24: Deadline (24 Series) (24 page)

Sammy reeled back, his chair spinning away, trying to keep his balance while one hand was still nailed in place. He came around with the smoking sawn-off, wielding it like a club, battering Jack about the head.

As Chase picked himself up, fresh red streaks across his cheek where he had taken a near-hit, Jack vaulted across the desk and bodychecked Sammy. He hit with such force that he dislodged the knife and Sammy went back, his ruined hand ripped open and gushing blood. Jack placed two hard, sharp punches into the other man’s throat. Bone and cartilage cracked, and this time Sammy went all the way down—and stayed there.

“Shit…” Chase wiped blood from his face with the back of his hand. “You think they heard that?”

The constant thumping of the strip club’s rock soundtrack hadn’t lessened in all the time they had been there, but Jack wasn’t about to stick around to find out. “So much for undercover,” he muttered.

Chase drew his Ruger and moved to the office door. “What now?”

Jack kicked the sawn-off aside and lowered his head to look at the monitor screens. Out in the bar, it seemed like business as usual. He spotted Sticks gesturing animatedly to another Night Ranger outrider, waving a cell phone around. Jack glanced at the other monitors. “Looks like two, maybe three men upstairs. Let’s do this quick. We need to move before anyone comes looking for our friend here.”

“A diversion is what we need,” Chase replied.

“Yeah.” In a glass-fronted liquor cabinet near the desk were two bottles of Wild Turkey, and Jack pulled the corks on both, slopping the bourbon all over the piles of papers and across the walls. Sammy had a cigar box on the desk with a gasoline lighter resting on top, and Jack flicked it alight.

“That’s not what I meant,” said Chase, catching on.

“Get ready.” Jack pulled his gun and tossed the lighter back at the desk. The naked flame immediately ignited the spilled alcohol, and a line of bluish flame swept across the wood paneling. The office was top-heavy with flammable items, and it would take only seconds to turn it into a torch. “
Go!
”

He pressed his hand into the small of Chase’s back, and the other man slipped out into the corridor leading from the bar. Jack pulled the door shut behind him, trapping the fire inside the room.

The corridor led away toward the back of the strip club, past a stand of out-of-order pay phones and doors that opened on to reeking toilet stalls. A wide wooden staircase rose, and Jack indicated it with a nod. “Take point.”

“Got it.” Chase moved quickly, holding his pistol down low. In the dingy interior of the club, their weapons wouldn’t be seen until it was too late.

Jack chanced a look back over his shoulder and for one brief instant he locked gazes with Sticks on the far side of the barroom.

*   *   *

“You hear that?” Fang rubbed the claw tattoo on the side of his face, eyes narrowing. “I thought I heard somethin’.”

But Sticks was talking, not listening. “Find Marshall and Tyke,” he said, raising his voice to be heard above the buzzy shriek of guitars coming over the Crankcase’s sound system. He prodded Fang in the chest to underline his point. “And get irons too, ’cause we have ourselves a—”

He stopped dead as he caught sight of movement out behind the now-empty dance stage. At the edge of the harsh glow of the spotlights, he saw the two strangers emerging from Sammy’s office. Their movements were quick and furtive, and Sticks immediately feared the worst. If they weren’t cops, then they had to be something worse, he guessed. Perhaps they really were from Chicago, but Mob hitters sent down to Deadline to whack the Night Rangers for some infraction Rydell had made, or maybe guns-for-hire dispatched by any one of a dozen rival MCs. It didn’t matter. They had to be dealt with.

On an impulse, Sticks brought up the cell phone he still had in his hand and snapped a couple of shots of the two men. One of them must have caught the flash in the corner of his eye, because he shot a look in the biker’s direction before disappearing toward the back of the strip club.

“What’re you doing?” Fang spun around to see the two men and he immediately tensed like a dog catching the scent of an intruder. “Whoa, is that them?”

Sticks abandoned his conversation and pushed through the gathered riders and truckers, shoving them out of his way, leaving a wake of angry curses and shouts behind him. Fang kept pace with him, at his side as they reached the mouth of the corridor. “Check on Sammy!” he snapped.

