She bobbled her head side to side. “I see your point.” A sarcastic eye roll then. “Do you have a stack of fake passports too?”
“Holy shit! I can’t believe I almost forgot those!” I dropped the bag and pointed at her. “Good call, Fancy.”
I left the door open and ducked across the hall and into the bathroom, lifted the lid off the toilet and fished out the triple-bagged, sealed, and waterproof bundle of IDs, went back into the bedroom, shaking excess water off the bundle before wiping it dry on the front of my shorts.
Temple had three fingertips pressed against her forehead, staring at me in disbelief. “That was sarcasm, actually.”
I laughed. “Yeah, well, a high-end fake passport is expensive as fuck and hard as hell to get hold of, so I ain’t about to leave these here for the cops to find. The guns, my cash, I can deal with the loss. It’s gonna hurt, but I can deal. My fakes? Oh hell no. Cost me several hundred grand and a bunch of favors to procure these, and they’re always useful.”
Temple just sighed. “You’re a piece of work, Duke.”
I just winked. “You think this place is something? You should see my pad at Harris’s compound.”
With that I led her out of the bedroom, careful to make sure she didn’t glance into the bathroom on the way. I paused at the door of the apartment, watching out the peephole. When I was reasonably sure it was clear, I toed open the door and pivoted out, scanning the hallway, the stolen pistol in hand.
Empty, for now.
I gestured for Temple to follow me to the stairwell, putting a finger over my lips to make sure she stayed quiet. I nudged open the door to the stairwell, inched in far enough to peek down the stairs, listening and watching.
I heard voices below, chatting in low, gruff tones in a language I didn’t speak, probably Ukrainian or Russian. Damn. I glanced back at Temple, shushed her again, and then put my mouth to her ear so I could whisper.
“Stay here, and stay low,” I hissed as quietly as I could, setting the duffel bag at her feet. “Don’t move from this spot until you’re sure it’s me coming up for you.”
“If it’s not you?” she asked, sounding more than a little panicked.
I grinned and winked. “It’ll be me, sweetpea. No worries.”
Down the stairs then, in a low tactical crouch, back to the wall, aiming at the stairs below me. I got down to the first floor and then I crouched on a landing and waited. The voices grew louder as they ascended the steps, clearly unhurried and unworried. Which was stupid, on their part.
If you’re hunting Duke Silver you’d better be worried, motherfucker.
I waited until the first one cleared the landing completely, the second right behind him. I drew a bead on the second dude’s forehead and squeezed off a round. The snap of the suppressed report echoed in the stairwell, and there was a spray of red and a thumping as he fell backward. The guy in the lead burst into motion, throwing himself to one side as he hit the stairs on his belly, Tec-9 whipping up.
I scrambled to my right just in time, his semi-automatic chattering. Half a dozen rounds smacked into the drywall where I’d been, and four more strafed across, following me. I hit the landing hard on my right side, rolled, and popped off two fast shots at the shooter. Only one hit, but one was all it took. The round splattered through the top of his head and exited near his shoulder blade, making a godawful mess of the stairwell.
I held my position for a moment, waiting for a third dickhead to pop up. When half a minute passed without anyone shooting at me, I shifted to a crouch and inched toward the stairs, not taking anything for granted. I counted one dead guy and a second corpse on the landing below him, and a third standing in the corner—
Fuck.
CRACKCRACKCRACK!
Three rounds buzzed past my head, the last one nicking my earlobe, missing my neck by gnat’s whisker. I slammed against the wall to one side, pistol whipping up, cracked off two rounds one handed. Again, it looks cool in the movies when the hero does that whole one-handed, arm extended shooting thing, but in real life that’s liable to get you killed, as you’re likely to miss even if you’re as highly trained as I am. You just don’t have the stability to aim accurately one-handed. I mean, if you’re a gunslinger in the Old West and you’re drawing and firing in one motion, aiming for center mass, sure, you’ve got a decent chance of hitting someone, if you’re ten or fifteen paces away at most. Further than that? Forget it.
