Lola on Fire Read online

  “Jesus,” he gasped.

  All hell broke loose.

  * * *

  In surrendering, Lola’s only strategy was to exhibit no emotion, show no pain, and deny Jimmy as much satisfaction as possible. It was a disappointing end for a woman once revered for her mettle, but to fight would be to lose, and the only thing worse than dying would be to award Jimmy the glory of her defeat.

  This was the plan, and she’d made her peace with it. Ever since viewing the three-and-a-half-minute video that Jimmy had sent, she knew that she had to bargain for her children’s safety. And what else did she have to offer? Taking Brody to the range, packing all the guns and ammo, had been a precaution. Both Grandpa Bear and Shifu Chen had taught her to always be prepared, but she didn’t think a single bullet would fly.

  Her thinking changed when Brody reentered the fray.

  She made her move only moments after Jimmy had kicked her in the ribs. It was not the optimum time in which to initiate an attack—by God, that kick had hurt—but Brody had provided a distraction, a tiny window in which to operate. He emerged from behind the nearest vehicle with her sawed-off twelve-gauge in his hands, raising it to shoulder-level. One of the gunmen on the roof registered the movement and reacted quickly, getting off a shot before Brody could adequately position the shotgun. Every set of eyes turned away from Lola and toward Brody, who’d fired a shot of his own—a wild effort that threatened no one, but caused Jimmy, Blair, and a few of the soldiers to scatter. Brody teetered and dropped. Had he been hit? Lola didn’t think so, and she couldn’t contemplate the possibility. She had to abandon any thought or action not directly connected to amassing a body count.

  Step one in that thought process was to get a gun.

  In the three-second window created by Brody’s distraction, she had regained her feet and scanned the environment for opportunities. The gunman to her right had curled over when the shots were fired, making his rifle difficult to appropriate. The big bruiser to her left—Scott Hauer, aka the Tucson Tank; she recognized his face from the photo on her bulletin board—had dropped to one knee. He had an M4 carbine at the ready position and a Glock 19 in an open holster. He also wore a ballistic vest, making him the perfect shield.

  Lola ducked behind him, lifted the Glock from his holster. Ideally, she would take out Jimmy and Blair first, but the gunman on the roof had fired at Brody again, and three more were closing in on his position. He only had one shell left in that twelve-gauge. If they flanked him—which they would—he’d be dead for sure.

  She took out the gunman on the roof. One accurate shot. The way his forehead lifted indicated hollow points in the mag. A second later, one of the soldiers advancing on Brody’s position was facedown with a bullet between his shoulder blades. Two dead before they realized what was happening—before the Tucson Tank realized that his gun was being used.

  Lola took aim at the next gunman approaching Brody’s position. The first shot hit his shoulder. It staggered but didn’t drop him. He shrieked and turned sideways. Lola fired again and the left side of his face disappeared.

  Three down.

  Blair—so sharp—assessed the threat and rounded on Lola, both .45s engaged, looking for a nonlethal shot. She took it: a bullet to the kneecap. Bone and cartilage exploded. Blood flew. But not Lola’s blood; Blair had shot the Tucson Tank—Lola’s shield—in the knee. It had the desired effect. He howled and writhed and Lola had to fight to keep him in position. Blair fired again, missing her gun hand by an inch.

  Only one option: Lola put the Glock to the Tucson Tank’s cheekbone and pulled the trigger. She turned her face away just in time. Blood and bone fragments sprayed her hair and the side of her throat. The Tank flopped against her, one leg twitching.

  Lola heaved the corpse to its feet as Blair fired between and through its legs. Another gunman had opened fire, thudding bullets into the ground. Lola squeezed off shots of her own—two of them at Blair, who deftly rolled and found cover beside the warehouse steps. The other gunman came up on Lola’s side. In his panic, or inexperience, he chose the side with the gun. She halted him with a bullet to the chest.

  Lola assessed the scene, peering from behind the shattered remains of the Tank’s skull. Jimmy—the sly cat—had evidently ducked into cover. Five gunmen were dead. Others were scrambling or prone. If they all shot at once, they’d tear her apart. They’d been given a nonlethal directive, though, which made them hesitate.

  Her shield was a heavy son of a bitch, and slick with blood. She would have to dump it and find cover. She looked first toward the row of parked cars where Brody had toppled from sight. As she watched, the last advancing gunman—it was Joey Cabrini, she saw now—slipped behind the back of an SUV. He’d reached his target.

  Back-to-back shots rang out. One of them—the first, thankfully—was a shotgun.

  Cover, Lola thought. She blind-fired the Glock until it clicked empty, seven erratic shots that bought her the time she needed. She retrieved the Tank’s M4 from the ground, dragged his corpse several feet, dropped it, and broke for the vehicles parked on the near side of the gravel track. Bullets followed her, chipping at the ground around her boots. She lunged for the cover of the nearest car, and that was when she was hit. Not a bullet, a blade—one of the throwing knives from Blair’s bandolier. It struck her left forearm with the power and suddenness of a scorpion’s sting. That little bitch really was dangerous.

  Lola scuttled behind the wheel and took a moment to center herself. Bullets splashed the car and blew out the glass. She looked at the knife in her arm but didn’t remove it—let it stem the blood flow. Keeping low, she scurried farther along the rank of vehicles, and blended with the shadows.

