“I appreciate the offers, truly. But I’ve already told him he’s with me from now on. We’re a team.” That his coworkers wanted to step up to the plate and care for him would make going out on missions easier. Knowing Jamal would be taken care of if something happened to him would be a huge relief.
“He clearly adores and idolizes you,” Kayla said. “We’re all here for you and we’ll help in any way we can.”
Words bumped up against the boulder in his throat, so he just nodded his thanks to his coworkers who had already become family to him.
#
Kenzie was reluctant to approach Jamal as he sat with his attention focused on the television. Had he seen anything when he joined her and Declan in bed last night? She’d been mortified to wake up and realize he was sleeping soundly between them when she wore not one stitch of clothing. It’d been careless and though she didn’t regret her encounter with Declan, she wished they’d been more discreet. “Hey, Jamal, what are you watching?”
“Kenzie!”
He scrambled up from the cushions and hugged her, his little arms gripping tightly. He didn’t act as if anything was amiss. Then he grasped her hand and led her back to the couch. “Do you feel better today?” The concern on his face touched her heart.
“I do. Thank you for asking.”
He dropped his head. “I’m sorry you were taken.”
“I’m fine now, so there’s no need to be sorry.”
He looked up at her, misery on his precious face. “But I should’ve watched out for you and I didn’t. Declan said we were a team, a threesome. Teammates should watch out for each other.”
“The last time I checked, boys weren’t allowed in the girls bathroom,” she reminded him. “There was no way for you to know it had two entrances.”
“Still.”
She hugged him against her side. He was much too young to carry the weight of the world on his small shoulders. “Hey, who’s that?” She pointed to the bear sitting on a pillow beside him.
“Oh, that’s Yogi.” He scooped the stuffed animal up and handed it to her. “He’s mine but I gave him to Declan to keep him company when he was hurt in the hospital and he’s kept him safe the last month but Declan gave him back to me so now we share him.”
She smiled at his run-on sentence. “Well, he’s just too cute. I have one like him in my apartment back home.”
His eyes widened. “You do? What’s his name?”
“Her name,” she corrected. “She’s a girl bear. I named her Aurora, after Sleeping Beauty.”
“That’s a pretty name. Do you think Aurora would like to meet Yogi sometime?”
“I think she’d love to meet him.”
Jamal’s face scrunched. “My brother made fun of me for having him. He called me a baby.”
Though she shouldn’t want to think ill of the dead, she really hated his brother.
“Well, I think you’re fortunate to have a loyal friend. Can I hold him?”
“Oh, sure.” Jamal handed the bear to her and she smiled. It looked well-loved. She thought he probably kept Jamal company on many nights. “Oh, he’s losing a bit of stuffing back here.” She turned him over to assess the damage. Though sewing wasn’t a skill of hers, she should be able to stitch together a hole. She prodded at the opening and felt something solid. That was strange. Kids’ stuffed animals should be safe. Wiggling her finger inside, she felt the foreign object and worked to free it, wincing when the hole ripped wider. She hoped Jamal didn’t notice she was wrecking his bear. Finally, the item slid into her hand.
“What’s that?” Jamal leaned over to inspect her discovery.
She turned the shiny object over in her palm. “It’s a key.”
Chapter Eighteen
Declan considered procuring plane tickets for Kenzie and Jamal and sending them to a remote island somewhere in the middle of the Pacific Ocean where they’d be safe from the threat of two rival gangs gunning for them. It was bad enough with just the Eighty-Sixers but throw the Daggers into the mix and they might be well and truly screwed.
“Declan.” Jamal bolted into the kitchen and slid to a stop by his chair. “Look what we found.” He pointed to Kenzie, who entered the kitchen behind him with Yogi in one hand, her other clenched in a fist.
Kayla, Ethan and Noah gathered around his chair as she held out her hand to reveal a key.
He lifted it from her palm and looked it over. “Where did you find it?”
She held up Yogi, turning the bear around to indicate the small hole. “In here.”
“I’ll be damned,” Noah murmured. “Jamarcus must’ve hidden it inside the bear for safekeeping.”
