“I’m driving us straight to the hospital,” Jackson said, his tone hard. “We can call Calvin when we’re there.”
“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” she asked, eyes roaming to the rearview mirror. “That might give them time to get away.”
She could see Jackson’s eyebrows pull together, a crinkle appearing between them.
“We don’t know what they injected you with,” he reasoned. “And, while I doubt it will do any serious harm, since Andrew seems so keen on having you alive, I’d rather not gamble.”
Nikki didn’t argue with that. She quieted as her thoughts screamed. So much had happened and was still happening. If Jackson hadn’t been around...
“What happened after I got knocked out by the door?” he asked, with obvious bitterness. The question refocused Nikki as they raced through the streets.
“Your neighbor walked up and tried to help,” she recounted. “Instead of shooting you and the man, he hit your neighbor and took me to the elevator. To be completely honest, I think that Michael guy is the nicer mercenary of the two.”
“He wasn’t all that nice,” Jackson said, readjusting in his seat. She saw him wince in the mirror.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“Yeah, just some bruising but nothing too bad.”
“Good.”
Nikki quieted and let Jackson focus on driving. He had thrown on the hazards and was speeding his way around people starting to leave work. If they managed to make their way to the hospital without hitting a large pocket of traffic, they’d be lucky.
Well, luckier than they had been.
“You awake back there?” Jackson asked after a few more minutes had passed. He looked at her in the rearview. She nodded.
“The numbness is still there, but it seems to have stopped spreading,” she said. “Though I am starting to get tired.”
Without looking into the mirror, she saw the bodyguard tense.
“I think it’s better if you try to stay awake, okay?” he said.
Again she nodded. The motion seemed to shake something loose in her memory.
“You know, during Jonathan’s big case he had to deal with a drug that had almost the same effect on—” Nikki didn’t get a chance to finish the thought.
Something slammed into the right side of the car.
And suddenly the world was upside down.
Chapter Thirteen
Andrew looked at the picture on the desk and sneered. He balled his hand into a fist and punched it clear off the workspace. It fell to the floor with a satisfying crash.
He felt his lips warp back into a smile. He pushed back in the chair and stood.
“That’s better,” he said to the empty room.
He moved to the blinds hanging over the office’s half-wall windows and opened them a fraction. Like workers in an anthill, armed men walked around the adjoining rooms, eyes and ears open. Guns ready. Andrew hoped the firearms were just a precaution. His goal had been, and was, simple.
Make Nikki nervous, scare Nikki, terrify Nikki and then kill Nikki.
He’d sent off her mighty three bodyguards easily enough, leaving the woman vulnerable and easy for the taking. Yet his plan hadn’t gone off without a hitch. Instead he’d run into something, or rather someone, he hadn’t bet on. Glancing back at the desk, he eyed Jackson Fields’s file. Andrew had made it his business to know everything about Orion, but the new hire had slipped under his radar completely.
Jackson had been a wild card.
One he hoped Charles and Michael would shuffle out of the deck.
Andrew took a seat on the couch, moved aside the rumpled-up blanket, and looked at the office from a different point of view. He imagined the red-haired woman sitting in the chair, eyes straying to her computer or whatever folder was open on her desk, back straight, posture proper. The boss. The one who commanded her little army without issue.
Heat filled him. An ever-burning anger that became further stoked when his thoughts turned to Orion Security Group. He’d once been like Nikki, better even, and still she’d managed to steal the loyalty of three of his agents. She hadn’t stopped there, either. Smearing his good name all for the sake of garnering more support and funding for her sad attempt to rise above her less-than-ideal position as secretary.
He snorted.
Being a secretary was still too good for her, in his opinion. She didn’t have the charm or malleability that he’d originally wanted for the position at Redstone Solutions, but the higher-ups had cleared her nonetheless. So he’d learned to live with her.
If only he’d paid closer attention, he might have recognized her for the lowly shrew she was.
A rhythm of chimes belted out from the cell phone on the desk. He reached for it and was surprised at the caller.
“Yes?” he answered, readying for what he could only assume was bad news.
“We have a problem,” Michael responded without missing a beat.
Andrew hung his head, rubbing the spot between his eyes, as if he could massage out whatever obstacle had found its way in his plan’s path. “And?”
“That Jackson has way more fight in him than I thought. They managed to get away, but I was able to inject her with the syringe,” Michael said. He didn’t pause long enough for Andrew to comment. Which was good for Michael. “Charles went after them, but I doubt it’s to follow your plan. He got shot in the arm and is still pissed about the coffee ordeal. I’m pretty sure he’s going for blood. Nikki’s blood.”
At that, Andrew knew the pain between his eyes couldn’t be fixed by mere touch. Things were getting too out of hand. His frustration bled into his response. “You know the deal. If anyone kills Nikki before I can get ahold of her, then no one gets paid. Remember?”
“Yeah, I got it.”
“Good,” Andrew said. “Now go clean up your mess before I decide that deal is off.” There was a pause. For a moment Andrew thought the man had hung up on him.
