17. “Whatta Man” #2
Raye took a second, then ordered, “Head to Titus’s.”
“Roger that,” Jessie replied. “See you there.”
She disconnected.
I held both phones in my hands and said to Raye, “Remember, Gabe and Cap know what they’re doing. The bad guys might have cut them off, but we know our guys have a plan and the upper hand. Okay?”
“They know the Nightingale guys have Kev, and they want Kev,’ Raye replied.
Oh yeah.
Whoever this was knew the guys had Kev, and they wanted him.
“They think they can get their hands on one or more of the Nightingale boys and use them as leverage to deliver Kevin,” Raye continued.
Oh yeah.
They were totally thinking they could do that.
I was sensing Kev knew more than he was telling anybody.
I was sensing with what was right then happening, the Nightingale guys would figure that out.
So last, I was sensing Kev was going to be in a load of hurt sometime very soon.
No, what was last was, I hoped Cap and Gabe figured this out (but they would) and called it in (though, I knew they would) so the rest of the guys (most importantly to me, Javi) knew to keep an eye out for these kinds of shenanigans.
The Merc came up on our tail about three blocks from Titus’s.
We had our tasers out and were ready to rumble after we parked outside Titus’s and rolled out of our vehicles.
Titus appeared from the shadows beside his man-cave garage, and he was making hand motions, though it wasn’t to us.
“Get inside!” he ordered.
Now that was to us.
“Cap is—” Raye began.
“Baby girl, love the love and concern,” Titus cut her off. “But get your ass inside my garage.”
I grabbed Raye’s hand and started to tug her to the garage.
As I did this, I saw two cars down the way pull in at angles, cutting off traffic on Titus’s street.
At that point, I heard car noises coming from the other direction.
Thinking they might be Gabe, Cap and their pursuer, I turned that way.
But it wasn’t. Instead, I saw two more cars stop, then expertly, and quickly, back into two driveways right across from each other.
We’d just got to the shade at the side of the garage when it went down.
Gabe’s Jeep raced down the road, a shiny BMW in hot pursuit.
We all hugged the side of the garage and watched, because, at the last minute, on a screech of tires, Gabe braked, then swung into Titus’s driveway and came to an abrupt halt.
After the BMW passed them, the two cars pulled out of the driveways down the street, boxing the BMW in from behind.
Both Gabe and Cap were out of the Jeep faster than you could blink, each with guns in their hands.
But Titus was on the sidewalk.
And he had a gun too.
He took aim.
BLAM!
We jumped.
The back tire of BMW exploded.
BLAM! BLAM!
We jumped again.
Cap and Gabe were also on the sidewalk, guns up, eyes to the sights, and the front tire was out.
The car careened, hit the bumper of one of the cars blocking the street, jumped the curb, smashed into a tree and stopped.
Cap, Gabe, Titus, and Titus’s four guys who’d exited their vehicles sprinted toward the car.
“Oh God,” Raye whispered.
I still had hold of her hand, and I kept hold.
But the two guys in the car didn’t have time to do anything tragic.
First, their airbags had deployed, so they were fighting those.
Second, Cap went to one side, and at an angle that would cause no bodily harm, he shot out the window at the same time his shot deflated the airbag. Gabe went to the other side, and he did the same thing.
Then they reached in the windows and one-armed dragged the men out of the car and onto their bellies. And in such a blur I didn’t know where they even got the zip ties, both of the men were hogtied on their stomachs on Titus’s neighbor-two-doors-down’s lawn.
More men showed out of what seemed like thin air while the first wave jogged back to the cars in the street.
Those cars drove away.
A huge Ram truck appeared and backed up to the BMW. A guy waiting there made short work of hooking the BMW to the back jack on the Ram.
The Ram drove off, towing the BMW.
And Cap and Gabe, with Titus’s men helping, picked up the dudes they’d just nabbed and carried them to Titus’s man cave, walking right by us, and I wasn’t the only one who watched with my mouth hanging open.
Oh, and by the way, Titus winked at us as he passed.
The door closed behind them when they got the men into Titus’s garage.
And Titus’s street looked like a perfectly executed takedown didn’t just happen.
I thought I even heard a bird tweeting.
All of this took, at most, five minutes.
Maybe half a minute later, as we stood in stupefied silence, Jinx rolled up in her older model BMW, parked on the curb, got out, and called, “ Hola , bitches!”
No one greeted her.
But Willow whispered, “Did I just see what I think I just saw?”
“I think we all saw it,” Jessie replied.
We hesitated two more seconds.
Then we raced into Titus’s garage.
* * *
We were sitting on Titus’s couches in his man cave: Luna, Raye and Shanti on one, me, Jess and Willow across from them.
Titus was sitting on his throne up on the dais at our sides, Jinx lounged at his feet, her back to his chair, her short legs stretched out in front of her, angled down the steps, ankles crossed.
We were sipping delicious palomas Titus made for us from his fab wet bar (they had a sugar rim and everything).
Don’t get the wrong idea about Titus’s throne, or the killer portrait of himself behind it, or the gold Camaro that was parked in that garage (though it was more like an art showpiece). The wet bar. The floor-to-ceiling wine rack.
Yeah, it was all way cool, but it wasn’t affectatious.
This had to be as it was because serious stuff happened in this room.
Like, lives being saved.
We did not, as we’d all hoped we would, get to witness a Nightingale interrogation.
Within minutes, Roam, Liam, Brady and Jacob showed.
They cut the zip ties that connected wrists to ankles, yanked the bad guys to their feet, loaded them up in their Denalis, and they took off.
Cap and Gabe went with them, leaving us with Titus to look after us, and promises we’d stay with Titus until someone returned to play bodyguard.
