Protect & Serve(48)

“Upstairs! Oh, God, they’re upstairs!” she shrieked, frantically motioning toward the living room with her head.

Confused, I aimed the shotgun toward the stairwell. “Who’s upstairs? Who the hell is up there?” I asked her, adrenaline surging through my body. Behind me, I could hear cops shouting, their voices strained. They knew I’d breached the house. I kicked the door shut and stepped away. I wasn’t about to give anybody a clean shot.

“My husband. My son. Please, help them!” she begged me, tears streaming down her pale face.

“Who’s up there with them? Who has your husband?”

“A man.”

There wasn’t time for more explanation, and I doubted she was capable of giving a coherent one, anyway. Poor woman looked shell shocked, like she was just hanging on by a thread. I nodded to her and rushed past.

I stormed the stairwell. I couldn’t stop myself. Whatever was happening here, I was the only one who could fix this. I was the only one on the force who I knew for sure wasn’t some Irish puppet. I was the only one I could trust. It was a terrifyingly lonely feeling.

I hit the landing, careful not to let my desperation get the best of me. I couldn’t go into this half-cocked, and I was dangerously close to doing just that. I had no backup, no one to cover me if things went south. I had to be more cautious, more patient. I had to plan ahead.

Gun drawn, I edged around the corner of the hall, sweeping my gun toward the door. When no one moved, I moved quickly and quietly past the family portraits hanging on the walls, all signs of domesticity passing by me in a blur. This wasn’t a house to me anymore. This was a war zone.

I stopped in front of the door. I knew I should have waited, should have listened for who was inside, but there was only so much time I could waste. If Nathan was in there with the Captain, then I needed to intervene as soon as possible, and even if he wasn’t, the cops outside wouldn’t wait forever to come and get me.

I took a deep breath through my nose and let it out between my trembling lips. This could have been the last thing I’d ever do. Was I prepared for that? Was I ready to die today?

No, I decided. Stop thinking like that. You fight. You fight smart, and fight hard.

I nodded to myself and faced the door. Here goes…

I kicked the door wide open. It swung inward with a crash, burying its knob inside the interior wall as I raised my gun again, throwing myself over the threshold.

“Police!”

Adrenaline pulsed through my veins as the little boy came into view, cowering in a corner. The Captain was just to the left with his hands in the air, the long barrel of a handgun pointed at his head. We stared at each other in shock.

It wasn’t Nathan inside with them. It was one of the phony Irish policemen. I was hit with a sensation that was equal parts relief and cold, hard dread. I was glad it wasn’t him, but at the same time, the fact that it wasn’t created a new set of problems. I could have talked Nathan down. This guy? Probably not so much.

This was not the situation I had expected to walk into.

“Drop the weapon,” I growled, training my shotgun on the Irishman. Behind him, I could see the shattered window and the shell casings scattered on the floor. He must have fired at least half a dozen rounds toward the officers on the street. Clearly, this was a man who had lost control of the situation.

That, at least, partially worked in my favor. It meant that corruption or not, the men and women on the street would be aiming at this asshole and not at me. Most of them, anyway.

“I said, drop it!” I shouted, wincing as he jumped, his finger resting firmly on the trigger.

“You should be dead,” the man offered up, glaring. He shot me his best sneer, but I could see the tremor in his hand. “You should be fucking dead. This isn’t how things are supposed to go. This isn’t my fucking fault!”

He looked scared and way too young to be up here with that weapon in his hand. He was quickly devolving, his trembling now so obvious that he was knocking the business end of his gun against the Captain’s skull.

This wasn’t good. A calm, cool, collected criminal was bad enough. But a man who thought he had no way out, who believed he had no option except to choose his own death? Those were way more dangerous, and any attempts to talk them down almost always ended in blood.

“There’s a SWAT team outside,” I began, “and every officer in a twelve-mile radius is parked down there. They’ll be coming through the door downstairs any second now. You’re not walking out of here. They won’t hesitate to kill you.” I took a breath, trying to offer him a little bit of hope in the face of overwhelming odds. “But if you drop the weapon and let me take you out of here, maybe none of this has to happen. Cooperate, and we can work out a deal. It doesn’t have to end this way.”