Chapter 24
Chapter Twenty-Four
The tie whipped through Javi’s fingers.
The snarling had stopped. Bourneville bolted towards the maze of storage units in eerie, focused silence. Just a slim black streak that disappeared into the shadows before Luka Horvat’s “What are you—” filtered through the speakers on the phone.
He left the phone. If he got this wrong he didn’t want to hear the consequences play out in real time.
Ahead of him, he saw Bourneville skid around the corner at the end of the aisle.
By the time he got there, she was already out of sight, somewhere in the maze of containers.
She was moving too fast for the security lights to catch her, but Javi followed the trail of them as they flicked on in her wake.
Somewhere in the maze, he heard Luka’s voice—not so pleasant now—yell, “You fucked up, Agent Merlo.”
Maybe.
He’d be the one who had to live with that.
A sharp corner at speed staggered him off the side of a container. It made a hollow sound on impact, the metal still holding traces of the day’s heat. Javi bounced off and kept moving.
Raised voices echoed disorientingly off the rows of metal boxes. It made it hard to triangulate where they were coming from. Javi resisted the urge to try and just kept his focus on the next light in the row as it flicked on.
The sharp retort of a gunshot cut through the night. Reaction flinched across Javi’s shoulders, and he faltered for a second. The ragged, horrified howl that ripped out of someone a second later made him exhale with relief.
It also made the vague shadow on top of a nearby unit look in that direction. The sudden, jerky movement was sharp enough to catch Javi’s attention. He stopped abruptly, feet sliding on the dirty concrete, and spun around.
He made eye contact with the man crouched up on container 56 for a beat.
Then he swung his arm up in one smooth movement and shot him.
The bullet hit the man square in his center of mass and threw him back.
His arms swung out as if he was trying to steady himself as he staggered backward.
Something dropped from his hand and clanked off the roof.
There was a cold part of Javi that recorded that fact for his report later as evidence of a weapon.
The man’s eyes widened in almost comical surprise as he teetered on the edge of the roof.
Javi shot him again before he could fall, a headshot this time.
The surprise was gone.
Outspread arms dropped, and the man’s suddenly slack body pitched off the roof. It landed with a muffled, meaty thud, and someone yelped “Jesus!” in reaction.
There was another gunshot, chased by a shocked yell of pain.
“Not fucking me!” someone screamed.
Javi pushed himself back into a run. His friend on the rooftop had taken enough time that he’d lost the trail of security lights, energy-saving measures flicking them back off again. The chaos and noise of the scene ahead of him was close enough now that he could find it on his own.
There was a gap ahead in the row. One container had been set down on a rock, the box of it tilted at a corner, and the one next to it shifted sidelong to make room.
Javi took the shortcut. It slowed his pace as he shuffled through, one hand against the rough, blistered box for balance, but it gave him some element of surprise.
Two golf carts and a cherry picker were parked in the heart of the container maze. There were four of Horvat’s men left and a twitchy woman with bleach-blond hair who was cowered right back against the bright yellow side of the cherry picker.
One man was down, white-faced and crying as he clutched the top of his leg with both hands.
His leg was still pumping blood in slow, ruddy gouts, but from the dark splatters of blood sprayed over the concrete around him, it would be worse if he let go.
That left three. One of them was trying to keep a grip on a struggling, bloody-faced Cloister.
The other two were trying to deal with Bourneville.
She was latched onto the arm of a blond man in what had been, before it got shredded, an expensive leather jacket.
The face was different from the one on file—with a new nose and the blurring puffiness of excess—but close enough.
Luka Horvat.
The man staggered as Bourneville thrashed her whole body. Fresh blood splattered over his boots. He tripped and went down on his knees. There was a wound in his other arm too, blood soaked down the front of his T-shirt.
“Do something!” he screamed.
One of his men, jacked and balding, raised a gun. The other man slapped it down.
“You wanna shoot him again?” he asked as he grabbed a heavy metal rod off the golf cart. He swung it in a short, vicious practice swing as he started forward.
“Federal!” Javi yelled as he stepped out into the open. “Drop the weapon.”
They didn’t.
The big guy cocked the cheater bar back, the flared end scraped with old paint, to swing at Bourneville. Meanwhile, Baldy apparently didn’t have any qualms about shooting Javi. He did a half-turn on the ball of his foot as he raised the gun.
