Page 113 of Under Cover
When they got to the double doors of the conference room, Harding took one door, Crosby the other, and they entered the room like they’d enter any other hostile space, busting open the doors and identifying themselves as Garcia, Chadwick, and Carlyle went in low and in formation before them.
“SCTF!” Harding boomed. “Hands in the air, weapons down. Iwillshoot the cell phone out of your hand!”
Crosby got there in time to see Jimmy Creedy and Kinsey Sizemore flanking Colin McEnany, all of them dazed as hell, and—he could revel in it—very, very afraid.
So was the lawyer with prematurely silver hair and a gray pinstriped suit, also flanked, but by two gentlemen in suits of their own. One looked Latino and the other Slavic, and here, Crosby thought, were the Turkish and Cuban delegates to the drug trade.
“What the fuck!” McEnany snarled. “Crosby! What do you think you’re doing here!”
Crosby smiled. “Arresting the fuck out of you, McEnany. Yeah, I took your assignment. Did you think I wasn’t keeping my team briefed on your every fucking move?”
Creedy’s gun came out before anybody could even predict it. “You fuckin’ traitor!” he screamed, aiming at Crosby. “Where the hell is my son?”
Crosby pointed his weapon at Creedy while Garcia said, “Watch McAsshole. He’s moving his hand.”
“You watch him. I’ve got Creedy,” Crosby murmured, keeping his weapon up. “Creedy, drop the weapon. And your son is somewhere you and your boys will never fuckin’ touch him again. D’you hear that, Sizemore? Nobody will touch him—he’s fuckin’ free of you assholes. Only good thing to ever happen to the kid.”
Creedy gaped at him, uncomprehending, his gun lowering, no longer aimed. “I’m the boy’s father—”
“The hell you are!” Crosby shouted, aware that his team was looking at him. “A real father doesn’t… doesn’t teach his kid to hate. A real father doesn’t fill a kid’s head with poison or let his buddies beat on the kid because he thinks it’s funny or will turn him into a real man or whatever. You’re a shitty fucking father, and don’t ask me where your kid is, because I got him away from you to save his fuckin’ life.Youmay think he’d be better off as a meth-addicted gorilla, but the guy next to you is no way to live.”
Crosby’s entire team was staring at him, but Crosby couldn’t seem to stop his mouth from running. McEnany stepped behind Creedy—the better to use him as a human shield—and Crosby just couldn’t stop talking.
“Don’t fuckin’ do it, McAsshole,” he snarled. “You got five guys in tactical who want to blow your head open like a watermelon—you feeling helpless yet? Feel like a victim? I bet you do. You had this coming, McEnany—like Damir Calvin didnot.”
“And you know what, kid?” McEnany called from behind Creedy. “I told you before—I don’t care how many bodies I gotta walk on to get where I’m going.”
With that, McEnany pulled his gun out and aimed it under Creedy’s arm.
“Gun!” Chadwick called, and Crosby was dimly aware that the two thugs flanking Cavendish had gone for their weapons too, but he’d called Creedy, and Creedy had a weapon, and he knew his team would back him.
Creedy jerked his weapon back into place as Sizemore pulled his own out, and the SCTF was no longer interested in talking.
“Fire!” Harding called. The eruption of gunfire was sudden and brutal.
And short.
One shot from each of them—Harding took Sizemore—and each target went down. Cavendish had been the only one without a weapon, and he stood in the middle, blood spray across his suit, looking like he was about to scream.
The team crossed the room quickly, each one of them kneeling down to secure the weapons and check the pulses. Sizemore’s big body had gone over backward, and he sprawled in a cheap suit without dignity, Harding’s bullet through his chest. Creedy had two bullets—one from Garcia’s piece and one from Crosby’s piece busting his chest open, leaving him looking surprised in death as he’d never had the smarts to be surprised in life. Checking their pulses was a mere formality.
McEnany had been shot through Creedy’s body, and he was wounded but not dead.
“Chief,” Crosby said crisply, kicking McEnany’s weapon away before kneeling down to cuff him in spite of the two big, sloppy bullet wounds from Creedy’s through-and-throughs. “We’re going to need a bus.”
McEnany scowled at him from his back, bleeding profusely from the gut. “You couldn’t even kill me right, you fucking screwup.”
But Crosby was surprisingly okay with that. “Are you kidding? You being alive to serve your entire life in Leavenworth is seriously the best fucking news I’ve had all day.” There was legitimate fear in McEnany’s eyes, and Crosby felt a slow evil smile twist his own mouth.
McEnany saw that smile and paled.
“Kill me now, you sorry piece of shit,” he moaned. “Don’t be a fuckin’ coward—”
“I think you’re mistaken, McAsshole,” Harding said, keeping both eyes on Cavendish. “That’s a stomach wound, and you pulled your weapon from cover. The real cowards shoot a kid in the back.”
McEnany opened his mouth and then groaned in pain, blood spattering from his lips, and since he was cuffed now, and probably going to live, Crosby took a sec to see what Harding was doing about the guy in the suit who had instigated all this bloodshed.
“I’m sorry,” Cavendish said, speaking for the first time and trying to contain his expression of horror at the bodies that had piled up on either side. “I have no idea what this is about, but—”
