Take the Key and Lock Her Up (29 page)

BOOK: Take the Key and Lock Her Up
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“He told me about EXIT, about my true mission, explaining about the tour guide part
being a front. He said I could protect people, save hundreds, thousands of lives by
taking out terrorists, foiling plots against the government, against innocent civilians.
And then he told me he knew who’d killed Arianna. Cyprian had used the resources of
EXIT to look into her murder and knew before the police who’d murdered her.” He watched
her closely. “Gage had already located him. He was hiding out in his old neighborhood.
If I agreed to join EXIT, Gage would take me to Arianna’s killer.”

Emily sucked in a breath. “You killed him.”

“Yes. And I don’t regret it.”

“I see.” She looked at the trees surrounding them, at the leaves and twigs on the
ground, anywhere but at him. “Well,” she finally said with a small laugh, “maybe I’m
not the only one who makes lousy decisions under pressure.”

He thought about arguing with her, trying to convince her that joining EXIT was the
right decision. But what would be the point? She was a cop. He . . . wasn’t. They
had completely different views of right and wrong.

Still, the sudden awkwardness between them when they’d been so comfortable with each
other moments ago bothered him. He tugged the go bag toward him and snapped the first-aid
kit closed, settling it into the bottom of the bag.

“You feel you make bad decisions under pressure, huh?” he asked as he zipped the bag
closed.

“Always. I don’t know what it is, but if a life is on the line, my logical thought
processes tank.”

“It’s the adrenaline. When you get scared, like in the tunnel—”

“I wasn’t
scared
in the tunnel,” she snapped. “I really thought I could take those guys on.”

The urge to smile was back. Emily had that amazing power over him, to take him from
the dark side and into the light in just a matter of minutes without even trying.

“Okay,” he amended. “When you’re
not
scared, but you’re in a tense or traumatic situation, adrenaline rushes through your
body. It makes your heart race, your respiration increase, your blood pressure go
up. If you don’t know how to calm down, think through the rush, and use it to your
advantage, you’ll make mistakes.”

“I’m well aware of what adrenaline does. But I don’t see how I can use that to my
advantage.”

“Adrenaline can increase your strength, numb you to pain, heighten your other senses.
But it’s only an asset if you can control it.”

“And how do you control it?”

He strapped the go bag on his back and pulled her up with him. “Are you always this
curious?”

“Pretty much. It drives my co-workers crazy. How do you control it? The rush?”

A crackling noise sounded off to their left. Devlin yanked the night-vision goggles
out from beneath his shirt and shoved them on his head. He peered through a break
in the shrubs and stiffened.

“Get down. Be quiet,” he whispered. He grabbed the Sig Sauer off the ground and shoved
it into her hand before pulling his own gun out of its holster.

She took the Sig, popped the clip, and checked the loading. “Okay, so how are we going
to do this? We need a plan.” She popped the clip back in and looked up.

Devlin was gone.

 

Chapter Seventeen

T
HERE WAS NO
sign of Devlin. Emily turned in a full circle looking for him. How could a man his
size move so quietly and disappear like that? She curled her hands around the gun
in frustration. What was she supposed to do? Stand here, wait, do nothing? Neither
of them knew how many gunmen were after them. What if he was outnumbered, or ambushed?
If he’d bothered to ask, he’d realize she was a good shot. He needed her, whether
he would admit it or not.

Wait . . . was she doing it again? Making another bad decision under pressure? She
bit her lip, hesitating. Devlin obviously didn’t want her help or he’d have taken
her with him. He’d pretty much told her to stay put by telling her to get down and
be quiet. Emily didn’t want to interfere if he had everything under control, especially
given her bad track record.

She sat on the ground, determined to wait, not to interfere. Without a phone or a
watch, she had no way of knowing how much time was passing. The warm breeze that occasionally
blew through the bushes clacked the branches against each other, but other than an
occasional owl hooting nearby, no other noises disturbed the silence of the night.

Had it been twenty minutes? Thirty? She no longer thought that Devlin would abandon
her, as she’d feared in the cell. But why hadn’t he come back by now? The only answer
she could think of was that he was hurt—or worse—and
couldn’t
come back.

