Hard to Come By

by Laura Kaye

  Marz heaved a breath and gave a sharp nod.

  Shane turned hard left and screeched across the road and into the parking lot, the pickup jumping at the harsh hit to the uneven curb.

  “Gonna pull up parallel to the back corner of the building. Stay low and get out on the driver’s side so we have cover til we see what we’re facing. Get ready.”

  Marz’s muscles were braced to explode. The truck came to a stop and the inside erupted into fast, efficient activity as they poured out onto the far side. The Camry was already parked and what Marz saw sent red-hot rage flowing through his veins.

  Emilie was resisting Jeffers’s efforts to get her out of the car.

  Scooting out of the truck, Marz couldn’t tell what Emilie was doing. He whirled, aimed his gun across the hood, and assessed. It appeared Emilie was hanging on to something as Jeffers struck at her back, head, and arms repeatedly.

  Finally, it must’ve been one blow too many as she sagged.

  “Go, go, go,” Nick said. In a series of coordinated actions they’d performed a hundred times before at as many different places, they bolted from behind the truck, using other cars and the corner of the building for protection. Beckett got off a few silenced rounds that took out the backseat window and glanced off the hood.

  Jeffers fired back, his gun’s retort echoing loudly off the storage buildings behind and to the side of their location. Marz crouched behind a black Lexus and aimed his gun, hoping for a shot of his own, but then Jeffers pulled Emilie’s body up against him like a shield—her back to his front, his gun pointed at the side of her head. The only thing Marz liked about the sight was the fact that her eyes were open. She hadn’t been knocked out by Jeffers’s assault. Everything else turned his blood molten hot with rage.

  “Who’s got a shot?” Marz yelled, seeing his teammates take up their own positions in his peripheral vision. If Jeffers got her inside the building, this situation would go from bad to worse in a heartbeat. Already, Marz worried that the sound of gunfire would draw more unfriendlies. Jeffers backpedaled faster, half dragging Emilie, who had a hard time moving her feet fast enough to keep up.

  Problem was, Jeffers knew what the hell he was doing. Of course, he would. Which left Marz no choice but to take a chance.

  He bolted from his hiding spot and raced low and fast across the lot toward the Camry.

  “Goddamnit,” he distantly heard Beckett curse.

  “I’ll kill her!” Jeffers yelled, keeping his gun trained on Emilie’s head.

  The words were like a sledgehammer to the kneecap, but Marz shoved the pain away. He needed focus and discipline more than anything else right now. He shielded himself behind Emilie’s Camry, which placed him maybe fifteen feet from the door—and from Emilie. Close enough to see the fear and pleading in her eyes.

  Jeffers reached for the door handle. Marz looked for a shot but didn’t have one, not without risking hitting her, too. The cop yanked the door open and ducked inside, but Emilie gripped onto the edge of the door as if to resist being taken in.

  “Fuck,” Marz said, admiring and fearing for her in equal measure.

  She cried out, and then her fingers flew free and she disappeared behind the gray door. It slammed shut behind her.

  The one thing working on their side was that they’d been inside this building before. The night they’d rescued Charlie from Confessions, they’d also raided this storage facility because they’d been told by a lower-ranking Churchmen that Charlie had spent some time at this location, too. So they weren’t going in totally blind.

  The team quickly convened at the door.

  “On my count,” Nick said, grabbing the door handle. “Three, two, one, go.”

  Nick opened the door, and Marz and Beckett cleared the opening and the hallway beyond, the team streaming in behind them. They cleared a utility room, a security room with several monitors depicting images of the business’s service counter and parking lot, and a bathroom, making sure there weren’t any enemies hidden behind them somewhere. From there, they entered a large room that appeared to be for shipment storage. The room was a maze of stacks of boxes of every shape and size. If anyone was there, they weren’t going to be easy to find.

  It was too damn quiet for a business in the middle of the workday.

  The team got about five feet in when shots rang out.

