Riding Dirty

by Danika Fox

  “We were never family, Nicky,” he said, propping his feet up on the desk. “Like you said before, you owned me. But not anymore.”

  “I was good to you!” my father said, his ire starting to rise as he got up onto his knees. “I took you off the streets, gave you a place in my organization! You owe me everything!”

  “And how many times have I tried to make you proud?” Lonnie asked, swinging his feet back down off of the desk so fast that I almost jumped as he stood. “How many times have I tried to show you that all your investment was paying off?”

  He paced around the deck and over toward the two of us, his eyes wild, his usually neatly combed hair out of place in several places. He looked totally unhinged. “And what the fuck did it ever get me?”

  “You’re my right hand man!” my father protested. “You’re the closest thing I have to a son!”

  “Well, if this is how you treat a son, then it’s no wonder why your daughter skipped out on you,” Lonnie hissed, getting down on my father’s level, kneeling on the floor. “I was planning on ruining your reputation—playing the long game—but I really don’t have the patience for it.” He stood again and turned to me. “Especially not when I have two little wrenches in my plan, screwing everything up!”

  He shouted the last three words right in my face, spittle flying from his mouth before he turned away, strolling back around the study.

  “Caputo,” Sergei’s voice carried from the other side of the room. “A moment.”

  Lonnie gave a snarl of annoyance as he crossed the room over by the window, their voices too low for me to hear.

  “What’re we going to do, Daddy?” I asked, still working at trying to get some give out of the zip-ties. My wrists were already starting to get sore from the friction of the plastic against my skin.

  “I don’t know what the hell we can do, sweetie,” my father admitted, looking over his shoulder at Lonnie. “If there’s as many men out there as I think there are, then we might not stand a chance even if we do manage to get out of these.”

  He was right. Sergei and his men definitely had numbers on their side, and without anyone to back them up, I honestly had no idea how we’d ever manage to make it out of the house alive, let alone some place that was by any means any safer.

  Everything looked hopeless, and if something didn’t turn in our favor soon, then we were both about to be executed.

  “If you want to fucking stand there and make comments about how I’m doing things, then why don’t you do something useful and go check on those fucking goons of yours, since they apparently forgot how a goddamn radio works?”

  Sergei muttered something under his breath in Russian before turning and leaving, taking one of his henchmen with him with another barking commands in his native tongue.

  From the looks of it, we were going nowhere fast.

  But then our luck turned.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw something move just outside of the window right as Lonnie turned his back to it, something that looked vaguely human-shaped. I squinted, trying my best to make it out as I watched it slowly move along, just barely cresting over bottom of the window as it went.

  And then a very familiar face appeared.

  Crush! I thought, my heart suddenly soaring in my chest just before his face disappeared back into the darkness of the night outside.

  I tried to hide my smile, to avert my eyes from where I’d seen Crush just moments before. But it was no good.

  “And what the fuck are you smiling at?” Lonnie snarled, suddenly in front of me, blocking my view of the window. “Pretty damn sure this is the last moment I’d be smiling in your shoes.”

  “I’m smiling because all of this is your fault, Lonnie,” I said, staring up at him. “Just like everything else, this is all because you fucked up.”

  “Shut your goddamn mouth, you little bitch,” Lonnie growled, raising his hand to slap me.

  “Don’t you dare touch my little girl!” my father snarled, straining against his own bonds, drawing Lonnie’s attention away from me. “I should have left you in the gutter where I found you, Caputo, with that drunk of a father of yours.”

  Lonnie shoved my father onto his back, stepping forward and pressing his foot down onto his chest. I could hear my father wheeze as Caputo laid into him with all his weight.

  “You don’t get to talk to me that way anymore, you piece of shit has-been. I’m going to be the one calling the shots, especially after they all hear how you offed yourself after your pretty little girl decided she’d rather be dead than back with her daddy.”

  “God, you sound like such a fucking idiot,” I muttered, trying to keep my cool as I watched him constrict my father’s breathing. “No one would believe that.”

  “I don’t really need them to believe it,” he laughed, taking his foot off of my father’s chest and turning to face me. “I just need to make sure they don’t think I had anything to do with it.”

  Lonnie turned his back on us, and once more I pulled at the plastic ties around my wrists. With one final tug, I finally felt them give, the tension just slack enough that I could get my hands through.

  “It won’t matter what they think, Lonnie,” I said, looking over at him as he took his place behind my father’s desk once more. “Not after tonight. Not after you’re lying dead on the floor.”

  “Oh, yeah?” he laughed, spinning in my father’s high-backed chair. “And who’s going to kill me? You? Last I checked you had your hands tied, and in case you missed it, I’ve got a gun.”

  “Enough,” Sergei said as he pushed into the room. “We have a problem. My men are missing. We need to search the grounds and—”

  “Yeah, I wouldn’t worry too much about them right now. You’ve got enough to deal with right here,” Crush said.

  I’d never been more happy to see him in my whole life. And not just because from where I was sitting, what he was holding in his hands looked an awful lot like a goddamn Uzi.

  26

  Crush

  Everything was chaos.