After everything he’d done, all the risks he’d taken to keep her safe, she owed it
to him to do the same. Sitting here when he could be lying somewhere bleeding wasn’t
something she could do for even one more minute. She’d waited, had given him plenty
of time to come back. She’d played it his way. Now it was time to play it her way.

Decision made, she stepped around the ring of trees as quietly as possible, looking
for some kind of sign to tell her which way Devlin had gone. With only the light from
the moon filtering through the trees, it took far longer than she would have liked,
but she finally found a footprint—a large footprint, like the kind Devlin’s boots
would make. With a direction to follow, she headed out.

Fifty yards in, she stumbled over a log. She fell hard, on her side, clutching her
gun in both hands to keep from dropping it. Her shoulder and hip throbbed, but nothing
seemed broken. Venting her pain with a good shout or a few choice curse words would
have made her feel much better. Too bad she had to be quiet. She shoved the gun into
her waistband and braced her hands on the ground to push herself up. The wet, sticky
dirt had her recoiling and sitting back on her haunches.

Blood.
Her fingers and palms were covered in it. She jerked around to look at the log. Not
a log. A body.
Oh, no
. She scrambled over and rolled the man onto his back. Relief flashed through her
when she saw it wasn’t Devlin, but relief turned to nausea when she took in the gruesome
details. The stranger’s throat had been slit from ear to ear. Blood soaked the front
of his shirt, releasing a metallic, pungent odor that was already beginning to draw
flies.

Bracing herself for the unpleasant task ahead, she slid a hand beneath him, feeling
his back pocket to see if he had a wallet. Nothing. She did the same on the other
side, but again, nothing. Wrinkling her nose with distaste, she gently patted his
shirt, then the rest of him. No identification.

He wasn’t wearing a gun. In the dark she couldn’t do more than a cursory search. Not
that it really mattered. Even if he were holding a gun when he was killed, the semicircular
angle of the laceration on his neck told her it was made from behind, by a man taller
than he was drawing a knife across in an upward arc. This wasn’t a justified killing
according to any laws she lived by. It certainly wasn’t self-defense to attack someone
from behind.

She swallowed hard and stood. One bad guy down, justified or not. How many more were
out there? And where was Devlin?

The only thing she could be sure of was that she was on the right path, as evidenced
by Devlin’s handiwork lying at her feet. He had definitely passed this way. Based
on the body’s current position, she made her best guess about which way he’d been
going and started out in the same direction, hoping it would lead her to Devlin.

A few minutes later, she found more evidence of Devlin’s passing through—
another body
. The dead man lay on his side, next to a pine tree, his neck obviously broken. That
seemed to be a favorite way of killing for Devlin. How could he seem so kind while
helping her and yet care so little about human life? She couldn’t reconcile the two
sides of him, especially after seeing two of his recent kills.

Feeling sick to her stomach, she searched the body for ID as she had the other man.
But again, he wasn’t carrying anything to tell her who he was. This man was unarmed
as well.

A muffled shout sounded from somewhere up ahead. She clutched her pistol and took
off at a jog, which was the fastest she could go in the near dark without running
into a tree or falling over a root. Another shout sounded, then a guttural curse,
followed by a smack, like a fist slamming into human flesh.

Shadows moved between the oak trees just ten feet away: two men locked in combat,
their arms wrapped around each other, struggling for the advantage. Devlin, unmistakable
in the dark because of his height, suddenly twisted and dropped down, breaking the
other man’s hold. The man stumbled, trying to catch his footing. Moonlight flashed
on steel. Devlin plunged his knife into the other man’s stomach and jerked the hilt,
tilting the blade up in a sickening move that sliced through the man’s vital organs.
The man was dead before his body even hit the ground.

Emily must have made some kind of noise because Devlin spun around in a crouch, as
if to spring at her. Her gun shook so badly in her hands she probably wouldn’t have
hit him if she’d wanted to shoot him, which she didn’t. She slowly lowered the pistol
and clutched a hand to her throat, sickened by what she’d seen.

