He pulled on his shirt, then heard a noise and froze. That was the basement door.
Had Michael woken up and gone exploring?
Instinct told him it wasn’t Michael, and his pulse ramped up. Shit on a stick.
Silently, he grabbed his SIG off the bedside table. Palmed his cell and texted his brother to get over here fast, that someone was in the house. If he was wrong, he’d deal with the ribbing. Better than ending up dead.
It could be Jed’s father, although the old man knew better than to turn up in the dark without warning him first. He was the one who’d taught Jed to shoot first, ask questions later. The FBI had spent weeks beating that out of him.
Adrenaline surged through Jed’s bloodstream, and he slid quietly across the floor, grateful for the solid craftsmanship of the cabin so that the floorboards didn’t creak beneath his shifting weight. He edged onto the landing and peered over the railing to the ground below. The fire burned low in the grate, casting a weak, orange flicker over the room.
He listened hard, but there wasn’t even the hum of the refrigerator. After a few long silent seconds, he detected the whisper of feet over carpet, and the shifting of a shadow in the darkness beneath him—a shadow too large to be an eight-year-old boy.
Was there only one of them?
There was no time to worry about it. Michael was down there, alone, vulnerable. All it would take was one bullet. One bullet. He should have been guarding the kid rather than fucking the mother. Goddamn it.
Fury fueled him. He didn’t bother with the stairs, he vaulted the rails and landed hard on top of the dense darkness. He aimed for the head with his feet and was pretty sure he connected from the grunt of pain he was rewarded with before the shadow fell to the floor, skull smashing into the kitchen island. Something spun across the floor. The sonofabitch’s pistol.
Good. He kicked at the almost indistinguishable figure a split second before the guy launched himself at him. His SIG went flying out of his hand. Dammit. Jed found himself forced back by a series of fast blows to the face and body. He got his brain in the game and remembered his training a moment before a knife flashed toward his gut.
He jumped back just in time. He grabbed a cushion off the sofa and used it to go after the guy’s knife hand. He forced him up against the bottom of the stairs, knocking aside a table and lamp, slamming the guy’s wrist against the wall as he jammed one elbow into the man’s throat and at the same time drove his knee into the guy’s balls. It was a street-fighting move, but his honor was not the object here. Survival was.
The assailant dropped the knife and Jed kicked it away.
The man was hurting, probably from the blow to the head, which was pouring so much blood Jed could see it in the firelight.
Jed was a third dan black belt in Taekwondo, but he had a horrible feeling this guy was better. Without that head injury affecting the guy’s vision and reflexes, Jed would probably already be dead. Then Michael. Then Vivi.
The realization renewed the focus of Jed’s attack. This wasn’t over yet. Jed went after the guy’s weak spots, kidneys, knees, throat, eyes.
The guy tried to dance out of reach. He was breathing heavily, a flat, unemotional light reflected in his eyes from the glow of the wood stove. His expression was implacable. A man used to killing. There would be no mercy shown just because his target was a small boy.
“You’re under arrest, asshole.”
The man startled him with a laugh as he wrenched out of his hold.
“I don’t think so.” An accent but a faint one. So Americanized Jed couldn’t place it. The guy attacked again, driving him back, trying to move toward where the pistols had skittered beneath the furniture. Jed did not intend to let him get near his gun or his knife.
The man grabbed Jed’s arm and twisted, sending him flying over the man’s shoulder to smash into another side table that shattered beneath him. Jed didn’t stay down; he rolled and grabbed a broken lamp and slammed it into the guy’s temple. The would-be killer swayed as if dazed. A movement on the stairs caught Jed’s eye.
Vivi.
Shit. She was carrying the weapon he’d given her earlier.
The guy lunged toward her. Jed didn’t hesitate. As much as he didn’t want to get shot, he wasn’t sure she would actually fire at another human being, and if the bad guy got his hands on her or the gun, it was all over except the grave digging.
The rug slipped under Jed’s feet, and he stumbled.
