Owen was as relaxed as he could be when he made it to the plush hotel where Annika had taken the Holders. Maybe it wasn't exactly 'plush' but it was a hell of a lot better than the ratty motels they'd been staying at.
The sun was still about an hour away, but he'd passed most of the night content in Annika's safety. Though he hadn't found the Mechanic, he hadn't found anything else either. That alone was a victory.
While he'd always wanted Lee brought home, Owen now found himself wanting Nick to succeed, too. Originally, for Owen it had just been about Sin, about finding Lee, about not crossing his own moral boundaries.
Instead, he found he had not crossed them, they'd simply dissolved away in the face of the choices he had to make. There was no going back, because there were no lines remaining to cross back over.
For a man who'd lived his life clearly inside the lines being without boundaries was like tilting the world off its axis. And he was glad to be back where he knew how things stood.
He looked around the lobby, one he was more familiar with than the places Sin and Nick had been taking him. Annika the illegal Russian hooker would not have made it past the desk here.
He almost smiled at the thought.
Had he known that Sin and Nick had found Lee, or even just taken care of the Mechanic, he would have been able to relax even more.
As it was, Owen was able to roll his shoulders, stand at the front desk and pick up his room key. Plastic this time. Not metal. Not with a chunk of some broken tool hanging off it to make it too big to put in your pocket and carry it off.
He and Duffy stood quietly waiting at the front desk while the nice man tapped on his keyboard and told them about the Wi-Fi. Despite it being the dark of night, and despite Annika leaving the key for them, it took almost as long to check in as normal. Still, Owen almost smiled to himself.
Trust Annika to get them out of that motel and out of the Mechanic's line of sight. Trust her to leave a three-foot hole in the wall when she left. He wondered if he should call later and pay for the damage. As his mind wandered through iterations of how to do that without confessing to a crime, the man behind the desk looked up at him. Taking the key, Owen suddenly felt free.
Annika waited at the other end of the elevator ride.
The Mechanic didn't know where they were. Duffy was stitched up and alive. He was out—
Shit.
The tracker.
With a motion to Duffy to wait a moment, Owen pulled out his phone and dialed once more the number Sin had given him.
This time, Todd Maxwell answered perfectly alert.
Smart like his brother, he said no names, gave no identifying information. "Yes? Is everything okay?"
Owen sighed. "I don't know." Owen felt his hand grasping at his own face is frustration. The move purely involuntary. "We found a tracker on our car. On the way back."
"Oh."
Yes. Good. "This means there's a trace to your place. I'll leave it up to you how you deal with that."
Owen waited for the blow-up. Waited for Dr. Todd Maxwell, dermatologist, to light into a string of swear words that Owen had brought this to his office.
But he didn't do it. There was only a small comment. "I understand."
"I'm so sorry."
"Will it clear up?"
It was a good question. Luckily, Owen felt there was a good answer. "Yes, hopefully within twenty-four hours. I'll call with news when I have it. Is that okay?"
"I would appreciate it."
Of course he would. Maxwell now knew that his brother was being held by one of the worst human beings on the planet. He must have been desperate to help. Desperate for information. He obviously needed that more than he needed his own safety.
But there was nothing more to say, so Owen quietly hung up the phone.
Todd Maxwell had been good to them in the face of overwhelming trouble to himself. Given that Sin said Lee had gone to him before, this wasn't the first time he'd been generous. He'd refused any kind of payment. And now wasn't upset that Owen had laid a tracer path to the door of his business.
He could easily see what little he knew of Lee in Todd.
The thoughts pinged around his head as they rode the elevator up. Now that he was no longer concerned with Anni's survival, other thoughts broke free of their moorings and Owen felt them careening around his brain, crashing into each other, and lying about like wreckage. His head hurt.
He slipped the plastic key into the slot and grasped the room handle, his only thoughts of holding Anni and falling deep, deep asleep.
Though Anni had gotten two rooms, one for them and one for the Holders, he opened his own door not to a waiting Annika, but to a gun aimed but wavering.
