Every Kind of Wicked (A Gardiner and Renner Novel Book 6)

Jack stepped into the opening, watching Jeffers’s gun hand carefully. If it so much as twitched in his direction, he must step back. Returning fire would not be an option with Shanaya used as a human shield.

It didn’t twitch. The barrel remained firmly in place at the girl’s right temple. Her eyes were huge and terrified, and she barely seemed to breathe.

The doctor said, “Tell your partner to stop where he is, because there’s two of my men out there with him.”

Jack called, “Riley! You’re not alone.”

No response, but that made sense. Riley wouldn’t want to make it easy for the hired goons to find him. Those goons would stand down, waiting for orders, as Riley cooperated with a temporary cease-fire—or so Jack hoped. The longer they could put off a firefight, the better, but Jack didn’t see how one could be avoided altogether. Jeffers had no options. The office had only one door and Jack stood in it. Pointing a gun at Shanaya seemed almost an empty threat; if he killed her, he’d still have nowhere to go but jail. All Jack would have to do is wait.

He hated waiting.

He said, “Dr. Jeffers. I would say Dr. Castleman, but—what did you plan to do when he came back from the Congo?”

“If he comes back from that hellhole. I’d have done what I’m going to do to now—close up shop and move on. This kind of work always has an expiration date. Linger too long, and the cement hardens around your feet. Classic mistake.”

“You won’t believe me,” Jack said, “but I know exactly what you mean.”

The man studied him, as if wondering. Shanaya breathed in with one short gasp, every atom of it audible in this tight space.

Jack pointed out, “But you’re a doctor. Med school, board exams, license. You’re going to walk away from all that?”

“Why would I have to? Nothing can connect me to this little enterprise, and I didn’t give opioids to patients who didn’t need them, or bill for procedures never done or durable medical equipment never purchased. The bad Dr. Castleman did. I’m kindly Dr. Jeffers, ministering to those who can’t afford care because other doctors only care about paying the insurance on their Lotus or keeping up with the country club fees.”

“Except you can’t get out of this building.”

“Without going through you, you mean?” Jeffers asked. “Good point.”

And he moved the gun from Shanaya’s temple and fired it at Jack.

The guy was quick—surgeon’s hands, Jack supposed. He jerked backward around the corner and felt the bullet graze his coat, the hot metal jerking the cloth with such speed that he had dropped to the ground and scuttled several feet away before he even smelled the fabric. One more shot blew through the office wall, showering Jack with tiny tufts of insulation. Feathers.

How to keep himself and Riley alive; and Shanaya as well, when she stayed stuck in a hole with a man more than willing to kill any inconvenient person he saw. He had to get out of it but couldn’t leave the room without his shadows making the movement obvious.

His two gunmen, however—

Off to his right he heard Riley say, “Jack?”

“Here.”

The light in the office went out. So much for shadows.

Jeffers would leave the room with Shanaya in front of him, an impossible target, while Jack sat there in the open. Not good. He straightened enough to walk in a sloping crouch and hustled toward the far corridor and the stairwell.

A shot flared but missed him in the dark. He picked up his pace as another shot answered.

“One down,” Riley called, his voice pinpointing his location. Another shot rang out, then landed with the thump of a soft target rather than the thwack of a floor or wall. Jack’s adrenaline spiked. Had Riley been hit?

Jack had nearly reached the end when a divot exploded from the wall in front of him, showering his face with tiny specks of paint and brick. He broke to the left, away from the corridor and stairwell, dropped to his knees, and hazarded a glance behind him.

His eyes had adjusted somewhat and he could see the edges of the cubicles, the interior doors, and Jeffers approaching with Shanaya plastered to his chest. She had both hands on his arm as if trying to pull it away, but the gun at her face kept her from struggling too much.

At the same time Jack heard a chair skitter away and a soft footfall. He hoped to hell it was his partner and not the guy who might have just killed him.

He had left the stairwell open for Jeffers, to at least keep him moving in a straight line. Otherwise they’d wind up at the same impasse as in the office. Officer West had remained downstairs. Surely he would have heard the commotion and gotten into position. Besides, Jack hardly wanted gunfire right outside the day care center, though its door looked bulletproof.