The reverberation of gunfire shattered the silence. The attacker flinched, but didn’t stop moving toward her. Vivi fired again, but the shot pinged off the stone fireplace and exited via one of the windows that overlooked the lake. Then she fired one last time. The guy grunted and veered out the front door, running away.
He went after the guy, but she grabbed his arm. Jed hesitated for a nanosecond. Vivi’s eyes were massive in the near-darkness, then her hands started to shake, and he removed the gun from her fingers.
“Michael,” she whispered, and bolted toward her son’s bedroom.
Shit. He was torn. He needed to catch this guy and shut this organization down. But there was also the overwhelming need to make sure Michael was OK.
Jed locked the front door, grabbed his weapon from the floor just in case there were more bad guys, and followed Vivi to Michael’s bedroom. In the dim light he could just make out the boy fast asleep, covers thrown off, chest rising and falling gently as if he didn’t have a care in the world.
Vivi swallowed noisily and then turned to him, gripping a handful of his shirt. She buried her face against his chest and whispered, “I just shot a man and my baby slept right through it.”
Jed hugged her tight and kissed the top of her head. “You saved our lives.”
He should be out there chasing this guy, but her hoarse breath told of her internal struggle and he couldn’t bring himself to leave her. Another mistake to add to the list.
“I don’t know how much longer I can go on like this, Jed.”
He said nothing, just squeezed her tighter.
***
Elan stumbled in the snow. His vision swam, blood pouring from a scalp wound where his head had split open when the man had landed on him from above. Amateur. He staggered into a snowdrift, his shoulder burning where the bullet had smashed into him. It hadn’t exited, and he needed to get the metal shards out and not just because they hurt like hell.
The snow felt good on his hot flesh. No one followed him yet, which was a miracle, but if he didn’t leave now he’d be trapped.
Off your knees!
He staggered to the police SUV, opened the door, and yanked the body of the dead cop out of the seat into the snow, throwing himself into the driver’s seat. Forcing himself to use his injured arm, he shoved the car in drive and locked the steering wheel hard right to turn the SUV around along the narrow lane. He fought back the blackness that tried to swamp his mind.
Everything had gone wrong.
A laugh hurt his chest. To think he’d never contemplated failure, certainly hadn’t planned on getting shot. Dying, maybe, but not this pathetic wounded escape.
Tires slipped, and he eased up on the accelerator. His vision faded in and out. Damn. He slapped himself in the face, spotted a water bottle on the passenger seat beside him. He opened the lid after jamming it between his thighs, tipped his head over the passenger seat, and poured the water over his face despite the fact it was freezing. The temperature shocked him enough to get his brain focused back on the road and not in the ditch.
He went left at the intersection and drove for a mile or so before he pulled up a roadmap of the area on the onboard computer. He stopped and got his bearings, trying to ignore the blood trickling down his face. He studied the landscape, struggling to remember the direction he’d walked to get to the cabin. Finally he figured it out and carried on driving. Another mile and there was a turn to the left that he recognized from earlier that day. Five hundred yards along, he pulled into a small parking ar
ea hidden from the road, finding his truck exactly where he’d left it.
He stopped the cop car beside it. Shoved against the door, barely strong enough to push it open. He searched for his keys in one of his vest pockets, pulled them out, and turned on the ignition of his truck and let the engine warm for a minute. He dragged the first aid kit from the middle console and taped some gauze to his scalp, wiped the blood off his face and pulled a ball cap tight over the dressing. He sucked in a breath at the pain, but after a few moments the increased pressure stemmed the flow of blood.
He slapped another gauze pad against the entry wound on his shoulder. It had stopped bleeding except for the occasional, ugly dribble.