Devlin straightened, stepped over the body of the man he’d just butchered, and picked
something up at the base of one of the trees. His gun. He shoved it into the holster
at his waist and faced her. Only six feet separated the two of them, but the distance
felt as wide as the Grand Canyon.

“I told you to stay put.” His voice was barely above a whisper. “There’s still at
least one more gunman out here somewhere. I saw his tracks.”

She shoved her gun into her waistband and shook her head. “You just . . . disappeared.
I was . . .” She broke off and looked at the dead man again, his stomach distended
and obscene with the knife hilt protruding from it. “I was worried about you,” she
finished. “But it looks like I should have been worried about this man, and the others
I found, instead.” She raised her gaze to meet his. “How do you sleep at night after
the things you’ve done?”

He laughed harshly. “So I should introduce myself and give them a chance to draw their
weapons first, to make it a fair fight? No thanks. That’s called suicide. Not my game.”
He headed back to the dead man, braced his boot on the man’s hip and yanked his knife
out with a sickening sucking sound. After wiping the blade clean on the man’s pants,
he returned to Emily.

“Since you decided not to stay where I left you, you might as well come with me to
find our last friend. I
am
going to find him. And when I do, I’m going to kill him. Not because I’m a monster
who enjoys taking lives but because I don’t want to die today, and I don’t want
you
to die. It’s that simple. We either take these men out or they take us out. Don’t
look at me with your shocked expression, judging me, expecting remorse. I do what
I have to do to survive. And I sleep just fine, thank you very much.”

He stepped past her, his long angry strides carrying him back through the trees, quickly
fading into the darkness.

She hurried to keep up. “Devlin, wait. Devlin, please, at least slow down.”

He stopped and waited until she caught up with him, then started walking again. He
paused in a patch of moonlight shining through the branches overhead and studied the
ground before continuing forward. He was hunting the last man. And she hated him for
it.

“Can’t we just get out of here?” she asked. “There’s no reason to try to find the
other one. He’s probably on the run, trying to save his own neck after what happened
to his friends.”

Devlin abruptly stopped.

Emily had to stop and turn around to face him.

“How long were you on foot patrol before you became a detective?” he asked.

“Almost three years. Why?”

“Including your time in the academy?” He sounded surprised.

“Yes.”

“Hmm.” He started walking again.

She had to jog to keep up. “Was there a point in there somewhere?”

“There would have been, if you had the experience to back it up.”

She rushed to get in front of him again, forcing him to stop.

“What is that supposed to mean?” she asked. “Seriously. I just want to understand.”

He shrugged. “Just that you’re a baby cop. Without enough real-world experience to
give you an appreciation for human nature. You’ll just have to take my word for it
when I tell you that the kinds of men who are after us—who
were
after us, except for our last remaining friend—are hard-core. These types of men
aren’t going to stop and let us go on our merry way. Which is why we can’t fall back
into defensive mode. I have to find this last guy before he finds us.”

He put his hands around her waist and moved her out of his path, as if she were a
table lamp. He was about twenty feet away by the time she recovered from her shock
and hurried after him.

“Devlin, wait,” she called out. “Your legs are much longer than mine.”

“Keep your voice down,” he said in a hushed tone as he turned around to wait. “Emily,
look out!”

She whirled around, clawing for her pistol. Before she could get it out, a man jumped
at her from the cover of trees and knocked her gun to the ground. She shrank back
from him just as something metallic flashed in the moonlight. The man screamed and
stumbled back, clutching at the hilt of a knife, now buried in his arm.

Devlin was suddenly there with them, shoving her none too gently out of the way. She
watched in horror as the man who’d screamed yanked the knife out of his arm and tried
to stab Devlin with it. Devlin dove out of the way and slammed his boot against the
man’s knee, making a sickening crunch. The man’s agonized scream echoed through the
trees as the knife dropped from his fingers. He fell to the ground, rolling back and
forth, clutching his knee with his one good hand.

BOOK: Take the Key and Lock Her Up
13.56Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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