Crazy Kisses (24 page)

And
kee-rist,
there he was, killing people in front of Nikki again.

In five steps he had her in his arms and was reaching up to cut her free.

“K-kid.” She was shivering uncontrollably, her voice raw with fear.

“Shhh, baby. I’m getting you out of here.” His knife went through the rope, and she collapsed into his arms.

Without letting go of her, or taking time to cut the bindings on her wrists, he stepped over to the boy and cut him free. Fast Jack dropped like a cat to the floor and, just as Kid had predicted, took off for the service lift to the alley, working the knots on the rope around his wrists with his teeth. With Nikki in his arms, Kid was right behind him.

The boy scrambled onto the lift and hit the UP button, but the doors no sooner opened above him, out into the alley, than somebody yelled, “It’s Fast Jack!” and all hell broke loose with a burst of automatic fire careening into the basement.

Geezus.
Kid dove with Nikki behind a tower of crates and hoped to hell they were full of something that would stop an automatic round. Almost immediately, Jack landed on top of them, a pile of fast-moving arms and legs.

Kee-rist.
What kind of trouble was the kid in that everybody wanted to grease his ass?

The service lift was grinding its way up, but he could hear the guys in the alley already jumping down onto it, not waiting for it to come to a stop. With one swift cut, he freed Nikki’s hands, held on to one of them, and took off running for the stairs.

“Five Locos coming down the stairs, heading your way,” Skeeter’s voice echoed through his earpiece.

Fuck.
He made a fast right at the next tower of boxes and sprinted with her to the elevator. Fast Jack, the little bugger, was already inside and reaching for a floor button. Kid slammed into the door before it could close, then shoved Nikki inside, behind him.

“Main floor, Jack,” he said to the kid, now praying for the damn doors to shut. It sounded like the guys from the alley were invading. “And if you ever try to cut me out again,
I’ll
be the one who takes you down.”

Jack at least had the decency to look remorseful. “You were headed for the stairs, not the elevator.”

“The stairs got busy.” He shrugged out of his jacket and put it on Nikki, making sure she got her arms inside the sleeves. The boy was shivering, too, but he was a guy, and he was on his own. Besides, he looked tougher than snot—wiry, fierce, even a little wild-eyed, but still not terrified.

“So’s the damn main floor gonna be busy in about thirty seconds,” Jack said.

“So where are you going?”

“To the roof,” Jack said.

Well, they sure as hell weren’t going to get there very damn fast. The elevator was moving at a crawl.

Kid pulled Nikki under his arm and squeezed her, trying to impart some warmth, while still keeping his gun hand free.

“What’s on the roof?”

“A fire escape that runs all the way down the north side of the building,” the boy said.

Sounded good to Kid.

“Talk to me, Nikki,” he said, shifting his attention to the woman shivering in his arms. “Are you okay?”

“Y-yes.” She nodded, her teeth chattering.

He’d have to take her at her word for now. They were far from out of this mess.

“You need to get her out of here, man,” the boy said. “Before the Bloods and Locos and the rest of those badass uptown barrio boys chew up the Aztec Club. They ain’t gonna like that you capped two of their guys.”

“Who was shooting at you from the alley?” Kid asked. The gunmen had yelled the boy’s name.

“Parkside Bloods.”

Of course. The Parkside Bloods had Fast Jack at the top of their menu tonight. “What about the Locos?”

“All upstairs.”

“Badass uptown barrio boys?”

The boy shrugged. “You left two dead ones in the basement, man. I don’t know where the rest of them are.”

“Do you know how many there were?”

“Five got out of the Cadillac with the woman.”

That left three from the kidnapping crew, and depending on where Conseco was in the building, the cocaine king might or might not know that his whole night had just gone straight to hell.

“Skeeter,” he said into his mike. “Two Colombians down. At least three more still alive. I’ve got Nikki and the boy. We’re in a service elevator that runs up the west wall. Can you see the elevator door?”

The sound of a woman screaming delayed her response. He knew it wasn’t Skeeter. Skeeter did not scream.

Then shots sounded.