  Adrenaline flooded through Marz’s body, honing his senses even as chaos erupted all around him. Two guns fired from across the room, and the team took cover and returned fire. Voices shouted commands, and Marz dove behind a stack of boxes, a whizzing sound letting him know he’d just gotten damn lucky.

  Was one of the shooters Jeffers? Was Emilie in this holding room somewhere?

  Marz peered around his boxes and made a dash toward the next set.

  His movement attracted fire again, and the direction from which it came became more apparent as Marz watched where the rounds struck stacked boxes or the far wall. He had to take out that shooter and find the other one.

  Marz looked to Shane and Beckett, who held positions to his right. Shane gave a series of hand signals indicating they’d flank the shooter and come up on him from both sides. Marz gave a tight nod and took off in a low, careful crouch.

  Moving as quietly as he could, Marz used the boxes as cover and continued toward a long counter—the perfect hiding place for a shooter.

  A muzzle came around the edge of the doorframe closest to the counter. Marz jerked back for cover just in time. Bullets tore into the boxes behind him, sending Marz all the way to the floor. Nick dove behind a trash can. Marz squeezed off a few shots and then released his spent clip and inserted a new one.

  More gunfire from the doorway. Nick gave a signal that he and Easy would take out that shooter and secure the door. And then they were all in motion.

  Marz, Beckett, and Shane converged on the counter. The African-American man—who Marz recognized from the photographs they’d taken at last week’s drug deal—raised up to fire, not realizing how close his enemy had gotten. Without hesitation, Beckett put a bullet between the man’s eyes.

  Regret that it was all coming to this slinked through the back of Marz’s mind, but now was not the time to contemplate their actions nor how their investigation had turned them into vigilantes. Even if these scum suckers deserved everything they got.

  “Clear,” Nick said from the doorway. As he protected that position, the others swept through the remainder of the room to ensure no baddies hid somewhere behind them. In the process, they found the stairs down to the basement behind a door in the corner.

  So far, Emilie was nowhere to be found. Where the hell was she?

  Moving forward in the building brought them to the public storefront, where customers paid for packing materials and shipping or rented storage units. Marz peered at the face of the man Nick had taken out, but this one wasn’t familiar. The front was otherwise empty and a dead end, aside from the glass door that went out to the parking lot. Marz’s gut said that Jeffers hadn’t taken her back outside.

  That left the basement. The team gathered near the door, and Nick met everyone’s gaze. “On my count,” he said, grasping the doorknob to the basement. “Three, two, one, go.”

  In a crouch, Beckett peered low around the doorjamb, earning some new gunfire. He returned fire and started down. “Clear,” he called.

  They rushed down, stepped over a body sprawled at the bottom, and spilled into the room below, a lounge from the tables and couches that filled the space. In one corner, there was a door to the outside, but it was heavily bolted from the inside, so no one appeared to have exited there. When they opened the interior door on the far side of the room, gunfire erupted again.

  Easy grunted, drawing Marz’s gaze. Blood soaked into the torn shirt over his upper right arm. His gun arm. Shit.

  “How bad is it?” Marz said.

  Looking down, Easy shook his head. “I’m fine. Let’s do this.”

  They cleared the doorway a
nd then faced a long hallway with doors on both sides. Marz wanted to growl in frustration. This was taking too freaking long. Last thing they wanted was to give their adversaries enough time to call in reinforcements or for a passerby to hear the exchange of gunfire and call the police.

  First room was empty. Second room held a huge cache of weapons and ammunition.

  “Holy shit,” Beckett said.

  “A heroin empire requires a lot of firepower to protect, apparently,” Marz said, but he moved on. There was only one thing he cared about finding. Emilie.

  From down the hall, shots rang out again, pinging off the walls around them. A sharp intake of breath. Marz whirled to track the noise and saw Nick bleeding from the neck.

  “Flesh wound,” he said in a tight voice. “Let’s end this fucking thing.”

  “Oh, shit,” Shane said as he crouched and pushed open the third door. The hallway light illuminated the barred cells that filled the long, dark rectangular space.

  “Fucking hell,” Nick said.

