He grinned, or at least I thought he did, behind the glare of the light in my eyes. “Hello, girl,” he said. “Let me help you get out of there. Lots of scary things under there, you know. Black widows and brown recluse spiders, snakes, scorpions . . .”
I hadn’t even thought about it, but now it sounded sickeningly likely. . . . The very poisonous spiders he was talking about liked the shadows, the scorpions were badass and went anywhere they wanted, and the snakes would crawl in here to cool off. Damn. Now I didn’t even want to back up. Vampires, I can deal with. Creepy-crawlies in the dark, not so much. “Back off, gorgeous,” I said, and tried to make myself sound tough and mean. “I’m armed and dangerous.”
He giggled, high as a little girl. “Do your best with that toy,” he said. “I’ve been shot before—it don’t scare me.” For proof, he yanked aside the neck of his wifebeater tee, and I saw star-shaped scars in his skin right below the collarbone. Wow. He wasn’t kidding. I had the weapon in my hand, but my hand was shaking, and I knew I’d miss if I fired. Better to wait and make it count. . . .
He pulled the bleachers out at an angle with a final yank, leaving a narrow space against the wall that he could squeeze through—but didn’t. He bent and looked through it at me. No smile now, nothing but serious menace. “You put that popgun away and come on out of there,” he said. “I’m not going to hurt you unless you do something stupid, like pull the trigger. Got me?”
Shane had told me before, a gun is not a magic shield, it’s not a bulletproof vest, and it’s not a defense. It’s an offensive weapon, but I’d never really appreciated how true that was before. If you’re going on offense with someone like Mr. Skinhead, you’d better put him down hard, and I was shaking too badly. He was careful not to give me too good a target, either.
Hell.
I took a deep breath, holstered the gun in my pants, and held up my hands. Probably useless effort, but I tried to look harmless now as I walked toward him. He grunted in satisfaction and squeezed himself under the bleachers a little more, ready to grab me as I got close. In the process, he pretty much immobilized himself.
And that was what I’d been hoping he’d do. As he wedged himself in solidly, I pulled the silver-edged knife from the sheath on my wrist, under my shirt, and leaped forward to slam him against the hollow wall of the metal room. He hit with a resonating thud, and I got my forearm against his Adam’s apple with my knife resting just off to the side, over his fast-beating veins. “Hey,” I said. “I put the gun away, just like you said.”
He laughed, a thin and kind of crazy sound. Up close, he smelled sour and damp, as if he’d worn the same clothes for weeks without so much as going out in the rain. Ugh. “I’ll break your arm, little girl. For starters. I’ll bet I can get real creative with you. . . .”
I let the knife slip a little and gave him another scar. “Whoops,” I said. “Sorry about that.” I kept the knife steady on his throat as he froze, and pulled out the gun with my left hand. “I’m not a great shot with this hand,” I said, “but you know what? Good enough to hit the broadside of a piece of barn like you.” I shoved the muzzle against his chest. “Back up.”
He did, moving slowly, and his massive muscle-bound arms rose as far as they could. I’d impressed him, at least this far. He might not take a .38 seriously, but he knew I couldn’t miss if I fired it into his heart from that distance. He could have grabbed my arm and broken it in two shakes, but that left the knife at his throat.
So we did the dance, moving backward, until we were out of the bleachers . . . and that was when Michael said, from behind Mr. Big, “Need any help?”
I grinned tightly. “Well, I think I’ve got this, but sure. I wouldn’t want you to get bored.”
Michael grabbed the guy by the scruff of the neck and swung him around like a bag of cotton balls, slammed him face-first into the cage bars with stunning force, and Mr. Big dropped to the dirt floor limp as overcooked pasta. (I know about overcooked pasta. I am so not a cook.)
That left Mr. Slick, but he wasn’t just standing around, as it happened.
He’d unlocked Jeremy’s cage, and stepped back to pull the silver bars of the door in front of him as protection from attack. I decided, from the way he moved, that he was the local lion tamer. Or, more likely, lion-abusing a-hole. “This is your chance,” he said to Jeremy. “Kill them and go.”
Jeremy looked at him through the bars, close range, and said, “What if I want to start with you first?”
You’d think Mr. Slick would be freaking scared, but this was—unfathomably, to me—a guy who’d managed to capture a sociopathic machine like Jeremy and keep him under control for what looked like quite a while. He didn’t seem scared, or even ruffled. “You won’t,” he said. “You can keep the girl. I know you like to play with them first.”