There was a muffled yelp on the line, and then Cloister yelled, ‘Don—” The word was cut off, and Luka cleared his throat, vaguely annoyed now.
“Hurt him,” Luka said.The crunch that followed wasn’t loud.Javi still flinched at it and the strangled whine that escaped Cloister.Bourneville barked furiously, lunging at the end of her lead so fiercely her front feet weren’t even on the ground.“His face is next, Agent.He’s no oil painting now, but I can make it worse.”
“I said I’d do it,” Javi said.“Just—”
The knowledge he didn’t have anything to bargain with caught in his throat.He’d called for backup, but they wouldn’t get here in time.
“I’ll do it.”Javi put the safety on and tossed the gun away from him.It landed on the ground and skidded close enough to a unit to trigger the security light.He held his free hand up and went down onto one knee, his weight braced on the ball of his foot.“Just don’t make a fuss.”
It was the best he could think of.
He let go of Bourneville.
Chapter Twenty-Four
ThetiewhippedthroughJavi’s fingers.
The snarling had stopped.Bourneville bolted towards the maze of storage units in eerie, focused silence.Just a slim black streak that disappeared into the shadows before Luka Horvat’s “What are you—” filtered through the speakers on the phone.
Javi ignored him.He used his crouch as a racing start and sprinted after Bourneville.As he passed the first unit— 42, his brain recorded in case there was some method to the layout he’d need to use—he bent down and scooped the gun up from the concrete without breaking stride on his way past.
He left the phone.If he got this wrong he didn’t want to hear the consequences play out in real time.
Ahead of him, he saw Bourneville skid around the corner at the end of the aisle.By the time he got there, she was already out of sight, somewhere in the maze of containers.She was moving too fast for the security lights to catch her, but Javi followed the trail of them as they flicked on in her wake.
Somewhere in the maze, he heard Luka’s voice—not so pleasant now—yell, “You fucked up, Agent Merlo.”
Maybe.
He’d be the one who had to live with that.
A sharp corner at speed staggered him off the side of a container.It made a hollow sound on impact, the metal still holding traces of the day’s heat.Javi bounced off and kept moving.
Raised voices echoed disorientingly off the rows of metal boxes.It made it hard to triangulate where they were coming from.Javi resisted the urge to try and just kept his focus on the next light in the row as it flicked on.
The sharp retort of a gunshot cut through the night.Reaction flinched across Javi’s shoulders, and he faltered for a second.The ragged, horrified howl that ripped out of someone a second later made him exhale with relief.
It also made the vague shadow on top of a nearby unit look in that direction.The sudden, jerky movement was sharp enough to catch Javi’s attention.He stopped abruptly, feet sliding on the dirty concrete, and spun around.
He made eye contact with the man crouched up on container 56 for a beat.Then he swung his arm up in one smooth movement and shot him.The bullet hit the man square in his center of mass and threw him back.His arms swung out as if he was trying to steady himself as he staggered backward.Something dropped from his hand and clanked off the roof.There was a cold part of Javi that recorded that fact for his report later as evidence of a weapon.The man’s eyes widened in almost comical surprise as he teetered on the edge of the roof.Javi shot him again before he could fall, a headshot this time.
The surprise was gone.
Outspread arms dropped, and the man’s suddenly slack body pitched off the roof.It landed with a muffled, meaty thud, and someone yelped “Jesus!”in reaction.
There was another gunshot, chased by a shocked yell of pain.
“Not fucking me!”someone screamed.
Javi pushed himself back into a run.His friend on the rooftop had taken enough time that he’d lost the trail of security lights, energy-saving measures flicking them back off again.The chaos and noise of the scene ahead of him was close enough now that he could find it on his own.
There was a gap ahead in the row.One container had been set down on a rock, the box of it tilted at a corner, and the one next to it shifted sidelong to make room.Javi took the shortcut.It slowed his pace as he shuffled through, one hand against the rough, blistered box for balance, but it gave him some element of surprise.
Two golf carts and a cherry picker were parked in the heart of the container maze.There were four of Horvat’s men left and a twitchy woman with bleach-blond hair who was cowered right back against the bright yellow side of the cherry picker.
One man was down, white-faced and crying as he clutched the top of his leg with both hands.His leg was still pumping blood in slow, ruddy gouts, but from the dark splatters of blood sprayed over the concrete around him, it would be worse if he let go.That left three.One of them was trying to keep a grip on a struggling, bloody-faced Cloister.The other two were trying to deal with Bourneville.She was latched onto the arm of a blond man in what had been, before it got shredded, an expensive leather jacket.
The face was different from the one on file—with a new nose and the blurring puffiness of excess—but close enough.