  Caputo let out a scream as the air filled with the rapid pop-pop-pop of the SMG, everyone in the room hitting the deck. I watched Sergei take cover behind Falcone’s desk, putting an armchair between the two of us for cover.

  “You are much more courageous than I thought, Mr. Crush,” Sergei called, from his hiding place, a laugh underlining each word. “I underestimated you, I think.”

  The way Sergei talked, you might have thought he was having an actual good time, and when he came up over the top of the desk he was grinning from ear to ear. I ducked back behind the armchair as bullets flew through the fabric and exploded its innards out and into the fire. I was going to need something a little more substantial if I was going to make it through this.

  I glanced at the side of the room where Chrissy and her dad had taken shelter from the spray of gunfire. She didn’t seem hurt, but I couldn’t tell whether Falcone was still in one piece.

  “What? You are not going to at least do me the courtesy of making conversation?” Sergei laughed before falling back behind the desk again. I took the opportunity to let off another short burst of automatic fire in his direction.

  As he hid, I grabbed the coffee table that sat between the two armchairs and turned it on its side, moving behind it for a better vantage point. I need to catch him while he’s vulnerable, I thought as I sent another volley of bullets into Falcone’s rather expensive-looking solid wood desk. But from the way Sergei moved and took advantage of his surroundings, I couldn’t help but feel like he had more experience in these kind of situations.

  “I’m not a big talker,” I shouted back, hoping that maybe he might give something away while he moved.

  “Ah, man of action, yes?” he responded, popping off a shot that took a corner of the coffee table with it. “I respect that. It is a shame we did not meet under better conditions. I think I would have liked you.”

  Jesus fuck, this asshole liked the sound of
his own voice.

  I looked around for another spot where I might be able to close the distance between us without him noticing. I wasn’t going to get anywhere with him stuck behind that desk; he had too much cover, and I was going to run out of bullets eventually.

  A crash behind me forced me to turn my attention away from the Russian as three of his thugs burst through the door, weapons ready, but unsure of where to fire.

  That gap was more than enough to allow me to let a burst of gunfire off in their direction. Two of them took bullets directly in the chest while the second caught one in his shoulder, causing all three of them to hit the floor. The third gunman attempted to slink away, pushing at the floor with his feet, his own gun knocked out of reach as he fell.

  “I must admit, this is the most exciting thing that has happened since I came to this city,” Sergei said, as though he were talking about spending the day at goddamn Disneyland. I’d just taken out his men, and he didn’t even seem phased by it. “I will make sure you have a quick death, Mr. Crush.”

  “Shut the fuck up,” Chrissy hissed, rage filling every syllable as I turned to see her poking up over the table she’d hidden behind, gun in hand, and firing off a shot at Sergei.

  From the grunt of pain it sounded like she clipped him in the shoulder, though the laugh that followed didn’t make me any more confident in how this fight was going to end.

  “The little girl hit me,” the mob boss crowed. “But I think it was a lucky shot. We must see if she can do it again. I think you might have more luck now with two against one, Mr. Crush.”

  He was right. We had numbers, though I had no goddamn idea how good Chrissy actually was with that gun, or whether or not Sergei was right and that shot was just luck. But two against one meant that now I’d be able to move closer while Chrissy covered me—you didn’t need to be a crack shot. You just needed to know where the hell the trigger was and point the gun in the right direction.

  I looked across the room and locked eyes with Chrissy, offering a faint smile in an attempt to tell her I was glad she was alive, but all I got back was a look of mild anger and panic. I motioned toward Sergei, trying to mime out the act of firing at him on my signal.

  In response, her eyes widened and she pointed behind me frantically.

  I felt the chill of cold metal against the back of my head before I could understand what the hell Chrissy was trying to tell me. “Drop the fucking gun,” Lonnie Caputo whispered in my ear, pressing the muzzle harder against my scalp.

  Goddammit.

  I swallowed and slowly lowered the SMG onto the floor.

  I looked back toward Chrissy, her own gun trained on Caputo as he kicked mine away. This had just gone from bad to fucking abysmal.

  “Get up,” he said, “and tell your girlfriend to drop her gun too before I paint the floor with what little brains you have.”

  “Crush,” Chrissy began, but stopped as I held up a hand.

  “Just do what he says, Chrissy,” I told her, doing my best to sound like I wasn’t scared out of my goddamn mind. “We’re going to be fine.”

  “Not likely,” Caputo said, shoving me forward. I felt the odd press of something stuck in my belt against my back, suddenly reminded of the knife I’d taken earlier. “None of you are getting out of here.”

  “Finally, you are good for something,” Sergei growled as he stood up from behind the desk. “This was getting tiresome.”

  I moved as quickly as I could, stepping back onto Caputo’s toe and grinding the hard soles of my boot down until I heard something pop. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to draw his gun off of my head, giving me enough freedom to reach back and grab the knife from my belt.

  I swirled around as fast as I could, driving the point of the blade deep into Caputo’s arm, using my momentum to push him to the ground. He let out a scream that sounded more like it came from an animal than a person, which he summarily repeated as I pulled the knife back out again.

