Chapter Twenty-Six
Trinity Sands Resort
Lobby
As soon as Jesse got a good look at the downed Tango—“Kennion” he’d heard one of the other guys call him—he realized the guy was in serious trouble. He was coughing up blood and had decreased lung sounds on one side. An examination of his chest showed a circular bruise just to right of center.
“Did something hit you?” he asked as he strapped an O2 mask over Kennion’s face.
He nodded and pointed to one of the stanchions near the registration desk. The circular tip was the exact same size as the bruise on his chest. If he hit that with enough force to cause a pulmonary contusion, he was lucky it hadn’t thrown his heart into a fatal arrhythmia. A few inches to the left, and it probably would have.
Jesse looked up at Briggs, who hovered nearby. “He needs a hospital.”
Briggs pressed his lips together, glanced at the hostages. “He has you. Do what you can for him.”
Jesse considered the first aid kit. “His lung is damaged. Without my trauma kit, I can’t do anythin’.”
“Where is it?”
Jesse kept his gaze focused on Briggs, careful not to give any indication that he was also speaking to Gabe, Quinn, and Harvard. “In my room. On the fourth floor.”
Translation: the cavalry is coming from above.
Briggs’s lip peeled off his upper teeth in a sneer. “Exactly where we have your friends trapped. Convenient. What else do you have up there?”
“Nothing but my trauma kit. Think about it. If I had weapons in my room, our friends wouldn’t be trapped.”
Briggs said nothing. Just stood there, staring down at Kennion.
“Do you want him to die?” Jesse demanded. “Because that’s what’ll happen without immediate medical attention.”
“People die all the time.”
“Hope you’re gettin’ paid well. That money will be a real comfort when your buddy here drowns in his own blood.” Feigning annoyance—though, honestly, he didn’t have to try too hard—Jesse began packing up the first aid kit. It was stocked better than most. Almost as good as his trauma kit. It had everything from QuikClot to…morphine in auto-inject syringes. The two knuckleheads who had searched the kit had completely passed over the auto-injectors because they weren’t obviously sharp.
Their mistake.
Jesse palmed the three morphine pens, and caught Gabe’s gaze as he stood. Gabe nodded slightly. Help may be coming, but they weren’t going to wait for a shootout. If they could end this now, they’d take the chance. He flicked his gaze over to Briggs and wiggled the pens down at his side. Again, Gabe nodded.
Just as Jesse moved into position next to Briggs, a small bell announced the elevator’s arrival and everyone jumped—the hostages and the hostage takers. Which, given all the frayed nerves in the room and the twitchy trigger fingers, was a recipe for disaster.
Everyone shifted to face the elevator bank and guns came up. Jesse slid one of the injectors into his pocket and readied the other two. Maybe this was the help he’d promised, but more likely, this was someone throwing a wrench into the works. He wanted to be ready in case things went to hell.
And they did the moment those doors slid open.
Schumacher stepped out of the elevator, dragging a semi-conscious, barely coherent Jean-Luc with him. He had a gun to the Cajun’s temple.
“What the fuck?” Quinn and Briggs said at the exact same time. And, ironically, for the same reason. It was a kick in the balls when a man you thought you knew decided to pull a Benedict Arnold on his trainers, then turn around and Et tu, Brute? his own teammates.
How had they not realized this guy was so dangerous?
Jean-Luc’s eyes weren’t focusing and as Schumacher dragged him forward, he slurred something in a language that was not English. In fact, it didn’t seem to be any one language, but a mix of several.
Jesus, did the Cajun have head trauma? Connor hadn’t mentioned anything about Jean-Luc sustaining a blow to the head. Or maybe he was just delirious from blood loss? Either way, this was really fucking bad.
And where, for the love of God, was Connor?
If Schumacher had Jean-Luc, did that mean Connor and the rest of the recruits were—
No. As his stomach twisted with horror, he couldn’t even finish the thought.
