Chapter 32 #2
Lynn Carr had helped bury Mira Walsh, and now she was looking at Mira all over again, alive and holding Carr’s fate in her hands.
Good. Let it hurt.
“Ms. Walsh,” Lynn said.
Maren’s head came up. The look she gave Lynn was so sharp it should have left a slash across her face.
“Don’t,” Maren said.
Lynn swallowed. “All right.”
Colin kept his hand on Maren’s arm. “She got it. You have somewhere to take it?”
“Yes.” Lynn’s voice was controlled, but barely. “There’s a clean channel. A deputy director out of the western field office. Not Voss’s people. Not mine.”
“Name,” Colin said.
Lynn looked at him. “Not here.”
“Then you don’t get the package.”
Her gaze flicked around the garage. “We don’t have much time.”
“No kidding.”
“Voss expects confirmation within ten minutes.”
“Then start talking.”
Lynn’s mouth tightened. “You don’t understand. If I don’t send him proof that I have it, he’ll know.”
“He already knows,” Colin said.
Lynn went still.
There. That little freeze. Not surprise, exactly.
Fear.
Maren saw it too. “You know he sent Dekker.”
Lynn closed her eyes for one brief second. When she opened them, they were wet.
“I suspected.”
Colin’s blood went cold.
“You suspected,” Maren repeated.
Lynn looked at her. “I couldn’t change the location. If I pushed back, Voss would know I’d flipped.”
“So you brought us here anyway,” Maren said.
“Maren,” Colin said quietly.
Stay with me.
Maren drew a breath, but her gaze stayed on Lynn. “My sister died here.”
“I know.”
“Ray died because of you.”
Lynn flinched.
Good.
“I know that too,” Lynn said.
“I don’t forgive you.”
Lynn’s face crumpled just a fraction before she pulled it back together. “I’m not asking you to.”
“Good. Because if you were, I’d…I’d punch you.”
Despite everything, Colin almost smiled.
Lynn gave a single sharp nod, like she accepted the terms. “Fair.”
“Hailstorm,” Elissa said in Colin’s ear, voice suddenly tight. “I hate to interrupt what sounds like a very therapeutic conversation, but I just lost camera four. Northeast blind spot, elevator-side column.”
That’s when Colin saw movement in the shadows.
“Down, now,” he hissed as he pulled Maren to the cold, oily floor. Maren dropped.
Lynn did, too, but slower.
Dekker fired.
The sound of gunfire cracked through the garage, deafening in the concrete cavern.
Lynn jerked backward and slammed into the side of her Lexus.
Colin pushed Maren behind the front end of the SUV, putting his body over hers for the half second it took to make sure she was covered by the engine block, not the useless skin of the door.
“Are you hurt?”
“No.”
Good. She was unhurt and alive.
“Stay here and stay down.” He came up with his weapon already in his hand.
Another shot punched into the SUV above Maren’s head, glass exploding from the passenger window and raining down over the hood.
Maren flinched but didn’t move.
Colin shifted angles, using the SUV for cover, tracking the flash point from the blind spot near the elevator-side column. Dekker was exactly where Elissa had said camera four had gone dark.
Of course he is.
The man stepped out of shadow, weapon up, moving with the calmness of someone who had done this before and expected everyone else to panic.
Colin didn’t panic.
He put two rounds into the column edge where Dekker had been a fraction of a second earlier, forcing him back.
“Hailstorm!” Elissa snapped in his ear. “Watchtower on foot up the stairs. He’s entered level two. Sitrep.”
“Stay wide, Watchtower.” Colin said. “Dekker’s using the elevator column. Carr is hit.”
“Lilac?” Elissa asked.
“Uninjured.”
“Colin,” Maren said from behind him, voice shaking but present. “Lynn’s bleeding. It’s bad.”
Lynn was on the ground beside the Lexus now, one hand pressed uselessly against her upper shoulder. Blood slicked her fingers, too much of it.
Maybe arterial, maybe not. Hard to tell from here.
She was conscious. That was something.
Dekker fired again.
Colin ducked back behind the SUV as the round sparked off concrete behind him.
“Give me the package,” Dekker called. His voice was rougher than Colin expected. Not loud enough to carry to the floors below unless someone was already listening for trouble. A professional voice.
A dead man’s voice if I can get a clear shot.
Maren went very still behind him. Colin couldn’t afford to look at her.
“Package,” Dekker repeated. “And I let you walk away.”
Colin gave a short, humorless laugh. “You really think I’m that stupid?”
“No,” Dekker said. “I think you’re that attached.”
There it was.
The read.
Dekker had seen it. Maybe in the way Colin moved for Maren, or in the way his body stayed angled toward her even while he tracked the threat. Maybe because men like Dekker recognized love when they could use it as leverage.
Colin’s jaw tightened.
“She looks exactly like the one I already killed,” Dekker said. “Don’t make me do it twice.”
Maren made the smallest, pain-filled sound.
Colin’s vision narrowed.
Every promise. Every nightmare. Every time Juni had looked up at him and decided he would do. Every time Maren had trusted him with her life and her heart and that little girl’s future.
Colin breathed in. Held. Breathed out.
“Hailstorm,” Elissa said sharply. “Don’t let him pull you out of cover.”
Colin was already moving.
He crossed low behind the line of parked cars, counting the shots.
One. Two. Three.
Dekker was good, but he’d expected Colin to stay pinned behind the SUV with Maren. He might have clocked that Colin and Maren were together, but he didn’t know what she was to him.
Dekker shifted out from the column, trying for a new angle on Maren. Colin saw the silhouette and fired twice.
Dekker staggered back. Not down, damn it.
He’s wearing a vest.
Dekker raised his weapon. Colin fired again, higher this time.
Dekker’s head snapped back. He dropped.