He forced himself out of his car and back into the bitter midnight cold. He found the GPS locator on the SUV and ripped it off. Then he used bolt cutters—which hurt like hell—to remove the onboard computer before he tossed it in the snow. It wouldn’t last five minutes at these temperatures. Back in the truck, he dug into his gym bag and pulled out a thick, black hoodie, put it on, zipping it up to the neck. Hopefully, to the casual eye, he appeared uninjured. He swallowed some extra-strength painkillers with a swig of water to wash them down. His shoulder was numb now. His cell rang and he checked it. A text.
“It’s a GO. Forget boy. Get back to city. ASAP.”
Elan swore, reversed, and drove away. If only they’d sent him that message an hour ago. Dammit. His hands shook. He’d been so close to killing the child. So close. A curious burst of relief surged through him. Thank God.
The endgame was in play. He needed to find out exactly what the situation was. Figure out how long he had to get into position. He needed to remove this bullet and sew himself up. A lot to do in just a few hours, but he had to be careful. Everything had to be perfect. It could not go wrong. He’d rest when he was dead.
***
Leaving Vivi standing guard over Michael, Jed ran outside to see if the bastard was dead in the snow. There were enough dark stains on the ground to know Vivi had clipped him at least once. A blood trail led down the road, across the narrow bridge. Shit! A body lay in the snow. The sight of a cop uniform made his own heart stop beating. Liam! He ran, skidded to a halt on his knees, turned the guy over to check for a pulse and start CPR.
It wasn’t Liam. And CPR wasn’t going to help.
He called his brother who answered on the first ring.
“Shit. I missed your text. What happened?”
From the guilt and breathlessness in his brother’s voice, Jed had interrupted him with a woman. If there had been any way of delaying or changing the truth, Jed would have done it. Unfortunately, this was gonna hurt and no one understood that better than Jed.
“We had a visitor,” Jed ground out. There was no way to negate the pain.
“Shit.” Jed heard a rustle that sounded like clothes being pulled on. “I sent T-Bone to watch over the place. Did he fall asleep? I told him I’d be there in another hour. Dammit.”
There was a female voice in the background, and Jed frowned because she sounded a hell of a lot like Angela—but right now it didn’t matter.
“He didn’t fall asleep, Liam.”
“Oh, fuck, no. No, no, no.”
He heard a door slam and an engine start, the whoop-whoop of a police siren start up.
“Tell me he’s OK, Jed.”
But T-Bone—who Jed now recognized as being the younger brother of another of his high school friends—wasn’t OK. He was never going to be OK again.
“He’s dead, Liam. The guy who killed him was the real deal. I doubt he even saw him coming.” Jed closed his eyes. Christ, if his brother hadn’t had a hot date the chances were it would be Liam’s body he was staring at. His assumption and faith that they could deal with this themselves had got an innocent man killed. “Vivi shot the guy, but he ran off and stole your officer’s SUV. You need to get a BOLO out on the vehicle and you need to call in the feds. I’m sorry.” Jed hung up and called his father. “I need you to come over here and pick up Vivi and Michael. Take them home and guard them with your life.”
How had they found them? He eyed his SUV. Until he had someone go over his car for a tracking device he wasn’t taking Vivi anywhere in it. But how had they known he’d taken her? Someone had sure as hell put the pieces together fast. Or they’d gotten very, very lucky. Killion had probably figured it out. That should have alerted him to the danger earlier. His complacency had put the Vincents at risk and got a cop killed.
He strode back to the house and put more wood on the fire to warm the place up. He used his cell to quickly photograph all the pictures Michael had drawn and sent them to Frazer back at Quantico.
His phone rang thirty seconds later.
“Tell me this isn’t what I think it is.”
“It’s worse. I thought I was doing the right thing, but I screwed up. Vivi and Michael are both with me, and still alive, no thanks to me. I need ERT to process a crime scene.” He hung up on his boss, frozen from the inside out. His career was totally fucked, but worse was the self-reproof creeping through his skull. How could he have imagined he could keep Vivi and Michael safe? He’d let them down the way he’d let Mia down all those years ago.
But these terrorists had tentacles everywhere—who the hell could he trust? They had to have someone inside law enforcement.
