Chapter 18 #2
“Is that what you think the problem is?” Joey jeered from the darkness. “That you and me are too much alike? My God, Stevie, get a fuckin’ grip.”
“Joey, duck,” Gideon mouthed, but nothing came out. No air. There was no air in his lungs. Damn, had he misjudged the punctured lung thing? The pressure in his chest, the swimming vision, all of it would seem to indicate that yes, yes he had.
But it didn’t matter. Stevie had landed in the center of the light and had aimed his weapon and opened fire, one, two, three times, the roar like an apocalypse in the little room.
Joey.
Gideon didn’t give him a chance to set up a fourth shot.
TRAINING—JOEY had it. You kept moving, you knew where your partner was, and you didn’t open fire if you couldn’t see what was beyond your target. He and Gail had come through the door and seen the shattered chair immediately, but no Gideon.
But the minute Stevie opened his mouth about Joey’s little buddy, Joey knew Gideon was somewhere in this fucking pit.
So smart, Gid, getting out of his line of sight. Harding’s remark about Gideon not having a knife to his throat while Joey tried to negotiate had chilled Joey to the bone, but apparently Gideon’s pointy brain had saved them that.
So Joey had gestured Pearson to swing around to under the stairs while he called attention to himself and then sprinted, putting an old freezer between him and the psycho with the gun.
Gideon, where are you?
The three shots rang out, and Joey risked a glance over the obstacle hidden in the shadows. Stevie had been aiming for where Joey’s voice was, so he hadn’t even hit the thing.
And that’s when Gideon leapt out of the shadows and onto Stevie Carlyle’s back, his left hand rising and falling like a serial killer’s while Stevie dropped his gun and screamed.
With a howl, Joey’s father stumbled back against the far wall while Joey scrambled toward him, knife drawn.
He heard Gideon’s thud and groan as he connected to the wooden partition that was backed with brick, and then Joey was on top of Stevie, his own knife slicing the old man’s throat before they were both borne to the ground.
With a heave and a kick—and not a backward glance—he yanked his father’s body off Gideon’s and tried to assess the damage.
Oh God. Oh God—he looked like hell.
“Gail!” he cried, and she was right there at his shoulder. “Gail, God, we need a medic! We need… he’s coughing blood!”
“Punctured lung,” she said, and her voice was shaking but in control. He knew that, he thought, but he couldn’t say it. Oh God. “His ribs must be broken. Gid? Gid, can you hear us?”
“Joey…,” Gideon gurgled. “Couldn’t let him—”
“I’m fine, Gid,” Joey said, and his own voice was not in control, nothing was in control.
“Carlyle!” The voice at the top of the stairway had Pearson aiming her weapon, but Joey was on his knees, Gideon’s head pulled gently into his lap.
“Boss!” she called. “We’re here. We need a bus for Gid, Clint. He’s in a bad way.”
“Can he be moved?” Harding asked.
“No,” she said. “No. Punctured lung, broken ribs—”
“We got a bus waiting for the place to be cleared,” Harding said. “But I’ll have—”
“Move, Clint, I’m coming down.”
“Blodgett,” Clint muttered, stepping aside. “Who was supposed to stay outside with the bus.”
“I love you, Clint, fuck off.”
Later, Joey would tell Gideon that, he thought. Later, he and Gid would laugh about the big scary Clint Harding’s husband telling him “I love you, Clint, fuck off.”
But there was no laughing, not now, not when Gideon was struggling for breath. He couldn’t. He couldn’t. He couldn’t—
“Joey,” Harman Blodgett murmured, “lay him down again. We need a cervical collar to check for spinal injuries. There’s medics coming down. You should go up with Harding so we can tend to him.”
“Gideon?” Joey said, and it seemed to be the only word he had as he stroked Gideon’s battered face. “Gid?”
“Baby,” Harman said softly, “I need you to step aside. We’ll stand for him, Joey. You need to trust us with him, okay?”
My mate. My mate. My mate.
You have a pack, Joey. Have some faith.
He still didn’t have words, but he allowed himself to be pulled away, led up the stairs by Pearson, until Harding took his hand at the landing and pulled him out of the path of two very determined EMTs, jogging past with a stretcher that might just make it down the stairs.
When he got up to the kitchen, he glanced around, then blinked, then glanced around again.
“Jesus,” he graveled. “There’s a lotta fuckin’ dead people in this kitchen.
” The white-tiled walls were spattered with blood—it was something out of a horror movie—and no fewer than four guys lay sprawled on the kitchen island, on a counter, on the prep table, on the floor, all of them with holes in their chests or their throats.
