by Donica Covey
The fist connecting with his face brought him to his knees. Another thrown punch, another missed opportunity to duck and cover. As long as he kept Bismarck focused on him, then Cas could take a shot, a chance.
Take a shot? She’d never had a lesson in her life. Damn.
Too late, he saw the chair held above his head and it came crashing down. Stars danced before his eyes, making him sit stunned on the floor. Why was this happening? “Why?”
“Because you’ve made a mess of things and I’ve been paid well to clean it up.”
* * *
The floor was hard beneath her, almost knocking the breath from her body. After having been tied up for days, the pain of the blood rushing back was almost enough to kill her. She bit her lip, trying not to cry out. Her legs were unable to straighten and support her body. Stretching, any movement, was sheer agony.
She crawled, groping for even a small amount of support.
Justice was yelling for her to run, to get out. How was she supposed to run when she couldn’t even stand?
Callye watched Justice’s face as she moved to him. He knew the man. Her kidnapper, their tormentor, was a cop? It wasn’t possible. As she passed Justice on her way to freedom, she could see he didn’t want to believe it either. How could she leave him alone? But what could she do to help him?
“The keys to the sedan are in it. Once you get in there, you drive like hell away from here, you understand?”
The look in Justice’s eyes, pleading for her to leave, was almost more than she could stand. Once she made it to the car, she could use his radio or phone or something to call for help. Would they arrive in time?
Staggering in the darkness, she could hear the fight behind her. She slipped, falling to her knees. She looked up from the floor just in time to see the man hit Justice. A wicked blade flashed in the dim light. It headed straight at Justice’s face.
Fear swallowed her. Run. Get help. Move. She couldn’t. It wasn’t about her stiff body anymore. It was the morbid desire to watch the two men fighting.
The blade flew from Bismarck’s hand and disappeared in the darkness.
Justice went down with an audible oomph and didn’t move.
Callye was torn. She was ready to go up the first step when Bismarck stopped her dead in her tracks.
“You’re making it too easy, Bernard.”
Something cold was beneath her hand and she realized it was Justice’s gun. With the gun gripped tight, she pulled almost completely upright.
“Why?”
The question took Callye, and apparently Bismarck, by surprise.
“Because you’ve made a mess of things and I’ve been paid well to clean it up.”
Bismarck aimed a gun she didn’t even know he had level at Justice’s chest. “I’m gonna enjoy killing you. Justice for all.” He laughed.
“Not if I kill you first,” Callye’s voice was raspy but she was determined.
Justice’s eyes were on her, but she was too busy watching Bismarck to look at him.
“That gun is as big as you are. You could never fire it.” Bismarck never moved the muzzle aiming at Justice.
She pulled the trigger and staggered under the weight of the gun, but somewhere inside she found the strength not to fall backwards.
Bismarck moved in closer to her, taking his gaze from Justice. “You are full of surprises. Too bad you missed.”
Bismarck was now only a few feet from her. Any second he’d turn his gun at her, or maybe he’d lunge for hers, use it to kill her and then Justice.
“Even I can’t miss at this distance.” Callye squeezed the trigger. Time slowed almost to a stop as Bismarck’s look changed to one of pure shock.
The crimson stain of blood spread across the material of his shirt. In slow motion, his legs crumpled and he fell to the floor.
For seconds she couldn’t move. She’d just killed a man. Took a life. The gun sagged in her hand, dropped to the ground, and she followed close behind it.
Justice pushed to his feet and moved to Cas. She was rocking on the floor, her knees drawn tight to her chest. He rushed to her side and put his arm around her shoulders, but she jerked in fear.
Once more he touched her, pulling her tight against him. “Cas, baby, look at me. It’s all over.” Was she even hearing him? “Baby, come on. It’s all over, all over.” He held on for dear life, trying to get her to come back to him.
She sat stiff in his embrace, her eyes staring straight ahead.
“Baby, please, listen to my voice. You’re safe now. It’s all over. I’m going to take you home.”
Slowly, her head turned to him. “I…killed him…” Then she collapsed against his chest, her sobs wracking his body as he held tight.
With one arm still around her, he gently stroked her hair with his other hand. “You did what you had to do, baby. You saved us. If you hadn’t, he would’ve killed me.” He didn’t bother to add that he was sure after Bismarck had finished him off that she’d be next. “Can you stand up?”
“Not yet, please…” Her voice was soft, pained. “Everything…it hurts.” She cried harder and clutched to him like a lifeline.
A deafening roar sounded as the building shook and the roof began to collapse on top of them. He pushed her beneath him, trying to block her body from the falling debris.
Falling timbers and collapsing walls filled the air with dust. The smell of acrid smoke mingled with the musty odor on the air.
“Get off me.” She was screaming and pounding him with her fists. “Please don’t hurt me again. Please.”
He had to get her out of there. Fire ate at what was left of the room. With the old, dry building material feeding it, it was moving towards them fast. He pulled them out from under the rubble and pushed her. He trapped her wrists in his hands. It was a mistake that sent terror trembling through her.
“Baby, look at me. Please see me. We’ve gotta get out of here. Can you understand me?”
