sound to her right.
She turned and saw a flash of movement, but could do nothing to deflect that kick that caught her gun hand. The gun flew from her grip as another kick caught her in the stomach.
A cry ripped from her. Pain rocked through her, but she mentally forced the pain away and tried to focus on her attacker.
“You!” a familiar voice cried in rage. Mercer kicked her again and she rolled away from the kicks and quickly gained her feet.
She crouched, prepared for another attack. He faced her, his handsome features contorted with uncontrolled fury. “You’re supposed to be dead,” he said.
“Sorry to disappoint you,” she replied. He had no weapon and for that she was grateful. In hand-to-hand combat, she thought she could take him. “It’s over, Mercer. Why don’t you just give it up?”
“It’s not over until I say it’s over.”
She saw the cold hatred in his eyes, knew that at least at this moment he’d lost all sight of anything but his desire to see her dead. Cassie smiled grimly. “Bring it on, big guy.”
With a surprising speed, he lunged forward and tagged her with his right fist on her already sore jaw. She sucked air through clenched teeth as sheer agony rocked through her.
She countered with a left, landing a glancing blow off his chin. All thou
ghts of the action below them fell away as Cassie focused intently on her adversary.
She kicked, a high and powerful leg blow. He caught her leg at the height of the kick and pulled her other leg out from under her. She fell to the floor, stunned by his agility and speed.
He wasted no time giving her an opportunity to recover. He pushed at her body, moving her toward the edge of the loft. She struggled for a grip against the floor. If she went over the edge, the fall would be bone-shattering. If death didn’t immediately occur, she would wish for it.
She kicked and swung at him as she remained on her back like an overturned turtle. She struggled to get to her feet, but he used his body and strength to keep her down and move her closer…closer to the edge.
She was no longer on the attack, but rather was in the defensive mode of trying to protect herself and keep from going over the edge of the loft.
To underestimate an opponent was a terrible mistake, and it was one she had just made with Mercer. She’d thought that even though he appeared to be in good physical condition he was probably soft, accustomed to leaving physical fights to his hired help. But that wasn’t the case. He was fit and strong and there seemed to be nothing soft about him.
If she managed to gain her feet once again, she wouldn’t make the same mistake twice. Her heart ripped beats in triple time as she tried to find something…anything to stop from being shoved from the loft.
But, despite her efforts, she felt herself sliding off the ledge. At the last moment she jackknifed her body and managed to swing one leg up and over the iron railing that provided a barrier from the edge.
With one leg hooked, she swung out over the warehouse floor, then cried out as Adam smashed his fists against the leg that held her safe.
Once…twice…three times he mashed her leg with his fists in an attempt to dislodge her. Her leg quivered and excruciating pain tore through her.
Before he could achieve his goal, she swung her other leg over the railing and pulled herself up. From there, she leapt back onto the loft and faced him once again.
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