I was behind him then, and he was too distracted with his imagined victory that he hadn’t heard or felt me move in.
Not until, at least, I had a handful of his hair and a knife to his throat.
A quick yank to the side exposed his carotid. And one good slice inward had blood spraying everywhere. Jugular was good too, but carotid severing was almost always fatal.
The blood loss was fast and without immediate intervention, you were a goner.
Curtis was as good as a goner as he grabbed his neck.
“Rot in hell, Curtis,” I hissed.
Beneath him, Louana turned then slid out, kicking him hard, sending him sprawling to the ground.
Where he never moved from again.
“Huh,” Louana said as she got back to her feet. “Fifteen seconds. He really held on there,” she said, giving me a smirk. “We have to get out of here,” she added, making her way back toward her strange brown bag.
It wasn’t until then that I realized it was the damn submachine gun I’d had stashed in the hotel inside it.
Before I could even think about how she had gotten hold of it, though, the door was bursting open.
“Wait wait wait, Lulu,” I called, voice firm because I knew that thing had a hair trigger and she had an itchy finger.
And the person who had barged in?
It wasn’t one of Curtis’s crew.
No.
It was fucking Voss.
“Nice gun,” he said, nodding at Louana who had it half raised.
“Voss?” she asked, sounding breathless. “How…”
“Car is down the street,” he said, shrugging. “Didn’t take a genius. Nice,” he said, smirking down at Curtis’s dead, bloodstained body. “So, what are your prints on?” he asked, tucking away his own gun with a silencer and reaching for something in his pocket.
A travel bag of baby wipes.
“The other guys,” Louana started, taking a few steps forward.
“Don’t worry about the other guys,” Voss said, making his way toward the chains that had been around my wrists and giving them a wipe. “What else?”
“Ah, almost everything here has been used on me,” I admitted, waving toward the table. “Not the battery.”
“Bring the bag over,” Voss demanded, snatching it out of Louana’s hand as she got close, and shoving the items in. “Anything else?”
“He has my wallet,” I admitted, nodding down toward Curtis. “And my keys somewhere, I guess.”
“We have to track down his bike,” Louana said, walking over to wipe down the window ledge she’d braced her hands on, and the pull she’d opened the window with.
“Behind the dumpster a couple buildings down,” Voss said, reminding me again how good he was at this shit, how much longer he’d been in the criminal world than I had. “Did you touch anything on your way in?”
“I was dragged in,” I told him.
The only answer I got to that was some sort of growl.
“Bathroom?”
“No.”
“Jewelry?”
“Wore gloves,” I told him. “Don’t know where those are.”
“In a bag in the van,” Voss said, shrugging.
“I touched shit in the van, though,” I told him.
“Okay. You good?” he asked, looking over at Louana.
“Yeah. I didn’t touch much,” she admitted as she finished wiping off the chain even though it was too textured to really hold onto a print.
“Then we’re out,” Voss said. “You good to walk?” he asked as he took the gun from Louana and tucked it into the bag, holding it from the bottom because it was sure to break with all the weight.
For a couple minutes, sure.
Then I was pretty sure the adrenaline was going to wear off and I was going to be in fucking agony.
“It’s not far,” Louana assured me as she came up to my side, lifted my arm, and draped it over her shoulders. “Let’s go,” she added, half pulling me along with her as we fell into step behind Voss.
We moved down the hallway I’d been dragged through and out into the main space.
Where everyone seemed to have been picked off in their sleep save for one of the guys who was shot dead halfway across the room. Like he’d heard a commotion in the back room, and was on his way to investigate.
Voss moved through the room like he didn’t even see the bodies, but I saw an equally impressed wide-eyed look on Louana’s face as I felt as we moved out of the building entirely.
Each step down the road toward Louana’s car felt more and more like torture until, finally, we were there.
“Sit. Don’t object. We get it. You’re a big, strong guy. Now sit down before you fall down,” Louana insisted, nearly shoving me into the passenger seat.
I watched as Voss tucked the bag of shit into the trunk of Louana’s car before he came back.
“Circling back to clean out the van and find your shirt,” he told me. “Then I am going to check in with the crew and get some antiseptic supplies. Tell me about the hotel.”
“Booked it under a fake name and ID. Close match, but not my actual picture.”
“Good. Leave anything there?”
“I took it all,” Louana said as she slid into the driver’s seat.
“Got the card?” he asked.
“Yeah, here,” she said even as I reached for my wallet to give him mine too.
“I’ll check out on the TV and drop ‘em in the lobby,” he said. “After I give it a wipe down.”
“Thanks, man,” I said, giving him a nod.
To that, he just gave me a shrug. “When you get to a different hotel, give me the details, and I can drop by with the wound shit,” he said.
And with that, he was gone.
“Jesus Christ,” I said, slamming my head back on the rest, not sure what I was more overwhelmed with—the pain or the insanity of my rescue, and the loyalty of my friends.
“Yeah, that about sums it up. If you can’t put your belt on, brace yourself so you don’t bounce around. We’re getting the fuck out of here,” she said.
I barely got a chance to do as she instructed before we were driving off. Not speeding, but almost pushing the limits.
“Here,” she said, tossing her phone at me. “Call your parents. They need to hear from you.”
With that, I did.
There was about ten seconds of telling me they loved me and were glad I was okay before the berating started.
“You deserve it,” Louana whispered to me, clearly hearing my mom ranting at me through the phone.
I did.
I’d been reckless.
I’d made them all worry.
I put Louana and Voss and the others at a lot of risk because I hadn’t said shit, because I thought I could handle it myself.
That was the point of the club, wasn’t it?
That I didn’t have to handle anything on my own anymore.
“Alright. They gave me a lot of shit,” Louana said as she came back to the car after heading into the hotel she’d settled on. “But I got them to let us check in early by making them think they fucked up and lost our reservation from last night,” she said as she rummaged around in the back of her car, producing a wrinkled sweatshirt that was going to be tight. “You can’t go in there bruised and bloody,” she reasoned when I grumbled.