Behind him he heard Duffy pull his weapon as Owen tried to process, why Annika was so still on the bed and Nikki Holder was holding the gun on her and crying.
He must have made a noise, because the woman gulped and the weapon jerked. "Don't move."
"Owen." The word was soft, simple and meant nothing other than his name. There was not a wealth of meaning behind it. But it made him look. Take stock. And that was more disturbing than he could have imagined.
Annika's hands were tied behind her back with ripped fabric. She sat on the bed, up against the headboard, obviously stressed. From her position, there was nowhere she could go, no fast move she could make, hindered by fluffy white pillows and the awkward alignment of her seating.
Owen looked back and forth between the women. His brain registered sounds but felt as though he was trying to understand a surrealist painting rather than seeing something real in front of his eyes.
Behind him, he heard Duffy click the door shut.
Probably a good idea. Anyone walking by—at one a.m.?—could interfere. With two guns drawn now, that was a recipe for problems. And Duffy already had one bullet wound.
For a moment, Owen's tired and scattered brain shot off on a tangent he could grasp: Duffy had suffered one fucking bad day. And it had all occurred because of Owen.
"Owen."
His attention zeroed in on his wife again, his brain careening back to the present. But she didn't say anything else. No, the sound of ocean waves crashing was really the sound of Nikki Holder, crying as she spoke.
"I have to."
"No you don't."
Owen frowned. The words didn't come from him. Nor from Duffy.
Only then did he spot Randall Holder behind his wife, his hands gently lifting to settle on her shoulders.
"I do!" Tears ran down a face already blotchy and Owen's brain sharpened.
Professionally, he knew he should never work a case with his own family involved. He also understood there was no choice here. No back-up.
Everyone who could solve the problem was in the room.
Assets: Annika—smarter than she looked. Duffy—gun already drawn. Pretty good shot and police trained. He and Owen could work in tandem without speaking. Himself—trained FBI agent with some hostage negotiation training he would have to pull out of the back of his brain.
Detriments: Duffy was shot. No one was coming. Nikki Holder was clearly insane with worry or grief. Annika was tied up and put in an untenable position. Himself—his brain was fucking shot because that was Anni tied up on the bed.
He opened his mouth. First names. Gentle voice. "Nikki."
Though her hands continued to shake ever so slightly, she didn't take her eyes off Annika. But her chin lifted and he knew she was listening. "Nikki, what's going on here?"
"I have to kill her."
That was a terrible opening statement. Was she mentally ill? He prayed not.
"Why?"
Hoping she wouldn’t say the voices told her to, because that was hard to combat, he waited.
They all waited. Nikki Holder just kept her gun aimed and sniffed. Unable to wipe the tears from her face, they ran unchecked onto her shirt. The size of the wet spot told him she and Annika had been at this for a while before he and Duffy burst in like idiots. Maybe the fact that Annika was still alive was a good sign. A sign that Mrs. Holder wouldn't pull the trigger.
But Owen couldn't bank on that. "Tell me why . . ."
Another sniff. Another moment passing with nothing.
Owen let his question sit and get heavy.
Annika must be about to die of heart failure. He knew what it was like to look into a loaded gun. But he didn't think he'd ever held his cool as long as she had. His wife managed to express a perfect combination of sympathy and boredom.
He couldn't look at her.
Had to pretend it wasn't Anni on the bed.
He waited.
"He called. He'll kill my family."
Owen wanted to collapse. It wasn't schizophrenia. Just the Mechanic. He tried to talk, but found his voice didn't work. He tried again.
"Nikki." Use names. "Annika saved you. If you pull the trigger—" He didn't say 'kill her'. He couldn't live with the thought. "—you'll live with that forever. . . And it won't protect your family."
Another sniff.
The only acknowledgement he was getting.
"Nikki, baby." Her husband pleaded. Owen wanted to stop the man but the words were coming out too fast. "I know you'd do anything for me and the kids. But not this. Please don't kill her."
Sonofabitch.
Owen didn't remember his whole hostage negotiation training class, but he did remember that you didn't speak what you didn't want to happen. You repeated what you did want.
