The guard didn’t pursue him, though Reese could hear him speaking over his radio. He hit a set of double doors, uncontested, and burst through into the emergency room, full of confused patients, some sitting, some standing, some demanding to know what was going on while the intake nurses waved their hands and called for quiet and order.
Everyone turned toward him when he entered, and everyone froze the moment they spotted the gun in his hand. In the second before the screaming started, he spotted his quarry: the flash of Melanie’s blond hair, and the back of a tall, thickset man as he hustled her out through the sliding doors. The man’s hand, Reese noted, was at her elbow, like he was helping her, rather than gripping tight at her upper arm.
She glanced back over her shoulder, briefly, when the shouting started, and it was only once she’d spotted him that her eyes widened, and her mouth dropped open.
She wasn’t being kidnapped; she was leaving with the cartel under her own power.
Reese took off.
He saw the man moving to intercept him from the corner of his eye. A citizen, someone who’d been waiting with a loved one in the ER. Middle-aged, fairly fit, his face set in lines of petrified determination. He’d decided Reese was a gunman, a threat to civilians, and he was going to throw himself on the figurative grenade. Try to take out the threat.
Reese admired his spirit, but he didn’t have time for the distraction.
He paused, and let the man get closer; he was unarmed, and came at Reese with bare hands open and ready to grab, to grapple.
Reese feinted, brought a hand up, and hit the man right in the sternum with the heel of his free hand. The man’s forward momentum, and the perfect strike, sent him staggering backward with an explosive breath, all the air rushing out of his lungs. Part force, part shock.
“Move,” Reese told him, dodged around him, and kept going.
Melanie and her escort were out the door. A car sat idling beneath the porte-cochere.
Reese hit the threshold just as Melanie was being bundled into the car. If he shot now, there was a high chance of striking her. Did it matter?
Personally, no. She was involved, clearly; he thought it would be easiest to clear the board of players.
But the club would want to question her. Candy had known her; he would want answers.
Reese made an on-the-move decision, and when he reached the open car door, he had his knife in his other hand. The man had his back to him, and he stabbed him, quick and clean, in the kidney. The man yelled, and toppled forward into the backseat of the car. Melanie screamed from inside.
Reese struck again, this time in the man’s calf, and earned another scream.
Then the car was jumping forward, tires screeching, and it sped away with the man’s feet still dangling out of the open door.
Melanie must have dragged him inside, because no part of him was visible by the time the car whipped around the corner and the door slammed shut on its own.
Reese stood a moment, catching his breath, listening to the motor of the Mercedes roar as it drew farther and farther away, out of sight, and then, a few beats later, out of hearing range. He inhaled, and exhaled, and inhaled, and exhaled, and realized, finally, that he was a jumble of emotions inside, fractious and quivery and feeling a dozen different things at once, too tangled to parse at the moment. He waited for the cold dispassion that had been his constant companion to descend, but when it didn’t, he finally turned and headed back inside.
Perhaps Agent Maddox could be of some help in escaping.
Forty-Three
There was a hole. In the wall. Its edges jagged, the studs snapped off like broken teeth, exposed wires trailing like snakes over the debris-littered hardwood.
To be fair, it hadn’t been the sturdiest of walls. A bit of cinderblock around the foundation, but mostly just sheetrock, insulation, and inexpensive wood siding. A man couldn’t have run through it, but a truck – especially one with a big brush guard or hunting grill on the front – could have done it, easy. And it had. It had punched right through, like a fist through wet tissue paper. Broken some tables. Destroyed the big flat-screen TV. Sent the couch flying. There had been glasses and coffee mugs on some of the tables, and their shattered fragments glinted along the floor, where sunlight flooded in through the opening where the wall had been only an hour ago, when he left for the precinct.
It was funny what a person noticed, in moments of crisis: the finer details that the eyes caught upon, and which captured the attention. Amidst the detritus on the floor, Candy’s gaze landed on a pencil, a basic, yellow, No. 2 like he’d used at school as a kid. It lay under a table, the table where Benny’s corpse was draped, his head a ruin like a split melon, blood and tea comingled on the tabletop.
There were blood flecks on the pencil, tiny droplets.
“…Candy. Candy.Derek.”
He blinked. Jenny stood in front of him, her hands on his biceps – clutching hard, nails digging in, bright spots of pain that cut through the haze that had engulfed him the moment Jenny saidMichelle’s gone.
He lifted his head and scanned the room, the contained chaos of it. He didn’t remember walking inside, wasn’t sure if the paramedics had already been inside, tending to the wounded – his wounded brothers – or if they’d arrived while he’d stood there, staring, sound coming to him in muted swells like he was underwater.
Cletus was being strapped down to a stretcher. Another paramedic shined a penlight in Talis’s eyes, asking him questions Candy couldn’t hear the answers to. He noted Cantrell, with a start; the agent was picking his way carefully through the debris, wearing sterile gloves and murmuring to himself as he surveyed the damage. Fox was talking to Eden, who was bent at the waist, examining a long gash at somebody’s hairline. One of the Cali boys; Tee, he realized, belatedly.
“Derek,” Jenny repeated, and he looked down into her worried face. Her eyes gleamed, shiny with checked tears, but she was composed, brave-faced. Unlike him, she’d taken command of the situation, wasn’t panicking.