  Sergei let out a growl as Chrissy turned her gun toward him and opened fire, catching the mobster squarely in the lower right of his torso, drawing a string of curses from his lips as he returned fire, his eyes wide with rage.

  “Chrissy!” I shouted, grabbing Caputo’s gun from the floor. “Get down!”

  Sergei lifted his gun again, this time firing straight for the window, letting off two slugs.

  I squeezed the trigger, just barely missing his arm as he ran at full tilt toward the shattered window and leapt through. I vaulted the coffee table, gun still in hand as I chased after him, out the window, landing with a less than graceful roll that left my shoulder in searing pain.

  “Crush!” Chrissy called after me, but there wasn’t any time to stop or look back as I tore off after Sergei as he made a break for the front gate. God only knew how a man that big could run so damn quickly.

  As the two of us rounded the corner of the house, I managed to fire off a shot—nowhere near close enough to hit him, but enough to make him dive for cover behind a row of bushes and return fire.

  I put my back against a low wall as plaster and cement rained with every shot Sergei took. I fumbled with finding the release for the clip, desperate to get a sense of how much ammunition I had to work with. But as the magazine slid from the handle I felt a sinking feeling come over me. I was completely out.

  “Fuck,” I hissed, glancing over the wall to make sure I wasn’t getting snuck up on. If he found out that I was depleted, I was a dead man, and there was an old saying about bringing a knife to a gunfight.

  A silence grew as I tried to think of some kind of plan, anything that might save me from getting gunned down once Sergei realized he had the upper hand. I was running out of time.

  “Are you still there?” came the mocking tones of the mobster. “Not getting performance anxiety, are you?”

  Asshole, I thought, taking the knife from my belt, hoping to maybe get the jump on him if he got too close.

  “Is this hide and seek now?” he teased, his rich voice bubbling with sadistic laughter. “Because I am very good at this game, Mr. Crush. And I always win.”

  My heart was racing, my mind racing a mile a minute with all the ways this could all go wrong. My hands were slick with sweat, and for a moment I thought I might drop the knife from how badly I was shaking. I was almost sure this was going to be the last thing I ever did.

  I could hear the heavy sounds of footsteps approaching, a heavy rhythmic breathing—excited breathing. He was enjoying this, this little cat and mouse game we had going, and he knew full well that he was the cat.

  “Come out, come out, wherever you are…”

  Wait. Was he… purring?

  No. No, that wasn’t purring. It was...

  It was low at first, and then louder, rumbling like an entire pride of lions all roaring at once in the distance. But it wasn’t anything so exotic. It was motorcycle engines. A lot of them.

  The sound seemed to draw Sergei’s attention away from me, turned instead toward the cacophonous roar that was fast approaching. I knew this was going to be the only chance I was going to get, and I took it.

  I sprang from behind the wall, running at Sergei at full-tilt, knife raised high above my head. I let out a scream of pure fury, bringing the blade down just in time to watch the Russian turn his gaze back toward me, his eyes wide as I plunged the knife between his shoulder and neck.

  The world stood still for a moment as both of us stared, my hand still firmly holding onto the knife as I watched the Russian start to realize what had just transpired. His mouth moved, his eyes turning as best they could to look at where my knife was currently sticking from him, buried to the cross guard in his flesh.

  I pulled the blade back with a sickening sound, stumbling away as Sergei reached up to grasp at the now profusely bleeding wound. His eyes stayed glued to mine, wide with terror, and for the briefest moment before his lips curled into a kind of mad smile as he began to laugh, crimson gurgling up from between his lips.

/>   Slowly, the Russian mob boss crumpled to the ground, his hands still desperately clamping at his neck to somehow stem the tide of red that streamed from between his fingers.

  But there was nothing he could do. There was no staunching the flow.

  The knife slipped from my red, red hand.

  27

  Chrissy

  “Crush?” I called, retracing the way he and Sergei had ran as they’d chased one another around the side of the house. At first I had thought to wait for him to come back, but fuck that. He could be in serious danger. With Lonnie on the floor and no one else threatening my father, I untied his wrists and told him to stay put before I rushed after the two heavily armed men.

  I had no idea what I was going to find once I did catch up to them, but my gut told me that Crush would need me, and for my adrenaline-fueled brain, that was enough reason to go rushing straight into whatever danger was waiting for me, gun in hand.

  But as I turned the corner I came to a stop, a wall of muscle impeding my way. Crush was standing there, his shirt sprayed with blood that I hoped wasn’t his, a wet, red knife in his hand. It fell to the ground as he turned his gaze toward me.

  At his feet was the limp, lifeless body of the man who’d spent these last few days trying to kill me—the man who had haunted my dreams at night. His face was buried in the dirt, a gaping wound in the side of his neck spilling a tide of crimson onto the grass as Crush and I stood before one another.

  “Is he—?”

  “Yeah,” Crush replied, glancing down at Sergei’s corpse. “I didn’t have any other choice.”

  “I think it was either him or us from the beginning,” I said after a moment’s pause. “He wouldn’t have stopped, no matter what.”

  “I think you’re right,” he sighed, shaking his head. Before he could say another word I threw my arms around him. He stumbled, then found his footing and with a vengeance returned my embrace.