It took a precious minute, but she finally looked at him and nodded.
“Good. Come on. Stay low and stay beside me.”
She stumbled on what was once the ceiling.
Flames licked his back as he tried to keep her on her feet. Another explosion rocked the ground beneath them. When it settled, he ran, pulling her alongside him.
He threw a glance over his shoulder, and then looked down at her. The fire was closing in on them. They had to get a move on.
She jerked in his grasp, and he watched in horror as she collapsed on the ground, a jagged piece of broken timber embedded in her side. Blood oozed down her body.
“Oh, God!” He grabbed her up in his arms, making for the flight of steps that would lead them to the door, to safety.
His feet slipped beneath him and he stumbled. Trying to carry them both was almost impossible. “Hang on, baby, we’re almost there. Almost there, just a little farther.”
Outside, sirens wailed. If he didn’t hurry, the building was going to collapse on top of them. “Here we go. Almost there. Almost to the door.”
Just as he made it out the door to the fresh air, the building groaned, gave a final shudder, and then collapsed.
He moved her farther from the building as squads and fire engines arrived on the scene. She was still as death, her skin far too pale and her breathing hard to detect.
“We need an ambulance here, now,” he shouted out to the people rushing by him.
Her blood was so warm and sticky as it coated him. He held her close, rocking her, his tears falling on her face as he clung to her, willing her to hang on.
“Please, baby, I need you. Don’t leave me like this.” His head jerked up. “Where the hell is that ambulance?”
* * *
Two men sat in a black sedan hidden in the crowd, watching the flurry of activity. When Justice and Callye emerged, Jarold growled. “This isn’t possible. They all should be buried underneath the burning rubble.”
“We’ll get him, Mr. Abrahms, I promise.”
“I’m sick of promises. Bismarck had the perfect opportunity, but he had to get cocky and screw it all up. Find out where Bismarck is. If the explosion didn’t kill him, I want you to, got it?”
“Yes, sir.”
Another explosion rocked the building’s foundation, and angry flames surged brighter in the dark night. Abrahms shook his head. This wasn’t going at all as planned. Damn that Bismarck for a fool.
When Rivera found out he failed—Abrahms shuddered. Crossing Mr. Rivera was suicide. Jarold looked back out over the burning building and the flashing lights. The explosives should’ve gone off sooner, another minor error that was going to come back to bite him in the ass.
“Let’s get out of here,” he ordered the driver. In the rear window, the chaos drifted farther and farther away. Before long it was out of sight.
Now he had to start from scratch and get the unit off their tails. He had to get the imported merchandise packaged for shipping into Texas and California. How was he going to manage that when the distraction they tossed out had failed?
Jarold leaned back. When he’d come into the business, black tar and marijuana were the big players. Pure white heroin now added to the mix. Outlying counties made a huge demand for coke, and most of the cities had meth labs. He was a long way from a fiend crawling the streets. Now he had personal drivers, bodyguards, housekeepers and more money than he could spend. No way was he going to let a couple of piss-ant DEA agents ruin his life.
There was still time to take down Bernard and his friends. Picking them off one by one was really the only way. Taking them on as a unit was suicide. That should buy him time to get things set up so the operation could move forward with very little interference. Now, how to keep Rivera at bay until it was done…
Chapter Nine
“Where the hell is that ambulance?” Justice shouted again above the wailing of the sirens. In the flashing strobe lights around him, he looked down into Cas’s pale face. “Don’t you dare leave me, you hear me, Callye Ann Simone? I need you, damn it.”
The blood was pooling beneath his arms as it seeped from the many cuts slashing her small frame. Bruises in colors ranging from violet to angry black and green dotted her face and arms. His stomach clenched in fear.
“We need the medics now,” he shouted again. Was anyone even hearing him? Why the hell didn’t someone come for her?
Uniforms raced around him, but all he could see was Cas. “Damn it, Cas, please hang on.” Her pulse was so weak. They couldn’t be too late. This just couldn’t be happening. He’d just gotten her back, he couldn’t lose her now.
The medics pushed him out of the way as they lined a spine board behind Cas and carefully positioned her on it. Then he reached out to help lift it to the gurney. Justice jumped into the back of the rig while the medics secured the gurney in place. “Please, baby, please hang on.”
They were only a few miles from the hospital when the medic monitoring Cas shouted, and the second medic jumped from his seat. They pulled out a defib unit and applied the patches.
Justice’s mind screamed in agony as the computerized voice said, “Charging—” then, “—shock now.”
Once…twice…she hadn’t responded yet. The medics continued to work on her as the ambulance raced through the streets to the large medical center. They arrived at the hospital and Justice jumped out the side door as they pulled her out the back, rushing her inside. A nurse blocked his way to the exam room.
“I’m sorry, sir, you’ll have to wait out there.” She indicated the waiting room.
“But…” His voice was as broken as his spirit.
“As soon as we have news, a doctor will be out with you.”
With the nightmarish images dancing through his mind, he alternately paced the waiting room and dropped into a chair to scrub his hands down his face. He needed to smash something. If that son of a bitch weren’t already dead, he’d be happy to kill him. Only he’d make sure that it was a slow, torturous death rather than the relatively quick one Dalton had received at Cas’s hands.
