by Cindy Gerard
Vehicle traffic was light; pedestrians were scarce. Wyatt would like to chalk it up to siesta. But he was smarter than that. This reeked of a setup.
“Too quiet,” he agreed.
Jungle drums, Doc had said. Yeah, urban jungle drums in the form of cell phones, spreading the word that they were coming. He figured there were eyes everywhere.
“Rafe, tell Gabe we’re going once more around the block. We’ll regroup two streets up, figure out our approach.”
Hugh snapped photos of the building with his cell phone as they passed, capturing the entry door, the side view, and the rear exit as they made a pass through the alley. When they met up again, those two passes were the sum total of their “eyes on target” recon.
It sucked. In the perfect world, they’d have sat through hours of briefings, made practice runs on a similar site, then spent more hours debriefing the mock op to see where they could improve. They didn’t have that luxury. They didn’t have shit.
He was asking a lot of his men. A lot of Hugh, who had made it clear he was opposed to this tactic and was as jumpy as hell. If Lola wasn’t there, then Wyatt was going to ask them to do the impossible over and over again until they found her or kissed their asses good-bye trying. Multiple take-downs in one day in these conditions would not only be brutal, they could be deadly. Once the adrenaline burn set in, to a man, they’d have difficulty with even the most routine task. Fine muscle control went to hell. A simple job like reloading a shotgun became a chore. That was why muscle memory was so critical. That was why practice made perfect. And practice was exactly what they lacked on this op.
He met each man’s face, and, even with Hugh’s stone-faced reluctance, he knew that, to a man, they were the best at what they did. This op wouldn’t be anything like the day before, when they’d gotten the drop on a clew of MS-13 rejects, so high on ganja and lulled by boredom that they couldn’t tell their AKs from their asses.
No, these bad asses were ready for them. They could damn well be walking into an ambush—or ten.
“We’ve got to figure they know we’re coming,” Wyatt said as they huddled around the hood of his SUV.
“No shit,” Mendoza muttered, stuffing two extra thirty-round mags for his M-4 into the ammo pouches on his vest.
Wyatt sketched the outline of the building in the dust on the hood.
“The crib is on the ground floor,” Hugh said, grudgingly filling them in on what he knew of the gang stronghold. “Stairway is central, right inside the front entry. Stay left of the stairwell. Fourth door on the right should be ground zero.”
“Gabe, I want you on the master key.” Wyatt made an X in the dust over the area Hugh had marked as the front entry. “We meet resistance at this juncture, you know what to do. If the main entry is accessible, save it for door number four.”
“Roger that.” Gabe reached into the SUV for the sawed-off twelve-gauge shotgun. Whatever you called it—master key, Avon calling—the Mossberg 590 Persuader loaded with breaching rounds would blow any deadbolt, hinge, or lock. And if Lola was inside, the breaching rounds stopped with the door. She wouldn’t be in any danger from that quarter.
Wyatt stuffed flash bangs into one pocket and, just in case they needed them, handed a couple frag grenades to Hugh, who took them without a word.
“Rafe, Joe, I want you on the rear entrance.” Even though each situation was different, the team knew the logistics of a dynamic entry—which by design, philosophy, and implementation, was to rescue hostages and kill bad guys—like the backs of their hands. He didn’t have to tell them not to commit too early. They were there for backup, and if things got too dicey, their job was to sweep in and kill everything that twitched, right down to the cockroaches. Cockroaches being the operative word here, because these MS-13 bastards were insects.
“Hugh and I will make the front entry.”
Wyatt trusted Gabe to cover their six. Gabe knew the drill. Wyatt and Hugh would be damn vulnerable from behind once they blew inside. Whether Gabe stowed the shotgun behind his back on its sling and transitioned to his M-4 or let loose with a breaching round, Wyatt knew that anyone who crossed the Archangel’s path would end up deader than last week’s news.
“Eyes peeled for booby traps,” he warned them. “We trip a mine, any kind of IED, it’ll be all over but the cleanup. Questions?” he added as the sun beat down and their blood pumped through their veins like rocket fuel.
