Page 72 of Avenging Kelly

I traded the pliers for a pair of tin snips and kneeled next to the person on the floor, picking up their hand and pulling up their pinky finger. “Unless you don’t want this hanging on a chain around my neck, you better fucking start talking.”

“Cut me, and I’ll nut punch you,” was whispered next to me as I held up the fist.

“Stop this now. I’ll tell, but,” Frances reached up to wipe her eyes, “you have to protect me. They’ll kill me.” Apparently, it hadn’t sunk in that I’d kill her just as easily.

“Who?”

And then, the bird began to sing…

28

LONDON

Austin and I were in Battery Park at Versey Street, where Frankie Man had a lush suite on the fifteenth floor of the Conrad New York Hotel, along with eight rooms on the fourteenth floor, which meant he’d brought minions. It was nice to have a hacker on standby.

Nat Crossley’s sudden demise put us at a material deficit because we didn’t know what the Mangellos knew about the Torrente organization, but it was a lesson to us all the next time an operative was brought on board… trust is earned over time, not immediately given because someone’s cousin’s brother-in-law’s dad said they were good. I wasn’t sure how Nat came to work for Giuseppe, but I worried that someone had dropped the ball while vetting the traitor.

I was sure Giuseppe knew he’d fucked up by hiring the kid on someone else’s word, but that problem was now mute. Next on the hit parade was getting Daisy back to her mommy and getting the five of us out of the country so Kelly could go to rehab.

I was certain my man had his hands full with getting Ritchfield to out her cohorts, but I received an odd text from Casper that he had a fantastic idea to help get the woman to talk, so I trusted he did. I prayed to fuck he did.

“Got any ideas about how to get up there?” I asked Austin over the earwig I was wearing to communicate. I was at the corner of Versey and North End Way trying to cover the two back exits, and he was covering the front and side. It was unseasonably warm and clear that March night, thankfully, since we were outside. We could get into the hotel easily, but up to the penthouse? That was another story.

“We’re not going up. They’re coming down,” Austin stated.

I suddenly had a flashback that didn’t make me feel good, but it had worked, just as Duke had suggested. Was it redundant to try the fire game twice?

“How?” I asked, imagining scenarios, good and bad, in my head. Where would the best place be to set a fire? It would have to cause enough smoke to make them clear the building, that was for sure.

“I’m calling in a bomb threat to the hotel. Be on the lookout if they come out your way,” Noble alerted. He’d been able to show me pictures of the players, but if there was a mass exodus out of the two exits I was watching from the corner, I wasn’t sure if I could pick them out of a crowd. I would, however, try… as I skulked to hide near a mailbox.

Suddenly, there were two figures dressed in black across the street from me. “I got company,” I whispered as I slid around the side of the mailbox and ducked.

Almost before I got the words out, there were two more coming toward me from the other direction at a quick pace about thirty yards away. It was the middle of the night, so there wasn’t much street traffic, which was what made me notice them in the first place. “Two more. I got four,” I whispered as I tried to be one with a light standard.

I reached for my firearm behind my back when something pinged off the mailbox next to me that had me cowering until I could get my gun out of my fucking waistband. The laugh that rang out, which I easily recognized, pissed me off.

“You fuckers,” I hissed. Out of the shadows came Smokey, Ace, Duke, and Dominic. The four of them were wearing night vision goggles.

“Who is it?” Noble asked over the comms.

“Your husband and the three stooges,” I answered.

“Who says he’s not the fourth one? Weren’t there four of them?” Austin answered, a laugh in his voice.

I remembered when my fellow agents were preparing for some risky shit when I was with the DEA. Lots of banter and shit talk helped diffuse the pre-operation nerves. It was good to see that some things were universal.

“Okay, I’ll send Duke and Dominic to your side, and Smokey, Ace, and I will watch the other side. This way, we have more coverage around the building. Stay on comms so I know what the fuck is going on over there.”

I took Dominic’s goggles and sent him and Duke down the alley to the front of the building to help Noble. Smokey, Ace, and I moved into better positions to get eyes on the herds of people who would flood out of the fancy hotel while we tried to locate one baby girl in the crowd. What the fuck were we thinking?

“Copy. I’m making the call now.”

“Toss the phone after.” I turned to my companions. “He’s making the call.” We spread out and waited for the fun to begin.

Less than thirty seconds later, alarms blared from the building, shattering the quiet March night. In the distance, there were police and fire alarms, and not fifteen seconds later, people poured out of the building and onto the sidewalks, running left and right in total panic.

We’d tried to make our job easier by stationing ourselves on the outer edges of the property in hopes that we had a fighting chance at seeing the baby in someone’s arms, which was absolutely a losing proposition. There were too many parents carrying children for me to recognize any of the players in the photographs Noble had shown me.

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