Friendly Fire (4 page)

“Okay, that's enough,” Taylor said. “Rinse off and let's get going.”

Ethan leaned forward into the wall, into the spigots, and let the water flood for just a few more seconds over his face and hair. Down his back. Then he shut the water off.

Keeping his back turned to the deputy, he said, “Where is my towel?”

“That comes in another two minutes. Turn around and look at me, please.”

Covering himself again, Ethan turned. Taylor had donned a pair of blue rubber gloves.

Ethan's heart rate doubled. “No,” he said.

“It's procedure,” Taylor said. “Nobody enjoys the cavity search, but—”

It
did
hurt. Oh, my God, it hurt so bad. And the monster laughed as Ethan yelled
.

“No!” Ethan shouted it this time.

Taylor seemed startled. “Come on, Ethan, don't—”

The color in the room changed in Ethan's head. Reality transformed into something unreal—unrooted. He knew it was impossible, but he was eleven years old again. But now he was big. Now he could defend himself.

He launched himself at the cop. Not the shithead predator cop, but the nice one. The one named Taylor. Like Andy Taylor from Mayberry, the show that played without end on TV Land. The deputy was taller by a head, but Ethan knew a trick to make up the difference. As he lunged forward, he tucked his chin just a little and then on contact, thrust his head up under the deputy's jaw. He heard a snap, and he heard someone yell. It might have been Ethan's own howling, but he couldn't be sure.

They were on the wet floor now, bare skin against leather and hardware. Ethan threw punches and he received them, but he didn't feel anything. This was
not
going to happen to him again.

The space around him reverberated with noise and he saw more shoes and he felt more hands. He swung at as many of them as he could. His guts exploded as someone landed a kick, and then he saw the stick coming.

Darkness.

Chapter Four

“W
here do you want me?” Boxers asked.

Jonathan pointed ahead and to the right. “Take the red-black corner.” The right rear corner. “I don't expect they'll run away from a knock at the door, but we might as well be prepared.”

“Just sidearms, I presume?”

“And keep it concealed. Like I said, I don't anticipate a panic response from a knock at the door.”

Boxers backed into a parking space across the lot from room 124, threw the transmission into Park, and sat, his massive hands poised at ten and two on the steering wheel. “This doesn't feel right, Boss.”

Jonathan pulled on the door handle. “Let's see what happens.”

Playing drunk was a tricky thing. The staggering, slurring caricature drunk wouldn't fool anyone. In fact, the average drunk tried very hard
not
to look drunk when he was at his drunkest, which was a doubly difficult act to pull off when the person trying to look sober was in fact sober, trying to look sober while drunk. It was about understatement, and the stink of booze should go a long way toward selling the bluff. If room 124 was indeed the right place, then alcohol would be against the occupants' religion, triggering an even greater level of disgust.

Jonathan's plan was simple. He would knock on the door, and when someone answered, he'd eyeball them to see if they matched the description of the kidnappers. He'd apologize for the interruption, and then evaluate the options to rescue the little girl. Boxers monitored the action from the shadows of the building's right rear corner, where he could simultaneously see if anyone bolted out the back, while keeping an eye on Jonathan.

“Is everybody on the channel?” Jonathan asked softly as he approached the door.

“Big Guy's here,” Boxers said.

“And Mother Hen.” Venice monitored most of their ops when they went hot. Sometimes, Jonathan wore a body cam to give her a more complete view, but there was no place to hide it on this disguise.

“Here we go,” Jonathan said. He settled his shoulders and sagged his knees a little. He let his eyelids droop just a bit, and then rapped on the door with the knuckle of his left middle finger.

He heard motion on the other side. Multiple voices. It took nearly ten seconds for one voice to say what is normally said immediately. “Who is it?”

Jonathan said nothing. Noting the motion of the curtains as someone peeked out, he knocked again.

More motion, more voices. They sounded angsty.

Jonathan whispered, “I think you might be getting some business after all, Big Guy.”

“You're making my nipples hard,” Boxers replied.

Jonathan smiled and kept knocking. Not hard—not a search-warrant pound—just a steady, annoying-as-hell thump with his knuckle. The whole point was to get them to open the damn door.

“Go away!” a voice said. It carried an accent, but these days, in this neighborhood, unaccented English was more the exception than the rule.

He heard a little yip—maybe squeak was a better term. Was it a little girl being hurt?

Jonathan kept knocking.

Finally, he heard the chain move on the back of the door, and the knob turned. The door cracked a few inches, enough to reveal a man's left eye. It looked like a pissed-off left eye. “I said go away!”

