Page 147 of Lone Star

Reese glanced over at the dying thug, his gaze as flat and spooky as Jinx remembered from a few days before. Some guys looked hard, some looked impassive, so many brothers who’d cultivated inscrutable expressions they wore like weaponized masks. But this kid didn’t even look human.

He glanced back at Jinx and said, “We need to leave.”

“Yeah, no shit, Sherlock,” Gringo snapped at him. “You gonna just stand there, or help me get him up? He’s fucking crippled.”

“I’m not crippled.” But his effort to sit up left him gagging.

“Right. We need a wheelchair.”

From the hallway, Fox’s brother asked, “Where’s the Menendez woman?”

“Other end of the hall,” Gringo said, distracted, a hand on Jinx’s shoulder. Then his eyes widened. “Oh, shit.”

~*~

Jinx wasn’t the largest and heaviest of the Lean Dogs, but he was well-muscled, and more or less dead weight given the extent of his injuries, so it took Reese, Gringo, and Agent Maddox to wrestle him into a wheelchair while Tenny sat on the edge of the bed, shaking. Maddox had flashed his badge when they came off the elevator, and told everyone to take cover. Nurses and doctors and patients had ducked into rooms, and behind counters, but a voice continued to call codes over the PA. Reese knew they were dealing with a matter of seconds before security arrived, or the local police. Maddox could get them out of the building, but that didn’t mean complications wouldn’t arise.

Jinx’s IV had pulled loose from the crook of his elbow, little pearls of blood running down his forearm, staining his gown.

“He needs morphine,” Gringo said, tone grim.

“There’s a pump attached to his IV,” Tenny said from the bed. “Same as mine. Get a fresh needle in him and then hit him with two presses.”

Reese could have done it – he’d administered his own first aid in the field for years; he could stitch a wound neatly as a seamstress on his own body – but he could hear the clock clicking away in the back of his mind. “Can you do it?” Reese asked Gringo, and earned a grimace.

“Probably. Maybe.”

“I’ll talk him through it,” Tenny said. “Go.”

Reese headed for the door.

Maddox stepped in front of him before he got there, brows nearly fused together over his slender nose.

“We don’t have time,” Reese said.

Maddox’s mouth pressed to a flat, colorless line, because he knew they didn’t, and that Reese was right, and that Maddox was the least-equipped to handle this situation. It rankled, though.

The agent finally nodded and stepped aside, and Reese took long strides down the hall, his gun at the ready. A nurse peeked out of a door, gasped, and retreated. He passed a cracked door and heard loud sobbing on the other side. People were frightened – civilians. That was normal, in his line of work, but he didn’t normally have to show his face to them – naked and without paint, unmistakable, a gun in his hand for all the security cameras to see.

That wasn’t how it was done. That wasn’t the way to maintain ghost status.

His pulse ticked up a notch, and it had nothing to do with the situation at hand, but the situation to come, maybe, if the FBI didn’t wipe the slate clean after all of this.

Melanie Menendez was in room 203, Jinx had said. It was second to last on the left; he could see its door from here – its open door.

He approached with all the required caution, kicking the door in, hands tight on his gun. But it was too late. Melanie was gone – in a hurry, if the way the blankets hung down off the bed was any indication.

Reese turned and bolted.

“What?” Maddox shouted, when he reached the nurse’s station.

“Gone,” Reese said, already shouldering his way into the stairwell. “Tell them to lock the building down.”

“Fucking shit…” Maddox murmured, before the door closed, and cut off the sound. Then Reese was pounding down the concrete stairs as fast as he could go.

When he pushed through the door at the bottom, he had to dodge past a security guard, an out-of-shape young guy who shouted for him to stop. He wasn’t armed with anything but a baton, though, so Reese ducked, and kept running. Down a hall, doctors and staff members flattening themselves against the walls to avoid him. Everyone he passed wore a variation of the same expression: stark, knee-shaking terror.

It was the only way anyone had ever looked at him. Save for Kris. And his first master. And his new masters – who called themselvesbrothers, and who weren’t masters at all, and for whom he was doing this, so he could go home, and be around people who didn’t look at him like he was a ghost streaking down their hallways.

---