“Justice?” Chase, Mickey and Bobby were standing around him, worry lining their faces.
He rubbed his face, pushed up from the chair, and with wooden steps walked to the window. Looking out for a few minutes, he tried to find the words.
Finally he gathered himself and moved back to join them. “She umm…they were…damn.” He turned away. The pity in their eyes only made it worse.
“They were monitoring her vitals and suddenly she went into arrest. They shocked her a couple of times before getting here. Then they took her into a room. That’s all I know.”
He couldn’t fall apart now. She needed him to be strong for her. “How long does it take? When will they tell me something?”
Chase’s voice broke through his worries. “We need to know what happened in there.”
Justice stared over at Chase. Would it help him or make it worse to talk about it? Justice didn’t want to go back to the nightmare.
Before he could say anything, he heard a voice calling his name. “Agent Bernard?”
He moved to the doctor, his heart pounding in his throat. “How is she?”
The doctor motioned for him to sit, and Justice’s knees weakened. They always wanted you to sit when it was bad. How many times had he done the same for a victim’s family? He cleared his throat and reluctantly sat next to the doctor. “How bad is it?”
The doctor looked deep into his eyes. “I won’t lie to you, it’s bad. She’s very dehydrated and lost a great deal of blood. She’s suffered a skull fracture, several broken ribs, multiple contusions, abrasions, burns and smoke inhalation. There are definite signs of sexual abuse. The head trauma resulted in swelling to the brain.”
Justice swallowed the bile. He roughly brushed at his eyes. “Is… I mean. Are the injuries…” How to ask the questions without sounding like a babbling idiot?
Chase sat beside Justice and looked up at the doctor. “Are the injuries going to leave permanent damage?”
Justice couldn’t look at anything but the doctor’s face.
The man’s expression didn’t change. “Any damage, permanent or temporary, can’t be determined at this time. She’s still unconscious. We’re working to stabilize her condition, and then we’ll move her up to ICU. Once she’s settled in there you can join her.”
“I need to see her now.” Justice hated the pleading tone in his voice.
He watched the doctor’s eyes as the other man studied him closely then finally nodded in agreement. “For only a minute.”
The doctor led him down the hall and pressed the large metal disk on the wall. The double doors swung open. The longest walk Justice had ever made was the one down the corridor to her room.
Justice stepped into the room. Beeping came from the monitors and the pumping machines. Cas looked so tiny, so helpless, on the bed. With the blood and soot washed away, he could see just how like death she looked. He needed to sit on the chair. “I’m so sorry I let this happen, baby. I’m not going to stop until I get every last person responsible for this. I swear.”
“Agent Bernard? We’re ready to move her now.”
“All right. Where are you taking her?”
“Room twenty-five eighteen.”
He nodded and pressed Cas’s hand to his lips.
In the waiting room three pairs of sullen eyes settled on him, each glance mirroring the ragged emotions welling up inside.
“They’re taking her up now.”
Mickey nodded. “We’re headed back to the office. We’ve got work to do. Keep us posted, okay?”
Justice nodded at Mickey first and then at Bobby. They turned and headed out the doors. “I don’t think I can go through with this right now, Chase.”
“You look like hell.”
For the first time, Justice looked down. His shirt was torn. Bloodstains covered the front of it, and dried blood mingled with ash and soot on his skin. He turned away from Chase and headed to the
men’s room to scrub as best as he could.
A few minutes later the door opened and Chase was standing there, a tee shirt in his hand. “Strip and give me the shirt.”
Justice pulled the ruined material from his back, revealing the scratches and bruises that were forming on his chest.
“You need to be checked out.” Chase swapped the clean tee for the damaged shirt.
“I don’t need to be checked out. I need to get to Cas.”
“You need to—”
“To get upstairs to her,” he growled the argument, pulled the shirt over his head and hit the door at a brisk pace.
Chase followed directly behind him. “This won’t go away. I know it’s hard, but you need to get this over with.”
Justice stopped. “Let me have some breathing room. She needs me.” And I need her. Exhaustion filled him. How long had it been since he’d slept?
That was an easy one.
Almost three days. Since the night she disappeared, he refused to sleep.
They stepped into the elevator and silence enveloped them like a glove. Chase stood beside him but wisely didn’t speak. When they entered Cas’s room, Chase sucked in a shocked breath.
Justice pulled a chair up beside her bed. He reached for her, and once more her hand fit into his. Chase sat down in another chair, but Justice ignored everything beyond Cas’s hand in his and the sound of her breathing.
So much had happened in such a short span of time that it just didn’t seem real. Now he sat by the bed looking into Cas’s face. Her hand felt like ice in his so he gently rubbed it, trying to move the blood through to warm it.
“Justice.”
Finally, he looked over at Chase.
“What happened in there?”
“It was Bismarck. Dalton Bismarck. Kept her tied like an animal.” Anger and rage suffused him. “If the son of a bitch weren’t already dead, I’d kill him. Break him into so many tiny pieces that they’d never all be found.”
“At least it’s over.”