The two men directly in front of her were silent, temporarily stunned by her appearance, but the scream that filled the dingy saloon had each scrambling to find an advantage to break away from the deadly struggle.
The poor man with the knife sticking out of his back stared at her as if she could somehow help him.
Penni dropped her phone to the floor as she reached out to catch him. The one standing behind him didn’t give her the opportunity, though, pulling the knife out with a sickly squish, only to thrust downward again into his helpless victim.
Penni scrambled back a step, holding the man as he slumped into her.
The other man stood as if frozen to stone. He appeared to have just come out of the bathroom. He was young than the other men, his actions showing he didn’t know how to react to the life and death struggle. Penni didn’t think he was friends with the other guys; his clean clothes might have come off the rack, but they had high price labels. Penni had the feeling he had been as shocked by the stabbing as she was. He must have come out of the bathroom as she had entered the front, both of them getting a shock they didn’t know how to respond to.
Penni didn’t have much time to react before she felt the victim grasping her harder. The man’s weight buckled his thin frame as she frantically tried to catch him. She was sickened by the fear she saw staring back at her.
“Help us,” Penni appealed to the man across the room who was coming out of the bathroom.
He gripped the backpack slung over his shoulder. “What’s going on?”
The shaky voice didn’t belong to a man with a backbone. Penni considered herself a good judge of character. Shade had often bragged to his friends that she could guess which of them had swiped another beer out of the refrigerator or who had taken the last piece of chicken leftover from dinner. Penni would bet her last dollar the stranger gawking at her was going to run.
She felt her own legs give out under the weight of the man she wanted to save.
“Please …” Penni flinched at the womanish sound that emerged from the man at her plea.
The stranger across the room released a squawk before the coward ran across the room, sliding between her as the stranger hanging on to her released his final breath.
The man who had jerked his knife out of his victim’s back tried to stop his escape, slipping in the blood that showed the brutal evidence of his crime.
“Striker, hold on. Be cool.”
Another feminine groan brushed past her ear, and the coward disappeared out of the closing door.
“Fuck me!” Penni toppled over when the murderous rage was directed to her as his other victim escaped out the door behind her.
“Bitch, you’re going to pay for that!”
Penni found herself trying to struggle free from the limp body pinning her to the ground. She finally gathered her senses and managed to scoot out from under the body to make her own dash for freedom. A hand burying in her short hair brought her to a sudden standstill.
“Who the fuck are you?”
Penni tried unsuccessfully to pull her hair out of his grasp. The more Penni tried to tug away, the harder he held her.
“Let me go!” Penni’s demand was ignored as he pushed her farther inside the bar.
Penni blindly stepped over the blood-soaked man she had been unable to save.
She was released, finding herself staring up at an angry male face. It wasn’t the first time she had dealt with that reaction, but she wasn’t used to having a knife pointed at her. For the first time in her life, Penni found herself speechless.
She felt the sharp point of the knife under her chin.
“Who are you? This is the last time I’m going to ask!”
“Penni!” she barely managed to gasp out.
“Your DJ’s girl?”
“No.” Penni tried to shake her head yet stopped when she felt the knife nick her skin. “I don’t even know who DJ is.”
A tug on the back of her hair had her figuring out the man lying near her feet was the unlucky DJ.
“You were with Striker? Did he have you waiting outside?”
Penni didn’t flinch as his hand threatened to cut out her throat if he thought she was lying to him.
“I ran out of gas.”
Her eyes widened when she heard him begin to laugh.
“You don’t know DJ or Striker?”
“I’ve never seen either one of them in my life,” Penni confirmed truthfully, praying he would believe her.
The smug look filling his face did not bode well that she would escape unscathed.
“Then you were in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Nope, it isn’t going to go down well for me at all, Penni thought dismally.
“You’re not going to let me go, are you?”