Loose Ends Page 31

  They were on their own, and they needed to get the hell out of—oh, damn, oh, damn, oh, damn.

  Skeeter had gone mannequin in front of her, and over the blonde’s shoulder, Jane saw why.

  The “ghost” had returned, silent and stealthy, and was watching them with a preternatural intensity from where he stood in the shadows at the other end of Skeeter and Dylan’s loft. God only knew how long he’d been down there—and he was ever so much more horrible than she had imagined from her fleeting glimpse of him behind Mama Guadaloupe’s, his hair crazy white and raggedly long, his muscles bulging under his pale white skin, his neck thick, his hands huge and deadly.

  He’d torn King Banner’s arm off, clean off—oh, geezus, oh, geezus.

  And he was staring straight at them with a dead body lying at his feet, a broken, old man.

  “Go, go, go,” Skeeter said, lifting herself up and reaching for a handhold above her.

  Jane was more than ready to go, go, go, but the metal pipe Skeeter grabbed broke away, and their open-sided box of twisted metal shifted and yawed with a squealing screech of metal.

  Oh, hell. Jane lunged for Skeet, grabbing her hard around the waist and pulling her back. The stairwell shuddered into a new resting spot at an angle that threatened to spill them out, and Jane held on to Skeeter even tighter.

  Oh, damn, oh, damn. She braced her feet and gritted her teeth, and prayed.

  Below them, the albino walked over to one of the fallen rafters.

  Her arms straining, her heart racing, Jane watched in growing dread as he lifted the huge wooden beam up and braced it against the loft’s outside wall. When it was solidly in place, he lodged the top end of the rafter up into the exploded stairwell, crashing and slamming it into position. The stairwell bucked and tilted under the assault but ended up throwing them back against the rear wall of their perch, giving them a reprieve from falling to the floor below.

  Jane relaxed her hold and tried to slow her breathing, tried to slow the pounding of her heart and prepare herself for the coming onslaught.

  Because it was coming, and it was coming fast.

  The albino beast’s intentions were clear, and made even clearer when he started climbing—so fast, so freaking fast.

  “Are you ready to fight?” Skeeter asked, her voice breathless from the bone-rattling they’d just been given. They were out of time, out of choices.

  “Yes, ma’am, I am,” Jane said, sliding her hand down her leg and taking hold of the sheath knife she kept in her boot.

  Hawkins jerked his head up at the horrendous crashing and banging coming from above them. It wasn’t the storm raging outside. The sound was man-made.

  He and Quinn and Kid had been working the building from the top down, clearing floors and marking and mining the elevator shaft, Plan A in the Steele Street Survival Handbook for any bastard-in-the-building scenario, a plan they’d come up with after the last time a bunch of bastards had breached their home turf. They hadn’t seen a damn thing, not hide nor hair of the bastard Monk, or Jane, or Skeeter. Zach and Dylan were coordinating the SDF attack from the comm console, and Hawkins had thought they were holding the eighth floor, that nothing would get by Zach or the boss either way, from the top down or from the bottom up.

  “I thought we cleared the upper floors,” he said, his mood so far south he had nothing but cold, frigid, arctic anger running through him.

  Those were his girls Monk had taken.

  Kid had already broken into a run, heading toward the commotion.

  “We don’t have enough men to cover the whole damn place, Christian, not inside and out,” Quinn said, lying flat on his stomach, stretched out over the shaft through the open elevator doors on the sixth floor. He was setting the last claymore—very, very carefully. “The way Monk climbed in here, he could have gotten by us by going up the outside.” He set the trip switch, signaled, and Hawkins pulled him back.

  “Let’s go,” Hawkins said, and got on the radio. “Dylan, we’re headed back up.”

  “It’s Zach, copy that. Dylan is already on the move.”

  Good, he thought. From what they’d seen tonight, it was going to take everything Steele Street had to prevail—and prevail they must.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  Sweet, so sweet. Monk could see them up there, peeking out of the wreckage, the resolve on their faces revealed with every lightning flash.

  Here, he decided, was the fight he’d been wanting, in the last place he would have ever expected to find it—with a couple of women.

