Page 37 of Twisted Empire

“Hold on! Get out of the way.” One of them sprinted back toward his car.

The next thing I knew, the guy was speeding the car straight toward the hydrant. He slammed into it grill-first.

The hydrant burst, water spraying over the sidewalk as far as the edge of the parking lot. Well, I guessed that was one way to get it open.

A bunch of the men, as well as my friends and Madelyn, charged over to the hydrant. Everyone carried some sort of container, from the duffel bags that’d once held an assortment of weapons to bins and bags that’d been used for purposes I could only guess at. They held them up to the spewing water in turn and then raced toward the fire to toss the contents on the flames.

In the distance, I heard the first faint strains of fire-truck sirens. If we could just tame the fire a little, drown it as much as possible before the professionals arrived, maybe the damage would only be superficial.

A few of Beckett’s people had remained by the cars, covering their colleagues with their gazes fixed on the retreating enemy. A handful of the attackers had paused by their cars to take shots at us, and Beckett’s men returned fire without hesitation, determined to take down anyone they could.

My gaze caught on a man in that cluster of cars who was ducked down by the trunk of a sedan, his phone pressed to his ear. Was he talking to Doom’s Seed right now?

He had to be speaking to someone important if he figured it was worth staying in the middle of a gunfight to find out what they had to say rather than racing off first.

“Hey!” I shouted at the men on our side who were closest to me, and gestured toward the guy who was mostly out of view. “We need to get our hands on that phone. It could lead us straight to the asshole behind this attack.”

One of Beckett’s men nodded and darted around the van to get a clearer shot. Just as the guy I’d spotted started to lower the phone, the man I’d called over squeezed the trigger.

The bullet caught our target in the wrist. With a yelp of agony, he jerked his arm toward him, blood spurting and the phone dropping from his fingers.

It clattered on the pavement. Beckett’s people went back to firing at the last of the attackers, who were all scrambling into their cars now.

As they peeled away, I threw myself across the parking lot toward the fallen phone. I had to get to it before any of our enemies considered how valuable it could be and crushed it under a tire.

I kept my body low, hoping the men behind me could fend off anyone who tried to shoot at me. A bullet whizzed by over my head, and my heart lurched. But I snatched up the phone and hurtled back the way I’d come, my pulse hammering away with a mix of elation and terror.

The sirens were blaring louder. Just as I leapt back into the shelter of the van, three fire trucks swerved into the parking lot. The firemen charged out and rushed to the hydrant, where thankfully Beckett’s men had pulled the car out of range. Other firefighters started spraying down the building with water from the trucks’ on-board tanks.

The flames started to sputter under the larger deluge of liquid. Doom’s Seed’s people hadn’t been able to splash the gasoline all the way up the walls, and most of the fire sizzled out under the spray from the hoses. Black streaks cut through the pastel paint, but as far as I could tell, the flames hadn’t eaten through the building to its contents.

Beckett was going to have a reconstruction project on his hands, but a much smaller one than it might have been if we hadn’t headed out here when we had. His people’s efforts with the hydrant had slowed the fire quite a bit.

At the moment, Beckett was waving to his men. In a matter of seconds, they’d jumped back into their cars while Beckett, Madelyn, and my friends scrambled into the van.

“The police will be here too, any minute now,” Beckett said in explanation as we peeled out of the lot.

He drove in tense silence for several blocks before pulling over into a different parking lot outside a bingo parlor that was closed for the night. His breath came out in a ragged whoosh.

“We were too late,” I said, my throat tightening. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s not your fault. It’s that prick Doom’s Seed,” Beckett muttered. He sat up straighter, swiping his hand back through his hair. “You were right about the pattern. And it would have been worse if we hadn’t been here. But business is still going to suffer a lot after the spectacle those pricks made. And having the cops sniffing around isn’t great for us either.”

“We stopped them from doing everything they wanted to,” Madelyn insisted. “That’s a partial win, anyway.”

It occurred to me that in the panic of our departure I’d almost forgotten the one other possible win we’d made. I fished the confiscated phone out of my pocket. A smear of blood marked the screen, but it was otherwise undamaged.

I held it up. “We have this too. One of Doom’s Seed’s men was making a call on it in the parking lot—maybe getting instructions from the boss himself? Or someone else important. If he’s the one who was getting the orders from people higher up, there could be some interesting material on there that we could use against Doom’s Seed, right?”

Logan’s eyes lit up. He gave me a thumbs up and took the phone from me. “That’s brilliant, Dex.”

Slade laughed. “Leave it to Dexter to find a way to turn a disaster around.”

Even Beckett had perked up a little. He smiled at me with a tip of his head. “I saw you running over there—I didn’t realize what for. Thanks for that. You really stuck your neck out.”

“Anything I can do to help, I’m on it,” I said, a strange sense of satisfaction washing over me.

I might not be immersed in the criminal underworld like Beckett’s people, but I was a real part of this new, joint team we’d formed with him. I’d contributed in ways his men hadn’t thought to on their own. Maybe hadn’t even been capable of, when it came to recognizing the patterns.

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