Page 71 of In Her Sights
“Anytime.” Although she could tell Cara was trying to sound casual, her voice shook.
“Molly!” John was suddenly there, hugging her hard and then running his hands over her as if checking for injuries. “What happened? Are you okay? I was preoccupied with dealing with them…” He gestured toward the guy he’d just been tasing, who was bundled up in so much duct tape he looked like a spider’s next meal. Lubchek, though still unconscious, was lying next to him, also bound with tape.
“I’m fine.” She ignored her still-numb arm, glad that at least it wasn’t hurting. “We should get this one secured before he wakes up, too.” She let herself give him one solid kick to the ribs, figuring he deserved that and so much more. “Did Sonny escape?”
“Looks like it.”
Losing Sonny yet again made Molly want to scream in frustration, but she shoved it down. They’d get him. They had to. Her family was depending on her to do this.
“Let’s get this guy restrained and then see if we can catch up with him. We still have that new ID that he wanted so badly.” John nodded at the envelope that lay abandoned on the floor. He grabbed Bastien’s arms and dragged him over to the others, making quick work of binding his arms and legs with duct tape. Molly tried to help, but she was pretty much useless with her dominant arm out of commission.
“Time to call the cops?” she asked with a wince. This was going to be a long night.
“No.” Sonny walked out of the shelves, pulling a terrified-looking Norah along with him. Molly’s gaze immediately dropped to the belt Norah was wearing, but her brain refused to accept what her eyes were telling her. Those couldn’t be explosives wrapped around her baby sister’s waist. They just couldn’t. She lurched forward, automatically trying to reach her, but Sonny yanked Norah farther out of reach.
“Don’t touch her,” Molly snarled, unable to look away from the belt that circled her sister’s thin hips over her T-shirt.
“What happens to her is up to you,” Sonny said, looking disturbingly gleeful as he clutched a cell phone in one hand and Norah’s arm in another. “I just want to leave this town. There’re people who want to kill me, and I’ll be a sitting duck back in jail. You, I’m assuming, don’t want this bitch to be blown to little pieces.” He cocked his head as Molly vibrated with growing rage. “And all of you, too. This baby’ll have quite the range.”
“It’ll take you out, too. You’ll be just as dead as us,” John said, moving in front of Molly, to her terrified annoyance. How was it better if he had his face blown off rather than hers? They were going to have a long talk about his self-sacrificing tendencies when they got home…if they got home.
She immediately shut down that line of thinking. It wasn’t helpful. What she needed was a plan or at least something other than the panicked voice shrieking in her head.
Sonny gave a twitchy movement that might’ve been a shrug. “If I don’t get out of here, I’m dead anyway. Might as well have the satisfaction of taking all you with me.” His grin was all wrong, spiking a shiver down her spine. “You would’ve just kept chasing me if I ran, anyway.”
In the tense silence that followed, there was a faint wail of an emergency siren, and Sonny’s head snapped up. The sound was both welcome and bitter, because Molly knew they’d arrive too late to do any good. It was up to them to save each other. “Hey, Norah. Remember Brody Knick?”
Before Norah could respond, John was already in motion, taking advantage of Sonny’s moment of distraction to plow into him, bringing all three of them to the floor. Grabbing Sonny’s wrist, John pounded it against the floor, and the cell phone that he’d turned into a detonator went skittering away from them. Sonny, his expression filled with fury, tucked his legs in and then double-barrel kicked John in the stomach, knocking him back. Twisting back around, Sonny reached for Norah. As his hand wrapped around the belt, Molly knew exactly what he planned. He must’ve designed the belt to detonate if it was removed, and he was about to rip it right off Norah’s waist, dooming them all.
Time seemed to slow as Molly ran toward them, her functioning arm outstretched in a futile attempt to prevent what was happening. As Sonny’s fingers closed around the belt, Norah moved toward him and drove her knee right between his legs. Apparently, she did remember the Brody Knick incident after all. He screamed, his grip releasing, and Norah rolled out of reach, the belt intact.
Molly stepped forward, preparing to dive on top of Sonny and subdue him, but something tightened roughly around her ankle. Her entire body stiffened with fear as her leg was yanked out from under her, making the world spin. Disoriented, she blindly struggled, her mind filled with nightmare images of impossibly strong men who could flip her so easily upside down, holding her painfully by her ankle as she struggled helplessly like a fish on a line. How could she ever hope to fight back against that?
When her shocked confusion cleared and the scene around her stopped spinning, she saw the cord that was wrapped tightly around her ankle. That’s what had flipped her and yanked her off the ground by her foot, leaving her dangling upside down. She’d been snared by another one of Sonny’s traps.
She could only watch helplessly as Sonny scrambled to his feet and sprinted away. John shifted, as if to chase after him, but then moved toward Molly instead.
“Get him!” She flailed her arms in a shooing motion, but John still advanced, wrapping his arms around her and lifting her so that the rope around her ankle loosened. “He’s getting away!”
“We’ll get him,” John promised. “If not today, then soon. Can you reach up and get that off?”
Despite his words, frustration still coursed through her. He’d slipped away from them again and again. He’d put a bomb on Norah. Molly didn’t want to catch him someday. She wanted to bring him down now.
Reaching up, she wrestled the snare off her boot. Seeing that she was free, John turned her right side up and set her down. As soon as her feet were on the ground, she took off after Sonny, shouting over her shoulder, “Don’t unbuckle the belt!” Norah and Cara nodded, their faces pale with shock, as Molly focused on finding the bastard who’d tried to blow up her sister.
She was done with his nonsense.
Even as she ran, John keeping pace right next to her, she kept her eyes open for other traps and trip wires. As she reached the end of an aisle, she turned the corner, catching a glimpse of movement to the right as Sonny ducked into a deeply shadowed corridor.
“This way,” she mouthed to John, who nodded grimly. From the look on his face, he was just as fed up with Sonny as she was. They chased after him, and Molly felt a dreaded sense of déjà vu. Except for the lack of patrons, this was just like the night they’d chased him through the bar, the night that ended in a huge explosion. Who knew how many bombs Sonny had planted around the building? The whole thing could go up, killing them all, and there’d be nothing Molly could do to save them.
Shoving the morbid thoughts out of her head, she concentrated on speeding up as they entered the dark corridor.
“Wire!” John shouted, and Molly jumped, hoping that her timing was right to clear the trip wire that was hidden to her in the darkness. When nothing caught on her lower legs, she let out a breath of relief.
“Thanks!”
His teeth flashed white, even in the dim light, as he grinned at her without slowing down. “Nice jump.”