  The one bitch had already shot him, but she was weaponless now. He’d disarmed Skeeter Bang-Hart, too.

  This was going to be short and sweet—very sweet.

  He never saw it coming.

  Near the top of the rafter, he lunged for Skeeter, ready to jerk her out of the wreckage and shake her until her neck snapped—but it wasn’t to be.

  She caught him in the throat with the heel of her boot in a strike so fast, so pure, he was amazed even as it sent him staggering. He was even more amazed when he lost his balance and fell backward down the rafter into a crashing heap on the floor.

  Bitch.

  He rose to all fours and took stock of himself, struggling to breathe, to swallow. She could have killed him with that strike, crushed his larynx. A lesser soldier would have already been dead.

  He started to his feet, when the sound of someone coming drew his attention to the far end of the loft. From behind the rafter, he watched and waited as a shadow warrior slid into the darkness of the room.

  Conroy Farrel—well armed, superbly skilled, and hunting.

  Unexpectedly, Monk felt the first stirrings of redemption move within his blighted soul. This was the fight he’d come from Bangkok to get. To test himself against this man.

  He let his gaze drift to the body at his feet. Kneeling, he smoothed the white lion’s mane of hair back off the death-flattened face. Lancaster would soon have what he had so wanted: Conroy Farrel dead, his body broken, his life bled out of him.

  Con slipped silently into the room.

  This was the place. Dust still drifted down from the ceiling, shaken loose by the room-jarring pounding he’d heard on the way up. Rain was coming down through a hole in the roof, gusting in with the wind, backlit by the lightning racing across the sky. It ran down a broken pipe off to his left and was pooling around a rat’s nest of exposed wires hanging uselessly off a smashed stereo system.

  There was so damn little justice in the world—but he would take what he could here. Take it in his fist and make it be what he needed it to be: Jane safe. His enemies vanquished. His life … his life—fuck! He couldn’t see his life, not if she died here because of him.

  He closed his eyes on a harsh breath and focused on the moment at hand. Jane Linden was a street rat, he reminded himself. She was tough, a fighter, and she was here, so close, within his grasp.

  Lancaster’s beast was here, too, in this broken room open to the night sky and the rain. The smell of him filled the loft, overpowering everything else, the metallic stench of him assaulting Con’s senses.

  “Monk!” A woman’s voice rang out from high above him, not Jane’s. “Scott Church! I know you, MNK-1. I can help you. I know what went wrong!”

  The slightest scuff of a footfall sounded twenty yards to the north of Con, at the other end of the loft, and he moved out, continuing around the perimeter of the room, always keeping a wall at his back.

  The loft had been destroyed, the ceiling caved in, the furniture broken and getting soaked, and somewhere in the mess was the beast she called Monk.

  He could smell the guy, but he couldn’t see him—yet. All he needed was one good shot, and he had his Wilson Combat .45 cocked and unlocked, ready to deliver it.

  “Randolph Lancaster lied to you, Monk.” The woman kept talking, her voice cool and clear. “But I have Dr. Patterson’s files, his records.”

  Con kept moving, one silent step at a time. He’d heard the name Patterson b
efore, attached to the rumors of the subpar Thai lab that had tried to take up where Dr. Souk had left off.

  “I know what Patterson did to you,” the woman said, “and I know how to fix the mistakes he made.”

  “Not a mistake!”

  The voice stopped Con cold. It was harsh and twisted, deep and menacing, thick with anger. It was madness, a howl beaten into words.

  “No mistake!” the beast shouted again.

  Oh, yeah, baby, you’re a mistake, all right, Con thought, tightening his grip on the Wilson, even more of a mistake than I am.

  Head shot, straight into the kill zone—that’s what he was looking for, one second’s worth of a sight picture and that bastard was dead.

  Another bolt of lightning cracked and sizzled across the sky, and for one endlessly long moment of time, the loft was lit.

