Page 64 of Nikki Sinatra: For Her Lover
“You failed to kill either one of us, which I’m proud to say,” said Nikki. “And you won’t get the chance to kill anybody else.”
But as she said it, Jackson pulled a knife out with his left hand. Mick saw it, but Nikki heard it flick open at the same time, and she grabbed his hand just as Mick fired a fatal bullet through Jackson’s head. He wasn’t taking any more chances with that bastard. And neither was Nikki. She turned that knife toward Jackson’s side, and shoved it through.
If he wasn’t dead from that bullet wound, he was dead now. He dropped to the floor.
They heard several more shots downstairs, and began to run in that direction, until Nikki remembered something else. “He didn’t go where Jackson was,” she said.
Mick looked at her. “What?”
“That guard I took out up here,” she said, pointing to the guard that was lying dead at the bottom of the stairs. “When he came up here, he went to the right. But Jackson came out from the left side.”
They looked down the right-side hall, but saw nothing but a couple of closed doors.
Without saying a word to each other, Mick gave her cover as she moved to that first door and kicked it open. But when the door flew open and she saw a woman seated in the middle of the room, she was shocked. “Mrs. Cabrera?” she asked.
Mick moved into the room beside Nikki. He was shocked to see an old lady too. “Who’s that?”
“Apparently the boss,” said Nikki. “That’s Emilio’s mother.”
Mick frowned. “His mother? Working with the man that killed her son?”
“My son killed my children, and his children,” said the lady Nikki remembered as young and beautiful, but was now old and bitter. “We were determined to take out everybody responsible. That’s why I bribed those guards to get Jackson out of that prison. We’d been talking for years. Plottin’ and schemin’. I visited him in that prison for years. And our scheme was hatched. And we got them all. Except for you,” she said so bitterly that it made Nikki’s skin crawl.
“But today is your unlucky day,” the woman said with a yellow-teeth smile, and that was when Nikki and Mick both saw that she had a remote control in her hand.
“Bomb!” Mick and Nikki both yelled out to alert their crew downstairs as they both ran out of that room and down that hall as fast as they could run. “Bomb! Bomb!” they were yelling. “Get out of the house!”
But Mick knew there was no way they were going to be able to run down those stairs in time. As Nikki was about to run downstairs, he grabbed her, ran with her to the end of the hall, and threw her with all the strength he had out of that second-floor window, shattering the glass.
But just as he threw Nikki, the woman pressed that button. And the house exploded.
The force of that explosion threw Mick so hard that it threw him out of that window right behind Nikki, as the entire house buckled.
Reno, Sal, and Monk had finally neutralized all of those guards and were just about to run up those stairs to assist Mick and Nikki when they heard them yell outbomb! They ran out of the front door just as the house exploded. They were thrown too, across the yard, but they were otherwise okay.
They got up quickly and ran along the side of the house. Nikki had landed on one bale of hay and Mick had landed on another bale. But whereas Nikki was getting up with only a few scratches on her arms, Mick was still laying there.
They all tried to grab him and help him up, to get him further away from the explosive house, but Mick snatched away from them. “Do I look like agotdamn invalid?” he barked out at them.
But Reno wasn’t scared of Mick. “Actually you do,” he said, and they all laughed.
All except Mick. It took some effort, as every bone in his body was aching, but he managed to pull himself up. Alone.
They all got further off of that property and piled into Roz’s Bentley to flee the scene before any emergency personnel could show up. Mick and Nikki got in the back seat, with Sal ending up in the middle. “Ain’t this some bull,” he complained.
Reno sat up front with Monk. Monk was their driver. Remarkably, and despite all of the running and falling they did getting out of that house, his trademark hat remained on his head. Reno couldn’t believe it. “That explosion knocked me on my ass,” said Reno, “but even it couldn’t knock that big-ass hat off your head.”
Monk laughed.
“Just drive me to my Escalade dammit,” said Mick, who was in severe pain. “I’ll take it from there.”
Nikki and Sal looked at each other. Mick was in so much pain he could barely sit up, and he was going to drive?
When Monk drove around the back road where the Escalade was parked, and Mick tried to get out, Nikki pulled him back down. “We got you, Pop,” she said to him with that unblinking sincerity in her eyes.
Mick knew there was no way he could drive. Nikki’s insistence only proved it. And he nodded. But with a caveat:“Wreck my Escalade,” he said to her, “and your ass is dirt and I’m the shovel.”
It was so corny that all of them laughed.