So yeah, my stupid ass missed. But my shots got close enough to make the guy duck, which bought me a few more seconds. And in a firefight, seconds are all you get. I used those seconds to slap my left hand up against my right in a nice, clean two-hand grip.
SNAPSNAP—
The suppressed pistol bucked in my hands, time once again slowing down as it does in those situations. I saw the shooter at the bottom of the stairs, tucked into a corner, crouched, both hands on his pistol in a professional grip, barrel aiming at me. I saw his finger squeeze the trigger once, twice, saw the weapon buck. My own was barking just a hair ahead of his, and then I was moving, throwing myself to the opposite wall. Something hot and sharp sliced my left bicep, and then a bee buzzed angrily past my ear, and then my foot was slipping in the gore on the stairs and I was flying, momentarily weightless.
I hit the stairs hard enough to knock the wind out of me, stars dancing behind my eyes, and then I was rolling down them. I reached the landing dizzy and disoriented and gasping, thudding up against a bleeding corpse, with the third shooter still standing, clutching his gut, shakily drawing bead down on me.
I was on my back, and he was behind me, and I couldn’t breathe and my head was spinning and throbbing from the topple down the stairs, but I got my piece up and a round squeezed off before rolling twice to one side, away from the dead guy. A bullet hit the concrete of the landing centimeters from my face, spattering me with sharp shards of spraying concrete dust, and then a second one hit an inch from my leg, and I had to roll again, but there was nowhere to go except down the stairs again and the asshole still wasn’t dead, despite a bullet in his gut and another in his chest.
“Fucking die, motherfucker!” I growled, and shot him twice more before throwing myself down the next flight of stairs.
I was ready that time, though, going down feet first on my back, my ass and shoulders taking the brunt of the initial impact, and then I twisted to my stomach, sliding down two more steps, my pistol aiming upward.
The soon-to-be-dead asshole staggered into view, torso now dotted with spreading stains. Tough sonofabitch, I’ll give him that.
“You first,” he ground out in a thick Eastern Bloc accent, arm rising limp, aiming at me.
“Yeah, I don’t think so,” I said, and ended the discussion via the expedient method of a well-aimed bullet to the brainpan.
Gore painted the wall behind him, his head yanking backward as the round exited the back of his skull.
A sound below me had me rolling to my back and aiming down the stairwell, finger tightening on the trigger. Until I saw that it was Bruce, pepper spray in hand, eyes wide.
I groaned in relief, and lowered my gun. “Ain’t you ever been told not to roll up to a gunfight with pepper spray, Bruce?”
He stopped, nearly dropping the can. “What—what in the Sam Hill is going on, Dan?”
I let my head thud against the stair. “Ran into some trouble, my man.”
Bruce’s gaze went to the red mess on the wall of the landing above me. “Heard shooting, figured I’d best come investigate.”
I met his fearful gaze. “You don’t want any of this mess, Bruce. Go home. Say you got sick, had to run home before you shit in your boxers. Hell, say you got drunk on lunch break. Just…go home. Now. You never saw me, or my girlfriend, okay? We were never here. You’ve never even met me, matter of fact.” I lifted an eyebrow. “It’s for your own good, buddy. Now go on, git.”
Bruce hesitated, and then his gaze flicked up to the red dripping down the wall. “Yeah. My wife has b
een sick. Best go home and take care of her.”
“You do that, Bruce.”
He turned and lumbered back down the stairs and out of view. I heard the door at the bottom of the stairs slam closed, and then I finally relaxed, but only for a moment.
I had to get out of here.
The one thing that was really bugging me, though, was that they’d found me here. Harris didn’t even know about this place, and four of Cain’s mercs had found me? How? I’m not sloppy. I know I hadn’t been followed here, because I’d been watching. So...how in the ever loving fuck did they manage to find me? Not luck, that’s for damn sure.
I couldn’t figure it out, and that was a serious problem.
I scrambled to my feet and jogged up the stairs to Temple.
As soon as I came into view, she rushed over to me. “Duke! There was so much shooting, I was sure you’d—shit, you’re bleeding!”
