Jax slithered head first down the steps. He could feel the rough floorboards snagging his shirt, scraping his bare arms.
He had no way of knowing exactly who was downstairs. The last thing he wanted to do was get in a shootout with some Katrina-crazed homeowner, or maybe a cop. But then he saw the tall man at the base of the stairs, the shadow of his gun extended by the length of a suppressor, and Jax knew he wasn’t dealing with either a cop or a homeowner.
The light filtering in through the uncurtained ground floor windows glinted on something shiny in the man’s ear. Jax saw the gleam of a tiny blue LED and realized it was a Bluetooth earpiece. The guy was listening to a cell phone.
Then one of the steps groaned beneath Jax’s weight.
The man jerked, his gun coming up to fire. But the sight of Jax upside down on the stairs must have confused him because he hesitated for a split second. Jax squeezed off two rounds, one right after the other, his ears ringing with the percussion in the confined space. The unsuppressed explosions bracketed the other gun’s silenced pop.
The man in the hall jerked once, twice, then dropped to his knees. Jax was about to fire again when the man pitched forward onto his face. It was only when Jax felt the sting in one of his legs that he realized the sonofabitch had hit him.
Jax slithered the rest of the way down the stairs. Given the way he was hanging upside down, he figured it was easier than trying to get up. October Guinness came charging down the stairs behind him, a big Glock held in that professional grip she’d displayed on the cabin cruiser. She was so small and slim that he kept forgetting she was a vet who’d seen action in Iraq.
“Is he dead?” she asked in a hoarse whisper.
Jax held a finger to his lips in warning. Slipping the Bluetooth from the dead man’s ear, he listened to the frantic voice at the other end of the connection.
“Christ! What the hell happened? Fitzgerald? Fitzgerald, talk to me. Lance says he’s a few minutes away. I heard shots but now the microphones aren’t picking up anything. Fitzgerald?”
Moving quickly, Jax went through the dead man’s pockets, removing wallet, gun, keys. He found the guy’s cell phone, turned it off, and took that, too. That’s when he noticed the tattoo high on one of the guy’s arms: a scorpion superimposed over two crossed arrows.
“Isn’t that—”
Surging to his feet, Jax clamped his hand over her mouth. “The house is wired,” he whispered, pushing her toward the back door. “They can hear everything we say.”
He dashed back up the stairs to retrieve their flashlights, then pulled her out of the house. She waited until they were on the back porch, then said, “Who would bug an empty house?”
The sound of an engine pushed hard cut through the night. “Shit,” he said. “Here they come.”
Leaping off the back porch, they lunged across the overgrown, rubble-filled yard. From the street out front came a screech of brakes, the slamming of doors. A powerful searchlight lit up the darkness, wavering as running feet slapped around the side of the house.
“Shit,” said Jax again. Grabbing her arm, he ducked through the broken fence separating that yard from the next. She snagged her foot on a branch buried deep in weeds and would have gone down if he hadn’t caught her. The spotlight bounced over them.
“Keep low,” Jax warned. They took off across the adjoining yard just as someone squeezed off a half-dozen suppressed shots that ripped through the pile of debris to their right and sprayed the air with splinters from the wooden fence.
“You all right?” he said, not missing a stride.
“God—I—hate—to—run,” she said, her voice jagged as she leaped over an old bathtub and then what looked like a broken chair.
They had to cut across three more yards to get to where they’d left the car. By the time they reached the old garage, he could feel his shoe filling up with blood, and the wound in his calf was throbbing like hell. He threw Tobie Guinness the keys to his car. “Pull it out of the garage and open the passenger door for me.”
She caught the keys. He could hear her yanking open the car door, gunning the engine. He crouched down in the shadow cast by the garage wall, took the silenced pistol he’d lifted off Fitzgerald and trained it on the fence.
The searchlight’s powerful beam wavered as the man holding it stooped to duck through the storm-shattered wooden fence at the edge of the yard. Taking aim, Jax fired off three rounds. He couldn’t be sure if he hit the guy, but at least the sonofabitch dropped the light and flattened. Someone shouted and two more searchlights split the night. “Jesus Christ,” said Jax.
The Monte Carlo shot out of the garage and slammed to a halt beside him. Jax leaped for the open passenger door. “Floor it! Let’s get out of here.”
She hit the gas, lurching out of the driveway and laying down a trail of rubber the length of the street. Twisting around to look back, Jax saw two men burst into the street behind them. “Get down!” he shouted as both men opened fire. The back window shattered, showering them with broken glass.
“How am I supposed to get down when I’m driving?” she asked, careening around the corner.
Jax shook the broken glass off his lap. “Damn. There goes my good driver discount.”
And then October Guinness did the most amazing thing. Her eyes were wide with fear, her grip on the steering wheel so tight her fingers showed white. But she looked over at him and laughed.
Lance was standing at the base of the staircase and looking down at Paul Fitzgerald’s body when Hadley walked in the back door, a stream of dark red blood running down the side of his face. “You hurt?”
Hadley swiped the back of his hand across his cheek. “Nah. Scratched myself on the fucking fence. What’s the damage?”
“Fitzgerald’s dead.”
“Shit.” Hadley blew out his breath in a long sigh. “Has the operation been blown?”
Lance shook his head. “It’s bad, but I don’t think things have deteriorated to the point we need to abort. There’s no one in the neighborhood to have heard the shots. The house is still intact. We take Fitzgerald’s body and we get out of here.”
“But they’ve seen everything.”
“So? What have they learned? Right now, all this is meaningless to them.”
“It won’t be meaningless after tomorrow night.”
“By then they’ll be dead.”