  Marz’s skin crawled. Would Jeffers have stashed Emilie here? He felt for a light switch and then reared back in case someone took a shot. All stayed quiet. A few of them crept through the room while Beckett and Easy watched the door. Cell one was empty. So was cell two.

  “We got two noncoms here,” Shane said, staring into the third cell. Marz joined him, hope flaring. But neither of the blond-haired women crouched on the floor beside a cot was Emilie. But goddamn if the gang wasn’t into kidnapping as a regular thing.

  “I’ll take care of this,” Shane said. “Go find Emilie.”

  As Marz retreated, he heard the women plead with Shane not to hurt them. He reassured them, his words filled with Southern charm.

  Out in the hallway again, all hell broke loose.

  “Incoming!” Beckett yelled.

  They all rushed back into the cell room as an explosion rocked the hallway. Marz’s head glanced off the cement floor, shooting a ringing ache through his skull. Debris rained down on them and the lights flickered.

  Vision blurry from the hit to the head, Marz blinked, twisted his prosthesis free from a pile of rubble, and awkwardly pushed himself off the floor.

  “Everyone all right?” Shane yelled as he ran toward them.

  “Yeah,” Marz said, accepting Shane’s hand.

  Three pissed-off affirmatives answered as the other guys dragged themselves off the floor.

  Footsteps in the hallway. Coming their way.

  Beckett stalked to the doorway, glanced around the jamb, and squeezed off three quick rounds as debris floating in the air around him. “Clear,” he said.

  “Stay with the women,” Nick said to Shane, and then he turned to Easy. “See if you can find the keys.” Both men nodded.

  Stepping over pieces of drywall, chunks of cement, and two more bodies, Marz, Beckett, and Nick left the cell room and cleared two more rooms, then approached the last door on the hallway.

  If Emilie wasn’t here, where the hell was she?

  Chapter 15

  Between Jeffers’s constant stream of threats and jabs with the gun at her head and the soft space under her chin, the throbbing of her skull and back from where he’d hit her earlier, and the way each fired shot ratcheted up the fear and adrenaline in her body, Emilie was holding on by a very thin thread.

  But Derek had come for her. Somehow he’d found her and come for her. The GPS on her cell phone, maybe? Who knew. All that mattered was that, because of Derek, she was going to have a chance to come out of this alive.

  Sitting in a chair in the corner of a dingy office, Emilie kept her eyes trained on Jeffers. If she got a chance to disable him, she would take it. Her brain raced as she considered what she might do to get his gun away from him or knock him out.

  Three more shots echoed from the hallway. Closer now than before.

  “Come on,” Jeffers growled as he looked at his cell. The minute they’d holed up in this room, the guy had placed some calls. To whom, she didn’t know, but it was clear that he expected help to arrive. And that Jeffers considered her someone that a church would want. Whatever that meant.

  How did a police officer get away with being this fundamentally bad?

  The doorknob turned, just the littlest bit. Unfortunately, Jeffers must’ve seen it, too, because he yanked Emilie from the chair by the arm and held her in front of him again. What a freaking coward this guy was.

  The door exploded inward in a spray of wooden shards. Emilie barely bit back a scream as a huge dark-blond-haired man appeared in the doorway.

  Jeffers fired a series of shots at the opening and the man jumped back and disappeared. A moment later, the man ran across the opening of the ruined doorway, firing as he moved. Emilie braced and flinched, waiting for her body to register the searing pain of a gunshot. But it didn’t happen. Cement dust rained down from the wall above them.

  And then another shot, and Jeffers hollered and jerked his gun hand. Where had that shot come from? But the answer hardly mattered because just then, Jeffers’s weapon clattered to the floor as his hold loosened across her shoulders and throat.

  Reacting on pure instinct, Emilie reached behind her, grabbed the man’s crotch, and squeezed as hard as she could. He let her go altogether as he roared in outrage and pain. She scrambled to the floor for the gun, turned on her butt, and pointed it at her captor. She squeezed the trigger.

  “Don’t shoot!” came a voice from behind her.