“Yeah.” Mendoza, apparently, felt the need to fill Doc’s shoes. “Is it too fucking much to ask that they come up with air-conditioned Kevlar?”
“I’ll tell Santa you want some for Christmas,” Green grumbled.
“Jesus. Green made another joke,” Mendoza said with a shocked grin. “Check him for a fever.”
“You guys done?” Even though he appreciated their efforts to cut the tension, Wyatt shot them a glare. “Hugh?” Because he’d been silent, Wyatt addressed him directly. “You got nothing to add?”
Oh, he had a lot he wanted to say—Wyatt could see protest written all over his face. But he just shrugged and bowed to Wyatt’s lead. “It’s your show.”
“Okay, ladies,” Wyatt said after they made a quick commo check. “Hit ’em hard and fast. And you earn a fifteen-mile run in full gear if you end up with so much as a scratch.”
“Love you, too, Papa Bear.” Mendoza kissed the air in Wyatt’s direction, then shifted to his game face.
“Lock and load.” Gabe pumped the twelve-gauge once, loading a round into the chamber.
Game on.
Single file, with Gabe leading the way and Green pulling up the rear, they jogged along the pocked and pitted sidewalks. The word must have spread wide, because there wasn’t a living soul outside in the sun within a three-block area. If there had been, one look at their detail, armed to the teeth in full combat gear, and they’d have dived into the closest rat hole.
When they reached the corner of the target building, Mendoza and Green peeled off, jogged down the side of the building, and disappeared down the alley.
“Keep alert,” Wyatt said, and the three of them inched along the front of the building until they reached the central door.
Crunch time.
With their backs pressed to the hot cement exterior walls, they advanced closer.
All quiet on the western front.
Wyatt sucked in a deep breath.
Gabe’s gaze was locked on his.
“Go,” he said with a nod, and brought his M-4 to his shoulder. Beside him, Hugh did the same.
The entry door was solid wood, closed up tight. Gabe stood to the side, tried the handle. Locked.
No hesitation.
Boom! Boom! Boom!
He unloaded three breaching rounds, one at the door latch, one each on the two metal hinges holding the door to the metal frame.
Smoke was still curling out of the shotgun’s barrel when Wyatt stepped up and slammed a boot heel into the door. The slab of scarred wood leaned on the broken hinges like a drunk on a bender, then fell to the floor with a crash of splintering wood and a cloud of fine dust and street dirt.
Leading with his rifle, Wyatt burst into the main hallway, ready to fire at the first thing that moved. Hugh was right beside him as they maneuvered through the fatal funnel, each clearing his section of the hall as they rushed toward the fourth door.
Wyatt had the fleeting thought that it was as if no time had passed since the two of them had cleared a rat hole together. No time. No regrets. No anger. They moved like the well-oiled team they’d always been, in complete sync, anticipating each other’s moves, knowing exactly where they were in relation to each other.
“Clear right,” Hugh said.
“Clear center.” This from Gabe.
Wyatt secured his section. “Clear left.”
Wyatt reached door number four first, waited the nano-second it took for Hugh and Gabe to get in place, then tried the handle.
When he found it locked, he nodded to Gabe, who shoulder
ed the shotgun.
Boom!
The Mossberg blew the door open in one penetrating shot. Wyatt tossed in a flash bang, then charged into the room.
Hugh and Gabe stormed in behind him, weapons aimed as they moved through the dump of a living room, cleared it, then cleared both bedrooms, the bathroom, and the kitchen.
“What the fuck? Where are they?”
“Doesn’t make sense,” Wyatt said in response to Gabe’s commentary on the empty apartment as the three of them wandered around the room, using the barrels of their M-4s to move aside torn curtains and stained sofa cushions.
“They’ve got the numbers,” Wyatt continued. “They pride themselves on standing their ground. They protect their turf. Why wouldn’t they make a stand?”
“Maybe because they were never here?” Gabe suggested with a hard look at Hugh.
“Oh, they were here,” Hugh said, either choosing not to take insult at Gabe’s veiled accusation or not catching it. “Smell that?”