Fang nodded and grabbed the office door’s brass handle, turning it before he realized that it was red-hot. “Hey—”

Whatever he was going to say was lost as the door came open with a heavy gust of hot, fiery smoke. Fang reeled away as flames curled like talons, sucked out into the corridor by the pressure change in the air. It had been a long time since the Crankcase’s pitiful sprinkler system had been overhauled, and too late it was clear that if it had ever worked, it certainly wasn’t working
now
.

Sticks grabbed Fang by the collar of his jacket, hauling him back as the flames bit into the wooden flooring and went searching for anything else that would burn.

Behind him, a shock of panic jolted through the Crankcase’s clientele, and chaos erupted as everyone made for the door at once.

*   *   *

The strip club’s fire alarm bleated, but like the unmaintained sprinklers it failed to do the job it was designed for, giving off a muffled squeal that was barely audible among all the other background noise.

Chase ascended the staircase at a pace, holding the Ruger down and to the side. A blond-haired biker was coming up off a stool as he came into view.

“Hey, what’s going on down there, izzat smoke?”

He didn’t give the guy the chance to think. Chase brought up the pistol and cracked the butt of the gun across the bridge of the biker’s nose, smashing it with a single blow. Blood gushed out across his face and he staggered, shaking off the pain. In the next second, the man roared like a bull and charged at Chase with his hands out.

It was an easy assault to deal with, and a part of Chase liked the fact that his old skills were snapping back into place so seamlessly. He dodged the attack and hit the guy low, sending him sprawling down the staircase in a messy tumble. Below them, there was a thud of displaced air as the fire started to take hold.

Jack sidestepped the first guard as he went down and turned at the top of the staircase, aiming down the upper corridor. “Target!” he snapped.

Another Night Ranger, this one a gangly figure in denim with a shock of black hair, came racing toward them clutching a compact Mini Uzi submachine gun. Unlike the other biker, this one didn’t hesitate. He mashed the trigger of the SMG and let the recoil jerk his hand up and across, spraying a salvo of 9mm rounds across their path.

Chase threw himself into cover behind a decrepit leather chair, ducking as shots tore the stuffing from the seat back. Despite the gunfire, doors along the corridor were opening as those inside heard the racket. A skinny redhead—one of the women who had been dancing when they arrived—froze on the threshold and shrieked in panic.

Jack didn’t flinch at the new line of attack and fired twice with his M1911 pistol. Both rounds hit the biker in center mass and he jerked backward, unloading the rest of the Uzi’s magazine into the walls and the ceiling. A stray round from the machine gun caught the redhead between the eyes and she fell back into her room.

Gray smoke was following them up the stairs now, and heat came with it. Jack moved forward on the left, keeping his gun close to his chest, and Chase moved in parallel with him. They kicked in doors, panning across each room with their guns, seeking targets.

Each of the rooms was the same kind of sordid, perfunctory space, set aside for the Crankcase’s callous human trade. A parody of a boudoir, all snarls of bedsheets and sex toys laying in a mess. “Everyone out,” Jack shouted. “This is your one and only chance! You stay in this place and you’ll burn with it!”

His words were enough; women spilled out of the rooms in disarray, desperate to flee the indignities they had been forced to suffer here.

Jack called out to Chase. “Can’t go back the way we came in, there has to be another way out.”

“I hear that.”

“We need to find it, fast.” Jack tried a door that didn’t open at first, then he raised his foot and kicked squarely at the lock, snapping it out of the frame. He pushed through into a darkened interior and out in the corridor Chase caught the stink of stale sweat and cannabis. He glimpsed a blur of movement and suddenly Jack was pulled off his feet, wrenched aside and out of Chase’s line of sight. He heard a girl’s high-pitched scream, and the crash of something breaking.

Leading with his Ruger, Chase rushed the room and came upon the other man in the grip of a huge, naked biker easily as big as a sumo wrestler. In the half-dark of the room, Chase made out the biker’s tree-trunk-thick arm around Jack’s throat, pulling tight to choke the life out of him. “I’m gonna snap your neck, little shit!” he bellowed. Jack struggled, his gun lost in the melee, punching and kicking his assailant to no obvious effect.