“I may be under your employ,” Michael started. “But don’t mistake that fact for me taking whatever it is you want to dish out. You disrespect me any more and I’ll cancel the job and still take my money.”
The call ended.
Andrew put the phone back on the desk, admittedly a little ruffled. Michael and Charles were not men to be trifled with, he knew, but he was frustrated. The entire situation had gotten out of hand. Ronald Dabney had barely hurt the woman before he’d been killed, his two mercenaries had decided to go off book and tried to rough up Nikki and Jackson at the coffee shop, and instead had to kill two cops and deal with their patrol car, and now one of those mercenaries had possibly gone rogue to satiate his anger.
Andrew ran his hand over his face and sighed.
“What a day,” he said, once again to the office.
He dropped his gaze to the picture frame on the floor. Kicking it over, he looked at the image behind the broken glass.
His sneer came back.
Nikki, Oliver, Mark and Jonathan smiled up at him, frozen in a happier time in their lives.
“Oh, how that’s about to change.”
* * *
EVERYTHING ELSE IN the world seemed to dull compared to the noise.
Glass shattered. The engine whined. Metal crunched, scraped and ground against the asphalt. It all created a storm of sound that disappeared just as quickly as it came.
Then Jackson was hanging upside down.
He blinked a few times before his brain caught up to what had happened. The stolen SUV had flipped and now he was looking down at what used to be the windshield, warped and bent from the impact. On reflex he traced the seat belt that bit into his chest with an odd sense of wonder. The way the front seats and dash were disfigured, he had no doubt that if he hadn’t buckled up he’d be ju
st as mangled.
“Nikki!”
Horrible, twisted images of what the woman in the backseat must have endured flashed through his mind as his brain fully caught up. When she didn’t answer, the images only intensified.
“Hold on!” he yelled back to her.
Not caring to be cautious, Jackson unbuckled his seat belt. He fell against the roof of the SUV, barely catching himself with his hands and keeping his face from the layer of glass that covered the top, now the bottom. Pain shot across different parts of his body, but he didn’t have time to investigate. Nikki’s prolonged silence was too loud to focus on anything else.
The brunt of the impact seemed to have been absorbed by the passenger side of the car. If he had wanted to get out on that side, he’d have to be a good deal smaller to even attempt it. The driver’s side door wasn’t great, the top bent enough that the window was gone. It also kept the door from opening with ease. So Jackson used the lack of window to his advantage and crawled through it onto the asphalt. He ignored the blood trail his hands left behind.
What he expected to be a sidewalk filled with bystanders and hopefully helpful pedestrians was instead an empty corner of a run-down intersection. He tried to mentally backtrack where he’d driven but realized that while he knew how to get to the interstate from his apartment, he wasn’t familiar with where they were now.
Jackson ducked around to the backseat, immediately thankful that the worst of the crash seemed to be, once again, the opposite side. Even more, the front of the vehicle had also fared worse than the back. Still, as he looked through the cracked but not broken window, his blood ran cold.
“Nikki?” he tried. The door wasn’t as contorted as his had been, but it stuck firm for the first few pulls before finally opening with a loud whine of protest.
Nikki looked like an upside-down marionette, discarded by her puppeteer. Her body was suspended awkwardly amid the destruction of the crash, held by only the thin strap of her seat belt. One hand brushed what was once the roof of the car while the other hung higher, her body turned enough that half of her sagged farther down than the other. It created enough of an angle so Jackson could see her face against the cascade of her hair. Eyes closed. Bloody. Unmoving.
“Nikki?”
Jackson moved in and put his fingers on her neck, fear and anger and a cocktail of emotions he didn’t have time to think about flooding his system. Seconds felt like minutes as he waited. And then he felt the beat of her pulse. Then the rise of her chest.
“Thank God,” he breathed.
He had started to unhook her when Jackson stopped himself. He wasn’t a paramedic and certainly not a doctor, but he knew that after a car crash, moving someone could be just as dangerous as the crash itself had been. From a cursory look, he couldn’t for sure make the call that she was okay to move.
“Nikki Waters,” yelled a voice from somewhere outside.
Jackson backed out of the vehicle and finally stood to look over its bottom. Another cold feeling started to fill him when he spotted the car that had hit them.
It was a cop car and through its mangled front Jackson could see a bloodied and very angry Charles. He was having trouble opening his door but not with locating his gun. When he spotted Jackson he aimed it at him.
“I’m going to kill you both!” he roared. Jackson ducked as a shot went off over his head. He waited for another, but it didn’t come. Moving to the front seat, he looked around for the gun, cursing himself for putting it on the passenger seat instead of keeping it on him. A loud repetitive bang sounded as Jackson swept the front seat for any sign of the gun.
Charles was trying his best to get out of the car.
Which was not good for them.
