Knuckles in his mouth—dust and salt on his tongue as he bit down—and the sound of his own breathing loud in his ears as he slid over the rocks and sand. It hurt. It didn’t hurtenough,and that scared him.
He was the only thing he could hear. The jeep was on fire, and the woman was wailing, but all Clay could hear was the static in his head.
“Give it a fucking rest,” Clay muttered to his brain. “Not everything has to be about you.”
He cracked his neck to one side, then the other, and breathed out slowly. The memory faded to a nervy rattle in the back of his skull and the taste of blood still in his mouth—he ran his tongue over his teeth—that might be just where he’d bitten the inside of his cheek.
“Shut up!” a man yelled. “I can’t think. Shut the fuck up.”
There was a thud and a yelp, and then the sobs got even more strangled and raw. Clay edged away from the door and toward the front window. The pane was blacked out by spray paint, but someone had made a half-hearted effort to scrape it off. Probably with a butter knife from the shape of the chiseled-off lines.
Clay held his breath and leaned over to peek into the house. The front room looked clear—although he was blind to the corners—and the woman was curled up in the hall. Over her shoulder, he could see into a slice of the kitchen. He didn’t have eyes on the shooter, but there was blood tracked over the cracked white linoleum in the kitchen.
A decade’s worth of training clicked through his mind like a shitty Filofax: option, scenario, outcome. He hesitated for a moment, his breath sticky on the back of his throat as he weighed the assessment.
But the hell with it. If he’d learned nothing else from being enlisted, he’d learned not to fuck with what wasn’t broken.
Get in. Fuck them up. Deal with the fallout later.
In position. Bravo 4. Move, move, move.
Clay stepped back, shifted his weight, and kicked the door in. The heel of his boot connected in the sweet spot just under the padlock, and he felt the impact up into his knee. The lock held. It was the door that didn’t. Screws ripped out of old, poorly maintained wood, and the door flew open. It slammed back into the wall and bounced back. Clay blocked it with his arm as he moved into the room and along the wall, out of line of sight from the kitchen.
Habit cleared the blind corners—nothing in them but rat shit and old sheets.
The woman on the floor screamed and tried to squirm away. She’d been shot in the shoulder, and it was a bloody mess of pulped flesh. Blood puddled on the ground under her and smeared beneath her heels as she tried to get away. He recognized her. It took him a second to realize from where.
“It wasn’t my idea!” she said, her working hand raised to ward Clay off. “I didn’t know it was gonna—”
…her nails dug into Clay’s skin as she grabbed his arm. Her face was pale and her eyes were shiny with panic. ‘Something happened. In the restroom. There’s bloodeverywhere.It’s that man who came in; the fancy one from Lexington.”
“Shit,” Clay swore and took off running.
It was Buchanan. He knew it. That was just their fucking luck.
“Shut the fuck up, Betsy!” a voice yelled from the kitchen. A bullet punched into the floor between Betsy’s feet, and splinters flew up to dig into her ankles. She screamed and curled into a ball, her fingers buried in her dark brown hair.
Clay raised his eyebrows as he skirted around the room. “Arlo?” he said. “Is that you?”
Someone breathed heavily in the kitchen for a moment. Then, “No.”
“I can smell flop sweat and BBQ bunions,” Clay said. He indulged himself with a brief, exasperated look at the ceiling. His old master chief would have clipped him around the ear for letting his concentration slip, but… he wasn’t here, and Clay might have to deal with being conned by Arlo. Of all the dumb bastards out there. He pulled his attention away from that thought and cocked his head to the side. “Kinda think it is you.”
He took quick steps to the side, the soles of his boots scraping over the dusty floor. Just in time.
“Fuck you!” Arlo spat.
Two gunshots echoed through the small house. The bullets punched through the drywall and hissed past Clay’s face. One of them hit the doorframe behind him with a solid thud, and the other smashed the blacked-out window.
Light flooded into the room. Someone yelled outside, and Clay grimaced at the thought he might have to pay the local LEOs off again. It wasn’t like Ezra covered expenses. He glanced back quickly to check the street outside and got a glimpse of Grade on the other side of the car, hunkered down behind the trunk.
Not an idiot, then. Good. Only room for one of those in a bed.
“Where’s Hadley, Arlo?” Clay asked.
“I’m here!” Hadley said. His voice was steady. Guthrie had said Hadley was good under pressure, unflappable. It looked like the old sergeant was still a fair judge of character, except when it came to bookies and bar fights. “Boss, is Betsy OK?”
Clay glanced at the woman on the floor. Her face was sticky with sweat and snot, and her lips were gray as more blood leaked from her shoulder.
