Touch & Go (Tessa Leoni, #2)(41)

Justin was looking up and to the right. I followed his gaze until I spotted a small electronic eye protruding from the corner. I wondered whether we should wave, or whether that would be childish.

We exited the sally port into a towering white corridor. At least two stories tall, with huge steel girders forming intersecting Vs above us. Keeping with the prison theme of soullessness, the floor was poured gray cement, the walls painted stark white and the windows, high above us, dark eerie panes of glass. Periodically, cement staircases protruded from the right side of the wall, leading to second-floor doorways.

“We’re behind the cell blocks,” Justin murmured. He looked at Mick, his gaze still challenging. “This is the exit hallway in case of fire. Hey, man. Tell us where we’re going. I’ll lead us there.”

“Walk,” Mick ordered.

Justin and Ashlyn took the lead again. And I fell immediately behind once more, still trying to force my limbs to fight gravity. Arm swinging slowly forward. Knee raising slightly, trying to cycle ahead. The lights were bright. Bouncing off every hard white surface. While my head ached and my stomach cramped and I wanted to curl up in a ball in a cool dark place. I would cover my face with my hands. I would succumb, sinking down, down, down into a darkness without end.

“Move.”

Mick’s hand on my arm, shoving me forward. I stumbled, he tried to correct, I stumbled again.

Dimly, I was aware of Justin and Ashlyn, well ahead now. Justin had his arm around our daughter’s shoulders. His head was low. He was speaking in her ear.

I was the distraction, I realized. Mick had to tend to me. And while he and I tussled with my weak, uncoordinated limbs, Justin could lead our daughter out of here. He knew where he was, behind the cell blocks, he’d said, with three locked doors already behind us…

I tripped, almost went down. Mick grabbed my upper arm, dragging me upright and twisting me around till we stood mere inches apart, chest to chest, face to face. I stared into his crazy blue eyes, framed by his even crazier blond-and-black checkerboard hair.

“Walk, goddammit! You move, you perform, you work, or I’ll blow out your f*cking brains myself.”

I wished I had my husband’s courage. I would’ve settled for my daughter’s bitterness. Instead, I smiled up at the crazy commando, watching his eyes widen in surprise.

His left hand, bruising my arm. His right hand, with the Taser, dangling forgotten by his side.

“Shhh,” I whispered at him.

“What the—”

“Shhh.”

Then, faster than I knew I could move, definitely faster than he thought I could move, I grabbed the Taser with my bound hands, twisted it between us and pulled the trigger.

It’s true what they say: The bigger they are, the harder they fall.

I would’ve liked to enjoy the moment more, except from up ahead, my daughter started to scream.

Z had materialized in the corridor. Big Brother always watching.

He had a Taser, too, except his was pointed at Justin, who was now on the ground, entire body jerking crazily. Ashlyn stood beside her father, her face clearly beseeching.

“Whatever you can do,” Z stated clearly from the other end of the hallway, “I can do better.”

At which point, he popped a cartridge out of the end of the Taser, turned deftly and dry fired into my daughter’s exposed forearm.

Ashlyn no longer screamed. Now she more like shrieked.

Her skin, blistering. I knew, because I bore the same burn mark on my upper thigh.

I released my Taser. It dropped to the ground. I stepped away from Mick’s convulsing form, putting space between myself and Z’s fallen comrade.

Much more slowly, Z lifted the Taser from my daughter’s pale skin. He stood, twenty feet away from me, holding up the Taser like a gunslinger, and I half expected him to purse his lips and blow the smoke from the end of the barrel.

Ashlyn was crying. She danced on her toes, bound hands dangling before her, as if that would help ease the pain. Justin had stopped twitching on the floor, but he didn’t immediately rise to his feet. My husband had been hit how many times in the past twenty-four hours? How many unfried brain cells could he have left?

“The background report did not indicate you would be a problem,” Z said, still looking at me. “Interesting.”

I wanted to jut out my chin at him. Yell at him for harming my child, torturing my husband. But the heaviness was back, an internal lethargy that would sink me yet. I tried to plant my feet, found myself swaying instead.

“Ashlyn…,” I might have whispered.

Except, suddenly, with an ear-splitting roar, Mick leapt to his feet, fists clenched, face enraged. In exactly half a second, his gaze found me, locked on target, and he charged.

I collapsed, trampled like a dandelion before a rampaging bull. He was bellowing, Ashlyn was screaming, and I could hear another voice, maybe Z, calling out something, but mostly I was trying to curl up, to tuck my head into my bound arms as Mick grabbed my hair, lifted my head and shoulders half off the floor, then slammed me back down onto the concrete.

Cracking. Maybe a rib. More likely my skull.

More screaming. More yelling, and then a strange sizzle and burn until I realized that Mick was off me, once more on the floor, once more convulsing wildly, except this time it was his own guy who stood above him, Z and his creepy cobra-tattooed head, pulling the trigger.