“Dude!” Jonathan said. He wedged his body closer to the door. “Whatcha doin' in there? This is the party room, right?” He pushed on the door, opening it just enough to see the shadow of a second man wedged behind the door panel. He was hiding. In the mirror on the wall over the dresser, Jonathan saw a seam of light around the closed bathroom door. That made at least three targets. And the one he could see looked Middle Eastern. Check, check, and check.

“There is no party here,” the man at the door insisted. “You need to leave.”

When Jonathan saw what appeared to be blood on the floor, he decided it was time to call an audible. “Dude, look, I'm sorry, man. Can I just use your pisser?” He pressed in tighter.

The doorman pressed his hand to Jonathan's chest. “No, you may not. You are drunk. You do not belong—”

“Hey, Mindy, are you there?” Jonathan shouted.

The doorman's eyes flashed fear as commotion rose behind the closed bathroom door. The doorman's hand whipped around to the back of his trousers. It was all the confession Jonathan needed.

Jonathan shouldered the door hard and drove the heel of his left hand into the other man's nose. Knocked off balance, the guy staggered back three steps. Jonathan hammered the door again, harder this time, to unbalance the guy in the shadow. In one smooth, practiced move, he lifted his T-shirt with his left hand, pulled his 1911 from its holster, and thumbed the safety off.

The man he'd driven back into the room recovered enough to draw a pistol, and had nearly brought it to bear when Jonathan fired two one-handed shots into the gunman's chest. The guy was still collapsing when Jonathan pivoted left to encounter the hider behind the door. He never saw the man's face, but he saw the gun in the man's hand. A pistol-grip pump shotgun with a shortened barrel. Jonathan fired three times into the shadow's center of mass, and both the weapon and its owner fell like bricks.

When Jonathan turned back to the first guy, he saw that he still sat upright, bleeding from his chest, his face a mask of confusion. Jonathan shot the mask through the eye.

“Mindy, are you in the bathroom?” As he spoke, he pulled a fresh mag for the Colt out of its pouch on the left side of his belt, and brought it up the pistol's grip.

“Help! I—” The young voice was silenced by a slap.

He dropped the partially spent mag into the space between the middle and ring fingers of his left hand and jammed the new one home. The whole maneuver took less than two seconds. He dropped the mostly empty mag into his pocket. Never enter a new gunfight with old ammo.

Jonathan fired a kick that landed square on the bathroom door's flimsy brass-colored knob.

The panel exploded inward, launching a shower of splintered mirror.

Mindy screamed. Her kidnapper held her by her flaming red hair, lifting her off her feet as he cowered behind, trying to get a bead on Jonathan. Black zip ties bound Mindy's hands in front of her. Motel bathrooms were not big spaces, and old shitty ones were even smaller. At a range of maybe three feet, the worst marksmen in the world would have a hard time missing.

Jonathan went for the gun. It was a Glock—either a 19 or a 23. He grabbed the weapon at the slide, behind the front sight, and he twisted it inward and up. If it fired, it wouldn't hit anyone. As the kidnapper's finger snapped inside the trigger guard, the guy lost his concentration on Mindy's hair. As she moved, she opened a space that revealed the bad guy's face. Jonathan thrust his Colt through the opening till he felt hard contact with the guy's forehead, and he pulled the trigger, opening a star-shaped hole in flesh and bone. The kidnapper left a crimson arc on the shattered green tile wall as he slid sideways into the bathtub, pulling the shower curtain and rod with him.

“We're clear,” Jonathan said, holstering his Colt. “Three sleeping. PC is secure.”

“Holy shit, Scorpion, what did you just do?” Boxers nearly shouted. The cadence of his words told Jonathan that Big Guy was running.

Without saying a word, Jonathan grabbed Mindy around the middle and lifted her off her feet. She struggled. “Leave me alone!” she yelled. “Let me go!” She swung her bound fists as a single unit, as if chopping wood.

Jonathan used a second arm to pinion her hands to her side. “Don't look at the bodies,” he said, as he maneuvered her out of the bathroom. “I'm here to take you back to your parents.”

“Put me down!”

She'd been through a lot. Jonathan didn't expect her to understand what was going on, and this was no time to go into detail. He just gripped her tighter and hustled across the parking lot toward the Ford. He carried her sideways to avoid getting kicked by her pedaling feet, and was a little ashamed at how quickly his grip had begun to slip. Apparently, kids are born with a wriggle instinct, and young Mindy was particularly gifted. He picked up his pace.

