The Final Twist by Jeffery Deaver (free ebooks romance novels txt) 📕

turned to the man’s girlfriend. “Did he really say ‘budging’? Are we in the high school lunch line?”

Blushing, the man grimaced and backed off. His girlfriend muttered to him acerbically, “Told you not to be an asshole.”

The bouncer took over the defense of the castle. “You can’t come in. I told you.” He stood up. He wore an expandable baton on his hip. Shaw had been whipped by one. They really hurt.

He looked over the man. “I’m going inside to get my niece and then we’re going to leave. She’s sixteen.”

The bouncer paused. His eyes swept the sidewalk. “She’s what?”

The man, trying not to look stricken, glanced inside. Then back to Shaw. “All right. Go in. Get her. Just make it fast.”

Shaw strode into the packed, sweaty crowd. He wasn’t exactly sure what the point of the place was. There was a disc jockey and some people were dancing, or gyrating, on a large hardwood floor. Many sat on mismatched chairs and couches or were perched on stairways or wooden crates. They were shouting and drinking and vaping and smoking pot. Some were passed out. A few had thrown up; he navigated carefully.

No, this wasn’t just hell, Shaw thought. It was Dante’s Ninth Level—an appropriate metaphor, considering that a man named Dante Mladic was the owner of the club.

He made a circuit of the mad place, making his way through the sweating bodies, avoiding jostling, avoiding several drunk women and one man who came on to him.

Then, in the back, he noted two doors.

It was the one on the right he wanted because a guard sat on the chair just beside it. He was lean and about thirty, with curly blond hair and razor-sharp features—his nose, cheekbones, his chin. He was hunched over, reading something on his phone.

Shaw staggered up and tried the door. It was open, but instantly the man was on his feet, pushing it closed. “What’re you doing?”

“Bathroom.” Shaw’s speech was slurred. He thought he was doing a pretty good job. The rewards business from time to time required a bit of acting.

“S’over there.” The big man gestured with a thumb.

“No, it’s broken. Something’s broken. A pipe.”

“Get the fuck out of here. I’ll have you thrown out.” The Balkan accent was faint.

“Bathroom,” Shaw said again and walked to the second door, and stepped into a business office, which was empty and dark.

“The fuck,” the man said and followed him in.

“Bathroom.” Shaw kept with his preferred line of dialogue.

When the guard’s fist drove forward toward Shaw’s solar plexus, he easily sidestepped and dropped his center of gravity. He executed a fair wrestling takedown, his right arm going between the man’s legs and around to his spine. In college his coach had said, “Can’t be shy in this sport. You queasy about going for the jewels, take up fencing.”

Shaw leveraged up and, gripping the man’s collar with his left hand, he took him off the floor entirely and dropped him hard on the oak. Factories made very hard floors and his head banged with a sound you could hear over the music.

Still he needed to debilitate the man, so he dropped his fist into his gut. Hard but nothing broke.

He got out of the way in time to avoid the vomiting.

It was one hundred percent certain that Colter Shaw had just committed an unprovoked assault (the fear of an attack) and battery (an unwanted touching and, in this case, head banging and gut punching).

The question remained: Was it justifiable?

He believed it was.

Shaw was here because Mack McKenzie had finally traced the gray van into which Tessy Vasquez had possibly disappeared near Ghirardelli Square. Through several layers of offshore corporations, she’d learned that it was ultimately owned by a company controlled by Mladic, a San Francisco club owner. And suspected drug dealer and sex trafficker.

His base of operations was this club, the Steelworks.

If the man presently gasping for breath in front of him was not involved in crimes, Shaw would have some consequences to face. But he’d seen no option.

So he searched the man.

And discovered two things. One was a Glock 17 semiauto pistol, which he slipped into his waistband. The other was some information. His driver’s license indicated he was Gregor Mladic, presumably Dante’s son or nephew.

Make that three things.

In his rear pocket was a packet of zip ties.

Two of which Shaw used to bind his wrists and ankles.

Now, for the door on the right.

He opened it.

Colter Shaw drew his gun and started silently down the stairs descending into the old building’s massive, pungent basement, redolent of mold and heating oil.

52

The pounding feet on the dance floor above them had stopped. Everyone had evacuated. The roar of the flames was the only sound encircling them.

Shaw turned to the hole they broke open in the Sheetrock and said to Nita, “Up the stairs now, fast. There’ll be police.”

“But . . . what about you?”

He smiled to her. “Not yet.”

And turned back, jogging to the far end of the corridor.

It had been twenty minutes since Shaw had descended the stairs from the door on the right down to the cellar of the Steelworks club, and the blaze was growing by the minute—the blaze set by the men in the TV room, under what was surely Dante Mladic’s order to destroy incriminating evidence in the office.

The TV men were gone, Nita was gone.

But Colter Shaw knew that he was not alone down here.

Choking, his mouth covered with his untucked shirt, he made his way down the main corridor, toward the far end.

Shaw believed he heard sirens, though it was hard to say over the raging fire.

At the end of the main corridor he turned down the hallway to the right. He drew his flashlight and hurried forward. Now that the footsteps above were gone and he was around the corner from the flames, he could hear thuds and the muffled cries of “Help” and “Get me out! Please!”

Shaw couldn’t kick the door in—it opened outward—so