Nickel City Crossfire by Gary Ross (children's books read aloud TXT) 📕

saying anything, gun hand trembling. Then he started to giggle, an unnerving sound even amid loud music.

With my free hand, I stuffed the pocket square from his suit jacket into his mouth and pushed it deeper as he tried to speak. Then I removed his gun from the cross-draw holster on his left hip, unscrewed the still warm suppressor, and tossed it aside. The gun and his cell phone went into one of my pockets and plasticuffs came out of another. Rolling him onto his right side, I cuffed his hands behind him and then his feet at the ankles.

“You shot yourself, QC,” I said. “If you need a tourniquet, all I’ve got is your tie. But if you try to scream, I’ll tie it around your mouth, and you might bleed out. Should I use it to stop the bleeding?”

Still on his side against the edges of the stairs, he nodded, hard.

With my tactical knife, I cut away enough of his pants to show me the bullet was likely lodged in his meaty left hip. The rate of blood flow did not indicate arterial damage or the need for a tourniquet. I cut a long strip off his pants and tied it around the entry wound just tight enough to make a temporary bandage. Then I rolled him back as far as both sets of cuffs would allow. His angle was awkward against the stairs. He looked uncomfortable.

“The good news is, you won’t bleed out and you still have your dick,” I said, undoing his brown and gold tie and pulling it from around his neck. “The bad news? I don’t trust you to keep quiet.” I wrapped the tie around his mouth twice and knotted it between his teeth. Flaring nostrils told me he could breathe. Then his beady eyes became discs full of fear.

Keisha had come down the steps and now stood behind me, gun in hand. “Hello, QC. The bitch is back.”

“Keisha, eyes on the main course,” I said. “Yes, it’s personal but this idiot’s only the appetizer.”

“I know.” She slipped the gun back into her shoulder bag. “I just want to see him sweat.” Moving from behind me, she put one boot heel against the makeshift bandage and pressed down with all her weight.

QC’s eyes grew so wide his irises were ringed by white. He shook and jittered and made a horrible muffled trumpeting in his throat, cheeks filling like a bellows. When she stepped back, he was puffing hard, his forehead slick. His eyes were still fearful but now wet.

“There,” she said, as I stood. “That was for Odell.”

Just then the front door opened, letting in another blast of cold air. Harlow Graves walked in, his face twisted in apparent disgust, and said something I couldn’t hear over his shoulder to Oscar, who was behind him. Graves saw me and stopped in mid-sentence as I leveled my Glock at him. Then he saw Keisha and QC. He started to turn as if to head back outside, but Oscar caught his arm and twisted it into a hammerlock that kept him angled to one side. Graves muttered something about making us pay—until I motioned them over, placed the barrel against his forehead, and told him one word or wrong move would make Rosalind a widow.

Oscar looked at Keisha and smiled. “Girl, your daddy is sure gonna be thrilled to see you. Soon as I can, I’ll hug you for him.” Then he looked at QC, who had slid down to the floor in front of the stairs. “Which one is he?”

“The fake cousin,” I said. “He shot himself when I shocked him.” I looked at Graves. “I take it he denied any involvement.”

“Denied every word,” Oscar said. “Told me he was just a lawyer who didn’t know anything about FBF.”

“Yet here he is sharing guard duty with FBF’s chairman of the board, and the CEO, both of them cold-blooded killers.” I gestured to Graves’s tie. “We need to truss him up the same way, so we can finish this without interference.”

Nodding, Oscar removed Graves’s tie as I pulled out more plasticuffs. It took less than a minute to immobilize and silence Graves, whom we left on the floor near QC.

Despite the lessening of fervor and the slowing of the drumming that meant the song was winding down, I gave Oscar and Keisha a moment to embrace. I took that time to type and send my final text message of the night. Afterward, I asked if they were ready. Both nodded, tears in their eyes. Then, with Keisha on my left and Oscar on the other side of her, each of us with an arm around her, we pushed open the door and started down the aisle. I kept my right hand inside my jacket, near my shoulder holster.

In a billowing white surplice with a kente cloth stole bracketing the cross that hung from his neck, Dr. Markham had just returned to the wooden lectern. When he saw us, his mouth fell open. “Oh, my God!” he said after a heartbeat or two, so close to the microphone his words reverberated. “Even as the good Lord takes one of our children from us, he sends another one home!” He pointed to us. “Praise the might of our Lord!”

Seated at the piano with her back to the congregation, Loni spun around on the bench and froze, clerical collar bobbling with her swallows, her white surplice and black underskirt twisting and riding up to reveal too much thigh, which would have been considered indecent if anyone had been paying attention to her.

But as far as I could tell, all eyes were on us as we made our way through the center of the assembly. I saw mouths hanging open, smiles, looks of disbelief, confusion on the faces of children and a few of the elderly—and Jen, in her purple ski jacket and rising from an end seat beside Bianca. Following my texted instructions, she moved near the entrance