Chapter 38 Alice
Alice
Alice tried to shift into a less uncomfortable position.
Pain seared her side, but if she sat tall and took short breaths, she could avoid the worst of it.
The shed was silent and growing hotter as the afternoon slid on into evening, with one remaining guard leaning back against a wall.
Alice caught snatches of Tania’s muffled voice outside.
Going by her tone, she was clearly getting impatient. For what?
Beside Alice, Florence also sat ramrod straight, but more for reasons of pride, Alice suspected.
The only giveaway of her real feelings was a jiggling leg that made her foot compulsively tap the floor.
She seemed to be avoiding looking at Alice, which was understandable, given that Alice had dragged Carter into the trap that had set all this in motion.
And had pinned the murder on him to begin with.
The door opened, and several goons entered.
One ordered Alice and Florence to get up, which Alice did gingerly, since she couldn’t push off with her hands.
She followed Florence through the door into the yard, limping slightly to keep the weight off her injured side.
Chickens clucked and scattered before them.
Was this it? A bullet to the head? Their bodies dumped where they would never be found?
She couldn’t let that happen to Kimberly. Or Carter, if he was even still alive. At last, she felt something for someone, and it ended like this? At last, she had a glimpse of what that kind of connection could be like. It was only the beginning of things. It couldn’t end here.
Tania was leaning against the hood of the blue sedan. “Get rid of them,” she said. “And get this place and the cars cleaned up. No DNA. No mistakes.”
Alice detected a slight frown from Florence, which was more emotion than she’d seen from the woman all afternoon. Tania, for her part, seemed to have lost her earlier swagger.
Tania’s phone rang, and she almost dropped it in her haste to answer. Seconds later, she hung up. “Get them out of here and finish them off,” she shouted to her goons. “A convoy of police and Feds has just come off the highway.”
A goon put his hand on Florence’s shoulder.
It was like he pressed a button. She whirled around, threw her hands over his head so he was trapped in her zip-ties and yanked him down by the neck, at the same time driving her knee up into his nose.
Alice hoped the sickening crunch was his nose and not her knee.
He reeled back, the sudden force snapping the tie, and Florence lunged for his holster.
Sirens. There were sirens. Florence was buying time?
If so, it was working—everyone was frozen to the spot with the shock of watching a sixty-something woman take on a man half her age and twice her size.
But the sirens seemed to break the freeze-frame.
The other guards went for Florence, just as she grabbed the gun from the holster and backed up, half-limping, half-hopping, training it from goon to goon, as they drew their own weapons.
“Sure, we can kill time having a shootout,” Florence shouted, tearing off her gag, “or you can take your chance, get in the car and get out of here. I know what I’d choose.”
With all eyes on Florence, Tania took off in the other direction, her pumps slipping on the gravel.
She was headed for another car, a Lexus parked alongside the sedan.
Before Alice knew what she was doing, she was running after the woman, as if her feet had made the decision and not her head.
And then she was catching up and she had to figure out what the hell to do about that.
When in Rome… Following Florence’s example, she leaped up and clotheslined Tania around the neck with the zip-ties.
Tania toppled backward, pushing Alice off-balance.
The world tipped. Alice’s spine hit gravel, the impact firing up her side, and Tania bounced down on top of her.
A direct hit on her ribs. She saw stars.
She actually saw stars—flashes of darkness, with pinpricks of light.
She tried to suck in a breath but it was like her lungs had gone concave and were stuck that way.
Next she knew, Tania was kneeling on her, a knee pinning her bound hands.
Alice squirmed but Tania’s fingers closed around her neck.
What had Alice been thinking, going after her like that?
Age difference or not, the woman had probably been actual KGB.
Alice tried to cry out to Florence, who was somewhere behind the cars—no doubt facing problems of her own—but no sound came out.
She lashed out with her legs, wriggled for all she was worth, each shift knifing her side, but Tania just squeezed tighter, her blue eyes bulging with the effort.
Alice’s vision darkened and speckled. Her hearing seemed to glitch.
Where was Florence? Had Tania’s people gotten her?
Beside them, the sedan’s wheels spun and the vehicle roared off.
Gravel pelted them, and Tania flinched. Alice used the distraction to yank her hands free and whack Tania’s arms away, while trying to gulp in a breath through the gag.