Javi shot the thug with the cheater bar first. The bullet hit the guy’s shoulder, high enough that it splintered through his collarbone and splashed out the back of his neck, and staggered him back a step.
He dropped the bar from suddenly numb fingers to clatter on the ground.
While he decided whether he had any fight left in him or not, Javi threw himself to the ground in a skidding slide.
Baldy’s hands jerked as he tried to track Javi’s motion. It was bad luck more than good aim that his first shot caught Javi’s calf.
It wasn’t the first time someone had shot at Javi. It was the first time he’d been shot.
He registered the impact first. His leg felt like a truck had driven over it, a heavy, crushing pain that radiated from his calf up the back of his leg to his knee. Then it went numb.
That wasn’t going to last.
“Fuck,” he spat through clenched teeth.
Baldy steadied his aim as Javi tried to get his leg under him.
The man’s nostrils flared, and his mouth twitched as he readied himself to be a cop killer.
Javi was a good shot. He had always been solidly in the top ten, but never the best. Even the best—Alvin Cowper, an ex-Mormon who always looked vaguely surprised other people thought it was hard—wouldn’t be able to aim, fire, and drop Baldy before the man was able to finish squeezing the trigger.
What else was there to do but try, though?
Javi tried to bully his shock-heavy arms into cooperating.
Before he could fire, Cloister lunged in from the side and looped his cuffed hands under Baldy’s chin.
As six-foot-three of bone and muscle yanked him off his feet, Baldy’s finger jerked instead of squeezed.
The bullet skimmed the air next to Javi’s ear, a hot whine of noise and sharp, itchy pain.
He glanced quickly toward the guy who’d had hold of Cloister. The man was laid out on the ground, his scalp split open down to the bone where Cloister had smashed it against the side of the cherry picker.
The blond woman has sunk to the ground, head buried in her knees and hands over the back of her head. As Cloister grimly strangled Baldy, the man’s face red and swollen all the way up to his hairline, Javi braced his hand on the ground and pushed himself to his feet.
Oh yeah. He bit down on the inside of his cheek, as if that pain would help. That hurt. His leg felt like someone had poked a hot iron into it.
Bourneville yelped. It was a high-pitched, raw sound, and something about it sounded bad. Javi had never had a pet when he was a child and definitely not as an adult, but it didn’t matter. That was the shocked noise that something in pain it didn’t understand made.
He staggered around, trying not to put his weight on his leg. Luka Horvat was back on his feet. The cheater bar that his goon had dropped was in his hand, cocked back, and Bourneville staggered back from him on three legs. Her side looked wrong, caved in, and her breathing was uneven.
Luka peeled his lips back from bloodied teeth in a grimly satisfied smile as he swung in a brutal arc at her head.
“No!” Javi yelled as he dragged his shock-heavy arm up. He wasn’t sure he could feel the trigger, but he tightened his grip anyhow.
“Fass!” Cloister snapped.
And even bloodied, broken, and three-legged, Bourneville did as she was told.
She lurched forward under the swing of the bar and grabbed Luka’s wrist. The muscles in her shoulders stood out as she shook her head like a terrier with a rat.
Sharp white teeth tore through the leather cuff and dug down to bone that gave with a dull, distinct snap.
Luka’s hand bent the wrong way, and he howled as the bar slid out of numb fingers.
Javi shot him.
He went down like a sack of wet meat. Bourneville stood over his corpse and shook it, snarling through the mouthful of crushed bone and flesh, until Cloister told her to release. Then she let go, backed up a few shaky feet, and sat down.
Cloister dropped the choking, half-conscious Baldy and staggered over to her. He dropped down on his knees next to her and ran shaking hands over her head and, carefully, down her ribs. She snapped at him weakly, teeth clicking in the air, and he grimaced.
“Backup is on the way,” Javi said. “Is she—”
Cloister wiped his nose on the back of his hand.
“She’s OK. She’s gonna be OK,” he said as Bon weakly licked his hand.
Javi noted that his wrist was swollen to the point the flesh was digging into the metal of the cuff.
Before he could ask, Cloister looked over at Javi, and his brain visibly tried to click from K-9 handler to boyfriend. “Shit. Are you—”
“Not taking it personally,” Javi said as he leaned back against the container. He should have picked up his phone, he thought grimly. “She’ll be OK, baby.”
Everyone was OK.