Gabe snorted. “I smell gunpowder.” He walked back into a bedroom for another look around.
Hugh shook his head, followed his nose back to the kitchen, and returned with the smoking butt of a joint pinched between his index finger and thumb. “Couldn’t have been gone too long.”
Mendoza and Green walked through the door just then and took in the empty apartment.
“No one went by us,” Mendoza said. “What the hell’s going on?”
“Wyatt.” Wyatt turned at the sound of Gabe’s voice. “Check it out.”
Gabe walked out of the bedroom; a small heart-shaped disc hung from the delicate silver chain dangling from the tip of his index finger.
Wyatt reached for the necklace and held the heart to the light. He read the word HOPE, engraved in delicate script on the silver.
He flashed on a memory of the first time he’d seen Sophie’s daughter. She’d been wearing a necklace exactly like this one. He hadn’t been able to read the engraving then. Now he knew what it said. LOLA.
He clutched the fragile necklace in his fist. Such sweet innocence. Two little girls, best friends, wearing necklaces with each other’s name. Thanks to these barbarian bastards, that innocence would be lost to both of them forever. One of them might even lose her life.
“She was here,” he said, his heart pounding as a vicious anger burned through his gut. Anger so raw and visceral that nothing short of blood was going to assuage it.
“Was being the operative word,” Hugh pointed out.
Wyatt gave Gabe a nod. “Destroy this shithole,” he said.
“Wait.” Hugh stopped him on his way to the door. “What’s the point? Leave it. We don’t have time.”
And Wyatt didn’t have time to argue or to wonder why Hugh questioned his order. “Destroy it,” Wyatt repeated, and got the hell out of the building before he imploded along with the apartment that the guys were in the process of leveling to rubble. “Give the rats one less warren to hole up in.
“Where next?” he demanded of Hugh, who followed him back out onto the street.
“Again, what’s the point?” Hugh asked.
“The point is, I’m going to find that child.” Wyatt marched back to the SUV.
“Jesus. Don’t you get it? They’re ten steps ahead of us.”
“Then we’re just going to have to move faster!”
Hugh jerked open the passenger side of the SUV. “You’re not going to find her.”
Wyatt glared at him over the roof of the vehicle. “Watch me.”
25
“That is so not a word!” Crystal protested, her eyes sparkling mad.
“It so is a word,” Johnny argued, leaning away from the table and the board game, somehow managing to look indignant, wounded, and amused as hell when Crystal leveled her accusation. “Can I help it if I have the superior intellect when it comes to this stupid game?”
This stupid game was Scrabble, and watching the three of them—Johnny, Crystal, and Hope—huddled around the table in her library pulled at strings attached directly to Juliana’s heart. Life. She loved being surrounded by it. And all this life filling the empty spaces in her home made her realize how much she’d missed having someone to share it with. And she loved how Hope had come out of her shell.
“Do you want to get the dictionary out, or should I?” Hope asked Crystal, grinning the way a twelve-year-old girl should be grinning when she was in the company of her biggest crush, namely Johnny, and her new grown-up BFF, namely Crystal.
“Go for it, girlfriend,” Crystal said, exchanging a high-five with Hope, who giggled and looked toward Juliana for direction when she couldn’t spot the dictionary.
“It’s on the third shelf behind you,” Juliana told her, then grinned again when Hope stuck her tongue out at Johnny, shrieked in delight, and scurried past him when he tried to grab her and keep her away from the dictionary.
Amazing, Juliana thought, that Hope could be in such deep, dopey, puppy-dog love with cute Johnny and yet adore Crystal, who was clearly the love of the gorgeous Texan’s life. Ah, youth, she thought, smiling at the easy way Hope managed to compartmentalize her feelings so she could have the best of both worlds when it came to the Reeds.
“I’m telling you, it’s a word,” Johnny insisted, then shook a finger at Hope. “Don’t crack the dictionary open, Princess. If you let Crystal sucker you into looking it up, it’ll cost you points,” he warned Hope with a wink that made her blush and smile even wider.