The silence afterward hit almost harder than the gunfire. For one second, no one moved.
Then Maren said, “Colin?”
He turned. She was on her knees behind the SUV, pale, glass in her hair, the package still clutched against her body beneath her jacket.
Alive.
“Stay there,” he said. But she was already looking past him at Lynn.
Lynn still had one bloody hand pressed to her shoulder, but now her face looked gray and shocked.
Maren looked at Colin. Then she crawled out from behind cover.
“Maren, no.”
“She’s bleeding.”
“I said stay—”
“She dies, Mira doesn’t get justice.”
That stopped him only for a second. Then he moved with her, keeping himself between Maren and Dekker’s body as she reached Lynn Carr.
Maren dropped to her knees beside Lynn. “Move your hand.”
Lynn’s eyes rolled toward her. “It’s bad.”
“I know. Move your hand.”
To Colin’s surprise, Lynn obeyed.
The wound was high in the shoulder, too close to things Colin did not want nicked. Blood welled fast and dark between Maren’s fingers when she pressed both hands over it.
Lynn screamed.
“Sorry,” Maren said, not sounding sorry at all. “Don’t die.”
Lynn made a strangled sound. “I’ll do my best.”
“Do better than your best. You owe my sister that.”
Lynn flinched.
Good.
Colin swept his gaze back to Dekker’s body. The man was down near the column, one arm bent beneath him, weapon a few feet from his hand. He was still, but Colin didn’t trust dead until he’d verified it himself.
“Hailstorm,” Malcolm said in his ear. “I’m on four. Report.”
“Dekker down. Carr hit. Lilac uninjured. Need medical and extraction.”
“Copy.”
“Do not approach from the elevator column. Come wide.”
“Already doing it.”
Colin moved two steps away from Maren, just enough to keep his body between her and Dekker while he kept his weapon trained on the man who had murdered Mira Walsh, murdered Ray Castillo, torn apart a little girl’s bedroom, and tried to use Maren’s heart against them.
Dekker didn’t move.
Colin kicked the weapon farther away, then checked him.
No pulse.
Done. Fucking done.
“Colin,” she said.
He turned immediately.
“I need something to pack this with.”
He stripped off his overshirt and crossed back to her, tearing it as he moved. His hands were steady. Good. He needed them steady. Maren’s were steady too, though her face had gone pale beneath the glass glittering in her hair.
God, there’s glass in her hair.
Later.
He could fall apart over that later.
He pressed the wadded fabric into her hands. “Keep pressure. Hard.”
“I am.”
“I mean harder.”
Lynn cursed when Maren obeyed.
“Good,” Colin said. “You can complain. That means you’re breathing.”
Lynn’s eyes focused on him. “Dekker?”
“Dead.”
Her mouth trembled. For one second, she looked like she might cry.
Then she closed her eyes. “Voss will know.”
“Doesn’t matter. He’s going to know a lot of things soon,” Colin said.
Maren leaned closer, her voice low and fierce. “Who’s your clean contact? Give us the name now.”
Lynn’s eyelids fluttered.
“Lynn,” Maren snapped.
That got her eyes open.
Maren pressed harder. “You do not get to die in the same garage where my sister died without giving me the name.”
A weak, horrible smile touched Lynn’s mouth. “God. You really are her sister.”
“You’d better fucking believe it,” Maren said. “Name.”
“Santiago Rivera.”
Colin repeated it into comms.
Elissa’s voice came back immediately, all business now. “Got it. Running verification.”
Malcolm appeared between two parked cars, weapon up, face cold and unreadable. He took in Dekker’s body, Maren on the ground with both hands buried in Lynn Carr’s blood, Colin standing over them, and the envelope corner just poking out beneath Maren’s jacket.
“Hell of a morning,” Watchtower said.
A siren sounded somewhere below them. Maren looked up at Colin. He saw the terror she was holding back. He touched her cheek with the backs of his fingers.
“You’re doing good, baby.”
Her mouth trembled.
Then she looked back at Lynn and pressed harder.
“Don’t die,” she ordered.
Lynn groaned. “You Walsh women are very bossy.”
Maren’s eyes filled.
“Yeah,” she said. “We are.”
Malcolm lowered the massive bulk of his body beside them. “I’ve got her,” he told Maren. “You did good. Now move.”
Maren hesitated.
Malcolm looked up at her, Chicago tone in every word. “That wasn’t a suggestion, sweetheart.”
Colin helped Maren move out of the way. She held on to him tightly.
Malcolm put one hand over Lynn’s wound and held out the other. “Package.”
Maren pulled the manila envelope from beneath her jacket and passed it to him. He tucked it inside his own jacket without looking away from Lynn’s wound.
“Gun,” Malcolm said to Colin.
Colin’s jaw tightened.
“I’ll preserve it,” Malcolm said. “I’ll deal with local. I’ll deal with federal. I’ll deal with the whole damn alphabet if I have to. You two need to be clean and gone before this place turns into a damn circus.”
Colin handed over his weapon, hating every second of it.
Malcolm glanced at his face and snorted. “Take mine if it makes you feel better.” He held out his own gun, grip-first. Colin took it.
Maren looked between them like they were both insane, which, fair.
“White Toyota Corolla,” Malcolm said, pressing harder on Lynn’s shoulder. “First floor. Key’s in my left jacket pocket. Ironman will route you.”
Another siren wailed, closer now. Colin took the key.
Lynn groaned beneath Malcolm’s hand. He looked down at her. “Stay with me, Carr. You and I are gonna have a very unpleasant conversation when you’re not busy leaking all over my pants.”
Then he looked back at Colin. “Go.”
Colin didn’t argue.
He wrapped one arm around Maren, grabbed what little they had out of the SUV, and he got her the hell out of there.