CHAPTER ONE #2
“Heads up...” Sam’s voice held a note of warning, but it wasn’t about Jules tiptoeing down that hall to peek into the rooms. No, Sam’s attention was sharply focused back out on the street. “Large black SUV just pulled up. Tinted windows, just like the one that... Fuck! Gun! Get down! Now!”
Jules didn’t hesitate. He dove for the laminate on the hallway floor as—holy shit!—the front windows exploded with a crash of broken glass behind their tightly closed blinds. “Sam!”
But Sam wasn’t caught in the hail of bullets.
He’d flung himself across the living room and down, landing half on top of Jules as there was a second crash, which was no doubt the destruction of the wall-mounted TV, across from those windows.
From this vantage point, glancing up, Jules could see the puff of white powder as some of the bullets fully penetrated the drywall that separated the living room from this hallway, before embedding themselves into the far wall with a dull thud.
“Go!” Sam was shouting as he himself was already in motion, army-crawling down the hall toward the farthest bedroom, pulling Jules with him as he went. “Move! Go! Now!”
“How many shooters?” Jules shouted back even as he realized that reaching for his phone to call for FBI backup—which he’d done automatically—was no longer an option.
This new gig was all him and Sam. Only him and Sam, since they were here in LA instead of San Diego where the main Troubleshooters office was based.
Of course, this new gig was supposed to be devoid of any and all large black SUVs filled with people trying to kill them, so there was that.
“I didn’t stop to count to more than two,” Sam shouted, “front and back windows. But it’s one of those big motherfuckers with a third row of seats.”
Jules did the math as he rounded the corner into Emily’s back bedroom—the primary—on his elbows.
The intentionally serene blue walls didn’t quite eliminate the anxiety of weapons being fired in their direction, but nice try, Unknown Interior Designer.
He scrambled up into a crouch that matched Sam’s as they both beelined for the rear window, which turned out to be a convenient slider door.
Yay? “So... anywhere from three to eight.”
With only a single handgun between the two of them, along with a limited amount of ammunition, run like hell was, absolutely, the best option for surviving this scenario.
Jules unlocked and easily slid the glass door open as Sam’s attention was caught by something on a little white table next to the bed—comfortable, neatly made, king—but the screen door was locked and Jules couldn’t get it open, how the holy bejeezus did this mechanism work?
But then Sam was back and finessing the mechanism became moot as he jammed one big booted foot through the screen and pulled Jules outside with him.
The neatly landscaped backyard was—shit!—fully enclosed, with a wooden fence that was freaking high—extending way up above even Sam’s head. Getting over it was gonna suck, but get over it they would.
They had to.
Jules ran across a small area of grass that was surrounded by beds of flowers and bushes that lined that towering fence, heading—bingo!
—for a large stone statue of a smiling Buddha that sat in the far corner.
Sam was clearly thinking the same thing.
As Jules scrambled up the statue, using it as a series of uneven steps toward the fence top, the big SEAL gave him an additional boost, nearly throwing him up there.
Jules went through the bougainvillea—“Thorns!”—and used the momentum to swing his legs up and over the structure.
“Fuck!” Sam responded to Jules’s warning as he all but launched himself up the stone statue and threw himself into the back-neighbor’s yard.
They landed in a significantly less pristine straggle of brush and weeds at about the same time—Jules maybe a half a heartbeat ahead—and quickly surveilled this new yard.
Another full fence—not quite as high. A tree with a worn spot and a heavy chain, but no snarling watch dog, thank you, smiling Buddha, for small favors.
“Gate on the left, just beyond the garage,” Jules told Sam unnecessarily, because they were both already running toward it.
But—“Wait!”—Sam ordered before Jules could throw the gate open to allow them to exit. He crouched down, finding a crack in the wood to look through. “Fuck!”
“Black SUV?” Jules asked even though he knew that was exactly what Sam was looking at, out there on the street.
The SUV’s driver had anticipated their escape route—no doubt hoping to intercept them before fleeing the scene.
“Lemme see.” He commandeered the crack in the wood and peeked out and.
.. Ford Expedition. Black. Tinted windows. Coincidence? Maybe. And yet...
Jules had his phone out again now because...
“Now is not the time to call your mother, Squidward,” Sam said, pulling Jules with him back around this decidedly ramshackle mirror version of Emily Johnson’s house, heading to the far side of the tiny backyard, away from the gate.
“I’m texting Robin the lockdown code!” Jules hit send to his 9-1-1 message and jammed his phone back in his pocket.
