9. Falcon #2
"Hold position," Zip snaps. "Wait for the group."
"No time," Carrot says, and the line goes to static where his answer should be, which means he's already gone quiet on purpose.
We’ve waited too long.
The SUV behind us closes in fast while the one ahead begins to slow. A minivan travels beside us, two kids are staring through the back window.
“I’m taking the side road,” I announce into the radio.
“No, Falcon,” Zip orders. “Stay where it’s public.”
“There are civilians beside us,” I argue. “I’m not bringing them into this.”
“Then pull over and hold your position,” Zip instructs.
“They’ll light up the entire street,” I warn him.
“You don’t know that,” he fires back.
I turn right anyway. Both SUVs follow.
I grab the radio. “Vulture, we’re drawing them south along Keeler Industrial.”
“You are not drawing anybody anywhere,” Vulture snaps.
“It’s too late for that,” I tell him.
“Falcon,” he warns.
“Civilians were exposed,” I explain. “I’ve got Hustler with me.”
“That doesn’t mean you sacrifice yourself,” Vulture growls.
Before I can answer, the radio dissolves into static.
A jammer.
Hustler checks his phone and shakes his head. “Fuck, no signal.”
“They’re professionals,” I say.
That is its own kind of confirmation, but it doesn’t change anything. We’re in it now. The road narrows, with warehouses rising on both sides and no pedestrians in sight.
The first shot slams into the tailgate like thunder.
“Fuck!” Hustler shouts as he ducks.
I floor it. A second shot takes out the rear window, glass spidering but holding, and I'm grateful for once that Condor's paranoid enough to armor everything we drive. Hustler's window comes down a crack.
"Don't lean out," I tell him.
"I know how not to get shot," he shouts at me.
"Could've fooled me." I watch him aiming his gun.
He fires twice and catches the windshield of the vehicle behind us, and it drops back, and the one ahead slows to block the road entirely. The trap is closing. I spot a loading bay to the left, there’s a chain-link gate half open, it’s too narrow for both vehicles but maybe enough for us.
"Hold on." I give him a warning.
"Oh, fuck me," Hustler says, and I turn hard into it, metal screaming down the passenger side as we clip the gate, and the SUV behind tries to follow and can't, its mirror exploding against the post.
Hustler laughs, half hysterical. "Beautiful."
"I’m not done yet." The yard dead-ends behind the warehouse. I brake hard. "Out."
We move fast, him taking the passenger side, me behind the engine block. The first SUV enters the yard, three men get out with a stance that tells me everything I need to know. They are not here to just scare us off, they are here to finish it.
I drop one before he clears the door. Hustler covers the right, calls two more moving, shots hitting the concrete beside us close enough that a fragment cuts my cheek and I barely register it. One man goes down to my next shot, another to Hustler's, a leg hit that'll slow him down at least.
A bike engine screams into the yard behind us, he’s coming too fast, and too close to the fight to be smart. For one disoriented second I think it's one of theirs before I recognize the cut.
"Carrot, get down…"
He doesn't. He comes off the bike already firing, giving the third man something else to look at besides us, buying Hustler and me the half second we need to get behind the engine block properly, and it works exactly the way he needed it to and exactly the way I never wanted it to.
The third man puts two rounds into him before I put one into the third man, and by the time I get to Carrot he's already stopped moving.
He was nineteen years old. He rode ahead of his own backup because he wanted to be the one who got there first, and I taught him that, every time I told a prospect that showing up mattered more than anything else.
He believed me, and now he's on a concrete floor that smells like diesel because of a decision that was never his to make in the first place.
I don't have time to feel any of it yet. Right now, there's still a fight, and there’s something about the quietness that follows the third man going down is wrong. It has nothing to do with grief and everything to do with tactics I'm too far inside my own guilt to trust.
Then I hear the engine. The second SUV is leaving. My stomach drops, not from relief, but from the sudden understanding that this was never the whole attack.
"Falcon," Hustler says.
"Phone."
"No signal," he says, and I think I knew that before he said it.
"Move back." We leave Carrot where he fell because there's nothing left to do for him and every second in the open is a second we don't have.
We run for the rear wall until one bar shows, then two, and my phone explodes with messages, Zip, Vulture, Condor, and the radio crackles back to life with gunfire behind Vulture's voice.
My blood turns to ice when Zip’s voice breaks through the radio.
“Falcon,” he says.
I stop breathing. “What happened?”
Shouting erupts in the background, followed by a crash. It sounds like carnage.
“They hit the women’s house,” Zip tells me.
No. That isn’t right. It can’t be right.
“Cara?” I force the word out.
Zip’s pause lasts less than a second, but it feels like five years.
“We don’t know,” he admits.