Usually, I try to be as quiet as possible while sneaking up on a target. But the gunfire and my racing heart send all of my plans for stealth right into the toilet.
“You’ll not take me alive!” A voice yells from the house.
“Challenge accepted, asshole!” Cat hollers back. She’s toting two automatic weapons, spraying bullets along the side of the house.
Shit.
I can’t get close enough to the house with her shooting everything in sight. I look around both sides of the house for cover. The only thing remotely possible is the car that recently arrived, courtesy of Premy. During a break in the gunfire, I race to the side of the vehicle and crouch down. I hear Cat reload her weapons. I hear Jeffrey Rose cock a shotgun.
Boom!
The blast reverberates around the clearing.
I fall flat to my belly and look underneath the car to the scene on the other side. The house is riddled with bullet holes. There’s a crawl space that I might be able to fit into. More gunfire, and I scrabble across the dirt and into the crawlspace access.
Low voices murmur to each other in between gunshots.
“If she’s out there, more are on the way,” the woman says. Premy.
“Good,” the man spits out.
“Not good,” Premy answers. “These people are trained to bring in fugitives. Didn’t you see that Harrison Ford movie? Tommy Lee Jones’ character is a pansy compared to Cat and her people.”
“Then we need something more drastic,” Rose laughs.
I can’t see what they’re doing, but I hear someone riffling through a box.
“What is that?” Premy shouts.
“Grenade,” Rose laughs harder.
Grenade? What the… I don’t worry about them hearing me under the house. My only concern right now is alerting Cat of the grenade about to be lobbed her way. I push through the dirt and cobwebs and roll out of the crawlspace.
“Cat! Grenade! Incoming!”
I don’t know if she hears me because a heartbeat later, the explosion rocks the space at the edge of the trees, knocking me to the ground beside the car. I yank out my knife and wait for Premy and Rose to make a break for it.
My patience is rewarded when Premy comes running out of the house with a laptop slung over her shoulder. “Jeffie! Baby! Hurry!”
Premy opens the car door, and I knock her to the ground.
“Oof! Damn it!” She swears.
Premy tries to push me off, but I press her to the ground. “Where’s Rose?”
She stops struggling. “Inside, I think. Or outside? I don’t know. He said something about making sure.”
“Making sure, what?”
“Making sure he was the canary that killed the Cat,” Premy snorts.
I hit her in the side of the head with the butt of my knife, knocking her unconscious. I slice through the laptop strap and use it to tie her up before I’m on my feet, headed toward the woods.
Loud shouting and gunfire echo out of the forest, and I pray to everything that I’m not too late.
Chapter 44
“Never mess with a tired, pissed-off woman with nothing left to lose.”