“
Holy shit,
Kid. I’ve got Bloods coming in the back, and Locos pouring in the front, and a whole bunch of people trying to get out of the middle.”

“Where are you?”

“Behind the bar with my head down, cowboy. Do not get off on this floor. I repeat, do not get off on this floor.”

“Where’s Travis?”

“AWOL. On his own. I lost him.”

“Looks like your plan wins,” he said to the boy. To Skeeter he said, “Any sign of the feds or Lieutenant Loretta?”

“Not down here in the slopped beer and old cigarette butts, and that’s about as far as I can see, until the shooting stops. This is bad, Kid. Turf war galore.”

“We’re headed toward the top floor and will come down the fire escape on the north side of the building.”

“Roger.”

He had Nikki, and he was taking her out of there. The feds could have Conseco.

C
HAPTER

23

T
HE HIGHER THEY ROSE
in the building, the quieter it became, eerily so. Then the indicator lights on the control board flickered and died, and the elevator shuddered to a stop.

“Wh-what happened, Kid?” Nikki’s hand tightened in his. The boy swore under his breath.

“I don’t know.”
Dammit
. “Skeeter,” he said into his mike, but got no response. “Skeeter.”

Her radio was either dead or turned off, and he couldn’t imagine that she’d turned it off. He wasn’t going to freak, though. Skeeter knew how to take care of herself. He hoped to hell Travis did.

He reached inside his jacket pocket for his cell phone, but couldn’t get any reception—nothing. No one could hear him now.

“Are we trapped?” Nikki asked, huddling closer to him. She was shaking like a leaf.

“No, honey. I can get us out of here.” Guaran-fucking-teed. There wasn’t a goddamn elevator in the world he couldn’t take apart. He had Nikki, and she was alive, and that was all that mattered. Everything else was merely incidental—but he still needed a plan.

A tiny red dot of light appeared inside the elevator and started moving over the walls. He followed it to its source—the boy.

“Night vision flashlight?” he asked.

“Yeah. I always keep one with me. I work in the dark a lot. It’s handy for seeing what the hell you’re doing.”

No shit.

“Give me a hand,” he said, digging the tips of his fingers into the break between the doors. Between him and Fast Jack, they pried the doors open, but there was nothing but wall on the other side.

“Show me the ceiling.” That was their next best bet for making their escape.

The ceiling panels were screwed in, the screws exposed through age, not design, with the inside of the elevator stripped down to basics.

The boy proved invaluable again, when he produced a knife. Not a street fighter’s knife, but a handy-dandy, twenty-function Swiss Army knife.

“You keep this with you all the time, too?”

“Just in case,” the boy said.

Yeah, Kid usually had a whole lot of “just in case” stuff, too, but tonight he mostly had guns, and they sure as hell couldn’t shoot their way out of an elevator.

Once they got one of the ceiling panels off, Kid boosted himself on top of the elevator; finally, a bit of luck. With Fast Jack’s flashlight, the beam of which was hardly bigger than a quarter, he could see they weren’t very far from a floor.

“Jack, get your butt up here,” he said, reaching his hand down.

Jack took hold, and Kid swung him up.
Geez,
he doubted if the boy weighed a hundred and twenty pounds, but he was strong. When Kid put him on his shoulders, Jack didn’t have any trouble prying the doors to the floor open all by himself. Light flooded into the elevator shaft, and like the Rat he was, Jack scrambled off Kid’s shoulders into the hall, and disappeared from sight—instantly, without a backward glance.

Hell. Kid wasn’t going to worry about him. The boy obviously knew how to take care of himself in a bad situation. He just hoped Jack didn’t blow everything and get them all in more trouble than they were already in.

“Come on, babe.” He reached down for Nikki and pulled her onto the top of the elevator, and then, for a couple of seconds, no more, he just quit—quit worrying, quit fighting, quit thinking. All he did was hold her, and bury his face in her hair, and breathe her in, and thank God that she wasn’t hurt.

“Oh, Kid,” she sighed, melting against him. “I knew you’d find me. I-I just didn’t know if it would be in time. They were going to . . . going to . . .”

