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The air was wrong too. In an American strip club, the air snapped with lust. The air here was thick and oppressive. I could almost feel it weighing me down, pushing me down into the chair at the scratched wooden table.
One of the waitresses hurried over with a tray filled with our drinks and set them down on the table.
“Let me know if you need anything else,” she snapped quickly in Spanish, then hurried off to the group of guys flagging her down a few tables over.
“Does something feel off to you, boys?” I asked, continuing to look around under the guise of checking out the male patrons while I tipped back the shot.
“Yup,” Deo said, his eyes discreetly fixed on the thug outside the kitchen who looked like he had a stick up his ass—something had to be keeping his back ramrod straight like that.
I sat up taller, trying to mark out the amount of resistance we’d have here. There was stick-guy and two guys at a table closest to the benches who kept watching the girls—not like something they wanted to eat, but rather, like they were waiting for the girls to try to make their great escape. And three more men at a table on the other side of the room who were paying an equal amount of attention to us and the girls.
Deo shook his head. “Don’t even think about it, Greta. We’re outnumbered here, and you know it.”
Damn it, he was right.
ZiettoVito nodded, kind of looking like he was ready to grab me if I did something foolish.
Jeez, I wasn’t a complete idiot. There were at least six of them, probably armed, and who the hell knew how many more assholes they had stashed in the kitchen and in the back rooms. Shit went wrong even when we had it planned down to the very last detail. I wasn’t about to start shooting assholes at random and hoping for the best.
“This is so not what I meant when I said I needed a drink,” I muttered, staring at my empty shot glass.
“Maybe you just need another one,” Deo said.
I held up my hand to signal for another round when the bar door opened and four men walked in. Four men who were clearly here to cause trouble. The look in their eyes. The tense set of their shoulders. Oh, and the automatic weapons in their hands kind of gave it away too.
“Get down,” Vito barked as he grabbed onto my arm and yanked me to the ground beneath the table.
Just in time, too, because the bullets started to fly the second my ass hit the floor. I was going to shower in disinfectant when I got home.
“Grazie,” I said, though I don’t think Vito heard me over the deafening rapid-fire going on all around us.
Stick-guy and the guys at the tables had joined in, firing back at the newcomers.
“Care to pick a side?” I asked because cowering on a sticky floor beneath a table was about as much fun as it sounded.
And while shooting assholes at random might not be smart, when the assholes started shooting at me? Let’s just say, I wasn’t going to sit on my ass and twiddle my thumbs.
Deo shrugged, raised his gun, and shot at one of the newcomers.
Okay, so we were shooting for the home team, were we?
I grabbed my gun out of its holster and followed suit. Vito did too.
But just as the first newcomer fell to the floor, one of the girls who’d been acting as a lap-warmer scurried across the floor, shrieking until her body jerked to a stop five feet in front of me and hit the ground hard.
I darted forward on my hands and knees and grabbed hold of her beneath the arms.
“Get back here,” Vito barked, though he was already laying down cover fire.
“No, I thought it was a good time to go for a stroll,” I jibed as I pulled the girl back with me beneath the table.
Deo and Vito kept firing while I lifted the girl up just enough so that her head rested in my lap.
Her dewy, golden face was marred by a row of ugly bruises—they looked like fingerprints. Far worse, though, were the four bullet holes in her narrow torso, each one of them leaking out blood like a slow faucet, saturating her threadbare dress and pooling on the floor.
The gunfire had stopped. The home team had won. I could see the bodies of the four newcomers sprawled out and bleeding inside the door.
“Do you have any family nearby?” I asked the girl, dismissing the dead assholes. “I can call them for you.”