The sirens were louder. Alice tried rolling to her side but her body refused to cooperate, and she flopped onto her back again, each gasping inhalation bringing a new wave of pain.
“There? That where it hurts?” Tania said, throwing her whole weight into elbowing Alice’s side.
Alice screamed into the gag as her ribs detonated. She shut her eyes tight, and when she opened them, Tania was aiming a gun at her face. The woman slowly rose to her feet, backing off, the gun steady. The wailing sirens were joined by the roar of multiple engines being pushed hard.
“If I’m going to hell, I might as well send you first,” Tania said.
For the third—fourth?—time that afternoon, Alice found herself staring down the barrel of a gun.
Except this time, there was no escape. If she charged, Tania would shoot.
If she ran, Tania would shoot. If she surrendered, if she stayed still, if she fell to her knees and begged, Tania would shoot.
She couldn’t even speak. All because she had the stupid idea to run after the woman.
Letting her go would have been a perfectly valid option.
Everyone kept saying this wasn’t Alice’s fight, and yet here she was.
“No, you fucking don’t!” Florence yelled, leaping out of nowhere to kick the weapon clean out of Tania’s hands. It bounced along the gravel.
Tania seemed to contemplate her options, then lunged for the discarded weapon. Somewhere behind the cars, a vehicle skidded to a halt, and another. A couple of sirens silenced, but more wailed up behind them.
Bringing her hands to one side, Alice pushed up with a muffled cry, staggered to her feet and collapsed belly-first onto the gun a second before Tania got there, her arms trapped awkwardly underneath her, which was about as sophisticated a maneuver as she could manage.
Her ribs absorbed the impact and she yelped.
“Drop the weapon,” a woman’s voice shouted.
“Silvia, don’t shoot! That’s my mom!”
Carter! It was Carter.
Alice turned her head to one side, scraping her cheek across the gravel, just in time to see Tania run for the shed—and get swarmed by FBI agents in actual SWAT gear, shouting at her to get down. Just like how Alice had imagined it, except they weren’t coming for her. Well, not yet.
And if they were coming for her next, well, shit, they could have her.
Florence tossed her gun to the ground and raised her hands. “Just little old me here,” she called out. “You okay there, hotshot?” she said to Alice.
Alice grunted. She tried to push up, then decided not to bother. Fast footfalls scraped the stones behind her. All those books she’d read where the characters had run for miles with bullet holes through their stomachs and she had no visible wounds and couldn’t even sit up.
“Mom? Alice, shit, you okay?” Carter crouched beside Alice and carefully slipped off her gag.
His forehead was creased even more than usual.
She could kiss him. If she could move. She settled for just looking at him as best she could from the awkward angle.
He looked haggard and scruffy, and he was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen.
She laughed. Well, she tried to, and then thought better of it.
“I’m fine,” she squeaked.
“You catch a bullet?” he said, scanning her body.
“No, it’s nothing serious, I’m sure,” she said, fighting for breath. “I jumped from the balcony. Landed badly. Maybe broke a rib. Or several.”
“You jumped? Are you insane?”
“To the balcony below. Didn’t go quite as I’d imagined. I was a little low on options.”
“Wait one sec—I’ll grab something to cut these ties.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” Alice groaned.
“Carter?” Florence said, as he returned with a small pocketknife. She wasn’t even out of breath. “You know what happened to Rashida?”
“She’s safe,” he said, as he freed Alice and gently helped her into a sitting position.
Perhaps sensing that sitting up was all she could manage for the moment, he sat behind her so she could lean into him like an armchair, and she very happily let him take her weight.
She flailed a hand to her side and found his leg. Carter. Here. Alive.
“She caught a bullet in her side and played dead,” Carter said. “Sounded like they were more interested in finding you. She lost some blood but she’s gonna be okay.”
A fully kitted-out FBI agent crunched over the gravel toward them. “Everyone okay here?” she said.
“Good for now,” Florence said, waving her off. “You all just do what you need to. We’ll be here when you want us, though I think this one will need some medical attention. You know a bunch of Tania Garrett’s crew drove off just before you arrived?”
“We got ’em,” the agent said, walking away. “Fun times.”