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She moves to stand in the elevator doorway to keep it from closing.
There’s a large potted fern just by the entryway. I drop Shoulder Injury on top of Kneecap and go for it. I drag the plant across the floor and use it to jam the elevator so no one else can sneak up on us like this.
I drag the bodies of the dead guards one-by-one over to the emergency stairwell exit, but before I can get it blocked, the door opens. I don’t let them all get out. I shoot the first one and then shove him back against whoever is behind him. I hear grunts as bodies fall under the weight of their comrade.
Before the other two can get out from under him, I put bullets in brains.
I return to the lobby and finish moving the other bodies in front of the door.
Satisfied that this has bought us at least a few minutes, I grab Shoulder Injury under the arms. He groans as I relocate him to the security office.
“Watch that one,” I say to Mina, angling my head toward the guard I shot in the kneecap. “Shoot him again if he moves, but don’t kill him.”
She nods and holds her gun on him while I take Shoulder Injury back into the guard booth. I drop him in one of the chairs just as he starts to come around so I punch him again. He slumps, and I dig through the desk drawers until I find what I’m looking for: zip ties. I’ve yet to find a security office without them.
I bind the guard’s wrists and ankles with the plastic ties and let out a breath. Fuck my life. I can understand how the first few reached us. And after hearing what “might have been” gunfire, or a missing guard from upstairs not returning, they would have sent others to investigate.
The first three on the elevator and the three on the stairwell soon after make sense because it takes longer to run down fourteen flights of stairs than to ride down in an electric box. But I don’t know why there was yet another round of guards coming down both the elevator and stairs.
Either way, we have to know how many more are in the building. I’m not wasting this much ammo and not getting what I came for.
I go back into the lobby to find Kneecap where I left him with Mina’s gun still trained on him, but he’s beginning to come out of it.
“Go question the other guy. We need to know how many and who is still up on fourteen.”
She lowers her gun and goes back to the guard I left gift wrapped for her.
“I have a few questions,” I say to Kneecap as Mina closes the door to the security office behind her.
I hear a series of screams from the office and smirk before hauling my guy up and pinning him to the wall.
11
MINA
My hostage talked within the first five minutes. I was barely getting started. He has a throwing star in each thigh, and the guy is actually crying and blubbering right now. It’s several more minutes before I hear silence from the lobby. Either Brian got his intel or lost control and killed the guy.
I prop open the door and call out, “Brian?”
“Yeah?”
It sounds like he’s on the far end of the lobby. “What do you have on your Bingo Card?”
“Four,” he says. “A guard and our three targets. You?”
“Same,” I call back.
I hear gunfire, two shots in quick succession. I follow Brian’s lead and put two in my guy’s head as well. When I get back out to the lobby, a walkie talkie crackles. It’s attached to the belt of the guard Brian was interrogating.
“He broke like a small child,” Brian says. “Absolutely no tolerance for pain. So disappointing. They really don’t build them like they used to.”
Brian changes out his magazine, and it reminds me to do the same.
“What’s going on down there?” a voice calls through the walkie talkie. Either the last guard, or one of our targets.
Brian puts a finger up to his mouth in the universal “Shhh” sign and unclips the device.
“We handled the threat,” Brian says.
