“Seriously, boss. I get that you’re pissed, but there’s no need for this. Let me stash her somewhere out of sight, okay?”
“But it’s all just window dressing, ain’t it?” Yancey continued. “Deep down, you’re still half wild; all you wanna do is fight and fuck. It’s not your fault, really-it’s ours for thinking we could change your nature. But if you wanna play Big Bad Wolf with me, I’ll show you how we deal with wolves where I come from.”
“For fuck’s sake, Yancey, put the gun down!”
“You know, son,” Yancey said without taking his eyes off the dog, “it seems to me this little shit ain’t the only one around here who needs to learn who’s in charge.”
Yancey pulled the trigger.
His gun thundered.
But not before Lois threw herself off the couch.
With her arms and legs bound, she went down hard. Yancey’s shot ran parallel to the couch and angled downward to the spot where Ella stood. As Lois fell, it caught her in the sternum. Segreti screamed into his gag. Reyes rushed to Lois’s side-but there was no saving her. The bullet had passed clean through and left an exit wound the size of his fist. She was dead before she hit the floor.
“Jesus Christ,” Reyes said. “What did you do?”
Yancey stared at Lois’s corpse in wide-eyed disbelief.
“It wasn’t…” he said. “I didn’t…”
And then the lights went out.
32.
WHAT THE FUCK is going on?”
The house’s background whir ceased as appliances shut down. Yancey’s voice echoed, shrill and desperate, in the sudden quiet. His hands were sweaty. His mouth was dry. He became painfully aware of his own breathing and the roar of his pulse in his ears.
A rustling to his left. A squeak of couch springs. A struggle. A thud. A grunt.
Then, one by one, flashlights came on around the room.
Reyes still crouched beside the fallen woman, blood pooling black beneath her; lifeless eyes reflecting the flashlights’ beams, but now his gun was drawn and his head was cocked to one side, listening.
Segreti was sprawled beside him, straddled by two Bellum men. It seemed he’d tried to make a move despite his bonds. Yancey wished he’d died in the attempt. It would have saved Yancey the trouble of killing him.
Speaking of, that little shit of a dog was nowhere to be seen.
Yancey knew he was in danger of losing control of the situation. He tamped down his rising panic and forced some steel into his voice. “I want a goddamn sitrep now!”
“Could be an outage,” one of his men replied. “FEMA sent around a memo about the rescue effort taxing the power grid. Warned the lights could flicker.”
“It’s not an outage,” Reyes said. He nodded toward the curtains. Light shone through the narrow gap where they met. “The streetlights are still on. Which means we’ve got company.”
“Get him up,” Yancey said. The men who’d tackled Segreti hauled him to his feet and held him upright by his elbows. “Remove his gag.”
Once they had, Segreti spat in Yancey’s face. “You son of a bitch,” he said. “I swear you’ll pay for what you did to Lois.”
“Don’t you dare blame me for this! Her death is on your conscience, not mine. You’re the one who put her in harm’s way.”
Segreti turned his head and locked eyes with Reyes. “That how you see it? His actions seem justified to you? Because I promise, Lois ain’t the first innocen-”
Yancey pistol-whipped Segreti. Segreti’s head rocked sideways, blood spraying from his mouth. He sagged, his weight supported by the men on either side of him, and his eyes showed only whites.
Yancey cocked back his hand to hit him again. Reyes grabbed his wrist to halt the blow.
“Yancey! He’s had enough!”
Yancey yanked his hand free and wheeled on Reyes. They stood nose to nose in the darkness, grips tightening on their weapons. “Are you questioning my authority, son?”
The moment hung between them-fraught, electric. The armed men around them tensed. Yancey felt as if his future hinged on the outcome of this confrontation. Reyes’s challenge painted him as fallible and weak. He couldn’t afford to let it stand.
Reyes glanced around the room, and realized that he was on his own.
He relaxed his posture and backed down.
“No,” he said.
Yancey smiled, wide and predatory. “I’m sorry-I must’ve misheard. No what?”
“No, sir,” Reyes replied through gritted teeth.
“Attaboy,” Yancey said, his confidence returning. He looked at Segreti, who was once again conscious, although his eyes swam woozily in their sockets. “So, Frank-who’s your friend out there?”
Segreti frowned. Spat blood on the floor. “Fuck if I know. I didn’t think I had any left.”
“Don’t worry,” Yancey said, “you won’t for long. Reyes, McTiernan, Bigelow, Stahelski, go check the perimeter. Weddle, Swinson, Lutz, you stay in here with me.”
The men, save Reyes, muttered their assent and geared up.
Yancey gave Reyes a hard look.
Reyes returned it.
“There a problem?” Yancey asked.
“Not so long as the prisoner is still alive when we get back.”
The streetlights looked like paper lanterns in the fog and bathed the neighborhood in gauzy white. In the long shadows of the Broussard house’s backyard, though, their illumination dwindled to the false twilight of a horror-movie poster.
The back door creaked slowly open. For a long moment, nothing happened. Then two mercenaries slipped into the night, nearly invisible in their matte-black body armor. They moved with silent precision, one advancing while the other covered him.
Hendricks studied them from the shadows, assessing strengths and weaknesses.
He’d watched the house for ten minutes, trying to formulate a plan of attack, but when Yancey arrived, he knew he had to make his move. Hendricks had been creeping toward the house when he heard the gunshot. For a moment, he’d worried he was too late. Then Segreti screamed-which meant he might be injured but was still alive.
In every scenario he considered, Hendricks was outnumbered and outgunned. The mercs carried MP5 assault rifles, fully automatic, thirty rounds to a magazine, and spare mags in their vests. And if they’d sent two men out the back, it was safe to assume there were at least two more around front. All Hendricks had was Pappas’s.45, which wouldn’t penetrate their body armor.
Their armor, however, afforded Hendricks some advantages. It slowed reaction times. Limited mobility. Dulled hearing. Narrowed visual fields. And the night-vision goggles they wore beneath their helmets were next to useless in the roiling fog.
One of the men took up a position behind the Jaguar in the driveway and provided cover for the other while he jogged toward the tree line. Hendricks smiled. He’d figured that’s where they’d begin their search, which was why he wasn’t hiding in the tree line.
Training is good. Training is valuable. But the wrong training leads to regimented thinking, which can be turned against you on the battlefield.
Thanks to the fog, Hendricks couldn’t see the one searching the tree line, so he closed his eyes and listened. Heard the muffled crunch of dropped pine needles beneath boots, the dry rustle of underbrush disturbed. When the man completed his search, he shouted, “Clear! You see anything on your end?”
“Nada,” the one behind the car replied. “I’ve got eyes on the house’s electric meter, though, and it looks like it’s been fucked with. Come cover me, and I’ll see if I can get the lights back on.”
“Copy that.”
The meter box was located on a small, single-story addition nestled in the back left crook of the house’s original cross gable, where shadows ran thick. A flower bed encircled the addition. Shrubberies partially hid the meter box. A garden hose hung just beside.