“Good idea,” Sam grunted as he again manhandled Jules easily up to the fence top with one hand under his arm, the other beneath his butt. “He still home?”
“Studio!” Robin was working again today, and he was safe as long as he stayed in the TV production lot, thank God for small favors.
This fence was older and, “Splinters!” Jules sang out but Sam ignored them just as he’d done with the thorns, and they both landed in yet another neighbor’s yard.
Where a woman—white, fifties, sunglasses, big hat, earpods—was sitting by her pool in the sun. She sat up, eyes wide, alarmed.
“Don’t scream, please don’t scream,” Jules said.
She screamed.
“Go inside and lock your door!” Jules shouted at her as he and Sam raced across her yard, once again doing their fence-climbing circus act. They landed, hard, in the next neighbor’s yard. It was also fully fenced, which was apparently just the way this entire SoCal neighborhood rolled.
“Dogs!” Jules warned, but thankfully they were little ones. They ran yapping happily at their feet as this time Sam pulled him toward the back fence-line—which was exactly what Jules had been thinking, too.
Time to head back toward Columbus Avenue, where their car was parked across the street and a few houses down from Emily Johnson’s, because while getting all these extra steps in today was certainly healthy, a set of wheels right about now would be nice.
Alley-oop!
Sam again threw Jules at this fence which was stone and even higher than the others. High enough so that Jules had to flail and scramble a bit to get up there. He used his legs to latch on and anchor himself at the top so he could reach down to intercept Sam’s leap and help pull the bigger man up.
“Watch your landing,” Sam ordered as yeah, the drop to the ground was even farther than the others had been.
The dead last thing they needed right now was a twisted ankle.
But they both would’ve gotten a ten from the judges for their injury-free dismounts (okay, an eight-point-five from the Russian) and Jules quickly followed Sam to this house’s driveway gate.
Where through another less-comfortably placed crack in the wood, Jules could see that his car—the new rental they’d been using to make today’s various and supposed-to-be humdrum, bullet-free Emily-Johnson visits—was right there, across the street, at the curb.
It was likely that someone had been left behind by the door-kickers to watch the house, and had seen them park before going inside.
If so, were they now still watching Jules’s car, waiting for them to emerge? Or had they bolted assuming the racket of all those shots fired had made somebody in the neighborhood call 9-1-1?
Screaming white lady, perhaps?
No, not perhaps. Definitely.
But so far, there were no sirens announcing police vehicles approaching, not even in the distance.
Sam was obviously thinking the same thing. He looked up at the side of the stucco wall of the house they were now crouched beside, leaning back a bit to see it better. Jules followed his gaze and realized the former SEAL was identifying and mentally marking hand and footholds so he could...
“Sneak and peek,” Sam confirmed quietly as he handed Jules his sidearm. “B-R-B.”
In a flash, he damn near walked up the side of the house and onto the shingles—making it look easy. Up there, he stayed low, careful to keep to the backyard side of the roof’s ridge, so as not to be seen from the street.
As he waited, Jules made sure that Sam’s handgun was secure, safety on, before he quickly checked his phone.
Robin had tapped back both a thumbs up and alarmed exclamation points to Jules’s 9-1-1 message, and Jules relaxed a tiny bit.
Even though there were a multitude of black SUVs in the greater Los Angeles area, he didn’t fool around when it came to his husband’s safety.
Although the fact that today’s fuckery-delivery-device was a black Ford Expedition with heavily tinted windows—exactly the same make and model of vehicle Jules had seen yesterday—was one hell of a coincidence.
And damn, Sam was right. Jules really didn’t believe in coincidences.
But still...
Someone had come here and kicked in Emily’s front door, and the simplest explanation for that was: whoever they were, they were looking for Emily. They either found her or didn’t—but the fact there were no obvious signs of struggle inside the little house implied that they didn’t.
And yet, if whoever they were, were watching the house, they’d surely made note neither he nor Sam were a twenty-seven-year-old woman as they’d approached the kicked-in front door.
So why open fire on them?
Unless whoever they were, they had already successfully grabbed Emily, which meant that the shooters’ goal was to kill... them...?
Them being the two-man team responsible for locating the now-kidnapped and/or murdered young woman...?
Could this be an attempt to slow down or even halt this investigation...?
Shit. Sam had been smart. Jules, too, should’ve put on his own shoulder holster this morning before leaving the house.
This investigation just officially went from a pain-in-the-ass and vaguely amusing annoyance to a full triple-complicated and dangerous what-the-fuck.
But hey, it was the Year of the Dumpster Fire.
What else was new?