Page 98 of Rough Hard Fierce (Chicago Underground 1-3)
Shelly broke her silence. “He must have found out.”
I barely processed her words, my mind banging against the futility of our situation.
“It’s for the best.” Shelly heaved a sigh. “I wish you weren’t here, though.”
Who would lock us in? Was it better to try and wait them out, maybe arm ourselves with whatever we could find? Or should we call out to them, try to reason or bluff our way out?
“Do you think,” she said musingly, “they’ll give Bailey to your dad?”
“What?” Her words sank in. I backed Shelly up against the ribbed metal wall, shaking her, bullying her, furious that she would even say such a thing. “Have you gone insane? You have, haven’t you? I could kill you! We aren’t going to die. We aren’t. We’re getting out of here, and I’m going home to Bailey. You can do whatever crazy shit floats your fucking boat, but leave me out of it. Do you understand? Do you?”
I was the crazy one, raging with impotence and venting fury at my best friend.
Shelly looked past me, her glassy eyes reflecting red and orange flames.
I glanced behind me. “Shit.”
A fire spread nimbly along the perimeter of the back of the warehouse, following the path of a metal wall that shouldn’t burn. It came around the sides, and I yanked us both away from the wall just as it came around and engulfed the front. Panting on the ground, we were trapped in a rectangle of fire.
Shelly’s words came back to me. “The whole house is rigged to burn if the security gets tripped. No paper trail, just ashes.”
Philip liked fire. Philip was paranoid. One of us here had betrayed him.
Now I understood what Shelly was saying. Philip must have known someone had betrayed him and set a trap. He’d probably thought it was me, though I doubted he really cared that much about Shelly either.
There was no way we could get out of a locked warehouse. There was sure as hell no way we could get out of walls of flame. I glanced up at the ceiling. No way.
I was really going to die here.
The flames leaped from the far corner onto a crate, which burned around the edges before it puffed into an oversize torch. It was only a matter of time.
Already my breathing was labored. Some of it was panic, but probably the fire was using up the oxygen. Would we suffocate first or would we burn? What a choice.
Oh, Bailey. Now that I’d caught up to Shelly’s line of thought, my question was the same. Would they give her to my dad? He’d raised me alone, after all, though he was twenty years older now. It wasn’t so bad a fate for Bailey, I told myself, trying to ignore the sickness in my stomach. If I was upset that I couldn’t see her again, didn’t get to watch her grow, that was my own selfishness talking. I’d brought this on myself when I hadn’t trusted Colin.
Oh God, did Colin know Philip had done this? For all I knew, he was the one who’d watched us enter and locked us inside. He’d found the money, the cop’s business card, so he had every reason to believe I had betrayed him. I wanted to believe he wouldn’t have done this. He would have confronted me, let me explain. Anything other than kill me—and like this.
But I’d always been a realist, and Colin was a hardened criminal, after all. A mean son of a bitch, he’d once told me. I’d denied it then, but it might be true after all. He beat up a man just for messing with me when he’d barely known me. He’d probably killed before. Just because he’d let me live with him, just because he’d fucked me didn’t mean I got special treatment.
Or maybe this was the special treatment. Maybe regular enemies got a bullet to the head, but traitors like Shelly and me got punished. Not just killed but burned, like fucking witches with a phony trial.
God, I needed to do something. I couldn’t just sit here and wait.
I ran to the nearest crate, one standing near the middle that hadn’t yet caught fire. My eyes burned from the heat and the smoke. I groped at the sides, searching for a latch. I moved around the crate, leaving a trail of blood as the coarse wood scraped open my fingertips. Finally I caught on a padlock.
It wasn’t any good. I couldn’t budge it. Then Shelly’s hands pushed me aside. She reached to the top and pulled herself up as if to climb it, but then stomped down on the padlock, and it broke apart.
Together we pulled aside the opening to reveal large black containers stacked up like legos.
“Help me up,” I said. My voice came out scratchy, but she heard me and bent to give my foot a lift. I caught hold of the second to highest container by its top, and my feet found holds on the lower ones. Slowly and with Shelly’s support behind me, I dragged myself up to the top.
The smoke was thicker up here, and I could barely open my eyes. I waved Shelly away, and she disappeared into a cloud of smoke. I rocked, gently at first and then harder, until the containers toppled onto the concrete.
When I opened my eyes, I saw one of the containers had cracked open, spilling large, gleaming guns like a macabre treasure chest. I forced myself up, but Shelly had already picked up one of the guns. She aimed it at the fire and pulled the trigger—nothing happened.
“Bullets?” she asked hoarsely.
We looked through the rest of the guns, crouching low to avoid the worst of the smoke, but there were no bullets packed with them. That would be too convenient.