Declan held the key up to examine it in the light. “This is literally the key to whatever the gangs are after.” He turned to Jamal. “Did your brother have a safe deposit box that you know about?”
Jamal lifted his shoulders and held his palms out. “I don’t know. He never told me anything, so I don’t know if he had a deposit safe or not.”
“Safe deposit box,” Declan corrected. “It’s a box inside a bank where you put valuable items like important papers and family heirlooms.” The key didn’t look like one, but they needed to narrow their choices down. If he had to guess, he’d say it opened a generic padlock.
“I really don’t know.”
“What about a storage building, maybe around your apartment?” Ethan asked.
Jamal shrugged again.
Noah plucked the key from his hand and studied it. “Did Jamarcus have a safe inside your apartment?”
“Really, guys, he didn’t tell me anything. If he did, he hid it in his room.”
Declan met Noah’s gaze. They both had the same thought. Though it’d probably already been combed over by both gangs and the police, they needed to get inside the apartment and take a good look around.
#
They drew straws to see who would stay at the safe house with Kenzie and Jamal while the others checked out the apartment. Ethan plucked the short stick, so he stayed behind while Declan, Noah and Kayla headed to the apartment where Jamal used to live and where his mother had lost her life.
Kayla made a call and learned that most of the Eighty-Sixers were currently locked up for a variety of charges ranging from outstanding warrants to criminal possession to felony assault for beating up Eric. Still, Declan wasn’t taking chances and adjusted the baseball cap on his head. Glasses and a fake mustache—courtesy of Kayla’s bag of tricks—rounded out his disguise. He didn’t want to risk someone recognizing him. The gang had obviously thoroughly researched him to know about his brother. They most likely had his picture, too. There was a slim possibility they’d know to look for Noah or Kayla, but they both covered themselves in disguises as well.
“It’s eerily quiet,” Noah remarked as he turned into the complex. Usually the lot was packed with run-down vehicles and groups of people milling about and the noise levels bordered on deafening from various locations. The cars were still there but the people and music were absent. Without worrying about dodging pedestrians or getting capped by a stray bullet, the condition of the buildings was even more apparent. Doors hung off hinges, windows that weren’t cracked or broken were boarded up, and the paint was multicolor graffiti and obscene doodles. Navigating the parking lot required NASCAR-like reflexes. Some of the potholes rivaled the Grand Canyon. The vehicles resembled the condition of the apartments with flat tires, broken or missing windshields, and the predominant color was rust. Many were propped up on cinder blocks. The owners had long since given up on any semblance of maintenance. City leaders needed to step up and condemn the place.
Noah parked close to the end unit where Jamal’s family had lived. Crime scene tape still surrounded the entrance, one end of the yellow ribbon fluttering in the breeze. The stench of rotting garbage, rampant mold and burnt food hit Declan’s nostrils as soon as he slid out of the SUV. Cars whizzed by on the road beyond the apartments and one dog started barking that set off two more, but
the ear-splitting levels of music blaring from apartments was blessedly missing.
Adjusting the cap lower on his head, he approached the entry, watching his footing so he didn’t step on broken glass, rusty nails or, look at that, a syringe.
“I got the okay to cross the tape.” Kayla ducked under the yellow ribbon and opened the unlocked door with a gloved hand. With her long hair tucked under a cap, sunglasses and a boxy jacket that hid her figure, she looked nothing like the attractive woman he knew her to be. He glanced at Noah and bit his cheek to keep from laughing at the cheesy handlebar mustache Kayla fitted him with that curled beneath his chin making him resemble a wild west gunfighter. Declan’s own Tom Selleck-esque stash probably didn’t look much better.
“Holy Moses.” Kayla turned and dry-heaved. “I’ve never smelled anything so horrible in my life.”
“Here.” Noah handed each of them a tactical gas mask with respirator like the ones they used while rescuing Kenzie. “It was bad the last time I was here and that was before two people had been murdered. It has to be noxious.”
“It smells like they left the rotting corpses inside and closed all the doors and windows,” Kayla moaned as she secured the mask in place. With the built-in comm system, it would be easy to talk to each other while they searched.
