Chapter 20 #2
Jenna sighed. “It’s not gonna take that long.”
“I need to take a piss. You do have a bathroom, don’t you?”
Jenna looked at me with a censuring demeanor, then pushed the door the rest of the way open. “Fine.”
I looked over my shoulders into the backseat. “Keep the engine running. I’ll be back.”
“Okay,” Cassie said with a nod.
“I’ll call if I see anything shady,” Monica reported.
I shifted my eyes toward Mimi, who was sitting in the middle. “You gonna be good?”
“All good!” she said, holding Barry in her lap to the cringes of Jenna the second she looked at it.
“Alright, let’s go,” I said, then got out of the driver’s seat and walked to the curb with Jenna strolling urgently just ahead of me.
She walked expeditiously in front of me and took the fire escape stairwell up, while I decided to casually take the elevator.
I whistled to myself with my hands tucked behind my back until reaching the top floor with an old-fashioned ‘ding’, smiling as I saw a slightly winded Jenna barging through the access door across from me mere seconds after.
“Any more than three floors and the elevator’s faster,” I informed her with an amused smile.
The look of mild annoyance she gave me was priceless.
“It also wears your legs out,” I continued.
“I’m in great shape,” Jenna countered as she stepped in the middle of the maroon carpeted hall, with me exiting the elevator to join her.
“I’ve seen…” I replied, recalling the all-too-recent and highly fond memory of Jenna’s nude body at breakfast, then gestured toward the corner condos. “Lead the way.”
Jenna bladed her body to step past me and head to her big brown door at the corner while I casually kept my eyes and ears peeled.
She hastily inserted her key and opened the deadbolt, then shoved the heavy door open as I followed closely behind.
And I thought I was bad.
Jenna’s apartment was a bachelorette mess.
Countless empty boxes of pizza, sushi containers, and take-out from a vegetarian restaurant—no doubt to balance out the rushed calories she was eating.
Hand-me-down furniture straight out of the 90s; brownish-red floral couches, wooden night stands with an armoire beside a small desk with a green-shaded banker’s lamp, and an old smelling burgundy brown afghan rug tying it all together.
She kept a purple step pad with a black yoga-mat in the far left corner of the room, a few five and ten pound dumbbells beside it, with an adjacent dusty treadmill serving as a little workout corner.
Under and around her desk were a few brown lid cardboard boxes, each one filled with haphazardly stacked paper and folders.
Jenna headed straight for those.
“When’s the last time you had company?” I asked, stepping over some clothes she’d no doubt left on the floor from stripping upon entry.
I was able to look through the window of the corner alcove, checking on the others in the SUV below.
“Is that supposed to be funny?” Jenna regarded me without turning her head as she gathered her materials.
“It is to me,” I said, then looked to the single corridor with a couple of doors lining either side. “Which one’s the bathroom?”
“Second on the left. And don’t miss.”
“Why would I miss?” I asked as I walked over the carpet toward my destination.
“Because guys don’t piss straight after a night of happy time,” she said.
I laughed outside of the bathroom door, holding the threshold while hollering down the hall. “What is this, a Jim Carrey movie? I sorted that out three hours ago.”
She had no answer for that one. I relieved myself with a long groan up to the ceiling, aiming perfectly into the blue ceramic bowl of the human waste throne before reaching for the handle.
And then I heard something from Jenna’s bedroom.
Except she was still in the living room.
I flushed, using the noise of the watery whoosh to mask my boot steps toward her slightly ajar bedroom door, wrapping my fingers around the knob to push it open.
And then a massive, splintering hole was blasted through the center of the door with an immense boom. A shotgun.
I staggered back as the pellets impacted my skin, feeling a tingling burn that was like applying a match to itching skin. I looked down at my damaged shirt, then shoved my arm through and grabbed the sawed-off double-barreled shotgun aiming at me.
“You got a boogeyman in your closet!” I shouted.
A quick yank was all it took to relieve the assailant of his weapon, which I tossed into the hall behind me. I kicked the door the rest of the way open, looking into the eyes of a young man wearing a gray hoodie with eyes flared into focused slits.
He pulled a knife, then shanked me several times in a violent rush with a guttural vocalization, while I stood there with a bored expression and then pushed him back with effortless strength.
The man’s stance faltered to a kneeling position on the floor, gawking at me in confusion before looking down at the knife he attacked me with. The tip was bent and dulled; utterly useless.
“No lookout?” I asked, stepping into the room while he stood up and tried to keep his distance, backing toward the window, glancing over his shoulder.
“Jax!” I heard Jenna yelp behind me.
And then I sighed, turning to see a second man in similar hoodlum clothing standing behind her, holding her at gunpoint. He must have been hiding in the kitchen, or one of the other rooms.
“Son,” I said in a tone of warning. “Put the gun down and I won’t feed you your own dick.”
“We gotta go, man,” said the shotgunner behind me. “This guy ain’t right.”
“Where is it?” he questioned into Jenna’s ear before aiming the gun at my head. “I know you’ve got the Ichor. Now tell me where it is!”
“She doesn’t have it,” I stated.
“You’re working for Gaines?” Jenna breathed, remaining still in the man’s one-harmed headlock while hiking up her skirt.
“This is gonna get painful. Tell me where it is before I shoot this guy in the face,” the guy threatened. “I’m gonna count to three.”
“I’m gonna count to one,” I countered.
Jenna got her hidden thigh gun out and dropped down fast. I pulled my gauss cannon and blasted the dude’s head clean off his shoulders as Jenna aimed her pistol and shot the guy behind me at the same time.
I didn’t shoot a hole through his head, I erased it entirely. His skull burst into a mist of viscera and bone fragments with a single pull of my trigger, his arm dropping with no chance of pulling his own.
Two thunks, one scream. I killed my target; Jenna hadn’t.
I turned around, impressed at Jenna’s marksmanship as the shotgunner stumbled back onto her bed, clutching his bleeding thigh.
“Stay behind me,” I warned Jenna, walking toward the guy and lifting him by the scruff of his hoodie and holding my cannon up to his chin. “Tell me who sent you or I’m gonna take a little off the top like your friend back there.”
“Look I’m just a snatcher!” he howled in a pained voice. “There weren’t any names!”
Jenna tactically swept the apartment, every corner and closet, looking for a possible third intruder.
“It’s clear!” she said before coming back into the bedroom and grabbing the man’s thigh, digging her thumb into his bleeding wound. “The bullet nicked your femoral artery. You’ve got about five minutes before you bleed out if I don’t call an ambulance. Now talk! What do you want with Ichor?”
“I don’t know!” the man wailed while I held him close. “A guy paid me to come here—said you took a bunch of the stuff from a warehouse. That’s all I know! Please just fucking call for help. I can’t breath—I—I’m getting cold!”
“Oh, relax, buster,” Jenna chastised as she tucked her pistol into her skirt. “It’s a flesh wound.”
“And did you know she was a cop?” I questioned, letting the man go to flail helplessly onto the bed.
He lifted his head and looked horrifically at Jenna. “A cop?”
She pulled her badge and dangling it over his head.
“Oh fuck…” he dropped his head back onto the bed with a crying countenance.
“You won’t get much out of him,” I remarked, walking over into the hall to pick up the shotgun. “He’s just an errand boy.”
“Maybe not, but I’ve got enough to tie him back to the warehouse,” Jenna remarked as she took out her handcuffs.
“No… You don’t.”
And then I aimed at the intruder and pulled the trigger.