Page 106 of The Evening Wolves

“Good fucking Lord,” Emery muttered as he turned to find his husband.

John reappeared a moment later, holstering his Glock as he came around one of the screens. To the question he must have seen on Emery’s face, he tilted his head in the direction he’d come from and said, “We had a runner.”

Adrenaline still high, Emery nodded. A part of him knew, later, he would relive some of these moments in slow motion. The kick of the Blackhawk. The way the man with the shaved head had gone down. But for now, he had to stay here, like this. He passed the meth head’s submachine gun to Tean. The meth head was taking labored breaths, his body still twitching in the aftermath of the electricity Tean had sent coursing through his body. Next, Emery checked the man with the shaved head. He was breathing, his color bad. Emery picked up his gun by the barrel in two fingers and carried it over to the front desk.

“Use this if you need it,” Emery said. “Otherwise, don’t touch it.”

Auggie nodded. He jerked a thumb at a red box behind the desk that said FIRE.

With a tiny laugh, Emery glanced at John. John nodded.

“You’re good here?” Emery asked.

“Good,” Auggie said.

Tean nodded shakily. He gripped the Taser so tightly that the fine bones of his hands stood out against the skin.

“Hit it,” Emery said.

Auggie pulled the fire alarm, and a klaxon began to blare as emergency lights flashed to life.

The volume bordered on painful, and as Emery and John made their way to the stairs, he asked himself how anyone could sleep through it. He had his answer soon enough: people began to stream out of doorways to clog the stairwell: a man in sailing boat boxers and a stained tank top; a woman in curlers and a terry cloth robe; barefooted children pursued by a harried-looking woman carrying a handful of tiny shoes. Everyone had the same expression, a mixture of confusion and worry, as they crowded the narrow stairs and pressed past Emery and John.

Auggie’s idea presented an ideal opportunity to check the hotel. The alarm meant that the hotel would be evacuated. If Vermilya and Koby and whoever else was involved in this refused to let the kids leave, they’d immediately know something was wrong. On the other hand, if the traffickers tried to remove the children from the building, the men stationed outside the hotel would spot them and move to intercept—or, at a bare minimum, follow. Best of all, emergency services would respond.

As they reached each floor, Emery stuck his head out into the hallway to see if he could spot anything unusual. Depending on the traffickers’ arrangement with the hotel, they might have booked anything from a handful of rooms to an entire floor—an entire floor would be ideal, of course, since it would reduce the number of people who saw and remembered the children being moved in and out. Also, that dark voice suggested, an entire floor would give them additional rooms for customers to use.

Checking the second floor was almost impossible because of the crush of people trying to escape into the stairwell. But Emery saw only frightened families and baggy-eyed road warriors, and he motioned for John to continue up. The flow of people was thinning at the third floor, and there too, Emery saw nothing out of the ordinary. By the time Emery and John reached the fourth floor, the flood of bodies had left them behind—a few people were still working their way down the stairs, but otherwise, Emery and John were alone.

Emery stepped out into the hallway and saw the man who called himself Jace Vermilya. He looked bad—his color awful, his hair lank, his action hero build wasted away over the last few days. But getting shot and almost killed would do that to anyone; the fact that Vermilya stood here, that he had possessed the strength and intelligence to murder the deputy guarding him and make his escape, suggested that even in an injured capacity, he was more dangerous than most people. He had a phone pressed to his ear and was talking, but when Emery stepped into the hallway, his head came up, and his eyes widened. He dropped the phone to his side and held up a hand.

“Hey,” he said. “Hey! Hold on!”

Emery brought up the Blackhawk. He started down the hallway. His brain had gone into lockdown, acknowledging only the immediate realities: Vermilya currently wasn’t holding a weapon, he was injured, he was afraid. The doors lining the hallway were shut, and an alcove opened on Emery’s left: ice and vending machines. His gaze fixed on Vermilya. “Where is he?”

“He’s fine. They’re all fine.” Vermilya took a step back. It was hard to see the action hero now. Hard to see the guy who had conned men and women into believing he was a crusader. Inside a baggy hoodie and sweatpants, he looked old and tired and jaundiced. This was the man, Emery thought, who had tried to ruin John’s life. This was the man who had taken Colt. “But you’ve got to stop right there, or I’m going to make another call, and he’s not going to be fine.”

Emery kept walking. Behind him, John was talking into his phone, requesting police at the hotel. That was smart, Emery thought. It was like a dream. That was the smart thing to do. He slipped his finger inside the trigger guard. “Where is he?”

“Stop!” Vermilya said, his voice cracking. “If I—”

Seeing him now, in person, awake and alive, Emery felt his last doubts fall away. This was the man. The one behind it all. Why else would he be here? Why else would his friends or accomplices or whatever they were—why else would they have risked so much to rescue him from the hospital? Anyone else, anyone except the mastermind, would have been left behind. Or eliminated. Emery thought of the ambush at the meth lab. Of the video of Vermilya cowing Brey. Of how he had, just now, threatened Colt. But it was more than that. Emery could see it in his face, and it wasn’t anything that would hold up in court, it wasn’t anything he could call proof or evidence. But he knew. Vermilya’s boldness in putting himself forward as the witness was more proof, in its own way: it reeked of his contempt for them, his utter surety he could walk away after burning their lives to the ground. It was another mark of his spitefulness, his final attempts to twist the knife. Just like taking Colt and Ashley.

“You arranged for Missy Bennett to be killed. You arranged for Sheriff Dennis Engels to be killed. You arranged for Dalton Weber and Ambyr Hobbs to be killed. You arranged for Adam Ezell to be killed, and Deanna Vance, and Marcie Fuentes, and Whitney Higgins. And that’s not getting into people like Eric Brey or Ingra Thomas. You destroyed my husband’s life. And you took my son. Get on the fucking floor before I kill you right now.”

“You’d better stop right there!”

“Where is he?”

“Ree, don’t get too—”

John cut off with a grunt, and then bodies crashed to the floor. Emery glanced back, and in his peripheral vision, he was aware of Vermilya taking the opportunity to bolt toward the stairs at the end of the building. But Emery couldn’t bring himself to go after him. All he could do was stare.

Koby—or whatever his real name was—and John were rolling across the floor. The kama lay on the floor a few feet away, and Koby was trying to drive a massive trench knife into John’s throat, above the protection of the stab vest, while John fought to keep the blade at a distance. When the men rolled again, a long rip showed across the back of John’s coat, and Emery knew what had happened: the kama had cut through the coat and been stopped by the stab vest underneath. The alcove, Emery realized. Koby had been hiding behind one of the machines. I walked right past him, Emery thought. I walked right the fuck past him.

He boxed up the self-recrimination and studied the men ahead of him. Koby’s face was a mess from his previous encounter with John—skin split across the bridge of the nose John had broken, eyes black and puffy from the blow. But he had the element of surprise, he was younger, and he had the advantage of being on top, where he could use all his body weight to drive the blade down. Worse, John had hurt his shoulder; on an ordinary day, he might have been able to hold the knife off, but today, inch by inch, it was slowly coming down.

Emery brought up the Blackhawk, tried to decide on his shot. The closer he got to the men, the better his chance of disabling Koby without hurting John. But it also put him within reach of Koby and that big fucker of a knife. Emery weighed his options for a heartbeat and took a step forward.

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