Chapter 26
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Present Day
Van Nuys, California
Mission Day Three
“Fuck! Gun! Get down! Now!” Sam dove across Emily Johnson’s neat little living room, intending to tackle Jules—who’d already hit the deck, good man—as the front windows exploded with a crash of broken glass. “Go! Move! Go! Now!”
The fuckers in the black SUV were firing automatic weapons. At them. Or at least at the house. Although Sam had been pretty prominently featured, standing right there in the open front door as the vehicle pulled up.
“How many shooters?” Jules shouted over the noise of repeated gunfire.
Sam helped him move even faster, belly-crawling down the hall, leading the way to the back bedroom, down at the end.
Hoping it had a window they could adios their asses out of in the event the shooters didn’t want to settle for drive-by damage and got out of the car in pursuit.
Unlikely, but it’d be foolish to assume.
“I didn’t stop to count to more than two,” Sam shouted back as yes, the bedroom had an easier-to-jettison-from glass sliding door that he now scrambled toward. “Front and back windows. But it’s one of those big motherfuckers with a third row of seats.”
“So anywhere from three to eight.”
This bedroom was the little house’s primary, with a king-sized bed, white spread, blue walls and a bedside table that...
What the fuck...?
Jules was opening the slider so Sam took a few precious seconds to grab the photograph from Emily Johnson’s bedside table and yank it out of the frame. Yeah, Jules was gonna wanna see this, but maybe not right this second.
He was fumbling to get the screen door unlatched, so Sam took the express route—kicking right through the screen—as he pulled Jules out with him into a small backyard.
He immediately did a fast but full three-sixty, weapon still drawn and ready to fire, but there was no welcoming squad waiting for them out back—another clear sign that the shooters in the SUV were amateurs.
Or at least not former military. Thank God for small favors.
Jules was already running toward the far side of the yard, knowing that Sam would follow, because yes, the small area was completely surrounded by a tall wooden fence.
But there in the back corner was a stone statue that Jules used, parkour-style, to propel himself up toward the top of that towering fence, even as Sam reached out to give him a boost.
“Thorns!” Jules announced as Sam, too, stepped atop the stone Buddha’s head to launch himself up and over the fence.
“Fuck!” But thorns were way better than bullets.
“Gate on the left, just beyond the garage,” Jules announced.
Sam was already heading for it. “Wait!” he ordered as Jules reached for the gate’s latch, dropping down to look through a crack in the fence at... “Fuck!”
“Black SUV?” Jules correctly guessed. “Lemme see.”
As Sam surrendered the peephole, Jules took one glance and pulled out his phone.
“Now is not the time to call your mother, Squidward.” Sam yanked Jules with him around the back of this house toward the ramshackle fence on the far side of the yard.
“I’m texting Robin the lockdown code.”
Because that SUV had been a black Ford Expedition same as the vehicle from yesterday’s clusterfuck. And even though the common sense part of Sam’s brain was shouting “Fucking seriously!?” it was better to be safe than sorry.
“Good idea.” Sam pushed Jules up to the top of that fence. “He still home?”
“Studio. Splinters!”
Fuck. But splinters, like thorns, weren’t bullets. Sam humped himself up and over that fence too and... Shit.
“Don’t scream, please don’t scream,” Jules implored the woman who was sunning herself by her pool, but to no one’s surprise, she pulled out her earbuds and screamed.
“Go inside and lock your door,” Jules shouted—always the boy scout—as Sam pulled him across her yard to damn near throw him over the fence on the other side.
“Dogs!” Jules shouted a warning, and as Sam landed he was expecting big bared teeth—he’d thrown down with attack dogs before and it had not been fun.
But this time he saw a pair of toy poodles who seemed to think he and Jules had come into the yard to play.
They barked and jumped happily at Sam’s feet as he veered over to the back fence.
They’d been running through yards, parallel to Columbus Avenue—Emily Johnson’s street—where the rental car was parked.
But now it was time to head back in that direction, see if the SUV full of shooters had gone back around the block to linger or if they’d fled.
Hard to believe they’d linger, but so far everything about this case fell headfirst into the hard to believe category.
The fence at the back of the happy little dogs’ yard was stone and even higher than all of the others they’d scrambled over.
