Save Me from Dangerous Men (Nikki Griffin #1)(67)

I breathed evenly. In and out. Trying to slow my pulse.

Time slowed, sharpened.

The first man who walked through the door would die.

That was a certainty. I’d put a two-and-a-half-inch steel slug traveling at 1,500 feet per second through him before he took a step. Didn’t matter if he wore Kevlar under his jacket. Bulletproof was always relative. The metal slugs would go through a bulletproof vest like cheap denim.

The question was the next two men. It would be a firefight. Chaos. Bullets going everywhere. A lot would depend on their experience. How they’d react after their friend crashed backward toward them with a hole in his chest big enough to fit a softball. Whether they’d panic. A lot more would depend on dumb luck. The random geometry of which bullets happened to go where. There were three of them. But I had a shotgun and a defensive position. I figured that gave me an even chance of surviving the next two minutes.

The lead man was at the door. I racked the shotgun. Took a breath in. Let it out.

It was time.

Then he did something strange.

He knelt like he was tying a shoe. He was putting his gun on the floor, I realized. He stood and reached into the inside pocket of his suit jacket. For an unsettling moment, I wondered if he had some kind of explosive he planned to use. Something I hadn’t considered.

He looked up into the camera above the door. I saw a hardened face, a sharp jaw, and pale eyes. He raised whatever he held toward the camera. A piece of glossy paper. A Polaroid. He stretched his arm up. Slowly, the picture filled the monitor. And then I understood. The lighting wasn’t great and the picture quality was only decent. But the face was one I would have recognized anywhere, regardless of bad lighting or fuzzy detail. A face as familiar as my own.

I was looking at my brother.





34


Shotgun at hip level, I walked across the room, opened the door, and stepped back. The three men stood in front of me without bothering to move out of the way of the shotgun barrel. Guns barely pointed at me. I wasn’t going to shoot. Worse, they knew it.

“Nikki,” the lead man said, stepping into the room. The other two moved in behind him. “We’ve been wanting to talk to you.”

I held the shotgun barrel less than two feet from his chest. “Where is he?”

“May we come in?” His accent sounded Eastern European.

I backed up. “Where is he?” I repeated.

“All in due time. May we?”

“Don’t play cute,” I snapped. “Don’t act like you waltzed in looking for a first edition. You have him. Where is he?”

“You seem anxious. I hope you will not accidentally shoot me.”

“When I shoot you, I promise it will be on purpose. Where is he?”

“Your brother is somewhere safe.”

One of the other two guys grinned. “He says hello to his big sister.” The speaker was the one who had kicked in the door downstairs. With satisfaction I saw Bartleby’s claw marks, lurid against his hand. He was the youngest and largest of the three, in his twenties, maybe six foot three or four, and the weight to match. He had the build and bearing of a hockey enforcer. The kind of guy who comes along for a fight and goes home disappointed if he doesn’t find one. His face was pockmarked by old acne scars and his hair was long and greasy with some kind of product.

I ignored him and addressed the lead man. He was running the show. “What do you want?”

“We want to talk to you.”

“Talk. Right.”

He shrugged, his eyes pale and expressionless. “We have to ask some questions about what you know. Call it due diligence. Then, if the answers are okay, we all go home happy.”

“I don’t do a thing until I see my brother.”

He smiled. “We would expect nothing less.”

Expect. With a helpless feeling, I realized that everything I was doing and saying was playing into their hands. “Fine. Go get him.”

“We go to him,” the man corrected. “Put your gun down. You can ride with us.”

“Not a chance.”

His eyes were an unnaturally pale color and conveyed a reptilian disinterest. “You misunderstand. Maybe I’ve been too polite,” he said. His smile was gone and his words, lightly coated by the accent, were clipped and careful. “Let me try again. Put that shotgun down and come with us, or our friend, who is babysitting your little brother, will use a hacksaw to remove his feet below the ankles.”

I thought hard. Trying to see a way out.

There wasn’t one. They knew it and I knew it. I could pretend I had choices, but I didn’t.

I shrugged. There was no point in stalling. The sooner I could get to Brandon, the better. I placed the shotgun on the floor. “Let’s go, then.”

“First we check you,” said the big one. Even as he spoke his hands were all over me. Unlike Mr. Ruby’s, his search wasn’t civil at all. I felt his hands rubbing against all the places where I didn’t want to feel a strange man’s hands. He took his time, finding the Derringer, the sap, the brass knuckles. Tossed the handful onto a chair and grinned up at me. “What’s a sweet little bitch like you doing with the fun stuff? You like to play?” His breath was sour in my face. Between his manners and his looks, he couldn’t have had an easy time getting dates growing up.