Page 80 of Shane
“Always,” Shane whispered as she led him into each of the four guest rooms and six horrific murder scenes.
One by one, Everlee documented the rooms, but didn’t touch anything. She used her cell phone to capture as much as she could, just in case something happened to the coverage from the helmet cams. Extra backup never hurt. Redundancy was rule number two: Always take more pictures than you think you’ll need. Someone else might see something you missed. Right after rule number one: Don’t get Shane killed. And stop shaking. Too many of the pictures she was taking were blurred, another reason for redundancy. She couldn’t even do this right.
Shane already had his cell up. Of course. He didn’t need to be told what to do. He’d been capturing images before she’d thought of it, and his were probably crystal clear. But okay. He might just be smarter than her. Everlee didn’t mind admitting that. Shane was her partner. She trusted him. She really, really did. She wasn’t alone, and he always had her six. Maybe she should admit her shortcomings and let the real hero in this twosome lead…
Just that fast, the snake in her throat vanished. Her chest expanded. She could breathe again. If that wasn’t an all-out nudge from the universe, nothing was. Okay then. As soon as this f’d-up mission was done, she was done thinking she had to be as big a badass as Shane. She was stepping back from being a fraud. Maybe then she’d stop hurting herself, falling and spraining her ankles.
Which took her full circle to the very real fact that she was a fraud. Always had been. It might just be time to come clean. To let someone in.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Shane followed Everlee. There were only four guest rooms. The scene in each was the same. Two queen beds. Six bloody murder scenes in all. Looked like Astor had delivered cold-blooded headshots while the men she’d hired to do her dirty work slept. The shredded pillows at the headboards now held blood, brain matter, and bone fragments. There were no signs of resistance, not even in the shared bedrooms. Which begged the question: Why hadn’t any these guys reacted once they’d heard shooting? Silencers were never as quiet as Hollywood portrayed. Had Astor drugged or poisoned them? That’d explain a lot.
Like Everlee, Shane snapped photo after photo. Of the rooms. The pillows. The blood splatter on walls and headboards. The darkening blood smears down the hall. By the time he and Everlee were back in the main room, his heart was pounding pretty hard. Quite frankly, the entire suite stunk to hell and the scene was beyond gruesome. But he was more worried about Ev than himself.
He’d seen worse than these carefully orchestrated executions during his deployments overseas. You put in enough hours in third-world countries, and it was a given. Most Americans, especially those loud-mouthed talking heads who’d never seen a second of combat, would be horrified at what most military members saw every day. The filth. The squalor. The physical abuse. Hell, the first time Shane had seen a small boy whipping his sad little donkey to make it walk, when its poor feet were lifted in the air by the over-sized weight of the cart it was trying desperately to pull, had been a huge wake-up call. There really was no place like home and when he wasn’t in America, he was powerless to stop any kind of abuse. The poor were just as wicked and as cruel as the wealthy. There was no EPA, ASPCA, Family Services, or women’s shelters. No compassion for elderly. No empathy for handicapped. No justice. Just gawddamned money. And pain. Yeah, always plenty of pain.
But Everlee hadn’t been exposed to any of that, and there simply was no way to train a grunt how to react to their first kill or death scene. The Corps hadn’t developed any how-to manuals to teach a guy or gal how to process the internal shock from violent, visceral imagery. You could talk to yourself all you wanted, but seeing truly was believing. Only then did you understand what walking through Hell meant, how it smelled and what it looked like. What Astor had done to her men was right up there with the atrocities committed during public executions in Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan.
Everlee had panicked at first sight, and for a few moments after she’d so skillfully kicked in the door, Shane had fully expected she’d bolt. But she hadn’t. She hesitated, but she’d stood her ground, and that said a lot. Everlee might be brash and in-your-face ready to fight, but she was also disciplined enough to control her emotions and finish the job. Even when it was uglier than sin.
But that flinch and the fear in her eyes when he’d taken hold of her helmet, that was something else again. She’d nearly freaked and he needed to know why. He’d held her before. Hell, they’d made love like rabbits back at Smoke’s place. Yet he’d startled her now? Why? Had Butch slapped her around? Abused her? Punched her? Shane made it his next mission to find out.
“I can’t believe she killed her guys,” Everlee whispered once they were both back in the white room. “All of them.”
That quietly spoken statement sounded as if it came from a little girl. Why was she staring at the bodies? Why was she standing over the closest vic, looking down at him like she knew him? Which Shane doubted. Something tremendously heartbreaking was going on inside Everlee’s head. One moment she’d seemed able to overcome the senselessness of this gruesome discovery, but the next—
“In c-c-cold blood… Her own m-m-men...” Her voice had grown breathier, too. “All six of them. Err, seven, if you include the guy back at the barn, and I think we should. She’s s-s-sick.”
Little Rock’s police department would be there within minutes. He’d given dispatch the basic details of the multiple murder scene, his name and TEAM badge number, as well as the identification number on his official FBI orders. He’d explained what authority he and Everlee’d had to enter the penthouse and go after Astor. Had also provided TEAM HQ’s main phone number if Little Rock’s police chief wanted to speak with Alex. He’d answered all dispatch’s terse questions. And now they waited.
While Everlee stood over that one body, Shane cleared the rest of the rooms, something he should’ve done as soon as they’d breached entry. He’d barely put his gloved hand on the closet doorknob behind the entry door when—
“Don’t kill her yet! She’s mine!” Tuesday yelled from the open entry, where Heston stood at her back. She held a SIG P365, a slim 9-millimeter pocket pistol that fit her small right hand perfectly. Her stance was spot on, her feet spread, one foot behind the other for stability, the heel of her shooting hand cupped like a lover in her left palm.
“Tuesday, shush. Put your weapon down,” Shane scolded. “Just me and Ev in here.”
“Oh, sorry. Yeah. I-I know. I see that.” She aimed her pistol at the floor and jerked her gaze off the murder scene at his backdrop.
“Couldn’t keep her away?” Shane asked Heston.
“Not after the murder scene you guys transmitted. Thought you’d need help. Extra hands, you know.” The charming Hispanic was gone. Heston’s sharp, brown eyes were grim and his lips were thin, tight lines. He leveled the .45 caliber, full-auto SIG 1922 Emperor Scorpion pistol in his right hand down at the floor.
Shane admitted, “Just finishing what I should’ve done earlier.”
Heston’s pistol came back up. “You’re just now clearing the place?”
“Yeah. Things went to hell as soon as we B&E’d.”
The closet knob in Shane’s hand rotated. The door slammed open, bounced off his chest, and—
Holy shit! Tuesday Smart was in two places at once. One with Heston. The other in the closet. Both pistols sprang to his hands. It was time Astor died.
“Back! Everyone get back!” Shane bellowed.
He couldn’t believe his eyes. Sure as fuck, the woman in the closet could’ve passed as Tuesday Smart’s identical twin. Well, except for the sneer twisting her ruby red lips and her poor choice of an FBI SWAT uniform as a costume. Not once on this entire mission had Tuesday sneered like that.
Astor fired. Shane jerked back at wicked sting of a close quarter impact. Fuck! She’d hit him! High on his biceps. Burned like shit. Whatever!