“Shhh, Nikki.” He tightened his arms around her. He knew even better than she did what Conseco would have done to her, and he didn’t want to hear the words spoken out loud. He didn’t have the strength for that. He’d been in Colombia for too long. He’d seen too much.

“How did you get to the club so fast?” she asked. “How did you know?”

“The boy,” he said. “Fast Jack. He called from the trunk of the Cadillac and told us exactly where you were being taken.”

“He called you from the trunk?”

“Yeah. Crazy, huh?” It
was
crazy. “He was hiding in there and ended up in the middle of your kidnapping.”

She let out another heavy sigh. “God, Kid. It’s been crazy since you showed up at Sandovals’ last night.”

He knew that, too, and he wasn’t too proud of it.

“Don’t worry, Nikki. This is the last of it. I swear. I’ll get you out of here, and you’ll be out of trouble, forever.” Because he was going to hunt Conseco down and kill him—no matter how far he had to go, no matter what he had to do. Conseco had made one big-ass mistake leaving Colombia, and if Kid didn’t get him tonight, someday, the bastard would make another. When he did, Kid would be there.

“Come on. Let’s keep moving.” Revenge would have to wait. Right now, he had to think about Nikki.

Standing up, he boosted himself up into the hall, and then reached down for her. The sign next to the elevator showed a number three. They were on the third floor. The Aztec was five stories high.

Once she was up, he had them on the move. She started to speak, but he put his finger to his lips. He didn’t know who was on the floor with them.

The elevator was on the west wall, and the fire escape was on the north, so he checked all the rooms on the left side of the hall, dragging her with him, moving fast, but none of them had the fire escape. It had to be all the way to the east, near the northeast corner, but when they got back out into the hall, there was nothing but a blank wall to the east. He had to find another way.

Shit.
He was starting to feel like a rat in a maze.

At the first intersecting hallway, he saw a red exit light at the far end. Holding her hand, he took off, heading that way. They could get to the second floor from the stairwell, avoiding the firefight on the first, and still get out of the building. Climbing down from the third floor was too risky with Nikki on his back, not when she was shivering and might be too cold to hold on.

Jack, the little Rat, really had disappeared, and Kid wished he knew how and where. Disappearing was exactly what he wanted to do with Nikki. Dead Colombians in the basement, gang war in the bar, and Juan Conseco somewhere up here on the upper floors—Kid wanted the fuck out of the Aztec Club.

The instant they entered the stairwell, he heard gunfire, and it sounded a lot closer than three floors down.
Shit
. The gang war had made it to the second floor. He wasn’t going to run a gauntlet of bullets with Nikki in tow, so he took them up, but didn’t get more than a couple of steps before a door banged open below them, and all hell broke loose. It sounded like dozens of people were fighting their way up the stairs. It only took him a second to figure out why.

“Kid,” Nikki said, turning and looking behind them. “I think the building is on fire. I smell smoke.”

The unmistakable smell of it came to him on the air, and just as quickly, a blast of searing heat rolled up the stairwell.

Geezus
. “Come on, babe. Let’s
go
.” Holding her hand, he took off up the stairs.

If things had been great before, they were perfect now. The friggin’ gangsters had set the club on fire.

Another door banged open—the second-floor door, he guessed—and the noise level tripled, girls screaming and squealing, guys shouting, feet pounding, lots of shoving, pushing, and swearing.

Kid could run, but a frozen, shivering Nikki trying to do stairs in a pair of stiletto heels practically put them in reverse. He swung her up on his shoulders in a fireman’s carry, the banana-clipped pistol still in his hand, and he took off.

He was fast, a verifiable track star, but within seconds, two Locos in do-rags passed him like he was standing still, and the horde kept coming, panic turning them into world-class Olympians. It was going to be a freaking circus on the roof, especially since from what he could see, the guns-to-dudes ratio was running at about fifty percent.

Worse than all of it was the smoke. It was quickly getting thicker, becoming a pall. The people below him were struggling to breathe. Drug lords and gangbangers were one thing. Fire was another. It struck solid, cold dread in his heart. He couldn’t outshoot it or outwit it, and he wasn’t at all sure he was going to be able to outmaneuver it. Going up in a burning building was a bad idea, and he knew it, but there sure as hell was no way to go down, not in the stairwell, which was beginning to feel like
it
was on fire.