He was opening his mouth, when Nikki Holder opened hers.
She was the hostage taker. When she was speaking, her likelihood of shooting was way down. "He'll kill you. I saw what he did to that officer."
Owen stepped back in, attempting to take control of the situation. "This will not keep him from hurting your family. Who saved your family a little while ago?"
Another sniff.
Another pause.
Then, finally, words. "She did."
"That's right. If he finds you, he will kill you and your family. Nothing here will change that."
If he finds you . . .
The words echoed in Owen's brain. When they connected to thought, it was all he could do not to roar. He began to wish that Duffy would just shoot the woman, so they could get out of here.
But he had to know. He already knew. But he had to be certain.
"Did he call you, Nikki?"
"Yes."
He bit his tongue. Tasted blood. Wished again for Duffy to shoot.
She'd kept a phone from them. A phone with access to the Mechanic.
Which meant she was more in the assassin's pocket than Owen had even guessed.
And it meant that the man who had already found them twice, could trace her cell phone signal and find them all here.
Or maybe he already had.
Sin's heart beat loudly in her chest and the adrenaline spiked through her system.
It had been beating like this almost consistently since she and Nick fled Ann Evalyn’s place, escaping but never seeing who had come in downstairs.
She now stood in the overgrown back yard of an abandoned house among abandoned houses in a crap neighborhood. To say it was run-down would be like saying the Titanic had a fender bender. Most importantly, it was the last place. She was betting everything that Lee was behind the closed door.
It took everything she had to calm her nerves. Though she was very good at staying focused, she hadn't had to fight for it like this in so long that she had almost forgotten how.
She had forgotten her hands would shake, her heart would try to escape her chest, her legs would turn to stone. She was almost fourteen again, picking her fights, taking the hits and creating the bruises that would hide any damage sustained in her first kill.
Since then, she'd taken bullets. Not today, but other days, other fights, Churkin had laid some damage on her.
Now she stood on one side of a door that closed off the biggest part of her life.
Nick's eyes darted toward hers. A slight lift of his chin signaled. Was it time?
She shook her head and leaned forward.
Pressing her ear to the door, Sin listened for what she could get. Though she didn't hear anything, that didn't mean anything either. The Mechanic was a professional: more cunning than Sin, colder than Kaspar Kurev, and meaner than Churkin. Sin wasn't surprised that sound was nonexistent on the other side of the door.
She offered a small shrug to Nick, who didn't respond.
Without moving her head, she darted her glance around, wondering if there was no noise because the Mechanic wasn't inside. If she were holding someone here—not her style, but if she were doing it—she'd be smart to be outside, to be watching.
But she couldn't find anyone.
No one had opened fire on them. Then again, they'd chosen the back because it would be hard to get a steady line on them and stay hidden. The yard had grown up so long ago that many of the weeds had become slim trees. She and Nick had slowly pushed their own path to the door. Anyone coming after them would have to do the same. Would have to rustle the weeds and bushes and give themselves away.
Nick pointed at his own chest, asking "Me first?"
And she wanted to say "yes." Wanted him to bust in the door, scream their way in with bullets and declarations. But she shook her head.
It was a house. Full of doors. Though she didn't hear anything inside, there was plenty outside. Rustling in the undergrowth, the occasional car on a street she couldn't see, the click and whine of a failing streetlamp trying to quit the world.
Reaching out, she grabbed the knob and turned it as slowly as she could.
It gave way with such shocking ease that she almost slammed it open. It creaked with wild abandon, happy to finally be used or shouting a warning to whomever waited inside. Sin had no idea which, so she opted for the safer route and assumed someone in the house was armed and dangerous.
Though the place was clearly abandoned, it was a Kurev holding. Sin was disturbed to come full circle and still be using the same methods from her first encounter taking down the Kurevs.
She stepped slowly into a room that was too much like the bar in Southtown to be coincidental. Though it was clearly a home, the abandoned furniture and the layer of dust, the recent disturbances to the dust were all the same. Someone had been using this place. Probably within the past two weeks.
