Chapte Twenty-Five - Tyler
Either this son of a bitch is heavier than he looks, or else Logan really did manage to put some work in on my ribs. Shit hurts. But no rest for the weary, as some asshole once said.
I feel like old Saint Nick himself, carrying a present for all the good girls and boys of the DEA. I realize that Maddie has yet to get any active intel that helps shut down the operation, but if Carlos is in custody, then that leaves Logan to run things and with that taint-griddler in charge, I imagine they can bring down this show in about five minutes.
Saint Nick. Hm. I wonder if that makes me Saint Tyler. I like the ring of that, but the Claus notwithstanding, most motherfuckers only achieve sainthood posthumously, so I don’t know if I should be gunning for it so enthusiastically.
Regardless, these are the thoughts running through my head to keep my mind off the amount of unexpected pain I’m in at the moment.
We approach the first corner in the hallway and Ricky peeks around to make sure the coast is clear. Just as a fire alarm goes off loud as fuck from wherever.
“Shit,” says Ricky. And looking back, I see smoke billowing out of the room Maddie lit up. I’m half-stunned that she did it and half-super proud of her. But both of those feelings are overtaken by a much stronger one. Paralysis.
Something about the smoke and the alarm and hauling this body…
Nadir.
The explosion that killed Nadir and the other guys wasn’t the one that got me. I mean, it was, but not exactly. It was like a chain event. Nadir and the other guys caught the first blast, and when I grabbed him and threw him over my shoulders to haul him out of the combat zone to a dustoff location, that’s when I triggered the blast that nailed me.
No one has ever come right out and said it, but I know that the reason I survived is because I was carrying him. His body acted as a mini-blast wall and absorbed enough of the discharge that no heavy shrapnel hit my vital organs. I just know it. I was pinned down though. Held there for however long. I don’t know. Just what they told me. It wasn’t the blast itself that fucked me up so much as the fire, I guess. Nadir’s charred body and whatever other burning shit was lying on me.
I don’t plan to ever tell Maddie that stuff.
And then, as if waking from a deep sleep, I hear the far-off sound of, “Tyler?” Maddie’s voice. And I blink myself back.
“Are you OK?” she asks. The concerned look on her face breaks my heart.
“Yeah. Yeah, fucking killing it. Locked, cocked, and ready to rock. Where’s the party?” And shit like that. I’m not sure how many tired, macho, war-time clichés I spew, but finally she just smiles, stands on her toes and kisses my cheek.
And then we’re on the move again.
Once we round the corner, Ricky throws his fist up. I am more than familiar with the signal to halt progress. Maddie, not so much, and because she’s glancing worriedly back at me, she kind of rams into Ricky.
“Why are we—?” she starts, but stops when she sees what Ricky sees. Four armed guards up ahead, all talking in Spanish and pointing in different directions. They haven’t seen us yet. The alarm is blaring all over the place, but the fire appears to still be contained to the room. Although, at the rate it was spreading, that won’t be true for long. Fuck, Carlos is getting heavy. I bounce to adjust him over my shoulders and I can feel my ribs pinch. I try not to let it show on my face.
The house/hotel/village/wherever-the-fuck-we-are looks like a Mediterranean architect partied too hard with a Spanish-style interior designer and they threw up everywhere. So there’s arches and alcoves and shit all over the place. Ricky pushes us inside one such alcove and says, “Stay here.”
We step back, just out of eyesight from the hallway, and when Maddie presses against me, it makes me forget for a second about all the pain, and the weight of carrying Carlos, and all of it… And Chuckie Stiff says hi.
“Are you kidding me right now?” Maddie asks in response to the sensation of feeling my throbbing hard-on pressing against her ass. I shrug a “what’re you gonna do?” shrug, and she rolls her eyes. Fuck, I love her so much.
I slide past her so I can peer around the edge of the alcove and down the hall, and what I see is… well. It’s some shit all right.
Ricky approaches the four dudes, speaking Spanish to them, and then points back to where we are. I pull my head back into the shadows as they all look this way but manage to keep one eye on the five of them. And what that one eye sees is some fucking next-level super-soldier nonsense.
Ricky laughs and bends down like he’s tying his boots, and when he pops back up, he’s holding a fucking bush knife he pulled from an ankle sheath. He slices the throats of the two dudes standing next to him with one sweeping motion, stabs the next guy in the chest—twice—before he can move, then breaks the fourth dude’s arm, pins him to the ground, and steps on his neck and snaps it.
I can’t believe I fucking knocked this guy out. Holy shit.
He looks back, giving me the sign for “don’t fuckin’ move,” runs out of sight for like twenty seconds, and then comes running back down the hall to where we are.
“OK,” he says, not even fucking winded. “What you did may have worked.” He addresses that to Maddie.
“Whattayou mean?” she asks.
“I told the primary strike team that you and Carlos are missing and that this wing is on fire. I directed half of them to go look for you and the rest to deal with the fire.”
“But then—” she starts.
Ricky shakes his head. “I directed them to run around the long way. Told ’em this way was getting blocked off.”
“Jesus,” I say. “That’s pretty fucking thin.”
“Yeah?” says Mr. Super Soldier. “Thin like starting a fucking fire? Or thin more like showing up at the compound of one of the five biggest drug traffickers in the world armed with nothing but a goddamn drone? Thin like those?”
“Fair enough.”
“Let’s go. We got maybe five minutes,” says Ricky.
And then we’re on the move again.