He concentrated on the sound of a door clicking open in front of him and glimpsed a white shirt as the second man escaped into the hallway beyond. He squeezed off three shots, hitting the door twice as it was swinging closed, and was rewarded with the sight of a figure flopping to the floor just before the door clicked shut in his face.
A flash of black blurred in the corners of his eyes as Alice ran past him and continued up the stairs, Dwight following closely behind.
“You gonna die, dude?” Dwight asked as he passed him.
“Shut up and go!” he shouted back.
They were moving fast, and he actually found himself lagging more than five steps behind them, pushing himself, because slowing down would only give his body too much time to remember that he should be lying on a hospital bed, not racing up an impossible flight of steps. At the moment, Reese wasn’t sure if surviving what was waiting for them up ahead or the ten floors of steps was the greater challenge.
As he went up, Reese risked a glance down at his side and was shocked not to see blood on his shirt. Of course, if his stitches had snapped somewhere during the mad dash up, it would take a while for the blood to seep through the bandages.
But for now, he was okay. Well, mostly, anyway.
He followed Dwight and Alice around the eighth floor and was halfway up to the ninth when there was a bang! from above them, but this wasn’t a gunshot — it was a door crashing open, just before someone opened up with a fully automatic weapon, like someone banging on drums with a sledgehammer inside the stairwell.
He finished the turn onto the ninth just as the gunfire stopped, his shoes slipping as they came down on a layer of bullet casings left behind by Dwight. His partner was pushing aside a bullet-riddled door, keeping it pried open with one shoe while he peeked in at the hallway and a man lying with a bloody chest on the other side. Dwight had the UMP45 in a sling over his shoulder, the weapon hidden in his jacket all this time.
Reese followed Dwight’s example and put the Glock away and unzipped his jacket, then pulled out the slung MP5K with the pistol grip. He looked for and found Alice, already on the steps leading up to the tenth floor, her Glock pointing up at the turn ahead. If she was in any pain at all, she wasn’t showing it, and Reese thought, Christ, that is one amazing woman!
“Anything?” he called up to her.
She looked down at him and shook her head briefly before returning it to the empty staircase above them.
“Clear?” Reese said, looking over at Dwight.
“As clear as it’s gonna get,” Dwight said, walking back to him.
“Let’s go earn our paycheck, then.”
“I thought that’s what I’ve been doing?” Dwight grunted.
Reese grinned then headed up the stairs, passing Alice and resuming the lead. Dwight was right behind him, while Alice didn’t say a word as she fell in at the back. Maybe she hadn’t argued because they were better armed, or, more likely, she wasn’t going to protest if they wanted to put themselves between her and whoever was waiting up there.
Can’t say I blame her one bit.
But there was no one waiting for them on the tenth-floor landing, not that it stopped Reese from moving with the submachine gun gripped in front of him, forefinger on the trigger. Dwight shadowed him with the UMP until they had made the turn and faced the last door. Reese kept going, turned right and rushed up the stairs that led to the rooftop, and, finding no one waiting up there either, headed back down.
He found Dwight focusing on the stairwell door, and Alice, with her back turned to him, keeping an eye on the stairs below them just in case someone decided to attack from the lower floors. Reese almost smiled at the way they were working together, as if they had been doing it for years instead of less than twenty-four hours.
Dwight glanced over and Reese shook his head, then nodded at the door. Dwight grinned and turned and unloaded the remains of his magazine into the slab of wood, stitching it from left to right until he was empty.
Reese quickly jumped down and pulled security while Dwight reloaded.
“You go first,” Dwight said.
“I went first last time,” Reese said.
“When?”
“Hong Kong.”
“I don’t remember that happening whatsoever.”
“Doesn’t change the fact that it’s true.”
“Whatever, dude.”
Dwight assumed the position, raising his weapon up to chest level, until he was looking from behind its iron sights before nodding.
Reese tossed a quick look behind him at Alice — found her staring back at him, waiting patiently. He returned his focus to the tenth-floor hallway door and scanned the holes Dwight had put into it but didn’t see anything that resembled movement on the other side. Not that he could see much through the small holes anyway.
He gave Dwight another glance. “You ready?”
“Depends,” Dwight said.
“On what?”
“You gonna go through it first?”
“Your turn, remember?”
“Figures,” Dwight said before turning back to the door. “On the count of five?”
“Sounds good.”
“So let’s get this show on the road before I die of boredom in here.”
Reese nodded and grabbed the doorknob, then twisted it but didn’t pull at it. He waited until Dwight finished mouthing the word five before jerking the door open and throwing himself against the wall at the same time. The door creaked against its hinges, and Dwight was a blur of black clothing as he lunged through the opening, the UMP gripped tightly in his hands—
Bang!
A stream of blood flashed across Reese’s eyes almost a full second before Dwight’s head snapped back into the stairwell, his body following and hitting the landing with a loud thump. The back of Dwight’s head smashed into the concrete floor, the submachine gun clattering as it left his useless hands and bounced against the railings before disappearing down the empty middle section of the stairwell.
Reese was still processing what had happened, staring at Dwight’s (dead) open eyes, when Alice charged past him — jumping over Dwight’s lifeless body — and into the hallway, slipping through the door as it began to swing shut.
He heard gunshots — one, two, three times — and they snapped him out of his shocked stupor, and Reese spun away from the wall and tilted his body to hit the slim opening before the door could close on him.
Alice was already up ahead, racing down the hallway with the Glock, stepping over another body in jeans and a black T-shirt. Dwight’s killer, now dead himself.
Dwight’s dead.
Thinking it made it somehow more real than when he had seen Dwight’s body crumpling in the stairwell a few heartbeats ago.
Dwight’s dead.
Five years since they had met in Panama City on an assignment put together by their former organization, when the seeds of freelance work were first introduced.
Dwight’s dead.
He liked the guy. Really, he did. They weren’t exactly as close as brothers — Reese didn’t have brothers and didn’t particularly want one — and most of the time they only ever met up when there was a job, but if you were to ask him how he felt about Dwight, Reese would have said, without hesitation, that he liked the guy.
Holy shit, Dwight’s dead.
Twenty-One
Dwight was dead, his body still warm in the stairwell behind her as Allie pushed on, stepping over the young man in jeans who had shot Dwight in the head. It was a good shot from twenty yards, while he was in a crouch, and maybe the guy was enjoying the moment just a little too much when Allie killed him, because he really did look surprised by what had happened.