The question was, were they here now?
Sin's answer: they had to be.
She and Nick had picked, busted, and shot their way into every other address on the list. This was the last one. Left because it was in a neighborhood and thus an unlikely place for the Mechanic to hold a live hostage. But when they'd arrived, Sin had seen the usefulness of the place. The weeds would muffle the sound, obscure the view. There wasn't anyone around to hear anything. And no one here called the police when they had a problem.
It was actually the perfect place.
Sin took a deep breath and smelled . . . A tinge of blood.
At least she thought it was that. Could be her imagination. Her desire to find Lee. Standing in the darkened kitchen, her eyes adjusting, her nose forcibly holding back the sneeze the stirred dust wanted to force on her, she understood how sad it was that the smell of blood was something good in her life.
With a low signal from her, she and Nick started pacing the area.
Her heart still beat erratically, fueled by wishes and real fear.
They clung to the edges of the room when they could do it without running into furniture. Still the wood creaked.
Knowing there was no way around it, that their arrival had already been announced, she made a series of short motions to Nick, sending him down the hall. Watching as he moved, she placed her feet only when he did, hung back so that any door he opened would reveal only one person to whomever waited.
It was a dangerous position she put her brother in. As she watched him position himself to the side of the door, grasp and turn the knob, she realized she might be sacrificing the only family she had left in an attempt to find the only family she had made.
Nick held his gun in one hand, and as she watched and held back, ready to spring in surprise, he counted down on the fingers on the knob.
He turned the knob, swinging the door in, leading with his gun.
And was greeted with nothing.
He entered purposefully, swinging the gun with his gaze, taking in every corner.
Though Nick stepped back out into the hallway and shook his head at her, she'd known from the way his shoulders fell as he'd swept the room.
Lee was not in there.
Though Sin had monitored her brother, she'd also kept her eyes on the hallway. It was dangerous for Nick to burst into the rooms, but it was also dangerous to take their eyes off the other doors. Anyone worth anything in this business would take the offensive at first opportunity.
There were no running feet. No clicks behind the other doors. And nothing burst open. Including her heart.
Quickly, without giving anyone time to prepare, Nick backed across the hallway, using Sin for cover. He grasped the next doorknob, and didn't even wait through a countdown. Sin's gun was in her right hand, her sai in her left; she was as ready as she could be, as he swung the next door open.
Again, he stepped in, meaning he didn't see anyone in there. Again, Sin felt the pop of relief mixed with disappointment. And Nick stepped backward into the hall. This time he didn't shake his head at her, just turned to the next door.
He turned the knob, swinging the door open.
And this time his shoulders popped up. The gun stopped mid-sweep and aimed, and without thinking Sin stepped into action.
She felt his spine against her own as she moved into place with a single step. Her own weapons pointed out, she rolled along Nick's back, listening to his voice but missing the words as her own adrenaline screamed through her system.
The hallway empty, no one jumping out, she could no longer stay behind. She had to see. So she continued to turn, swinging around to face Lee.
Only it wasn't Lee.
Wasn't the Mechanic.
A teenager, blankets strewn as recklessly around him as the needles on the floor, tried to press himself into the wall. Too high or too scared to make a noise, he stared silently as he pushed empty air out of his mouth.
Nick motioned the kid to be quiet and stepped back, lowering the gun enough to not be a threat. It was too cold at night to be here. The house wasn't 'on'. The kid was not a player in this game. Sin fought the despair that was working cold fingers into her heart.
Two more doors.
But much less hope.
Her breathing shallowed out, a bad thing in her world. Her weapons stayed up, but her arms lost the tension of a player ready to enter the fray. She now believed there was no fray to enter.
Nick opened the fourth door, saving the one at the dead end of the hall for last.
He looked at her, his eyes sharp, square, but clearly now believing as she did: Lee was not here.
They opened the last door without the tight readiness that they'd had for all the others. Convinced the space held nothing, Nick swung the door wide, gun leading, but trigger finger not quite ready for the shape that jumped out at him.