Voices drifted from the next room, and Braden turned to cover that direction. He was so focused on what he was doing that he almost missed his partner gesturing at the last line of metal racks. He glanced over to see what had caught Tommy’s attention and almost laughed. Besides boxes of jewelry, bins full of small art pieces, and piles of rolled-up canvases, there were stacks of cash—lots and lots of cash.
Tommy grinned, and Braden couldn’t help smiling back. This bust was going to be frigging huge.
Tommy motioned toward the entrance to the other room, and they moved forward together. Ahead, Braden could hear the sounds of clinking glasses and shuffling cards to go along with the low murmur of voices.
On the other side of the open door, Tommy gave him a silent finger countdown.Three…two…one…go!
Braden stepped into the room, taking in the three guys playing cards around a small table in the center of it—and the pistols sitting out in the open beside each of them.
Guess Tommy’s informant had gotten the part about them ditching the weapons wrong.
Shit.
“Freeze!” Tommy shouted as one of the men reached for the Colt .45 inches from his hand.
“Metro PD,” Braden added. “You reach for that weapon, and you’re done.”
When the guy hesitated, Braden moved to the side to get a better angle on the men while Tommy went to get their weapons away from them.
The front door of the building was a good twenty feet away on Braden’s left, and the only other way out of the room was through one of the two windows on either side of the front door, or through the second door behind a counter directly across from him. The counter might have been tempting for the thieves to use as cover, but to reach it, the men would have to turn their backs on Braden and Tommy. Braden didn’t think they were that desperate—or stupid.
Braden didn’t like how calm the men seemed, though. It was almost as if they weren’t concerned at all by the sudden appearance of two cops in their midst.
Eyes still locked on the three thieves, Braden opened his mouth to warn Tommy that something wasn’t right when two men stepped out of the darkness behind the counter and started shooting. So there were five bad guys in the room, not just three.
Something else Tommy’s informant got wrong.
Braden dived to the right to avoid the hail of gunfire coming his way. All the advantages they’d had against the three men seconds earlier—no nearby exits, nowhere to run, and no cover—now turned to disadvantages for him and Tommy. They were facing five men who seemed more than willing to kill them to avoid prison.
He rolled onto his left side and raised his weapon, aiming at the three men at the table, since they were closer and the greater threat at the moment. No doubt, Tommy was doing the same thing with the men behind the counter, but he didn’t have the time to check.
As Braden put a bullet in the chest of one man, he felt something hot sting through his right shoulder. It didn’t hurt at first, and he was sure he’d just been grazed, but then all at once, holding his weapon up got a lot harder, like he was lifting a thirty-pound weight.
A second man at the table stumbled backward and fell to the floor, obviously hit by a round from Tommy’s weapon.
Braden turned his attention to the third guy at the table, but he must have decided he was done standing in the open, blazing away at cops like this was some old west showdown. Instead, he shoved the table over and hid behind it, probably thinking the tabletop would protect him. It wouldn’t.
Braden aimed for the center of the table and put three rounds through it. He scrambled to his feet and ran for the table, intending to hide behind it long enough to get a shot off at the men behind the counter. Somewhere along the way, he got hit in his left thigh, and his sprint turned into an awkward stumble. He fell to his knees behind the table, lucky he didn’t end up on his face. It alarmed him that he hadn’t even felt himself get hit. Was that bad? He didn’t know.
Instead, he used the opportunity to drop the clip out of his 9mm and slide in a fresh one. He sure as hell hadn’t kept count of the number of rounds he’d fired, but he had to be just about out. He expected the two men behind the counter to send a hail of bullets through the table at any second the same way he’d done earlier, but thankfully, they didn’t. It was a good thing, too. The reload maneuver took him a lot longer than it should have. His right shoulder was on fire, and his arm refused to move the way he wanted it to.
Finally slapping in the clip, he transferred his pistol to his left hand and popped his head up for a look-see. Both men behind the counter were too focused on Tommy to notice Braden at first. That quickly changed when he took careful aim at one of the men and put a bullet in the guy’s stomach, making him stumble. The shot should have been in the center of the man’s chest, but shooting left-handed wasn’t something he practiced as much as he probably should. He adjusted his aim and got the second round on target just as the injured thief turned to face him. The guy flew backward, hitting the wall and sliding to the floor.
Braden twisted his body to take aim at the final man, but the man was already tumbling to the floor before Braden could get a shot off. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Tommy on his knees, his weapon pointing in the direction of the guy who’d just gone down.
Braden pushed himself to his feet, moving as fast as he could to see if the three men who’d been around the table were dead, then hobbling across the room and around the counter to check on the other two. They were dead, too. He took a few extra seconds to clear the room, but the place was empty.
“Clear!” he shouted before heading out to limp around the counter. “Holy shit, Tommy. I can’t believe we lived through that. I thought we were screwed for sure.”
He reached inside his pocket for his cell phone but froze when he realized his partner was still kneeling on the floor. Both arms hung loosely at his sides, his face pale and etched with pain. There were dark red splotches staining his T-shirt, running down his chest, and covering his stomach. Even as Braden watched, Tommy slowly fell forward.
Braden lunged toward his partner, catching Tommy before he slammed into the concrete floor.
“Don’t you die on me, Tommy!” he yelled as he pulled his partner into his lap and tried to press his hands to the gunshot wounds. But there were too many of them. Shit, how many times had he been hit?
Tommy’s eyes fluttered.
“Stay with me, Tommy!” he begged, trying hard to keep the panic out of his voice. “Don’t give up.”
