Blood and Fire (McClouds & Friends #8)(150)

She sucked in air. “O Dio! I’ll flush the thing down the toilet!”

“No, no, no! It’s all we’ve got to link us to Bruno! We’ll use it!”

“How?” She flapped her hands. Her voice cracked. “How?”

“Who the f*ck knows? I’ll come up with something. Just listen to me. We’re going downstairs. I’ll take the jewelry box. I’m going to say, loudly, near your purse, that my phone’s out of juice, and I’m going to borrow yours. You can call us using Petrie’s phone.”

“Where you going?” she demanded. “What will you do?”

“I don’t know yet, but we’re hauling ass out of here with the shooter, and you’re staying with Petrie while he goes to the hospital.”

She inhaled to argue. Kev clapped his hand over her mouth. “No, Zia,” he said, his voice steely. “Not this time. Petrie took a bullet for you. You will hold his hand in the ambulance. It’s the least you can do.”

She stared at him. Gave him a nod. He could hardly believe he’d managed to convince her so easily.

A siren sounded, far away in the distance. Good, for Petrie’s sake. No time to smash the box open here.

“That’s our cue,” he said. “Come on. Move.”





“Where is she?” King demanded. “What’s taking so long?”

Hobart tapped the keyboard. “Just waiting for the database to—”

Whack! King slammed the side of the computer desk, making them all jump. “Do it faster!”

Hobart flubbed the string of characters he was entering. He blocked, deleted, entered it again. “Yes, sir.”

King hung over the man’s shoulder. Melanie and Julian stood by, eyes downcast, shutting down external signals, hoping not to be noticed. He swung around upon Melanie. “Have they said anything?”

Melanie’s hands lifted to the earbuds in her ears. “Nothing new. No conversation. The McCloud who got wounded is just groaning.”

“Good.” King was glad the son of a bitch had taken a bullet. Let him ache and throb and bleed until he died. King wished him a nasty strain of antibiotic-resistant staph to gnaw at his suppurating wound for a few agonizing days before that happy event.

“I have it!” Hobart’s voice was tight with excitement. “They’re in a self-storage facility outside Newark!”

King peered down at the screen at the satellite shot of the McCloud brothers’ vehicle. As he watched, the door opened and a man in a lack knit cap got out. He went to the back of the SUV, opened it. Then opened the door of the unit. He returned to the car, seized a long, limp bundle. It did not move.

“Is she alive?” he demanded.

“Vitals all strong,” Hobart said.

The man dragged Zoe into the unit and came back out, locking it. He got back into the vehicle. Melanie’s hands flashed to the earbuds.

“Put the sound on the external speakers!” King snapped.

Hobart pushed buttons. Sound blared out, fuzzy and distorted. “. . . to the emergency room before I bleed to death, goddamnit!”

“Yeah, we’ll go, OK? We had to stash her first. She’d be hard to explain parked outside the Urgent Care if she started to squeak. And I want a crack at her before we deliver her to the cops, so you can—”

“What the f*ck do I care? I want to plug this hole!”

“Calm down. I’ll take you to the Urgent Care, and then I’ll come back and have a chat with monster chick. We’re gonna get friendly.”

“Tell me about it after,” the wounded McCloud snarled. “I’m hemorrhaging!”

“That’s not hemorrhaging. It was a ricochet, OK? Stop being such a *. I’ve gone out clubbing after worse than that.”

“Yeah, and I want stitches and an IV antibiotic, so drive the f*cking car . . . now.”

No talk after that, just grumbling and the sound of the engine revving. The vehicle began to move. The screen showing the RF frequency bleeping from the chip embedded in Zoe’s clavicle remained stationary in the storage unit. The one in Zoe’s cell phone and the one in Rosa Ranieri’s cell, which her adopted nephew had conveniently taken, began to move. King watched the vehicle until it pulled into the covered area attached to the administrative office of the storage facility and was lost to sight. He calculated the timing. Came to a decision.

“Hobart, Julian,” he said. “Go retrieve her.”

Hobart’s eyes widened. “But I thought—”

“Plans change. Her com device is with them. She’s immobilized, probably unconscious, so she wouldn’t be able to fulfill a Level Ten command even if I could deliver one. And I don’t want her interrogated.”

Melanie piped up, her voice anxious. “Sir, I could go with Hobart. I have more experience than Julian. He hasn’t even completed his final training, and if the McClouds come back before we—”

“Your combat skills are not up to a McCloud. Julian’s are superior to yours. Do not presume to question me again.”

Melanie’s face turned crimson. All three operatives were frozen, inert.

“For God’s sake!” he roared. “Move!”

Hobart and Julian scuttled out of the room. In the silence that followed, King heard choked sobs.