“And friendship!”How long could I bull my way through this encounter?
I looked at Jay to signal that it was time to find Pierrenow, but he was focused on the machine. Daisy unwrapped her arm from around a man and saw from my eyes that we were in trouble.
“I’ll have to ask my friend there,” I told the big guy.
When I tried to walk past him, he grabbed my elbow. “Not so fast.”
Clapping my hands around my mouth, I screamed, “Pierre!”
That was the loudest I’d ever been!
Then I surveyed the room. Most people were looking to see who had screamed, but one man’s eyes stayed on me—in confusion and then concern. A man in a leather jacket with a greyhound at his side.
I slipped out of the man’s grip and ran while Daisy rushed to grab Pierre. Jay looked around like he was lost. I pulled a mask from under my shirt over my face and jumped over the balcony, landing on the edge of a table. It flipped, and cards and chips flew everywhere.
I was on the floor with an ache in my back, a collection of chips on my lap. The lights of the ceiling created a glare around the people whose poker game I’d bombed, but I could tell from the chaos around me that they were not happy.
Some of the people fled, but one man brought a cane down on me to whack me in the head. A shoe flew out of nowhere, catching the stick in the crook of its high heel.
It was Daisy—she’d dived through the crowd to stop the swing before hitting me. With only half a second to pull the retractable staff from my boot and extend it, I swung upward, smashing it into the man’s arm, so Daisy could recover.
She reached through the slit of her dress to pull out her knife, but a man trained a pistol at her. I couldn’t get up fast enough to stop him should he shoot her! All I could do was pull a coin from the pocket of my shirt and flip it into the air to distract the gunman. By some miracle, the man was so stupid, so money-obsessed, that he let his eyes follow the coin through its upward tumbles.
As he watched the quarter flip between Lady Liberty and the bald eagle, I sprung forward, tucked backward into his body, and clock-hand spun him in a different direction. His finger jerked against the trigger, but the bullet went into the shoulder of one of his own boys.
The shot man screamed and tipped over in his chair. Before I could even process that, Daisy used the tipped table like a launchpad and moved with a speed and precision I’d never imagined she possessed. Using the table for leverage, she jumped the shooter and wrapped her legs around his neck. I spun away from him, and she twist-flipped him into a face plant.
Another table was overturned by the man’s feet, flinging a shot glass into a pillar. Glass rained over the both of us as Daisy recovered to one knee, knife still in hand. She wrenched the gun from his hand and then aimed it in a circle at the goons, who’d begun to close in.
“Back up,” she demanded, causing all the men to back away with their hands up.
I caught sight of Jay chasing Pierre and his dog from the venue—they both escaped through the emergency exit in the alley. And then, the room burst into even more chaos as cops flooded in. Our luck would have it that tonight was the night that they decided to bust Aphrodite’s for both the drinking and the gambling.
Pandemonium broke out between the cops and the remaining patrons. As dancers ran screaming from the violence, Daisy and I ducked away.
Someone had bolted the emergency exit to stop the cops from coming in, but there was one more—wasn’t there?
“Nick, get down,” Daisy said, pulling me to the floor as a gunshot popped off from somewhere.
We started to crawl, navigating around the busy feet, the broken stools, the stomped dice.
“Uh, when did you learn that move?” I asked.
“Oh, that?” Daisy said, glancing over her shoulder. “They teach it to you in finishing school. Right after tea etiquette.How to throw a man over your shoulder.”
When we stood up again, it was at a free door—the second exit. We ran outside and up the sloped alley into the streets slick with puddles.
Across the road, we found the roofless black car where Zihan was waiting, beckoning for us to hurry up. Once Daisy got in the front and I in the back, he pushed the gas and the car sped down the street.
Jay had been chasing Pierre, but he must’ve gotten a cramp in his foot because where we picked him up, he was hopping on one foot and screaming in pain.
The car screeched to a halt, and Zihan grabbed him by the collar, pulling him right off the sidewalk and throwing him into the back with one hand.
“Ow!” Jay screamed as he fell backward against me.
Zihan pressed the gas and veered into the street. An oncoming car in the other lane honked as he swerved to follow Pierre down into an alley. The car ran over puddles and dips of damaged pavement as he grabbed a trash can and then threw it at the car—its nasty, slippery fruit peels and food wrappers raining all over us.
Then Pierre mounted a motorcycle—his dog tucked into the sidecar—and took off, back onto the main street. We turned out of the alley so fast the car almost tipped over, and I had to hold on to Jay to stay steady. This car was speeding like a runaway train about to fly straight off the rails.
