Page 17 of Finding Lexie
“No. I’ll be at the bottom to catch you and to slow your descent.”
“Midas, that’s not a fireman’s pole or anything. It’s a freaking gutter. There’s nothing to hold on to!”
Midas took her head in his hands and tilted her face up to his. “You can do this, Lex. You have to do this. I don’t know who those men are, yelling in the stairwell, but I’m assuming by the blasts I heard that they aren’t here to pass out lollipops and spread good cheer. Yes, I’ve got a rifle, but I don’t have unlimited ammo. We have to get out of here. I will not let them get their hands on you again. Understand?”
She swallowed hard, took a deep breath, then nodded.
“Okay?” he asked, trying not to be impatient, even though he knew every second counted. They needed to be out of here by the time the men in the hallway got to this room.
“Okay. I’ve always wanted to try pole dancing. This is kinda like that.”
It wasn’t, but he didn’t contradict her or laugh at her joke. “Watch me, then do exactly what I do. We’ve got this.”
She nodded, and Midas didn’t waste any more time. He hated leaving her in the room, but they couldn’t go out the window at the same time. He regretted that they were on the second floor, but at least if either of them fell, it wouldn’t kill them.
Ducking, Midas threw one leg over the windowsill and stepped out. The ledge was only about three inches wide, but that was enough space for him to quickly inch along and grab the gutter.
“Now, Lex. Come on,” he urged as he did his best to brace his boots against the slippery metal downspout.
He waited until Lexie was on the windowsill before letting gravity do its thing. He slid downward quickly, in a semi-controlled manner, until his feet hit the ground.
Immediately looking up, he saw Lexie doing her best to cling to the gutter. He mentally swore when he saw her bare feet. Fuck. She’d only had on a pair of flip-flops when they’d rescued her from the desert, but those would have been better than nothing right about now. He hadn’t even thought about grabbing them for her; he was too concerned about getting her out of the room.
It couldn’t be helped now. He’d find something for her feet later. First things first.
“Do it,” he called out in a loud whisper. The hair on the back of Midas’s neck was sticking straight up and he felt like a sitting duck. The exam room faced an alley, which at the moment was empty, but he knew it wouldn’t be for long. He and Lexie needed to get the hell out of there and find some cover.
Amazingly, Lexie’s bare feet were actually a good thing. Her skin helped her cling to the gutter, making her descent painfully slow. When she was within reach, Midas reached up and snatched her off the side of the building. He wanted to carry her—oh, how he hated to put her clean bare feet down in the dirt of the alley—but he needed his hands free to protect them both as they fled.
“Good?” he asked.
Lexie nodded.
Without another word, Midas hooked her fingers in the waistband of his pants and headed down the alley, away from the front of the hospital. Any second, he expected to hear someone yelling at them from one of the windows on the second floor, but miraculously, they made it to the end of the alley undetected.
But they didn’t exactly blend in. Two white people, in a predominantly black neighborhood, stood out like a sore thumb. And the fact that he was dressed in desert fatigues and had a rifle slung over his shoulder didn’t exactly help matters either. Everyone they passed would be able to remember them easily, and tell anyone who might be hunting for them which direction they’d gone.
“This is two, anyone got ears?” Midas said into the mic of the radio as he and Lexie made their way deeper into the neighborhood around the hospital.
Silence greeted him. Shit.
They’d known these radios weren’t top of the line before they’d left the States, but no one had expected them to completely go tits up in the middle of the op. Midas wasn’t too worried. His team wouldn’t leave without him and Lexie, and they’d talked enough about backup plans to their backup plans to know what to do, but he hated feeling cut off from his friends.
Midas split his attention between where they were going and Lexie. The streets and alleys they were winding through were dirt covered, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t broken glass and other things that could cut her feet. He also hated that she hadn’t gotten as much of the IV into her system as he’d hoped. Fuck, the woman had just been held hostage for months, and now they were on the run from who knew what.
But Midas was sure that if they’d stayed in that hospital room, they’d both probably be dead. Those blasts he’d heard were explosions. And when he’d looked down the alley after descending the gutter, he’d seen smoke rising from the front of the building.
He prayed his team was all right, but his mission was Lexie. Rescuing her had been the objective from the beginning, and nothing had changed.
Midas stopped at the end of another alley and peered around the corner, only to swear under his breath and turn back the way they came.
“What? What did you see?” Lexie asked as she followed him.
“Nothing good,” he said grimly.
He’d seen half a dozen men coming down the street toward the alley. All six held semi-automatic rifles and didn’t look happy. There was more and more yelling coming from all around them, as well. It sounded like the men were riling up their neighbors. He had no way to know for sure if these were allies of the kidnappers, but Midas had no desire to face off against a bunch of armed men, for any reason.
He frowned as he tried to think of where to go, but the number of shouting voices around them seemed to be increasing by the minute.