Jackson moved to the backseat with Nikki, and after realizing the gun was also not there, he knew he had to make a decision. If he moved Nikki and something was seriously wrong, he could paralyze her for life, or worse. However, he didn’t have a phone, seemed to be in a deserted, run-down block with no people, and there was a man with a gun hell-bent on killing her with no surefire way Jackson could stop him. Sure, he could try to fight him, but what if he lost? What if he wasn’t fast enough? Nikki would be an easy target, hanging upside down and motionless.
The banging continued as Charles tried to get out.
Jackson made the decision right then.
Positioning himself under the woman, Jackson slid one arm around her back, put his shoulder against her, and then undid the seat belt. He threw his other arm up and around her, catching the weight of her body against his instead of the roof of the vehicle. The cramped space worked in their favor. Jackson was able to maneuver Nikki around so that he was holding her against his chest, like a parent might do a sleeping child. Yet Nikki didn’t even stir as Jackson managed to get out of the wreckage.
“It’s going to be okay,” Jackson whispered. He kept hunched over as he looked at their surroundings. Caught nearly in the middle of the road, he saw nothing that immediately screamed salvation. To the right was a vandalized storefront, the name stripped from a broken sign on top of a long pole. Across from it was a parking lot. Next to it was a strip mall, in obvious disrepair.
Keeping down low, Jackson didn’t look back to see if Charles had seen them. The only real chance they had was to find help or a place to hide until someone spotted the wreck or Calvin came their way. If Charles saw them now and decided to shoot, the most Jackson could hope for was to use his body as a shield and take Nikki as far as he could. Until that did or didn’t happen, Jackson kept Nikki firmly at his chest and ran as fast as he could toward the abandoned building.
Its front faced the street, and the windows had bars on them. Boards were over the front door. Jackson ran along the front, past these frustrating details, and was about to turn around the side of the building when a sound he had been hoping not to hear sliced through the air.
“I’m coming for you!” yelled Charles.
Jackson ducked around the side of the building before he could get a shot off again. The man had to be low on ammo, unless he had more on him, which wouldn’t surprise Jackson in the least.
Instead of finding an easy answer to their predicament, Jackson was met with a large lot beside, and stretching diagonal from, the abandoned building. Across its long stretch were the bones of a construction site, a mere shell of a work in progress seemingly long since paused. Parts of it were tall, parts of it were almost complete and the rest were exposed beams tangling with worn tarps.
It wasn’t a hospital or a police station or even somewhere to make a phone call, but Jackson knew what it could be.
A place to hide.
Chapter Fourteen
Jackson wished for many things.
First, he wished he’d had the sense to run back into his apartment and grab his cell phone—or, better yet, the handgun in his room—before racing to the lobby to try to save the day. In hindsight, the few seconds wouldn’t have made a difference. Then again, hindsight was always twenty-twenty, right?
Second, he wished he’d not fled and instead stood his ground and shot more than just Charles’s arm, stopping the chase once and for all. But then Jackson knew he’d only decided to run because Nikki had been drugged. With what? He still didn’t know.
The third wish he had was that he would have driven a completely different route on the way to the hospital. One that strayed far from whatever Twilight Zone episode they’d managed to get stranded in where, still, he’d seen or heard no one other than the crazed Charles declaring his lust for their deaths. If they made it out of this alive, Jackson promised himself he’d complain to someone about the Dallas block devoid of everything.
The fourth wish wasn’t as strong as the rest, but after carrying Nikki deep into the metal playground of the mostly exposed construction site—which he thought might be an old attempt at an
office complex—Jackson wished the sun would hurry up and set. The afternoon heat wasn’t making anything easier. He could feel sweat pouring off him at each new step, though he also realized some of what he felt could have been blood, too. The farther from the car they went, the more pronounced the various pains from the earlier fight and then crash became. In the back of his mind he noted that he probably had a concussion and that a rib or two might be bruised. Or broken. Not to mention all the little stings where glass had bit into his skin.
Again, the heat wasn’t helping.
But out of all these wishes, plus the few he had about wanting to randomly find a gun, phone or car, none compared to the loudest want of all that had been yelling through his mind clear as a bell.
Nikki still hadn’t woken up and he wished she would.
Charles hadn’t been hot on his heels, but as soon as Jackson had found a small niche between a steel girder and a partially constructed wall to hide them, he’d heard the mercenary swearing. The construction site was large and filled with nooks and crannies that two people could easily fold themselves into. Jackson hadn’t been able to see Charles, but his voice hadn’t been loud when he called out. He was farther away from them, Jackson decided. Slowly combing the area with his gun and murderous intent.
Ten minutes later, Charles was still working on finding them. If Jackson hadn’t gone the farthest away from the abandoned building next door, they would have been seen already. He’d peeked around the girder and caught a glimpse of the man, bloody and clutching the arm that had been shot but not dropping his gun. It was only a matter of time until he found them.
Once again, Jackson looked down at Nikki, tucked into his side. He held her up against him with one arm while his other held her knees to her chest to keep her feet from sticking out. It was uncomfortable to keep the two of them boxed up, but at the same time, he realized part of it felt right in a way. Holding her, worrying about her, protecting her.
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