Page 27 of Dark Angel
Styles grinned. “If the shoe fits.”
“Maybe someone needs to teach you who’s the boss around here.” Dragon Tattoo oozed menace and took a few steps closer toward him. “There’s four of us. We don’t need permission to take your girl. We take what we want. This is our turf.”
Four guys high on crack would be unpredictable and if Dragon Tattoo fired at close range, it would be curtains for him and a long painful death for Beth. If she had any sense, she’d run as soon as he landed the first punch—he wouldn’t draw down on them, not with his service pistol. Killing them would mean they’d be stuck under a mountain of paperwork for a week. He flicked her a glance. She’d removed her shoes and was assessing the situation. Relaxing, he sucked in a deep breath and blew it out slowly. His attention moved from the waving pistol to the man’s eyes. The one thing that Styles had learned from a young age was that in a street fight you never allow your opponent the opportunity to strike first.
He took one step forward and, taking the weight on the ball of his left foot, brought up his right boot between the man’s legs. As Dragon Tattoo buckled over, he kneed him in the face and then snatched the pistol from his hand and tossed it to Beth. She would have his back. As the other members of the group blindly searched for their weapons, he spun and landed a roundhouse punch to the second man’s kidney, danced two steps to the left, and brought his boot down hard on the third man’s knee. Three down—one out cold, two writhing in agony—one to go. The fourth guy was heading toward Beth, but she had him covered. Styles aimed kicks to his attackers’ heads, and they stopped complaining. He turned at the sound of a body hitting the sidewalk. A grunt came from his left as Beth pulled the heel of her stiletto from the temple of the fourth man, and calmly replaced the shoe on her foot.
Styles gloved up and then bent to collect the weapons. He stripped them and tossed them into various dumpsters. He walked back to Beth and stared at the man crumpled at her feet. “You could have killed him doing that. What were you thinking?”
“I didn’t need to think about it at all. He was a threat that needed to be dealt with and I used the appropriate force to take him down before he killed you.” Beth stared at him intently. “If I’d shot him at close range, he’d be dead for sure. I figure, worst-case scenario, he’ll just have a bad headache for a few days.” She leaned against the wall exhaling a long sigh. “I didn’t hit him hard enough to kill him.” She folded her arms across her chest and glared at him. “And yes, before you ask, I do know the difference.” Annoyance creased her face. “You know, you weren’t exactly gentle with them either.” She indicated to the men littering the alleyway.
Keeping his calm wasn’t easy but Styles sucked in a breath and shrugged. “That was necessary. Four on two.” When she ignored him and walked away, heading toward an open door, he followed. “Where the heck are you going?”
“I’m not done here.” Beth held the pistol out in front of her and approached the door. “FBI, hit the ground, hands on your heads.”
Drawing his weapon, Styles pressed his back to the wall and peeked around the door. “I don’t see anyone.” Scanning the room, he followed Beth inside the small brick storage space and gagged at the stench of unwashed bodies, urine, and drugs. “What are you doing now? We need to get out of here.”
“Shutting down their operation.” Beth smiled at him and ran a finger over the stacks of bills neatly lined up on a table, fresh from a counting machine and secured with rubber bands. “Looks like this is where they count the street takings and distribute the drugs. Look at the bottles over there. They supply the cooks with everything they need. They run the whole show from here.”
Styles moved his attention over the ton of greasy bills of all denominations sitting in a pile in the middle of the table waiting to be counted. On another table a stash of drugs, broken into neat packages ready for sale on the streets. “We can’t call this in, not without explaining why we’re here.”
He stared at her in disbelief as she pushed the small pistol into her belt and casually tossed him a wad of one-hundred-dollar bills, followed by another. She tucked two similar stacks under her arm and smiled at him. “Untraceable cash. Don’t come over all righteous with me. I’m not asking you to keep it. We’ll drop it by a church or shelter. It would be a shame to burn all of it, wouldn’t it, when people are in need? I’ll burn the pile on the table. They’re mostly ones and fives.”
Discovering Beth was slightly off center in her way of doing things was one thing, but taking money from the proceeds of crime, hit rock bottom in his book, and it was removing evidence. Styles swallowed hard. “No way. We’ll make an anonymous call like before.” He stared at the bundles of bills in his hands and then lifted his gaze back to her. “You can’t burn it.” He waved a hand toward the chemicals. “A fire will blow everything sky high.”
“That’s the idea.” Beth shrugged. “Do you know how many lives we’ll save by destroying this place?”
Before he could blink, Beth had taken a Zippo from the table and set fire to the pile of wrinkled dirty bills. He spun her to face him. “Have you lost your mind?”