Once they geared up, they filed inside. It looked pretty much the same as the images that haunted his dreams. His feet moved of their own volition to the spot where he’d come close to losing his life. Though he recalled Jamarcus pulling the trigger, the overwhelming sense of urgency to protect Jamal from the impact, and the searing pain when the lead connected with his flesh, thankfully he didn’t remember Jamal’s mother slamming his head with a baseball bat.
Crouching down, he fingered the hole in the wall where the bullet embedded after passing through him. He glanced down at the faded, worn carpet and his bloodstain, still clearly visible after a month.
A hand slapped his shoulder. “Quit thinking about that day,” Noah chastised. “I certainly don’t want to relive it.” It’d been Noah and Ethan who carried him out and most likely saved his life.
Pushing to his feet, he glanced around the dingy apartment and fought the wave of sadness that swept over him. Jamal had lived the first few years of his life in the filth.
“I’ll take the bathroom and death room,” Noah offered like a true leader. “Declan, you take Jamal and Jamarcus’s rooms and Kayla, check out the kitchen and living room. Look for hidey holes or loose boards. Anywhere contraband might be stashed.”
They split up and headed in different directions. The police had already processed the apartment, so drawers were rifled through and fingerprint dust marred several surfaces, but there was more destruction than what the cops would’ve left behind. Someone else had been here looking for something. It was either the Eighty-Sixers or Daggers—probably both.
He started with Jamal’s room. It was tiny, but he did have a window that looked out onto the busy street. The traffic noise was loud, even when closed. Declan gritted his teeth. They gave him the worst room in the place. Testing the lock, it slid open easily and he lifted the pane to allow in fresh air. Turning back to the mess, he frowned. It’d been ripped apart from stem to stern. The drawers of Jamal’s dresser were tossed in a pile on the floor and a knife had slit the mattress. Any clothes he’d left behind had been ripped to shreds. No surface had been left untouched. The room was small, so it took no time at all to go over every inch. When he was satisfied it was clean, he headed to the room across the hall and stopped in his tracks.
It was hard to tell where the searchers stopped, and Jamarcus’s own sloppiness took over. Even with heavy-duty latex gloves, he didn’t want to touch anything. Dirty laundry was scattered over the floor, including a bloody shirt that he might’ve been wearing the day he was shot. Every drawer was upended, and the mattress had been pushed from the frame and slashed.
Standing with his hands on his hips, he had no idea where to begin. The task was virtually impossible since he had no clue what he was searching for. He spotted a bat leaning against a wall and shuddered, wondering if it was the one Jamal’s mother used to bash in his skull. Pushing away his anxiety, he picked it up and used it to blaze a trail through the mess. After ten minutes of searching, all he’d come across was a stack of porn magazines, a bong and a switchblade. He was shocked one of the gang members hadn’t pilfered the contraband—especially the porn. He scanned his flashlight over the walls, behind posters of scantily clad women, and beneath the ratty rug looking for any abnormality but finding none.
“You guys find anything?”
“Nothing in the kitchen,” Kayla answered. “It’d already been thoroughly searched.”
“Here, too,” Noah concurred. “I did find needles, empty pill bottles and enough used condoms to fill a dump truck.”
“That’s nasty,” Kayla griped.
“Tell me about it,” he groused. “You find anything, Declan?”
“No. This room’s been scoured, too.” Something made him look up. That’s when he spotted the small nick in a gypsum ceiling tile. “Wait…I might have something.”
Grabbing the wooden chair in front of a desk that looked like it’d been used to snort lines of coke, he positioned it beneath the groove in the ceiling and stepped up onto the seat. The tile pushed in easily and he could just see over the edge. Trailing the beam of light around, it landed on a metal box. Sticking the flashlight in his pocket, he reached for the container and lifted it out as Kayla and Noah joined him. Hopping down, he placed it on the chair.
“It has a lock,” Noah noticed.
Declan took the key from his pocket and tested it, but it was too big.
“Step aside, boys.”
