Page 92 of Double Shot

That was good for us.

They completely abandoned the house, every one of them.

Sadie having a near melt down over our conversation was less good. She was injured, amped up on endorphins, and Lach was right; her taking a shower was a luxury at the moment, but it was one we could afford.

The police would eventually get here, but over a noise complaint, they wouldn’t hurry. No alarms, that would bump their priority down a few notches. The plus side of dealing with groups like the cartels was that they didn’t call the police, and often it was uniformed officers and agencies that were the greater threat to us.

There was a security system control panel in the back of the panic room, and I went to secure the grounds, make sure we didn’t have any inbound while Lach put some bloody fucking clothes on. I forced myself to focus, because the main thing on my mind was the shark bite that Kajin tried to take out of Sadie’s shoulder. It was awful and bloody, but no arterial bleeding, there was time. Cleaning it would be bloody awful, hopefully the shower would help cool her off, and help cleanse the wound some too.

I rewound the digital recordings and managed to track Kaijin’s egress, to the garage. Sadie wanted to know where the woman went, so it was an easy thing to find out. She seemed to be furious, I assumed that her personal car was one of those the guards had used for an escape. Two approached her, one a woman, the other a mousy looking man with a baby face.

She drew a pistol, likely taken from one of the fallen guards, and shot both of them in the face. The tape was silent, but I could well imagine the back-to-back pop pop. They both crumpled like dolls. She grabbed keys, got into a white sedan, non-descript, and drove away.

“The house is ours, all forces have withdrawn,” I called out. “Police have not been notified; their alarm isn’t even triggered. What a bunch of jokers.”

“They really felt like jokers when I was being shot at,” Sadie called from where she was sitting with Lach. They were caught in their own soft conversation, while he tended her injury.

“Touché, Poppet, touché,” I admitted.

“We will need to clear out of here posthaste, even if the police weren’t tagged by the security system, there is no way no one nearby didn’t call the police with all the shooting and grenades going off,” I said.

“She had no idea about the phone, mate,” Lach called.

“That’s how we found you so fast,” I said. “She didn’t even turn it off.”

“Would that have worked?” he asked.

“It would have slowed me down a bit, but maybe ten-fifteen minutes longer.” I had a little brag in that. I set the system to upload all of its data to my own cloud, concealed behind its layers of encryption. There was a ton of info not just about the house, and the record of the multiple felonies that had happened here, but also Cartel finances in North America.

There were plenty of personal files.

This was where Chauvignon had actually been living, this was his house. The son of a bitch had been practically our neighbor the entire time.

How many times had we crossed paths and never known it?

If Kaijin had her pleasure dungeon shit here, where was he?

There were too many questions and not enough time.

After the upload completed, I hit the keys to force the entire system to do a factory reset. Everything would be wiped, all the memory files blanked, it would take a government tech forensics team to get anything out of the hard drives now.

“It’s time to go,” I said, clicking the last few keys and shutting the place down. “Before Indigo’s finest finally do get here.”

Lach was dressed and only looked tired, but Sadie was pale and she was nearly coated in a sheet of fresh blood from her shoulder that stained the top of the towel she was in. Lach had managed a crude bandage over the worst of it, but that would require serious attention later. I should be able to handle it, but if it was too much, Doc Max was easy enough to reach.

“I’ll come back for the command van later, it’s safely parked and locked,” I said. Lach was still unsteady on his feet, and Sadie stumbled a bit. Blood loss and adrenaline crash were hell on a body. I wanted to get her back somewhere safe and make sure she didn’t try to go into shock. We liberated a BMW sedan from the garage and made the drive to Phoenician in what was likely record time.

* * *

Lach almost floatedin the oversized tub, and Sadie perched gracefully on the edge, their hands entwined. She had been reluctant to let me remove the wadded-up bandage and made a sobbing sound when I probed the wound. It didn’t look like a normal bite, she looked like she had been bitten by a dog, or some other sort of animal.

I gave her some Tylenol, the good kind from Canada, then sprayed the bite with a local anesthetic. This would be easier than removing a bullet, but the wound was ragged and ugly. It might take a few stitches, especially on the sides of the bite. Cleaning the wound was delicate, and getting antiseptics into it made Sadie cry out, Tylenol, even with the added benefit of Codeine, simply wasn’t enough I am afraid.

Lach suggested I give her some Ole Reliable.

I went and checked the improvised bar, and came back with a bottle of some local high proof whiskey, and handed it to her. “Ole Reliable.”

“Ole Reliable is whiskey?” she asked, almost incredulously.

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