He gathered up the drawing supplies and the tablet he’d given Michael and put them in a bag to send with them. Then he squeezed his eyes shut. Even now he was trying to use the kid for his knowledge, squeeze that young, vulnerable mind for every piece of information he could find to put these people behind bars where they belonged.
Then Michael and Vivi would be safe.
He spotted a pair of night vision goggles on the kitchen floor beneath the dishwasher. Shit. The guy had certainly been prepared. Jed frowned at the weapon lying beside the island. A twinge of unease shifted through him. Tanfoglio were damn good gunsmiths. They were also the chief supplier of handguns to the Mossad.
Could this get any more complicated?
It could certainly get worse if anything happened to Vivi or Michael or anyone else he cared about. Right now he was ill-prepared to stop it. They needed better protection than he could provide alone.
He went through to the bedroom and touched Vivi on the shoulder. She was as cold as a corpse. Eyes shocked and glassy. The woman he’d made love to earlier had disappeared deep inside.
“Liam will be here in a minute. Run upstairs. Get dressed”—she was clad in only a t-shirt and panties, which further reminded him how far he’d crossed the line with her earlier—“and grab your stuff because we have to get out of here fast.”
There was a noise at the front door. “Only me,” Jed’s father called out as Jed reached for his weapon.
Vivi obviously didn’t want to leave Michael. He put both hands on her shoulders and pushed her toward the door. “I’ll watch him. Go quickly. Dad will take you both to his place. Hopefully Michael won’t even wake up until morning.”
Her lip wobbled. “Won’t I need to make a statement?”
“Yes,” Jed said. “But I want you out of here first so we can process the scene and make sure there aren’t any other shooters nearby.”
She laid a hand on his chest, and he flinched away. She blinked at him then as if finally understanding that what happened between them earlier had been a massive mistake. She dropped her hand and moved away faster than if he’d bitten her. And he had bitten her several times when he should have been guarding Michael.
“I don’t want to bring danger to your parents,” she said quietly. “Maybe we should go to the police station?”
He tried to soften his features, but it was impossible. Inside he was so angry, with the situation, with himself, he could barely speak. He shook off the emotions that were clouding his ability to function, finally getting what his boss kept trying to ram into his brain. It was time to step back. Detach. He couldn’t hunt these people and guard Vivi at the same time.
“Dad will keep you safe for the next few hours. They even have a panic room in the basement of the cottage.” Her eyes flared. “And we’ll have people guarding the area. You need to hurry though, I have work to do.” He made his voice impersonal and implacable. It would be easier this way in the long run.
She firmed her mouth and nodded. Strode out of the bedroom door and past his dad who Jed heard ask if she was all right. He didn’t hear the answer, just the punch of feet on the stairs. Then above him, the thumping of belongings once again being thrown into a bag with little regard for packing—they were way past that logistical nicety. On the run again from people who would stop at nothing to kill them.
Who the hell was this? And why did they want Michael dead so badly?
His cell phone rang. Frazer. Jed straightened and answered, wondering if he even had a career left worth saving anymore.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Vivi ran upstairs, not even caring she was barely dressed as she passed Jed’s father. The fear and anger and distress of the last thirty minutes had made her immune to such minor considerations. The bedroom still smelled of sweat and sex which seemed to carry the price of letting down your guard.
So stupid. So naive.
She heard a police car arrive, sirens blazing. Her life had become a series of disastrous events that involved guns, death, and sirens.
For a brief time today she’d escaped it. Being here, in this beautiful snowbound cabin with a man she’d thought…
Her hands shook. Downstairs she’d wanted Jed to wrap her up like a little girl and take care of her, but she was the one with a child to look after. She was the one who needed to pull herself together. Yes, she’d shot a man, a man who no doubt would have killed her if Jed hadn’t disarmed him. A man who’d come here with the express purpose of putting a bullet in her son’s head.
Cold Pursuit (Cold Justice) (Volume 2) Page 23