Boxers was already in the cab and cranking the engine when Jonathan was still twenty feet away. Reading the situation for what it was, Big Guy swung back out of the vehicle and opened the back door on the driver's side. Jonathan ducked his head, stepped high, and sort of leaped onto the back bench seat, while at the same time turning to keep from landing atop the squirming little girl. Knowing that a door slam was coming, he tucked his knees up to prevent losing his feet at the ankles.

Five seconds later, they were on their way.

“Leave me alone! Let go of me!”

Boxers shouted, “Hey! Mindy, shut up! We just saved your life! Show some respect!” When Big Guy wanted to be loud, he could be seismic. They were harsh words, but they worked. Mindy fell silent, and even Jonathan felt a little stunned.

He unwrapped his arms from around the PC and helped her sit up straight. “Are you hurt?”

“They hit me,” she said. Some of the wind had left her sails, but she was still spun tight. Clotted blood mixed with her red hair.

“Well, they can't hit you anymore,” Jonathan said.

“You killed those men.”

“Yes, I did. They'll never hurt anyone ever again.”

“I didn't ask you to do that.”

Jonathan didn't know how to read the emotion in her words, and he didn't much try. At this point in a mission, his job was simple. He needed to return the precious cargo to her family and move on. He was not a counselor and he was not a soother of souls. In his experience, those who were so drawn were born with a radically different skill set than his.

“I didn't ask you to do that,” Mindy repeated.

“I heard you the first time,” Jonathan said. “But it's done anyway. Here, let me see your hands. I'll take those ties off.” As he spoke, he lifted out the three-inch folding blade that was clipped to the pocket of his jeans and opened it with a one-handed flourish.

The suddenness startled Mindy. She retreated from him.

“I'm not going to hurt you,” Jonathan said. “I'm just going to cut the plastic away.”

“Stay away from me.”

Jonathan sighed. “Fine.” He folded the knife and put it back in his pocket.

“Who are you? You're not the police.”

“That is true,” Jonathan said with what he hoped was a friendly smile. “We are definitely not the police. But we are on your side. We came here just to save you.”

“Why?”

“Because we're the good guys,” Jonathan said. She didn't need to know anything about his business arrangement with her father, and she didn't need to know anything about his operations. These were the times when he most missed his days with the Unit, doing the official bidding of Uncle Sam. Back then, the Army psychologists would take care of the emotional damage, and all he had to concentrate on was the physical stuff.

Right now, their biggest concern was to get rid of this vehicle and transfer over to the Batmobile. All the screaming and shooting almost certainly attracted attention, and if anyone saw them hustling Mindy into the backseat of the Ford, they would conclude that Jonathan and Boxers were the bad guys. So far, he heard no sirens or indicators that word of the shoot-out had made it to the authorities, but any delay would buy him only minutes.

They'd stashed the Batmobile in the bay of a body shop owned by Marcus Glenning, a former MARSOC operator who'd lost a leg in Afghanistan and retired on disability to pursue his passion for cars in the community of residents who would most appreciate his sacrifice. Marcus and Jonathan had crossed paths a few times back in the day, and Marcus was willing to do his old friend a favor without asking too many questions. Within an hour of trading the Ford for the Hummer, the Explorer would be a pile of parts awaiting resale.

Jonathan pressed his transmit button. “Mother Hen, Scorpion. Call the hammer man and tell him we're two minutes out.”

“Calling now,” Venice said.

Jonathan turned to his precious cargo. “Mindy, I need you to listen to me. I need you to trust me. Your father sent my friend and me to rescue you from those bad men—the ones who hit you and tied your hands. Can I cut that band off your wrist now?”

She held her hands out. He opened his knife again and carefully slid the razor-sharp blade under the plastic band, near her thumbs, and sliced it away. The deep red lines in her skin angered him. Mindy pulled her hands back and rubbed her wrists.

Jonathan continued, “In a few minutes, we're going to pull into a garage and we're all going to transfer to another truck. That's the truck we're going to use to take you home.”

“How do I know I can believe you?”

“I don't know how to answer that. Let's start with the fact that I killed the men who hurt you. That's got to buy me something.” He smiled, showing off his fake buck teeth. “I need you to cooperate with the transfer, okay? No more kicking and screaming, no trying to run away. We're still in danger, and need to move quickly. Will you do that for me?”

“Are you going to kill anybody else?”

Jonathan scowled. It was an odd question. “I hope not. I'll certainly try not to.” From the way she pulled back, he saw that it was not the right answer. “Let me put it this way. The only way I would kill anyone else would be to protect you from harm.”

Something clicked behind her eyes. “So, you're, like, my bodyguards?”

He winked. “We are exactly like your bodyguards.”