Nickel City Storm Warning (Gideon Rimes Book 3) by Gary Ross (i can read books TXT) 📕

hair.” Mark thumbed in a message and bared his teeth in a predator’s smile. “Follow me.”

38

Once we reached the south stairwell door, Mark turned to Rafael and Travis. “They’re below us,” he said. “Once you’re past this point, it’s three stories down to the lobby with no way out of the stairwell.” He pointed to his phone, which showed three figures still moving cautiously.” I have your number, sergeant. When I text you NOW, ease this door open and start down as quiet as you can.”

“Where will you be?”

“At the bottom. They’ll have nowhere to go. But we have to hurry.”

Rafael looked at Mark for a moment before nodding.

Mark led me around a corner to a STAFF ONLY elevator and produced a keycard to activate it. Ten seconds later we were descending. When the stainless steel doors slid open we were in a service corridor off the main lobby. Mark looked at his phone and texted Rafael as we rounded the corner to the stairwell door. He handed me his phone. “A flight above. Almost here. What do you think?”

The image was low def but I saw the woman was in the middle, the redhead in a DPS blazer pressed tight against her right side and a balding man in a white shirt hugging her left.

“Maybe this is a hostage situation,” I said. “They look like conjoined triplets.” I passed the phone back. “If it was the two of them and the two of us…”

He nodded. “Hard to get off a clean shot in a narrow stairwell with a hostage and cops coming down from above. Bullets could go anywhere.” He took a look at his screen before pocketing his phone. “But it’s go time if we’re gonna do anything.”

He opened the door, which squeaked loudly as I followed him into the stairwell.

The noise brought the bald man in white shirt and khakis hurtling down the remaining stairs, right arm above his head and beginning a downward swing with the knife in his hand.

Though he had an isolated target, Mark had no time to draw and take aim. Instead, he reached up to grab the man’s right wrist with his left hand and spun him like a dance partner. “Gonna use a blade, at least learn how,” he said, clamping his other hand on the man’s wrist. Wrenching the knife arm down, Mark pulled the man in for a bear hug.

Sidestepping them and starting up the stairs toward the man in the DPS blazer, I heard the sound of something sharp punching into a beach ball full of gelatin, followed by a brief exhalation. Next came a muffled whump and the thud of something heavy hitting the floor.

“For Jake Ferguson,” I heard Mark whisper.

Wincing at what had happened behind me, Wally Ray Tucker—in a wig guaranteed not to look out of place against pale skin—made sure I saw the knife he was holding to the abdomen of the trembling woman whose left arm he kept in a hammerlock. She was small, dark-haired, young, maybe Native or Latina. Wearing a simple summer dress, she had no uniform to identify her as a hotel employee, no lanyard with ID to say she had attended the conference. She was likely a tourist who had passed two men at the wrong moment and now looked frightened, maybe terrified because she’d just seen what a knife like the one against her belly could do to the human body.

“There’s nowhere to go, Wally Ray,” I said. “Copperhead can’t help you. You made sure of that when you created a panic to get away. But you don’t have to die here.”

He cocked his head, as if uncertain he had heard me correctly. Then he swallowed, hard. “She dies first, Rimes.” Gravelly voice full of new resolution, he shifted to put his back against the wall and moved down two steps, using his hostage as a shield. “And if the fuckers trying to tiptoe down the steps behind me don’t stop, she dies now.”

Rafael and Travis, guns drawn, came into view on the landing above and froze.

“Why don’t y’all put those guns away,” Wally Ray said. “Bullets can go every which way in a tight space like this. You might hit me, but you might hit her or these other assholes. No matter who gets shot, one finger twitch from either one of you and I guarantee this bitch will look like the cat that swallowed the cherry bomb.”

Rafael and Travis holstered their weapons.

“Ain’t this a crazy picture!” Wally Ray laughed, his head half behind the woman’s. “Got us a white man’s standoff. Above me a nigger and a spic. Below me another nigger. In my arms…” He tightened the hammerlock. “What are you, anyway, darlin’?”

“American,” the woman said, tears rolling down her already wet cheeks.

“Now you know that’s not what I mean!” He twisted harder. “Be more specific.”

More tears. “Polish American! Amy Ann Zielinski!”

“I’ll be damned!” Wally Ray said.

“One way or another,” I said, remembering Drea’s book.

He ignored me. “Nobody knows who anybody is these days. I mean, I could believe it if she was Italian, but Polish?” He snorted. “No way she’s a hundred percent. That’s what this country has come to, with all this race mixing nonsense.” He shook his head. “Ironic the only other white man here killed my friend Duke. Looks like he wants to do the same to me.” He took a breath. “So what are we gonna do, people?”

I glanced back at Mark, standing above Stanley Maxwell and gazing at Wally Ray with unblinking intensity that would have snapped the supremacist’s neck if it had hands. Rafael and Travis stared at him too, jaws clenched. I knew we all were calculating scenarios, anticipating the consequences of specific actions to end the standoff. We wanted this bastard but not at the cost of this woman’s life.

“You’re right, Wally Ray,” I said. “Nobody knows who anybody is.” I made a sweeping gesture that included Mark and the detectives. “These cops here? They