“What’s your plan, Jeffers?” Jack called. “You going to take out the entire Cleveland police force? Right now you only have fraud and unlawful imprisonment of that young lady. We know Wayne actually killed Evan Harding.” While, of course, acting on instructions from Jeffers, and he had left out Rick and Jennifer Toner. Jeffers didn’t need to know that they had connected the murders. It hardly boosted the incentive to put down the gun and make a deal.

Jack heard the brush of shoes on carpet at the outer wall and decided not to be a sitting duck for two different gunmen. He duck-walked over to the center aisle, took a peek, saw no one. Unfortunately the cubicles had been arranged in two solid rows. If he wanted to go up the center, cross to the interior wall, and come up behind Jeffers, he’d have to move all the way to the other end of the floor and then the full distance back to reach him.

He hadn’t bluffed about backup units responding. He and West had to keep Jeffers in place until they arrived, keep him from leaving the building with Shanaya, or she was as good as dead. It would be helpful, however, if Jack could get them all in a better position—take out that second guy, find Riley, and get Jeffers into a corner where he could see no other option but to surrender.

In other words, Jack needed to do the one thing he’d never been particularly good at—talking someone down. He needed Riley for that. He needed Maggie.

While he debated, he heard Jeffers shuffle around the corner and a sudden uptick in noise from the day care room. Jack hazarded a glance. In the vague blue light from outside Jack saw him pause outside the door, peering through the glass. Then he said, “Be right back, kids,” and Jack realized what the children had been shouting.

“Daddy!”

Then Jeffers took the gun from Shanaya’s head and fired at Jack, pulling her backward toward the steps as he did. Jack heard the pings of shots hitting the outer wall, the inner wall, the pipes snaking down the corner near the exposed wall. Then a hiss and a boom.

The room exploded with a blast that rocked his head back against the cubicle partition.

All of Jack’s senses failed at once. The light blinded him, the shock stunned him, and the shuddering noise deafened his ears. The ball of fire sucked all the oxygen from the room, and when he could breathe again he stumbled to his feet.

One of Jeffers’s shots had hit the gas pipe. Why that had caused an instant inferno, Jack couldn’t guess.

He turned to see Jeffers disappearing down the stairwell with Shanaya.

A scream, a primal, animal wail, cut through the choking air. A man, a figure cloaked in flames, came flailing through the smoke. Something—perhaps wishful thinking, perhaps the build or the cut of the fitted Columbia jacket—made Jack certain that this man on fire was not his partner.

Jack raised his gun but it would not be necessary—the guy sped past him without pausing, running senselessly to find some relief for the pain. The sight of his flesh burning was enough for Jack.

He ran toward the flames.

* * *

One floor below, Maggie nearly screamed when the officer grabbed her arm.

“What are you doing here? You’re the forensics tech, right?”

She shook her head in assent, momentarily speechless.

“Go back outside and get away from the entrance. Units are on their way.”

A shot rang out from the upper floor. Maggie abruptly understood the cliché about jumping out of one’s skin.

Jack.

She moved toward the staircase without thinking, confused when the officer grabbed her arm again, more forcefully than before.

“Now!” he hissed.

She hesitated. But this was their world, not hers. She needed to trust the officers to do what they did. She had to trust Jack. “Okay. Anything I should tell them when they get here?”

“Get across the street and out of sight. But if you can safely approach officers, tell them unknown number of suspects, unknown weaponry, unknown if possible hostage situation.”

That sounded less than helpful, but she turned to go. Then the explosion happened and the ground quavered underneath her feet.

The officer moved toward the stairwell, Maggie behind him. But when she realized what she was doing, she stopped again. She should not be here. She would only get in the way of the officers doing their jobs if they had to protect her as well as themselves, and Shanaya, and anyone else who might be in the place. But—Jack—

Two people came into sight. A man she did not recognize, with his arm around Shanaya’s neck and a gun in his hand, which he used to fire at the officer in front of her.

He missed, and the officer retreated, leaping to the left behind the curved reception desk instead of diving to the right into the sea of cubicles with their thin walls. Maggie imitated him. She would not make it across the open area to the door. And she didn’t really want to.

Though she really wished she had a gun.