“W-What did you just say?” Phillip stared at him with unseeing eyes, his pupils dilated and mouth hanging open. Nash couldn’t help but grin, enjoying the look of pure and utter confusion that read across his face. It was pretty stellar seeing someone so powerful suddenly so weak. Even though his knuckles ached from his punch, he wouldn’t have it any other way.
“The police,” Nash repeated, Phillip’s goons kept temporarily at bay from the threat of the wire, as if some little slip of metal and plastic and electricity acted like a force field.
“But you… you…” Phillip pressed his lips together and seemed to struggle to swallow hard. His mouth was probably getting dry, a side effect of the particular sedative Nash had chosen. Soon he’d be drifting into unconsciousness, and when he awoke, a whole new kind of shitstorm would be awaiting.
“What? You think because I’m a Steel Phoenix I’m above using the police to get what I want?” His lips curled back into a sadistic smile, one he hoped Phillip would see every time he closed his eyes in the near future, and then placed his hands on his hips. “If it meant taking you down, I would have worked with anyone. Now I get immunity and your ass is going to jail.”
“D-Do something,” Phillip gasped. He tried to lift his arms to point to one of the goons, but they barely made it a foot up before collapsing back onto his lap. Those glossy eyes twitched to Nash, and with his last deep breath, he hissed, “J-Just kill him…”
The room was quiet, peaceful even, as Phillip slumped over in his chair, and Nash remained unmoved as one of the goons darted over to check his pulse. When the burly black haired lackey was satisfied that his boss was alive, he rounded on the spot to glare at Nash. Oh, if looks could kill—Nash would have been more than six feet under.
“How do we even know you’re wearing a wire?” he barked, and Nash sensed the other goon shifting behind him. There was the slight creak of the hardwood floor, the rustle of cloth fabric as he moved his arms. Holding the man’s gaze, Nash reached into the top of his shirt and pulled out the microphone portion of the wire, displaying it to both men with the best shit-eating grin he could muster.
“Keep talking, boys,” Nash goaded. “I bet the pigs want to record as much of your involvement as they can get.”
The two goons looked at each other dumbly, lacking the nuance that the other pair had to have full conversations without saying a word in front of Nash. He tensed, waiting for them to spring to action, and at the slightest movement behind him, he lurched forward and grabbed the nearest open bag of coke. Without hesitation, he flung the bag at the guy on the other side of the desk, effectively blinding him with a dangerous combo of a potent drug and a powerful sedative, and then turned back to deal with goon number two.
Nash managed to dodge the first swing, the second, and even the third. He nailed the guy right in the gut with one punch, then brought his knee up for the final blow to his nose. There was a sickening crack when his knee collided with cartilage, and his attacker went down with a groan. A very solid body hit the floor seconds later as his partner hacked and swiped at his face, and Nash searched the fallen grunt for a weapon. Nothing. Not even a knife around his ankle.
“What the fuck are you doing, Crest?” Nash muttered, pushing the dazed goon back down and straightening up. “At least give these guys a fair chance here…”
The fair chance came when the guy Nash thought he’d already incapacitated flung himself across the room and tackled Nash to the floor. For such a big guy, he definitely came out of nowhere. But he was still struggling to see with all that coke powder smeared across his face, probably in his eyes, and Nash used just about every dirty trick in the book to get the guy on his back, then slammed his skull against the ground hard enough to send him to the dream world. He waited for a few long moments to make sure the guy was actually out, his chest heaving, and his breath coming fast from the exertion.
When he was sure his opponent was down for the count, Nash wiped his face to get any remaining residue off. He’d never been a powder drug kind of man, and he wasn’t about to start now when he needed his faculties as sharp as ever.
There was no telling how long Phillip’s boys would be out for, but Nash took a few minutes to do a sweep of the office, wishing he had more time to gather the evidence he needed. As of right now, the wire basically had a confession recorded on it, but he wanted a paper trail to link Phillip Crest to the hitmen who executed all those Steel Phoenixes last year. Unfortunately, he had to abandon the file cabinet at the first sound of groaning. It was conscious groaning, the rekindling of awareness, and he wasn’t in the mood to go for round two with these guys.
Abandoning the tainted drugs, Nash made a run for the door, only to come to a biting halt as soon as he yanked it open. Outside the room were about a dozen guys, all of them armed with assault rifles. Dressed in black as if they were some fucking elite Black Ops squad, they straightened up at the sight of Nash’s disheveled appearance—obviously something was wrong.
“Fuck,” he hissed, and just as the bullets started to fly, he slammed the door shut and pushed the nearest cabinet over to block it. Bullets blew holes in the wood, in the walls, and he dove for cover behind Phillip’s desk. Covering his head with an arm, he grabbed the microphone wire and brought it to his mouth, then hissed, “You guys planning on intervening anytime soon, or you just gonna wait until they fill me with lead first?”