“You’re just trying to trick me into believing you,” Hope maintained, dropping the heavy dictionary onto the table.
“If you loved me, you would believe me,” Johnny wheedled with a wounded puppy-dog look. “And you do love me, don’t you, sweetie?”
“You’re so full of it,” Crystal sputtered.
“Yeah,” Hope agreed, although it was clear she was practically melting under Johnny’s sugar-sweet spell. “Full of it.”
Reed made a show of clutching his heart and suffering the mortal wound she’d just inflicted, which sent Hope into another fit of giggles.
“They are so good for her,” Juliana murmured, just loudly enough for Nate to hear. She was curled up on one end of her sofa, her feet tucked under her, a book open but unread in her lap, as she watched the shenanigans Johnny was pulling.
Nate sat on the far end of the sofa, going over a stack of BOI after-action reports. “You’re good for her,” he said simply, those few words relaying an unwavering belief in her that sent an involuntary but wonderful feeling of warmth flooding through her.
Actually, it was Hope who’d been good for Juliana. She saw so much of Angelina in the child. And where once Juliana hadn’t let herself visit those memories of the daughter she’d lost, Hope’s unexpected appearance in her life had opened her up to testing those memories again.
Soon it would be four years since she’d lost her husband and their daughter. Four long, lonely years. Lonely but for Gabe, who always kept in touch. Lonely but for Nate Black, whose solid, steady presence was both comforting and unsettling. And lonely, because at the end of the day, she was always there alone.
She glanced at Nate and smiled when Johnny tried to enlist him as an ally for the validity of his challenged word.
“Sorry. You’re on your own, pal.” Nate wasn’t about to get dragged into the middle of that heated debate. “Be glad, Reed, because if I had to pick a side, it sure as the world wouldn’t be yours. You’re pretty but not nearly as pretty as those two.”
“And he says it’s all about the team,” Johnny grumbled, then went back to defending his word.
Although Nate had blown off his request to back him up, Juliana knew that Nate would go to the end of the earth for Johnny Reed. For all of his men.
And for her, she admitted, dropping her gaze and pretending to be engrossed in her book. After all, he’d been there for her since she’d lost Armando and Angelina.
Beside her, Nate continued to study his reports. She studied his profile, r
ealized that she did that a lot these days. More than was probably wise. She found him fascinating in so many ways. Ways that were hard for her to admit to herself. Physically, he was a very appealing man. A passionate man.
A flash of memory hit her, and she felt herself blush as she remembered the way he’d looked, naked in her bed, his broad chest lightly dusted with dark hair, the corded muscles of his arms bulging, a healed bullet wound on his right shoulder, another on his left pec. The scars of a warrior.
In the background, the heated Scrabble debate continued amid much laughter and empty threats.
He glanced up, then at her, an inquisitive look in his beautiful eyes when he caught her watching him.
She smiled and went back to her book.
And she wondered, for the hundredth time, why she was fighting this.
“Damn,” Crystal sputtered, looking up from the dictionary in disbelief. “Oenophlygia: the state of being drunk. It really is a word.”
Johnny gloated unabashedly. “Just wouldn’t listen, would you? Just couldn’t stand that I might be way ahead of the game. Word to the wise,” he added with a superior smirk. “Don’t mess with a man of my experience in that arena.”
Nate opened his eyes slowly, took a moment to focus, and realized he must have fallen asleep on the sofa in Juliana’s library.
“You work too hard.”
He turned his head and saw Juliana sitting beside him, a concerned smile tilting up the corners of her mouth. His heart did that slam-thump that it did every time she looked at him like that. “What time is it?”
“Late,” she said. “The Reeds and Hope went to bed about an hour ago.”
“So who won the Scrabble game?” he asked, stretching the kinks out of his neck.
“It’s still a work in progress. Johnny was getting a little antsy—his leg was bothering him, I think—and Crystal called it.”
“She’s good for him.” Nate scrubbed his hands over his face to rub away the lingering cobwebs. “Never thought I’d see any woman tame that outlaw.”