Sam gave Jules an extra emphatic boost, and as soon as the former FBI agent got himself anchored to the top, he reached down to help Sam up in a true, coulda-been-a-SEAL display of thoughtful teamwork.
“Watch your landing,” Sam grunted because shit this fence was high and neither of their knees and ankles were as young as they used to be.
But Jules dropped lightly to the ground beside him like the pro that he was, and headed to the gate that spanned this narrow driveway. They each took a breather and a look through various cracks and knotholes and yup, there was the rental car, parked where they’d left it.
Sam looked up at the house that they were crouching beside. It was similar to Emily’s in size, but like most of the little houses in this neighborhood, it had been re-imagined and renovated and added on to in an array of both good and bad architectural ideas.
The positioning of the window and the downspout from the gutter and the overhang of the single story roof was a pretty neatly engraved invitation.
“Sneak and peek.” Sam handed Jules his sidearm. “B-R-B.”
He moved swiftly and got himself up and onto the roof, careful to duck down and stay below the ridgeline, in case the shooters were watching from some hiding place nearby.
Peeking up and looking east he saw... The SUV had left the immediate area at least.
There was their rental car and... damn. It was probably undrivable—not that they’d want to go anywhere near it in the immediate future.
Another swift look down toward Emily’s house and... the entire front garden had been shot to shit. Damn, the sheer amount of ammo the crew in that vehicle had let loose was sobering.
Amateurs, maybe, but it was highly likely that Sam was only alive because Jules had annoyingly stopped to debate the potential meaning of Emily Johnson’s kicked-in front door.
If they’d immediately gone inside the way Sam had wanted, he wouldn’t have seen the SUV pull up. It was hard to imagine that one or even both of them would’ve escaped being hit—right through the now-shattered front windows of Emily Johnson’s little house.
But because Jules had also chosen that moment to reiterate just how much he believed that Milt the Junior—AKA Mick O’Rourke—was telling them the truth about not wanting his father’s money, they’d both survived this clusterfuck.
Sam lay there on the roof, just watching and listening as nothing moved out on the quiet street. There weren’t even any sirens in the distance. It was just... still.
Ominously so.
He took the opportunity to text Alyssa—a brief sit-rep ending with a quick Who’s sitting on their thumbs in the TS office? Because he and Jules were gonna need some help.
He knew Jules was probably getting antsy down on the driveway, so he quietly slipped down off the roof, crouching down to stay hidden behind the gate. "SUV’s gone. Street seems quiet. But...” He let his voice trail off.
Jules sighed heavily. “They slashed the tires.”
“More like shot the shit out of the entire car.”
“God, really? That’s two for two.” He was talking destruction of rental cars, and yes. He was... winning? “Damnit.” He handed Sam back his sidearm.
“Thanks. But that wasn’t quite the but I was thinking.” And yeah, Jules noticed Sam didn’t harness the weapon.
“Oh, good.” Jules sighed again. “You think they’re still out there, watching.” He pulled out his phone and opened his map app, switching to satellite view to get a closer look at the area. “Ugh. Too many splinters and so many fences between me and my tweezers.”
Sam made it clear. “Going out to the street and waiting for a tow-truck and a Lyft could well be a fatal mistake.”
“Let’s definitely stay away from making any fatal mistakes,” Jules agreed, as he expanded the map. “This day’s been stupid enough.”
“Stupid, but productive.” Sam looked over the smaller man’s shoulder.
Like most neighborhoods in this part of the Valley, this residential area bumped right up against a more commercial zone.
He pointed exactly as Jules zoomed in to look at, yes, a mall with what appeared to be an easily accessible parking garage.
On a one-to-ten scale of good places to hide from shooters in a black SUV, urban parking garages rated a high nine. “Considering we found our Emily.”
Jules sighed again. “I hear you, Starrett, but it still doesn’t make sense—”
Sam cut Jules off mid-argument by pulling that folded-in-half photo out of the back pocket of his jeans and handing it to him. “This was in a frame on Emily’s bedside table.”
Jules unfolded it and... “Oh.”
Oh, indeed. The photo was a printed glossy of a clearly loving couple—heads close together as they smiled at each other. The young woman had brown eyes in a pretty face surrounded by a mass of thick, dark, curly hair. The man...
“You were right,” Jules admitted. “We found our Emily. Son of a bitch.”
“Son of a millionaire,” Sam murmured. “Also? Wig.”