  There was no missing Monk. The bastard was huge, easily six feet four with a tangled mass of long white hair. He was built like a Mack Truck, a carved slab of granite, an extrapolation of Souk’s science taken into the bizarre zone. He barely looked human—and for that long endless moment of lightning-lit luminosity, when Con squeezed the Wilson’s trigger, all the beast’s attention was focused on the woman’s voice.

  The report of the .45 sounded. The smell of cordite followed, bitter and sharp. Then again, the whole process: trigger squeeze, the gun’s report, the smell of burned powder.

  In the split second of the two shots, the creature named Monk was looking up toward the ceiling. After confirming the two hits, Con’s gaze shifted, following Monk’s, and he saw what had been holding his attention: a long-haired blonde in a skin-tight gray dress and combat boots, and Jane, bruised and beautiful, and in mortal danger of electrocution.

  He was moving before the thought even hit him, moving to haul his ass up the rafter and get them down from the tangle of steel and roof and exploded stairwell, before the lightning found them—but between the thought and the deed, in mid-flying stride, he got hit by Monk.

  The beast slammed into him, knocking him into next week, moving him back ten feet, the concussion of the hit blacking him out. It was an explosion of light and pain, and then it was nothing.

  Nothing for a heartbeat.

  Nothing for two.

  The sound of battle, a woman’s scream, a cry of pain—they all brought him back.

  Flat on his back, dazed, he waited for his breath to return, waited to feel his body kick back into gear. He waited, and he heard the screams—screams of rage and fear.

  Monk had grabbed both of the women and was dragging them off the stairwell, fighting and cussing. Good girls. They had nothing left to lose.

  But he had something to win: this damn fight.

  Forcing a breath into his lungs, he got back to his feet and went after the bastard. He’d lost his gun in the fall, but he had a knife, and he had the will.

  There was only win, only win, no other option, and he would cut the bastard’s head off, inch by inch, if that was what it took to drop him.

  Partway down the rafter, Monk leapt off and landed next to someone on the floor. Con barely looked, but even a glance was enough to tell him his mission had ended without him.

  Randolph Lancaster was dead, a limp pile of old man in a crumpled heap on the floor. There was no mistaking the identity of the body, that thick mane of snow-white hair, and Monk seemed transfixed by it, momentarily distracted.

  Con moved in fast, holding the knife in a reverse edge grip, ready to carve the bastard a new face—but Monk was fast, faster than him, faster than the two slugs of .45 Con had leveled at him. The bullets had only left grazing wounds on his head when they should have exploded inside his skull. Somehow the bastard had outmaneuvered a pair of jacketed hollowpoints rocketing at 1,100 feet per second. Con barely caught him with his knife strike, a slash up the left side of his face, but it was enough to get the beast to relinquish the blonde. With a flick of his wrist, Monk tossed her hard against the window. She hit with a sickening thud and dropped like a stone—but in a move of supreme athletic grace, she landed on the balls of her feet, conscious and ready to go, except one arm wasn’t working now. Crashing into the window had dislocated her shoulder and put her out of the fight—or so he thought.

  He’d thought wrong. She wasn’t giving up, not for a second.

  She needed to. There was no place for her in this, no safe place.

  Con stepped in front of her and blocked the strike Monk had meant for her. It was a cracking blow to his forearm, but the arm held, and Con went in under the strike with the knife, burying it deep in Monk’s gut.

  Fuck. The blade went in, but the ripping-upward jerk he’d planned on using to eviscerate the bastard was a dismal failure. The guy’s skin was like rhino hide.

  So Con pulled the blade out and stuck him again, and again, and, for his efforts, Monk grabbed him by the scruff of his neck and lofted him into space, all without losing his grip on Jane.

  Fucking airborne. Geezus. He hit the floor again and had his breath knocked out of him—again.

  He did a quick calculation: him, the blonde, Jane, and dead Lancaster versus the subpar Souk knockoff who was cleaning his clock.

  He needed help. He couldn’t do this alone. It was like going up against an Abrams tank.

  “J.T.!” Jane screamed, struggling inside Monk’s heavy-handed hold.

  Yeah. J.T. That was him.

  He levered himself back to his feet, ready to wade back in and force Monk to release her, but to be smart about it this time, “smart” meaning not to let the bastard get a hold of him.