Awareness was returning, now that the high adrenaline of the shootout was receding. I touched my earlobe, and found the lower half of it missing, blood dripping onto my shoulder. “Guess I won’t be getting that earring I was thinking about, huh?”
Temple gaped at me. “You’re cracking jokes?”
I shrugged. “It’s just an earlobe, princess, I barely even feel it.” That was a lie—it stung like a motherfucker, but compared to a full-on gunshot wound, it was a minor inconvenience.
I checked the magazine of the suppressed pistol and found it empty. It didn’t use the same kind of rounds as any of the firearms I had, and the suppressor wouldn’t fit any of them either, since I was carrying all 9mm pistols and this one was a 5.56. Which sucked, but whatever. I stuffed the empty firearm into the duffel bag—since I wasn’t the type to leave a perfectly good gun behind, especially if it had my fingerprints on it and had been used to kill more than one someone. Then I threaded my arms through the cloth handles of the duffel bag so I was carrying it backpack style.
I pulled Temple face to face with me. “Got a bit of a mess going on down there, princess, so you may want to close your eyes and let me lead you down, okay?”
“Is this how it’s going to be?”
“What do you mean?”
She gestured at the stairwell. “People shooting, you bleeding, dead dudes everywhere…”
I shrugged and nodded at the same time. “Yeah, probably.”
She sagged against me, her head buried against my chest. “Yay.”
I tipped her chin up. “Come on now, Fancy, where’s that sass?”
She jerked her chin away and re-buried her face into my shoulder. “It’s gone,” she drawled, “I lost it. Bye-bye.”
“Listen, kitten, I’ve kept you safe thus far, yeah?” I nudged her chin up when she didn’t reply. “Yeah?”
She nodded. “Yeah, but—”
“Well, I’ll continue keeping you safe.” I gave her my cockiest grin. “You’re with Duke Silver, babe. Ain’t no half-ass wanna-be two-bit thugs gonna get anywhere near you, and that’s a promise.”
What I wasn’t saying was that these guys hadn’t been half-ass, wanna-be, two-bit thugs. They’d had training, decent training at that, they’d just underestimated me and I’d gotten the drop on them. That last asshole had sent a few rounds my way, which had nearly had my name on them.
Temple frowned at me, but it was an amused frown, which didn’t make any sense, but there it was. “You really think highly of yourself, don’t you?”
“When you’ve been through the shit I have, not much will faze you. A few thugs trying to kill me? Meh.”
“What would faze you?” she asked.
I thought for a moment. “Me and my unit, back when I was with Delta Force, we were pinned down, surrounded, outnumbered, and running out of ammo. And then the fuckers went and tried to crash a goddamn helicopter into the location where we were hunkered down. Well, they didn’t try to, they did. Only the L-T saw it coming, so we had to make a break for it.” I hesitated, realizing she probably wouldn’t want to hear the rest of that particular story, “That wasn’t fun. Or, the time the helo I was in got shot down over enemy territory, and me and four other guys had to fight our way out. That was also severely lacking in chill.”
Temple stared at me. “That all really happened to you?”
I shrugged. “Well, yeah. Why?”
“And you survived it all?”
I laughed. “Clearly, since I’m standing here looking all sexy and shit.” I tapped her nose. “Babe, I grew up on the streets running in gangs. First time I saw a dude get shot I wasn’t even old enough to jerk off. Going into the Army just meant I got three squares a day and got paid to do gnarly shit, instead of risking arrest for just trying to scrape by.”
Her expression went soft. “You were homeless?”
I felt my walls wanting to slam up, my expression tightening, my natural tendency to tell her to fuck off with her questions and sympathy rising up inside me. “Something like that, yeah.” That was as nice an answer to that question as she was gonna get.
I slipped my hand over her eyes. “We gotta go. I hear the fuzz.”
It was long past time for the cops to get here, actually. The first shot had been five minutes ago, although it felt more like twenty—the shootout in the stairwell had only taken two or three minutes at most, despite how it had felt.
“Fuzz?”
“Cops,” I explained. “And I ain’t stickin’ around for questions.”