Kayla removed a small kit from one of the pockets of her cargo pants and picked the lock in less than ten seconds. After he removed it from the latch, Declan opened the lid. Stacks of bills filled the inside, along with several pouches of white powder.
“His drug dealing kit,” Noah guessed.
Declan fanned through one of the stacks. “There has to be thousands of dollars inside, and the coke would bring a decent price on the streets, but this wouldn’t have been enough for two gangs to kill over.”
“College fund for Jamal?” Noah asked.
“My thoughts exactly.” Grabbing a bag from the floor, he scooped the money inside and zipped it closed. Jamarcus didn’t need it anymore. His brother did.
“I’ll take care of these.” Kayla removed the packets of drugs and headed for the bathroom. Soon they heard the flush of the toilet. When she returned, she said, “We still don’t know what the key opens or where to find—”
“H-hello? W-who’s in here?”
They glanced at each other when they heard the voice emanating from the entry.
“Y-you’re trespassing on p-private property.”
“I’ll handle her,” Noah told them. “Wait here.” He strode down the hallway. “We have permission—whoa.” He stopped abruptly.
“Hands in the air, now.”
“Okay. I’m complying,” Noah assured the intruders. “Two men, heavily armed, one civilian,” he told them softly through the comms. “Daggers on both necks.”
“Where’s the other one? You didn’t come here alone,” one man insisted, while the other griped, “It smells like rotting roadkill in here. Give me that mask.”
Declan and Kayla exchanged a look. “There’s an open window in the back bedroom. I’ll go to Noah and you can climb out and approach from the side of the building. We’ll surround them.”
“On my way,” Kayla said. “I’ll take the bag.” He handed it to her, and she slid the strap over her shoulder before checking to make sure she could cross the hall without being seen. “I’ll let you know when I’m in place.”
“I said, where is the other one?”
Declan headed to where Noah stood with his hands in the air. Two armed men, as Noah said, were positioned inside the doorway with an o
lder woman in a green housecoat in front of them. Her shockingly orange hair practically stood on end and she shook so hard, her false teeth rattled. He thought he might’ve recognized her from the group that gathered on the night Jamal’s mother had been killed.
“You’ve got us.” Noah took a step forward. “Let the lady go.”
A brawny man with a shaved head and prominent brow ridge shoved the woman and she stumbled. “Get out, Grandma.”
He didn’t have to tell her twice. She disappeared out the door faster than Usain Bolt.
“Take off the masks and give them here,” a stocky man with wild eyes ordered in a nasally voice. He pointed his gun with one hand, the fingers of his other hand pinching his nostrils closed.
“You don’t want these,” Declan insisted, trying to buy time for Kayla to round the building. “It’s calibrated to our breath so if you put them on, all the toxins will instantly be released into your lungs.”
“Holy cow,” Kayla laughed in his ear. “That was so lame.”
Hey, give a guy points for trying, he thought. And ha, it worked because the man dropped his hand. The Daggers weren’t the sharpest knives in the drawer. Ha again. He cracked himself up. Both men tugged the edges of their t-shirts over their faces instead.
“You’re not getting out of here alive,” the brawny man informed them. “You might as well tell us what you found.”
“I’m in place,” Kayla reported. “No lookouts. Just the two. Get ready. I’m tossing a bang snap in three.”
Declan settled his weight between his feet, ready to draw his weapon. A loud pop sounding exactly like a gun shot rang out and the two Daggers spun around and started firing. Declan grabbed his SIG Sauer and ducked behind a wall while Noah did the same. The Daggers turned back around with their fingers still squeezing the triggers. Automatic gunfire ripped into the walls, dangerously close to where they were crouched.
They were powerless to fight back as the bullets kept flying. The shots grew closer as the men approached. Kayla tossed another bang snap and bullets sprayed in an arc when they spun to the sound, their fingers still squeezing the triggers. He eyed Noah, who nodded. Jumping to their feet, they stepped out and when the men turned around, they fired, each taking down a shooter. Kayla emerged through the door weapon first and aimed at the two unmoving men.
Running Scared Page 20