Briggs held up a hand to his three remaining guys, who all had their weapons trained on Schumacher. They relaxed a little, but didn’t completely lower their guns.
“What are you doing?” Briggs demanded.
“Following orders,” Schumacher said.
“Whose?”
“Your former employer’s. They’re unimpressed with your performance and asked me to fix the situation.” Without any other warning, Schumacher pulled his gun away from Jean-Luc’s head and shot Briggs directly between the eyes.
Briggs didn’t fall right away. He stood there, blinking in shock as blood dripped off his nose from the neat little hole in his forehead. Then his eyes glazed over and his knees buckled. The silence in the wake of the gun blast was so deep that the thunk of Briggs’s body hitting the floor echoed.
Schumacher, his arm still banded around Jean-Luc’s neck, easily spun and pointed his weapon at Jesse. “And this is ’cause I don’t like you or your little shit of a kid.”
That old saying about your life flashing before your eyes in the moments before your death? Yeah. It wasn’t so much his life, but his mistakes. And, boy, there were many. His relationship with Connor and the way he’d left things with Lanie chief among them. He had a moment to wish he’d done it all differently before—
Jean-Luc straightened and jabbed his elbow backward into Schumacher’s gut while simultaneously shoving the gun aside. The bullet missed Jesse by several feet and cracked the glass of the lobby’s front window. Another gunshot cracked from somewhere over their heads, and opened a gash across Schumacher’s cheek. If he hadn’t been wrestling for control of his weapon with Jean-Luc, if he hadn’t moved his head in the instant before the bullet struck, it would’ve gone into his skull.
Jesse looked up. If they had another shooter to worry about, he wanted to know where the hell the bastard was and—
Oh. Nope. It was the good guys. Seth lay flat on his belly, rifle pointed between two balusters of the second floor balcony, ready to take another shot at Schumacher. He didn’t get it. Schumacher shoved Jean-Luc hard enough that the Cajun, in his weakened state, lost his balance.
And then Schumacher turned to run like the coward he was.
Yeah, fuck that. Until Jesse knew his son was safe, that asshole wasn’t going anywhere. He lunged after Schumacher and caught him around the middle. They hit the marble floor hard, jarring every ache and pain in his body, but he ignored the discomfort and held on. They slid several feet and skidded into a potted palm tree. Schumacher twisted in an obvious attempt to get the gun up near Jesse’s head and pulled the trigger. The bullet burned past his cheek. Too close. Way too close. Jesse closed a hand around Schumacher’s wrist and knocked his hand against the potted palm until the gun clattered to the floor.
Schumacher swung a sloppy fist, all anger and no finesse. It glanced off Jesse’s chin and snapped his head back. He’d taken harder blows and recovered, but a simultaneous kick to his bad ankle had him seeing stars. His grip loosened and Schumacher squirmed free. He was gone before Jesse’s vision cleared.
Jesse pushed up on his hands and knees, and stared at the now empty hallway. He heaved out a breath, then limped to his feet and let the two empty syringes drop from his hand. Schumacher wasn’t getting far with two doses of morphine in his system.
At some point during the chaos, Gabe, Quinn, and Harvard had all reared up and used their zip-tied wrists as garrotes to neutralize the three remaining Tangos. Hostages screamed. Some scattered, racing toward any door they could find. Some cowered, adding to the noise and chaos. Danny and Marcus came down from the restaurant’s balcony and worked at directing people outside to safety.
Jesse snapped up the first aid kit and hobbled to Jean-Luc’s side. “Hey, Cajun. How you doin’?”
“Oh, you know,” Jean-Luc said in a reedy voice. He pulled his hand away from his side to show the fresh blood staining his palm. “Just bleeding all over the damn place like a stuck pig. I’m gonna pass out again, f’true.”
“Go ahead. It’s over now. I got you.”
“Good. Nobody else I’d trust to save my awesome self.” And his eyelids eased closed.
Jesse snorted. “Glad to see your ego’s intact, pal.”