  But the bullet had already hit Jeffers in the chest, and the man went immediately pale as he grabbed his hands over his heart.

  “Oh, my God,” she said as the reality of what she’d just done sank in. Her world sucked down to the hole in the front of his shirt and the small stain of red spilling from it.

  Derek crouched beside her and gently laid a palm on her forearm. He spoke words she couldn’t hear as she watched Jeffers’s body buckle and fall. “Emilie? Em? It’s over,” Derek said, the words finally penetrating the buzz between her ears. Two other men—the big guy who’d kicked down the door and a dark-haired man—rushed around them to Jeffers.

  Slowly, she pulled her eyes away from the cop and looked at Derek. The relief on his face reached inside her chest. “Derek?”

  “Yeah,” he said with a small smile. “It’s over now. You’re safe.” His hand slid up her arm to where her fingers still gripped the gun. He gently grasped the weapon and withdrew it from her hand.

  Emotion surged through her—disbelief, guilt, relief, anger, fear, and an overwhelming gratitude toward Derek. Tears gathered in her eyes and lodged a knot in her throat as Derek gently took her by the arms and helped her up.

  “I’ve got you now,” he said.

  Her knees felt like Jell-O. “Is he dead? I didn’t mean to kill him,” she said, staring at the growing circle of red on the dress shirt under Jeffers’s coat.

  Fingers gently forced her gaze away from the blood. “I don’t know, but it was self-defense, Emilie. You did nothing wrong here,” Derek said, his voice filled with conviction. He pulled her into his arms.

  Emilie melted against him, shaking so hard her teeth clattered and her back hurt. Part of her didn’t want to see, didn’t want to know, but she still found herself turning her head toward the group of men on the floor.

  The men crouching over Jeffers fired a series of questions at him, but all Emilie could clearly hear was the sound of that single gunshot—the one with which she’d killed another human being—ringing in her ears.

  “It’s no use,” the big guy said as he fished through the man’s pockets, removing his wallet and cell phone.

  “Then let’s get the hell out of here before we get company,” the dark-haired man said. He rose and turned toward her, and Emilie noticed he had an angry-looking cut across the side of his neck that had soaked the neckline of his T-shirt with blood.

  But she didn’t have time to ask about it, because they rushed her down the hall and joined four others—two men and two women—at the
midway point. The women looked nearly as shaken and bewildered as she felt. One of the men appeared to have been shot in the arm. The dark red running down his brown skin immediately resurrected the image of the bloodstain on Jeffers’s shirt. She couldn’t get away from the blood.

  Every time they passed a body on the floor, Derek’s arm banded around her more tightly. Debris and destruction. Dead bodies. Bullet holes in the walls. It looked like a war zone. What in the world had she fallen into? And who—or what—was Derek really?

  Upstairs, they made their way back the way she’d come in.

  At a small room in the rear of the building, Derek halted. “Wait a second.” He turned to one of the other guys. “Let me grab the security footage.” He darted into the room and Emilie gravitated just inside with him, not wanting to be separated from him. Not after he’d saved her. And not when his presence was the only thing keeping her from falling apart. “Damnit,” Derek bit out. He turned toward her, but his gaze looked over her shoulder. “The footage from today is gone. All of it.”

  “Shit,” the dark-haired man said as he dragged a hand over his head. “So we missed someone.”

  “Or someone came in after us. Either way, we’re on the grid now,” the big man said, stark blue eyes flashing. “Nothing we can do about that. Let’s go.”

  The men hustled Emilie and the other two women out the back door. When Derek directed Emilie toward a truck, she looked up at him. “My car. My things.”

  “What do you need?” he said, guiding her toward her damaged Camry. “Can’t take the car. The damage will attract the attention of the police.”

  Emilie thought of Jeffers’s obvious corruption and an icy certainty tossed her belly. “We can’t call the police on this, can we?” Silent tears slipped down her cheeks. “That man . . . the one I k-killed . . . he was a detective. I saw him at the station this morning.” Oh, God. I haven’t just killed someone. I killed a cop.