Chase didn’t hesitate. The training
was
still there. He
was
still good enough to do this. He didn’t think about the nerve damage, he didn’t dwell on the bottle of painkillers, he just raised the semiautomatic and fired a single shot before the biker could position Jack as a human shield. The bullet went through the big man’s left eye and blew out a welter of blood and brain matter over the wall behind him.

Jack pushed away as the biker’s corpse dropped like a felled tree. He sucked in a ragged breath. “Thanks.”

Chase nodded, finding the girl who had cried out hiding by the bed. “C’mon,” he told her. “We’re getting you all out of here.” He was suddenly breathing hard, the old familiar sting of adrenaline rushing through him.

*   *   *

Jack coughed out tainted spittle and stooped to scoop up his pistol from where it had fallen. As he bent low, he felt the heat radiating up through the floor from the strip club beneath them. Smoke was gathering along the roof, and it wasn’t just the death grip of the biker that was making it hard to breathe.

His plan, such as it was, had passed the point of no return.
Get in. Find the captives. Get them out alive.
Everything else was secondary to those objectives—but if he could destroy this snake pit in the bargain, Jack was ready to call that a win on all counts. These bikers were not the usual kind of trained soldiers that he faced, but that didn’t mean he could afford to drop his guard. What outlaws tended to lack in skill they more than made up for with violence and enthusiasm. Momentum would be the key here, he decided. From the moment Jack had been forced to attack Sammy, he had set into motion a chain of events that couldn’t be stopped. Thugs like these reacted to threats with the same pack mentality as wolves; bark loud enough at the start and you might force them to back off … but give them time to think it over and they would come for you in force.

He strode back out into the corridor and found the victims of the Night Rangers in a loose, fearful cluster. They were all looking to him and Chase for guidance.

“Please tell me you’re a policeman,” said a petite, dark-haired woman.

“Concerned citizens,” Chase corrected, helping the girl from the room as she walked on bare feet across the rough flooring.

“This place is on fire!” said one of the others. “Oh god, those creeps left us in here to die!”

“Not gonna happen,” Jack told them. He shot a look at Chase, lowering his voice. “I’ll go for the roof, make sure it’s clear. There’s got to be a fire escape at the back. Get them ready to run. Give me a two count, then follow.”

“Copy that,” said Chase. “Be right behind you.”

Jack sprinted down to the end of the corridor, turning his momentum into shouldering open a push-bar door. He spilled out onto the roof above the entrance of the Crankcase, and immediately a gust of hot, dry air washed over him. Smoke and licks of flame were spilling out the front of the strip club. He heard the crack and pop of bottles behind the bar exploding in the heat, and down where the MC had parked their motorcycles there was a chaotic mess of angry bikers trying to get their precious rides away from the building inferno. That was good; the confusion would work to his advantage, but not for long.

With the flickering, dying neon of the club’s illuminated sign between him and the bikers, they couldn’t see him moving around up there, but it was obvious that the front of the bar was not a viable escape route. The Crankcase was going to burn to the ground, and nothing would stop that from happening. Jack guessed that like law enforcement in the town of Deadline, whatever had passed for their fire department had long since been abandoned.

He turned around and scrambled up along a raised section of the flat roof, heading toward the back of the building. The heat was radiating up here too, and sweat prickled his chest. Jack blinked to clear his vision and moved low and quick, aiming the pistol into every shadowed corner. He’d been sloppy, letting that big thug get the drop on him. The next time it might cost him his life.

He circled around a skylight, thin streamers of smoke issuing out from the places where the window frames were loose. Inside, the flickering orange glow made it look like a portal into a furnace.

Peering over the edge of the roof, Jack saw a wide yard at the rear of the Crankcase with ten-foot brick walls topped by barbed wire. The only way in or out was a metal gate that opened onto a backstreet, and from his vantage point he caught sight of a heavy steel padlock securing it. Overfilled Dumpsters and heaps of beer crates congregated in one corner, and a black Chevrolet van was parked along the line of the far wall. Three more Night Rangers were out there, two of them arguing about what to do while the third one milled around, anxious and twitchy. Each man was armed with a TEC-9 semiautomatic.

“Screw this,” one of them was saying. “I ain’t sticking around here!”

“You want Rydell to know you left your post?” snapped the other.