One guy—a fifth—lay on his front with a knife hilt protruding from directly between his C3 and C4 vertebrae.
“Nice throw,” he muttered.
“Yeah,” Harding muttered. “It’s a beauty. Crosby, you got anything to say about that?”
Joey turned to Crosby in a daze and saw he was being tended to by another EMT for what looked to be a solid knife wound in his shoulder.
“All the other guys were in the front yard getting shot by you people,” he muttered.
“Joey said I needed to clear a path through the kitchen, so I cleared a path through the kitchen. Do you not have a path through the kitchen, Boss?”
“I appreciate not getting unalived by that asshole there,” Harding said, with a jerk of his chin to the guy with the knife in his back. “Who got you?”
“That asshole,” Crosby muttered, pointing his toe at a very surprised-looking dead man without a throat. “Sorry, Carlyle, I was doing that when Stevie got through.” He glanced at Joey and swallowed. “Gideon?”
“Getting worked on,” Joey said, feeling dizzy. “He’s….” His voice broke. God, he remembered how Pearson and Garcia had fallen apart when Crosby had almost died, and now he knew what that was like. He’d always assumed Crosby would live—but he couldn’t assume… couldn’t assume….
“He’s tougher than you think,” Harding said, and before Joey could retort that of course Gideon was tougher than anybody expected, he added, “but there’s something I need you all to see. Tal found it once we’d cleared the hostiles from the house.”
“Any arrests?” Pearson asked. What she was really asking was “Any survivors?”
“Not. Yet.” Harding’s expression was so grim, it took Joey a minute to realize what he might possibly mean. “Follow me.”
He led his way up the staircase to the upper floors and the place Joey remembered as his father’s study.
As he went, he saw Swan and Doba standing guard over a bedroom full of staff—two housekeepers, the young chef Joey had seen over Christmas, and two helpers, one possibly an assistant gardener.
Joey called Swan over before they passed.
“Be kind. I know we have to clear them, but if they got shoved up here when shit fell out, it means they have nothing to do with the business. This is a….” He grimaced. “It’s a room he let his guys use when they, you know, wanted to use someone. Nobody comes in here willingly.”
Swan nodded. “I got that vibe,” he said, glancing around distastefully. “I’ll hand them over to the first flatfoot that comes along and tell him to get their names and addies and let them go. Harding said he had a thing he needed us to see.”
“Yeah,” Joey said. He was pretty sure he knew what it was.
TEN MINUTES later, the whole unit was there, except for Gideon and Harm. Harm had radioed Harding to tell him that the bus was on its way to the hospital and to tell Joey it was good he’d stayed away. Joey didn’t ask what that meant. He understood his assignment.
He had to hold his shit together while Harding explained why having access to Stevie’s computer shit was putting that “we’re all dead” expression on his face, and then—he had promises from Pearson and Crosby on this—they would sedate him and drag him to the hospital to wait for Gideon.
He was being an adult. Gideon had taught him how to do this. His pack took care of him; he had to take care of his pack.
“Okay,” Clint said grimly. “Tal had about five minutes with this shit before she called me. Tal, you want to explain the sitch?”
She turned toward them all. “The sitch is that we have too many goddamned secrets,” she said seriously.
“You want to blackmail three-quarters of our elected officials? Our DOJ? Homeland Security? The cabinet? Bank presidents? This is the way to do it. Now some of it is dumb shit. We’ve got a daughter of a congressman who got revenge porned.
Somebody’s kid brother tried pot in college.
Shit that, in a sane political climate, wouldn’t mean jack squat, but as you know, those are not the times we live in.
And some of this shit is dangerous. Some of it is…
.” She grimaced. “It’s ‘secret police force will sneak into your bedrooms and disappear you’ dangerous.
You all know what I’m talking about. It needs to be released, but if we release it, we’re dead, our families are dead, and our unit is dead.
So this is big. And whatever we need to do, we need to agree to it.
This op, so far, it’s not sanctioned by the government.
They could just start by putting us in jail for coming over here to murder citizens, and that would shut us all up, and none of this would get addressed. ”
“But…,” Crosby said. “I mean, it needs to be addressed. I take it you got a plan to do that?”
Clint nodded. “Oh, I do. I’ve got a couple of channels I could send this through, and while there’s no guarantees it will all be taken care of—”
“It beats us getting disappeared from our beds as we sleep,” Natalia said, and Joey had a feeling she knew exactly what channels Clint was talking about.
“So,” Gail said slowly, “we wouldn’t be going public with this information. Who do we turn it over to?”