  Unbelievably, to him, the blonde had the same idea, to get back in there and do some damage. She gave him a signal, a subtle movement with her hand—and he understood exactly what she meant. She was going to distract the bastard with a feint, staying out of his grasp and making an opening for Con to go in and make some contact that counted.

  Great idea, and it worked. She drew Monk off, and Con came in high and landed a knife strike in the back of the beast’s neck, trying with all his might to sever something, anything—but no go. He got the knife in and got it back out, and then he got walloped again—and that time, something got shook loose.

  He tried to get up, but fell back down, the world starting to spin, his skin getting hot. White light streaked across his line of vision, bringing pain, the headache from hell. Shit. This wasn’t just about Monk hitting him like a freight train. This was about his own personal fucked-up situation.

  With agonizing effort, he got his hand in his pocket and pulled out some pills. A bunch of them fell onto the floor. Fuck. He could die here, and then what would happen to Jane?

  The possibilities didn’t bear thinking.

  He grabbed a red pill and put it under his tongue to melt, and he lay there, watching everything unfold around him like a strobe-lit dream, his body rigid with pain … Monk dismissing him with a sneer—yeah, you, too, buddy. Up yours. Jane reaching for him, screaming his name, and Monk pulling her in closer, lifting her off the ground—sorry, baby, so damn sorry. Monk reaching down and claiming Lancaster’s body. The blonde holding her injured arm close to her side and backing away from the beast.

  Whatever the pill was going to do for him, it wasn’t going to do it soon enough. Fuck! With another ungodly effort, he got to his hands and knees and willed himself to get back in the fight.

  Geezus, Jane. He needed to find his gun. It was the only chance she had. There’d be no outmaneuvering a pistol barrel jammed in the bastard’s ear. He could deliver that payload, by God.

  The blonde was pleading with Monk now, begging him to release Jane, making promises, offering deals, but the bastard just kept walking backward, carrying Jane and dragging Lancaster and watching the blonde, heading toward the elevator—which was oddly jammed open with no car stopped on the floor and with a bright yellow M spray-painted on the wall above it.

  Everything about the elevator setup screamed danger to him, danger and death, and Jane was headed straight
into it.

  Geezus. Where was his pistol?

  “Tell Red Dog to get her ass up here,” Dylan shouted into his radio, running full out for the thirteenth floor. “Tell her I need everything she’s got.

  Skeeter was alive. He could hear her voice, hear her shouting, and she was shouting for Jane. He hoped to hell that meant Jane was alive, too.

  His job was to keep them that way.

  The door to his and Skeeter’s loft was open. One look inside told him what he needed to know, and he went in with his gun drawn and leveled at the ready.

  His wife had been injured, and that pissed him off, but she wasn’t captive.

  J.T. had gotten the shit beaten out of him by the fucking huge albino in the middle of Dylan’s living room. Lancaster was dead, and Jane was headed to a very nasty end in the elevator shaft.

  There was only one solution: to tattoo his fucking name across MNK-1’s forehead with his .45.

  Piece of fucking cake.

  Bam, bam, bam. The sonuvabitch was fast, faster than Red Dog, which was ungodly fast, fast enough to keep Dylan from getting solid hits.

  So he adjusted, without ever taking his finger off the trigger or pausing in his shots.

  Bam, bam, bam—he landed those in the guy’s chest, which didn’t slow the bastard down or get him to release Jane.

  Bam, bam … Dylan released the empty magazine out of the pistol, letting it fall to the floor as he slammed a fresh mag home … bam, bam.

  He never stopped shooting, but he did change his mind and his target. Those last four shots had gone into Lancaster. Sure he was dead, but Monk was dragging him around like a teddy bear. The old man had value beyond reason—a good guess that turned into a cold fact when Monk roared and dropped Jane to pull Lancaster in closer, protecting him.

  Dylan liked tough girls, and despite looking like she’d been wrung through the wringer, Jane scrambled like a true street rat. The instant Monk released her, she dropped low, out of his line of fire, and took off like a shot.