Roam, by the way, lived on the streets with Cap when they were kids. They were both adopted by the same lady, Shirleen (who I knew, because she’d moved down to Phoenix—she was amazing, and not just because she did that). So they were like brothers (or even more like brothers than actual brothers).
But also, Roam, along with Cap and Eric, were Mace’s seconds in command because they all had the most experience and had been working with Nightingale or at Mace’s security company (which had merged with Nightingale Investigation) for years.
As they took their new suspects (prisoners?), Titus made us cocktails.
All of Titus’s guys were long gone.
One thing that was good about all of this (outside the cocktail and getting to hang with Titus), Roam had assured us the team had been made privy to what was happening and would be on more than their regular high alert.
Nevertheless, for the most part, none of us had been able to process all we’d witnessed outside in the ensuing time.
I knew we were going to process when Jinx groused, “I’m ticked I missed all the action.”
That was when Raye looked to Titus and remarked, “Methinks you’re not a one-man band.”
Methought so too.
Big time.
Titus smiled largely and replied, “Would love to have that kind of pull with the people, darlin’, but as it’s been throughout the millennia, the only way to keep the peace is to raise an army.”
Hmm.
I’d sensed there was way more to Titus than we knew.
Now that was certain.
Like this was any other day, hanging out with Titus in his pimped-out space, Jinx set aside her drink, dug in her bag, pulled out a nail file and started filing her nails.
This reminded me to ask, “How’s your accountant?”
Jinx stopped filing her nails and shot a sour face at me.
I wasn’t sure how to take that, but I wasn’t a fan.
Neither was Luna, because she asked, “Has he stopped seeing you?”
Jinx rolled her eyes.
I smiled.
He hadn’t stopped seeing her.
“What’s this?” Titus asked.
“Jinx has a client who brings her flowers,” Luna spilled.
Jinx turned her sour face to Luna.
“What’s this, baby?” Titus repeated on a murmur.
“It’s nothing, Titus,” Jinx said. “It just makes him feel better about fucking a whore.”
Titus’s lips thinned before he admonished, “You know my rule about runnin’ yourself down in my space, girl.”
Jinx shut her mouth but gave us the stink eye.
“You girls met this guy?” Titus asked us.
“Met? No,” Jessie answered. “But we’ve seen him and he’s cute. They wave at each other when he leaves.”
Now Jinx was giving the homicidal eye to Jessie.
“You bein’ courted, Jinx?” Titus asked.
“It’s not that,” Jinx lied.
“It is. It’s—” Raye started.
“Leave it,” Titus ordered quietly. “She’ll clue in. And if she doesn’t, she’ll pay the price.”
Wise words.
At this juncture, Shanti queried, “Um…is anyone still reeling about how badass all of that was?”
Oh yeah.
We all were.
“I’m reeling about how I’m going to manage sustaining still being mad at Cap, which he deserves, at the same time jumping his bones and fucking him stupid, which he also deserves, because that was all kinds of hot,” Raye replied.
She was so right.
“It’s big,” Willow said.
Since this didn’t make sense in the current convo, we all looked to her, but only Luna asked, “Sorry?”
“Whatever Kevin is hiding,” she answered. “Whatever he knew Trevor was into.” She turned to me. “You said Javi said he talked yesterday?”
I nodded.
She shook her head.
“If he did, if he told them everything, then they’d know what’s going on, they’d put a stop to it, and someone wouldn’t have come after Cap and Gabe today,” she replied.
I harked back to what I saw pass between her and Gabe earlier, and that she might have been freaking right alongside Raye when stuff started going down with Cap and Gabe in their vehicle tussle and chase, but I couldn’t get a lock on it before she spoke again.
“Kevin’s weak. Those guys put even minor pressure on him, he’d spill his guts. The fact that he didn’t means this is big. He’s scared. And he’s not scared of the Nightingale guys, so that means he’s scared of something even scarier than the Nightingale guys.”
We all sipped our palomas pensively on this thought because it was difficult to conjure up something scarier than the Nightingale guys.
Especially after what we’d just seen. You know, with pulling into a driveway, stopping on a dime, hauling butt out of it armed, taking out tires with one shot, sprinting toward a vehicle with two men in it you knew meant you harm, extricating those men and subduing them in ten seconds flat, then disappearing them from the premises about five minutes later.
Yeah.
That was all kinda scary.
Kick butt and hot AF.
But scary.
We all took another contemplative sip of our palomas.
Jessie snapped out of it first. “You got anything on this for us, Titus?”
“Baby girl, you know I champion you women’s mission,” Titus said.
“What you also need to know is, you get into this shit, you take baby steps. You don’t jump from feelin’ your way on the streets, developing a network, laying the foundation of a reputation, to wading in when a man gets his throat cut. ”
More wise words.
But this time they were also scary.
“That said,” Titus carried on, “since it’s obvious I can’t stop you, if I knew something, I’d help you.
But I got no lock on this. I’ve asked around, no one knows this guy who got whacked.
No one knows dick. And before you ask, those two men who came in and out of my garage, I’ve never seen them either. ”
Well, it was sweet he’d be in to help, but that wasn’t helpful.
We all took another sip of our palomas.
“Bitches!” Jinx snapped.
We all looked to her.
“He just gave you a clue,” she stated.
He did? I thought.
“He did?” Willow asked.
“If Titus doesn’t know the players,” Jinx explained, “this isn’t street.”
“Mm-hmm,” Titus agreed.
Oh boy.
We all looked at each other and not one of us did it easy.
Because, if this wasn’t street, we were wading into something else that was new, not just a guy who got dead in an ugly way.
And I could tell, even though we had no idea what we’d waded into, none of us had a good feeling about it.