“I don’t want the money for myself, Styles, and I’m not gonna leave it for the drug lords when a shelter could put it to good use.” The firelight glistened in her eyes as she looked up at him, seemingly oblivious to the fire now licking the walls. “One thing I’m not is dishonest. This”— she waved at the fast-igniting room—“is justice. Nipping them in the bud by destroying their distribution center is the only way to deal with these vermin.” She pushed him toward the door as flames crackled behind her and thick black smoke rose up like an evil entity waiting to pounce. “I suggest you start running before the heat breaks those bottles of chemicals.” She edged toward the door. “You know as well as I do that taking those guys into custody won’t solve the problem.” She ran down the alleyway, stepping over the still-unconscious bodies on the ground. “They’ll believe this was a takedown by a rival gang or someone higher up the food chain. They’ll probably believe they were lucky to get away with their lives.”
The next second, an explosion rocked the night, blowing a hole in the roof of the drug den. An orange mushroom cloud whooshed into the moonless sky and a wave of sizzling heat licked their backs just before the concussive force tossed them like fall leaves in the breeze and they tumbled across the blacktop. Styles landed on his back and Beth fell on top of him, forcing the air from his lungs. He lay stunned for a few seconds, but Beth staggered to her feet, collected her shoes, and the wads of bills, and then as if mesmerized, turned to look at the leaping flames. Gasping air into painful lungs, Styles stood as debris rained down on them in flaming pinwheels. “Beth, we need to get out of here.” When she didn’t respond, he grabbed her arm and, dragging her behind him, ran along the middle of the blacktop toward the van. “Go, go, go.”
He slowed as the van came into sight and turned to find her smiling. Conflicted, he just stared at her. Part of him believed she was the bravest woman he’d ever met, and the other part was annoyed by her unconventional behavior. “Jeez, Beth, what happened tonight makes us worse than the bad guys. If someone made us running away, we’re in big trouble.” He glanced over his shoulder, searching the street for CCTV cameras but found none.
“As if anyone in this neighborhood would be running to the cops to rat on those lowlifes or risk retribution by a drug lord.” Beth ran alongside him, with her heels click-clacking on the blacktop, seemingly oblivious to the flaming wood chips falling around her like spent fireworks. “By the way, there’s nothing in our rule book about what you did back there either, or the fact that you denied them duty of care by leaving them bleeding on the sidewalk, when you knew darn well the place was going to explode. Seems to me you’re the pot calling the kettle black.”
Styles climbed into the van and glared at her. “I didn’t kill them, did I? Although the jury is out on the guy you hit with your stiletto.” He shook his head slowly. “Okay, okay, don’t look at me like that. I do see your point but I don’t necessarily agree with it. This is why I’m not a city cop. Sometimes, it’s necessary to bend the rules to avoid complications, such as gunfights. Most of the guys in Rattlesnake Creek understand street justice. If the sheriff isn’t around to deal with them, I follow my own rules.” He sped off toward their hotel.
“So do I.” Beth tightened her seatbelt. “And like it or not, you’ll just have to get used to it.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
It was the early hours of the morning by the time Beth made her way inside the hotel and went to her room, leaving Styles to return the van. In the distance she could hear sirens blaring as fire trucks rushed toward the alleyway. Unconcerned, she pushed her disguise into a garbage bag and stuffed it into her luggage. She’d burn it when she returned to Rattlesnake Creek. Leaving evidence behind wasn’t in her game plan. She’d showered and pulled on PJs when a soft knock came on her door and she peered through the peephole to find Styles in the hallway. She opened the door to let him inside. “What’s the plan?”
“What do you mean by ‘what’s the plan’?” Styles dashed a hand through his hair and then paced up and down the room. “In the space of six hours on the job with you, I have about twenty grand of illegal drug money in my room, four injured men, and an out-of-control fire is raging downtown. I’m not stupid, Beth. Bending the rules is one thing but what happened tonight is beyond reckless.”
As far as Beth was concerned, everything had gone as planned and the drug bust had been a bonus. “I figure you need to calm down and take a breath. You’re looking kind of intimidating right now.”
“Well, I figure I’ll calm down when you come clean about what really happened tonight.” He stopped walking in front of her and stared her down. “I was watching that alleyway the entire time. The girls had barely climbed inside the van when a Lincoln came out of the parking garage and headed past me and down the alley. One of them told me that was Spike’s sedan and he was their pimp out looking for them. They were terrified of him. Now one thing is for darn sure: that Lincoln never came back out of the alleyway.”
Shaking her head, Beth lifted her chin. “Man, you are so intense.” She gave him an outline of her plan to remove the clients and get Spike alone, but from Styles’ expression, he wasn’t buying a word of it.
“Now don’t try and tell me nothing happened in there.” He pointed a finger at her. “You had marks all over the front of your shirt.”
Surprised by his astuteness, Beth sat on the edge of the sofa and raised one eyebrow. She’d just adjust the truth a little. “Spike took my phone and locked me inside what could only be described as a cubicle, which was opened from the outside. All the girls were kept in the same tiny rooms, where they serviced their clients. They sent me an old man and he got angry because I wasn’t twelve. I mean like red in the face and raving on about him being a judge and how much Spike owed him. Next thing I know, he gripped his chest and dropped dead.” She sighed. “It was no big deal.”
“You think? He was a judge!” Styles reeled back and his Adam’s apple bobbed as he registered what she had said. “What did you do?”
