Page 173 of American Hellhound
Ghost pointed to the ceiling. Upstairs. Because if they were holding Roman, they’d put him up there, where he didn’t have an easy escape route.
Collier nodded and they glided soundlessly from the room, guns raised, away from the noise and into a narrow hall. Smoke-stained floral wallpaper. A stack of dirty boots. The front door –not too late to back out, a voice very much like Duane’s chimed helpfully in the back of Ghost’s head – and the stairs.
It seemed too easy.
And of course it was, because a woman came around the corner, arms full of empty beer bottles.
They saw her. She saw them.
Ghost held a finger to his lips.Shhh.
She screamed. Damn it.
Ghost charged her. She kept yelling, screaming for someone named Dusty at the top of her lungs, tapering into a thin, high shriek as Ghost reached her.
She dropped the bottles and they shattered on the floorboards, flecks of glass spattering his shins like buckshot.
Her hands curled into claws and she scrabbled for his face, keening and hissing, trying to stagger back from him. But he grabbed her arm and swatted her away, brought the butt of his gun down on the side of her head. Her eyes rolled back and he let her drop.
Then charged up the staircase.
A stampede of footfalls tore through the main floor, men running and shouting to get to the woman he’d dropped. They’d have to be quick.
He felt Collier at his back, breath hot on his neck, as they pounded up the stairs.
Another woman waited for them at the top, older, gray-headed, hand clutched to her throat.
Collier grabbed her by the wrist and pointed her down the stairs, waving his gun for emphasis. “Go. Go!”
A door stood cracked-open at the end of the hall and Ghost moved toward it. When he was two feet away, it opened wider and a man poked his greasy head through. “Hey, what’s–” His eyes bugged when he spotted Ghost.
Ghost kicked the door, hard, and it sent the guy tumbling back into the room, landing on his ass with a squawk. He had a gun at his hip, Ghost saw, and he trained his own piece on the man’s chest. “Don’t touch it.”
He touched it.
Ghost charged into the room and kicked him in the head.
He was still in the process of toppling back, unconscious, when Ghost stepped over him and deeper into the room. It was a bedroom, as expected, with a sagging iron-framed bed shoved into a corner, and two sofas made up with sheets and pillows. Clothes were piled in laundry baskets and the whole place smelled like sweaty socks and weed.
Roman was tied to a chair in the center of the room, mouth covered with duct tape. He was alone aside from the man Ghost had just knocked out.
Collier hustled into the room, shut and locked the door. “We gotta hurry,” he warned. “A shotgun’ll tear this door in half.”
“Yeah, I know.”
With his free hand, he pulled the knife from his hip and cut Roman’s zip-tied wrists free.
Roman pulled the duct tape off his mouth himself with a hissed, “Shit!”
Ghost moved to his ankles. “We gotta move.” He kept the knife sharp – he couldn’t do laundry for shit, but he took care of his weapons – and it cut through the plastic like butter. “Hurry.”
“Shit,” Roman said again, struggling to his feet, shaking the circulation back into his wrists.
Footsteps pounded up the stairs and down the hall. The door shook in its frame as someone launched a shoulder against it.
“Now,” Collier said, moving to open the window.
It was a two-story drop. Ghost felt the impact of the landing rattle up through his ankles, his knees, his spine; felt it as a sharp stab of pain in his teeth, of all places.
