Okay. He was bluffing. He could only take them out with two bullets if Wrecking Ball and Zip Tie Guy happened to line themselves up just right in his sights. Buttheydidn’t need to know that.
Given Zip Tie Guy’s reaction to LT’s ink, Doc figured he could use the whole Navy SEAL angle to his advantage.
LT, who stood awkwardly with the wooden chair strapped to his back, played right along. “Do it!” he encouraged Doc. “Don’t worry about me and John. Put these bastards down and save the women.”
“J-Jesus!” Zip Tie Guy sputtered. “These sonsofbitches are crazy!”
“Crazy is as crazy does.” Doc winked, letting his mouth curve into a maniacal-looking sneer even as he listened for any sort of footfall from upstairs.Still nothing. Maybe Head Hancho is waiting to see how things play out before joining the party.“I’ll give you to the count of three to drop your weapons,” he told Wrecking Ball and Zip Tie Guy. “After that, I’m going to start ending lives. One. Two.”
He saw it then. The look that came into Wrecking Ball’s eyes.
It was a look he knew well. A look a man wore right before he split. Right before he was forced to face both parts of himself. The good and the evil. The light and dark. A look that said Wrecking Ball had made the decision to kill.
“Don’t,” Doc cautioned, pressing the pistol tighter against Red’s head. His heart rate, which had remained steady, ratcheted up a notch.
Wrecking Ball said nothing, but Doc saw the muscles in the dude’s big forearm flex as his thick finger tightened around the trigger.
“John?” Dana gasped when Wrecking Ball’s intent became clear to everyone in the room.
“It’s okay, darlin’,” Uncle John assured her. But John cut a look toward Doc that saidDon’t make a liar outta me, boy.
“I saiddon’t,” Doc growled again, the hairs on the back of his neck standing stick-straight.
Despite his boasting, he didn’treallywant to kill anyone. No matter how much training he’d received, no matter how hard the Navy had tried to make combat automatic and killing routine, taking a life never set easy on his shoulders. And after bugging out of the Navy, he’d promised himself to go the rest of his days without adding to his tally.
That hadn’t worked out, of course. Despite the Deep Six crew having left their Frogmen statuses behind, forces had conspired to make them all continue to fight for their lives. In fact, he’d had to end a man just a few months back.
Sure, it’d been in the service of saving Cami and Mia and Romeo, but it’d been another black mark on his soul all the same. And since then, he’d assured himself,again, thatthatdeath would be the last death to stain the fabric of his being.
Then again, if Wrecking Ball put so much as one more ounce of pressure on that Glock’s trigger, Doc was going to send a bullet clean through his skull.
“Brady, you with me?” Wrecking Ball asked.
“Jesus, Jace!” Zip Tie Guy, akaBrady, rasped. “How the hell are we—”
Doc stopped listening to the men because, in his mind’s eye, he saw Jace’s next move. And like a train coming down the tracks, there was no way to stop it short of stoppingJace.
Fuck, Doc thought, even as his muscles clenched in preparation to absorb the recoil once he aimed at Jace and scrambled the man’s gray matter with a .357 slug. Just as he was poised to point and shoot, however, his ears filled with the sound of Cami’s scream. “Dalton! Look out!”
Ah,he thought.So the man upstairs finally grew some balls.
Before he could adjust his aim toward the new danger, his head exploded.
Chapter 13
5:45 PM...
Cami had heard it said that fear had two meanings. One, forget everything and run. Or two, face everything and rise.
The second meaning came instinctively to her. She had absolutely no thought of herself, no thought of what moving from her chair might cost her. Her only thought was of Doc. Of getting to him.
She didn’t remember jumping up, her bound wrists making the move so awkward she stumbled. She didn’t remember running to where Doc had fallen. All she knew was that, suddenly, she was kneeling next to him, whispering his name and begging him to move.
The terror pounding through her veins made it sound as if there was a river rushing between her ears. Which meant she was deaf to the fourth masked man’s barked orders as he ran down the stairs, aiming his weapon at everyone in the room and gesturing wildly.
“Dalton?” she whispered Doc’s name again, panicked tears clogging her throat.
When the fourth gunman had appeared on the stairs above Doc, his deadly black handgun raised high over Doc’s head, Cami would swear her soul had left her body. Then when the gunman had brought the butt of the weapon down on top of Doc’s head, she’d known her soul had still been very much with her because she’d felt it rip in two.