He hoped to hell Skeeter had gotten out of the bar.

At the fourth-floor exit, he fought his way to the door, but it didn’t open. Doing his best to hold back the tide of people threatening to sweep him and Nikki away, he put her down next to him, in the small eddy of space he made with his body.

“Hold on to me!” he yelled above all the noise, and felt her hands tighten into fists on his shirt. Then he put his shoulder to the door. It gave a little, which encouraged him, so he hit it again, harder. Something was blocking the door from the other side. If he could move it just a few inches, he and Nikki could slip through. Their chances of getting out of the building from the fourth floor were better than from the fifth, and the roof was going to be a disaster.

Then the worst happened. One second Nikki was behind him, holding on to him, and the next she was gone, swept up in the tide of panic and people rolling like a juggernaut toward the top of the building.

“Kid!”
she screamed, then disappeared from sight.

Shit.
Kid threw himself into the crowd, using every physical advantage he had to fight his way up the stairs. In glimpses and pieces, he saw her up ahead of him, barely keeping to her feet, and his first fear became that she would get trampled. Then someone knocked her down, and the next time he saw her, she’d lost his coat and her dress was torn.

Goddammit
. He had to get to her—but he couldn’t, and the smoke and the heat were getting worse.

When he burst out onto the roof, it wasn’t much better, but he didn’t think Nikki was behind him. Everything in the stairwell had been sweeping up, carried by the force of all the people trying to escape.

There were dozens of them, maybe a hundred, coughing, wiping tears from their eyes, running this way and that, trying to figure out which way to go. But he didn’t see Nikki anywhere.

Then he felt a stray breeze cut through the smoke billowing up all around. So did everyone else, and still caught in the crowd, they all stumbled toward it. In just a few feet, he realized that despite all the smoke, only the front half of the building was on fire. The flames were bound to spread and turn the whole building into a chimney, but they hadn’t yet, and help had to be on the way. Loretta’s SWAT team and the DEA, the FBI, all those guys must be getting close.

“There’s a fire escape,” someone yelled, and everybody swarmed in the guy’s direction.

Kid held himself against the crowd, searching faces. Then he saw her, and his blood ran cold. Two men had hold of her arms, dragging her along. The third had a gun to her head. They were all moving with the crowd, heading for the fire escape, and in the next instant they disappeared into the smoke and all the people.

“
Conseco!
” he shouted, his feet moving him forward, slowly at first, then faster. “
Juan Conseco!
”

It was hard to make himself heard over the sounds of the fire and all the crying and shouting and running. It was even harder to keep Nikki and the Colombians in sight. Smoke was drifting everywhere. People were in the way. His gun was drawn, ready, but there wasn’t a clear shot, not in the smoke and confusion.

“
Conseco!
” He had to get them to stop. “
Soy el asesino fantasma! ¡Estoy aquí!
”
I am the ghost killer. I am here.

Here for you, you sonuvabitch.

He called out again, working his way through the crowd, and when the smoke cleared again, he saw them.

They’d stopped and closed ranks, and they were waiting, looking for the man they’d come to kill.

Nikki had gone limp and was being held up only by the large man who had his arm around her waist. Juan Conseco was on the man’s left.

The third man was nowhere in sight.

A dozen people were between him and the Colombians, and Kid waited for the space to clear.

Over by the fire escape, it was pandemonium. But Kid didn’t give the chaos a thought. His mission, the focus of every ounce of energy he had and every breath he took, was staring at him from behind the two semiautomatic pistols pointed through the crowd, straight at his head.

That was their first mistake.

“
El asesino fantasma,
” Conseco called out over the distance separating them. A smile crossed his face. “So, my ghost killer, in the end it comes to this? That
el asesino
is outgunned?”

Kid didn’t think so, not with only two guns to his one, and Nikki useless as cover.

A fresh surge of panicked club-goers stumbled between him and Conseco before the first group finished passing through, all of them doubled over, coughing from the smoke, and oblivious to the danger they were in.