Page 21 of Femme Fatale
The other two women shrank from the light, but one, the tallest, with a shiner blossoming on her cheek, gave me a hard, appraising look.
Joker was all business now. She checked the girls for injuries, helped them to their feet, and told them to hang tight while we cleared the rest of the rooms.
I tried the second door. Empty, except for two cots and the smell of urine.
The third door, though—that one was different. A single woman, cuffed to a pipe, her head lolling on her chest. I recognized her from somewhere, but couldn’t place it. She wore a ripped velvet dress, the kind that clings in all the wrong places, and her neck had a bruise as wide as my palm.
Spade checked her pulse. “She’s breathing.”
Joker took the keys, unlocked her. The woman’s eyes fluttered open. “Who—who are you?”
“Friends,” I said. “We’re getting you out.”
She nodded, tried to stand, then collapsed. Tempest lifted her easily, carrying her like a broken doll.
We hustled back up the stairs, adrenaline thrumming. The bodies in the kitchen hadn’t moved, but one, the tased guy, who was awake and trying to crawl. Spade kicked him in the ribs on the way out. “Sleep it off.”
In the main room, the lights had gone from neon to red alert. A silent alarm, maybe, or just bad wiring.
Aces pinged my phone. “Three vehicles approaching from the east. Black SUVs. No plates.”
I typed back: “ETA?”
“Two minutes. Less if they floor it.”
We had to move.
I led the girls and the crew out the back, into the wasteland behind the building. Glitz and Nines were waiting by the bikes, engine idling. Glitz tossed me a zip tie and a first aid kit.
“You get them all?” she said.
“Three and a half,” I replied.
Nines didn’t look up from her phone. “I got a ping. Zeke’s people just pulled traffic cams. They know we’re here.”
Tempest eased the unconscious woman onto the back of her own bike, then strapped her in with a bungee cord like luggage.
I turned to Joker. “You good to ride?”
She wiped blood off her knuckles and grinned. “Never better.”
We formed up, girls in the middle, Harlots around them. As we rolled out, I looked back at the building. A fresh spray of blood gleamed on the glass doors. I didn’t care.
I rode lead, Joker and Spade on my six, the others close behind. We peeled out as the first SUV fishtailed into the lot, tires screaming. A man in a suit leaned out the window, saw the gun in my hand, and ducked back inside.
“Cowards,” Spade muttered.
We cut across the dirt, hit the highway, and opened the throttle. The desert was cold and empty ahead, and we left Jack’s Rabbits behind us, broken and leaking.
Every muscle in my body hurt, but I didn’t slow down. Not until Vegas was a line of light in the windshield and the girls behind us were safe.
***
We stopped on the far side of the valley, where the headlights couldn’t reach and the only sound was the ticking of cooling engines and the desert wind. Aces swept the horizon with a flashlight, eyes narrowed to slits, but nothing moved except a coyote a hundred yards out, yellow eyes unblinking.
Tempest parked her Harley, then eased the unconscious woman, now half-awake, groaning, off the seat and set her gently on the dirt. Joker wrapped her jacket around Tina and started dabbing the cuts on her cheek with spit and the hem of her own shirt. The other woman, the tall blonde, didn’t bother sitting. She stood like she was waiting for a limo, not stranded at the edge of Clark County, hands at her sides, chin high.
Even bruised and with blood on her teeth, she looked expensive. Hair was two shades of gold, the kind you paid for every month. Her lipstick was smeared but defiant. She wore a necklace with a pendant that caught the moonlight. It was a sculpted wolf’s head, the eyes set with little green stones. I watched her take in the whole crew, measure every face, and decide exactly how much respect to give each of us.
