Page 26 of Lone Wolf

Arms tensed with a slight bend at the elbows, he padded swiftly up a few steps, acquiring more of her critical mass and putting her body between him and the elevator. If one of her partners opened fire from the car, she’d absorb the rounds first.

Her back was pressed to the bunched curtains, her shoulder blade nearly touching the frame of the elevator doors.

He stayed four steps down to cut his profile from the elevator’s vantage. He was merely a head, the top of a torso, two arms aiming a gun. That was all of him they’d have. And yet they’d be clumped neatly before him. Once the doors parted, he could aerate her and the elevator with a tight grouping.

Now the third-floor indicator glowed.

A ding.

A forever delay before the doors peeled wide.

Evan took the slack out of the trigger.

A teenage girl stepped out.

The very motion brought her to the edge of the catwalk. Alarm in her eyes, staring down at the wreckage below. And then a single word muffled by emotion: “Dad?”

Evan said, “Get ba—”

The woman sprang behind Jayla Hill, wrapping her up with an arm across her throat.

Jayla cried out. Her head twisted back, the intruder’s face hidden behind hers. She had braces on her teeth, a spotting of acne on her chin. Seventeen years old.

The intruder’s shoulder dipped as she reached behind her and entwined a hand in the curtain. Gripping it in a gloved fist, careful to keep Jayla between herself and Evan, she moved slowly across the face of the sliding glass door, pulling the curtain from the rod, each wooden hoop giving way with a ping.

Evan came up another step, iron sights level, front post pegged on the rear notch, both aligned with the slender edge of the woman’s forehead peeking out just above Jayla’s shoulder. The woman was precise, leaving little of her to hit.

More curtain rings gave way: Ping. Ping. Ping.

“Steady,” he told the woman. “She’s a kid. She’s just a kid.”

Ping. Ping. Ping.

The girl was breathing hard, hyperventilating.

“Let her go and I’ll let you go,” he said.

The woman kept on, leaving no separation between herself and the girl, moving with greater vigilance yet.

Ping.

Ping.

Ping.

The curtain tore free, heaping on the catwalk with a sigh of fabric.

The woman unlocked the sliding glass door and flung it open behind her. The November chill crawled inside, curled itself through the interior, wound itself around Evan on the stairs.

Twisting her hand, the woman took up the fabric around her forearm.

Evan sensed the gears turning, a premonition of what she was about to do, but he couldn’t catch up to it, not all the way.

“Hang on,” he said, as much to himself as to her.

The woman remained skillfully hidden behind Jayla, Evan tracking the visible parts of her with his pistol. A flash of elbow, a sliver of leg, and then the woman’s hand flared up into view, holding a flex-cuff prepped in a loop. The noose lowered over the girl’s head, fastened around her throat, and zippered tight, the noise strident.

Jayla cried out, a strangled wheeze, flecks of saliva flying from her mouth. Her fingernails dug at the strip of plastic that had embedded in her throat, cinching off her airway.