I led her down the first flight of stairs, guided her around the first dead guy, lifted her over the second, and skirted close against the wall to avoid the third.
“Something smells funny,” she remarked, hands outstretched, as if I’d let her run into a wall or something.
“That’s the smell of death, princess. Or, more accurately, the smell of a gut shot.”
“Why does a gut shot smell so bad?”
I debated on the best way of putting it. “Um…you open up the belly, what’s inside? Guts, right? Perforate those with slugs, well…you’re in for a bit of a stench.”
She gagged. “Oh. I’m sorry I asked.” We made it down another flight, away from the corpses, before I uncovered her eyes. “How many were there?”
“Three,” I said. “Well, four, including the guy upstairs.”
“Is that all of them, you think?”
“Of this group, probably.”
“How many are there, like, total?”
I shrugged. “No clue. Countless, would be my guess. He doesn’t pay them all directly, like, on a payroll. They live their lives, run their product, and keep their cut of the profits. Situation like this, they’ll get a call from one of Cain’s lieutenants giving ‘em instructions with a promise of a reward if they catch me. So it’s not like he has this army of mercenaries sitting around waiting to his bidding, not like that at all. This is a drugs and guns and prostitution ring, these guys are mostly just your average criminals who happen to work on his behalf.” I gestured back up the stairs. “The more of those guys I take out, though, the more pissed Cain is gonna get. Eventually he’s gonna send some of his real-deal trained mercenaries, ex-Spetznaz and KSK and whatever. That’s when this shit is really gonna get fun.”
“We must have drastically different notions of fun, Duke,” Temple said. “My idea of fun is spending an afternoon shopping on Rodeo Drive, or having a long brunch with my girlfriends. Running for my life and getting shot at is not fun.”
I paused at the entrance of the building, peering outside. It looked safe, so I grabbed the door handle, but Temple stopped me.
“Um, are you going out there like that?” she asked.
I stared at her. “Like what?”
She gestured at my shoulder holsters. “The guns? Isn’t it…a little obvious? I mean, the police take one look at you, think, huh, we just got a call about a shooting, and that guy is wearing guns right out in the open, so—”
“Okay, okay, I get your point,” I cut in. “Hold on a second.”
I jogged back up t
he stairs to where the three corpses were; the first guy I’d shot had been a single round to the forehead, and he’d been wearing a windbreaker, which hopefully wasn’t too messy. I found the guy in question, head hanging backward off of a stair tread, dripping nasty on the step below. And bingo, his windbreaker was brain-matter free, thank god. I stripped him of it, slid the duffel off my shoulders, and shrugged into the jacket—the dead guy was a bit smaller than me, so it was a tight fit but it disguised the holsters. I snagged the duffel and hustled back downstairs.
Temple stared at me as I led her outside. “Is that...from one of the guys you killed?” she asked as I led her out of the building and away from it as fast as possible without looking obvious.
I nodded. “Yeah. Most expedient way of solving the problem, as I don’t keep clothes at this place either, and we don’t have the time for me to go back up even if I did.” I gestured at the crowed around us, people milling, chatting, checking cell phones to see if there was news on what was going on. The first cruisers were just starting to arrive and were setting up a cordon, but hadn’t started blocking access yet. Cops scrambled out of the cars, weapons drawn, chins dipped to report into radio mics
“What do you do at a long brunch?” I asked, trying to sound casual as we pushed through the crowd of onlookers. .
“Um, well? We drink a lot of mimosas and eat finger food and talk about boys and gossip, basically. Girl stuff.” She was keeping up the charade like a champ, bless the girl.
I laughed. “Oh. And a long brunch is what? An hour?”
Her turn to laugh. “An hour? Hardly. If you’re not still there at, like, three or four, you’re an amateur. We brunch until dinner on a regular.”
I goggled at her. “And you literally just sit around and get wasted and gossip? Like, all day?”
We were away from the bulk of the crowd by now, and had reached an intersection; I turned at random, my main priority now being to just get us away from the scene, ASAP.
Duke: Alpha One Security: Book 3 Page 10