  * * *

  Gunfire cracked against the night sky and blurred the few stars. Brody’s first thought was to hide beneath the SUV he’d taken cover behind. A more compelling thought—in keeping with the coal that burned inside him, and the hard DNA passed down from Lola—was to use the one shell remaining in the shotgun. Remembering his crash course at the range, he maintained a short distance from cover to increase his movement and visibility. A peek over the hood confirmed Blair was too far away and Jimmy was out of sight. Several bodies were scattered across the warehouse’s frontage. He couldn’t see his mom at all, then realized—to his awe—that she was using one of Jimmy’s guys as a shield. All the attention was on her.

  Almost all. A familiar gunman marched toward the SUV: Joey from Bayonet. His directive then had been to intimidate—to terrify. Now his intent was to kill.

  Brody recalled another lesson from the range. “Keep low,” his mom had said. “Make yourself a smaller target. If you can go prone, do it.” Brody dropped to his knees, then slowly to his stomach. The SUV’s shadow fell over him like a blanket. He brought the shotgun to his shoulder and held it firmly, remembering its bright kick.

  Joey advanced. Brody tracked his position from beneath the SUV. He shut out everything else—the gunshots, the screams—and focused on Joey’s combat boots, getting steadily closer. He exhaled a jerky breath and curled his finger around the rear trigger.

  It happened quickly. Joey slunk around the back of the SUV, paused for a second, then jumped out. He was crouched, looking down the barrel of his AR-15, its muzzle aimed several inches too high. Brody didn’t hesitate. He pulled the trigger an instant before Joey pulled his.

  Joey’s shot missed. Brody’s didn’t.

  The sawed-off hammered against his shoulder and voiced a devastating report. A cloud of shot erupted from the left barrel. It severed one of Joey’s legs at the knee and left the other hanging from a thick cord of fat and muscle. Joey dropped as if someone had yanked a rug from behind him. He didn’t scream—he grunted, shocked and pig-like, rocking on his belly with his eyes rolled to whites.

  Brody repelled all emotion: horror, guilt, disgust. This moment was about survival. Later—if there was a later—he could anatomize the shooting and everything associated with it. He could be human again,
but right now he needed his blood to run cold.

  He got to his knees, turned the shotgun around, and cracked the butt against Joey’s forehead. It took three swift, fierce strikes to knock him unconscious.

  Brody yanked the AR-15 from Joey’s limp grasp and soldiered on.

  * * *

  Lola flared inside. She tasted the fight, the thrill, the heat. A sound like ringing crystal flooded her mind. She hadn’t planned on going to war, but here she was.

  The unstoppable Lola Bear, locked and loaded once again.

  The three remaining gunmen on the roof were open targets. All, to their credit, had gone prone, but their little pale faces still peeked up over the edge, and that was enough. Lola squeezed the M4’s trigger twice and took two of them out. She moved to another vehicle—to get a better angle, but also to create confusion as to where the shots were coming from—and took out the third.

  The rooftop threat had been eliminated. The ground threat remained: at least seven soldiers. And Blair. And Jimmy. They were scattered. Some were in cover. Shots rang from multiple directions. Bullets struck the parked vehicles with hammer-like sounds. Glass exploded. Tires hissed. Lola blind-fired toward the warehouse, then moved again. She peered through the tinted window of a Chevy Suburban and noticed muzzle flash from behind the vehicles parked on the other side of the gravel track. Staccato shots, directed at the warehouse.

  Brody.

  “Keep moving,” Lola shouted between shots. He was in the shadows, but if she had noticed his muzzle flash, Jimmy’s guys had, too. Underscoring this logic, bullets rattled the hood and windshield of the car closest to Brody’s position. Lola located the shooter. He was tucked into the deep shadow around the loading dock. She switched the M4 to three-round burst, rolled from cover, and squeezed the trigger twice. One of the six bullets found its mark. The shooter staggered from the shadows, clutching his bleeding gut. Lola switched back to semiauto, aimed, and removed a piece of his skull.

  Back into cover. She moved.

  Bullets continued to sting the air. The vehicles rocked on their flats, their paint jobs perforated. Another gunman broke from the shadows and charged Lola’s side of the track, firing on the run. He’d clearly abandoned the nonlethal objective. Lola timed her move. She aimed through the broken windows of what had once been a Lexus and squeezed off a shot.

  Nowhere near. Her support hand was weakening—that goddamn knife in her forearm, affecting her aim. She fired twice more, missed both times. Now the charging gunman—it was Jared Conte, another face from her wall of fame—had seen her muzzle flash and swung his rifle toward her.

  She dropped just in time. Bullets sizzled over her head.

  “I’ve got you, bitch,” he screamed.

  Lola rolled to the next vehicle along and took up a new position. Grimacing, she mounted the M4 and popped up over the hood.

  Jared was no slouch. He was ready for her.

  Lola’s luck, her talent, whatever it was, had run out. The barrel of Jared’s rifle looked enormous.

  He was beaten to the trigger, though. Not by Lola, but by Brody, who’d broken cover on his side of the track. He fired once, hitting Jared in the back. A ballistic vest stopped the bullet, but the force of it knocked him to his knees. Lola finished the job. Her left hand trembled but she was close enough that it didn’t matter.

  She aimed for the middle of Jared’s face but got his throat. Six or seven inches low, but the result was the same.

  Another dead soldier.

  Lola moved into deeper cover, clutching her wounded forearm. She didn’t know how many of Jimmy’s guys were still in the fight, or how many rounds were in the M4’s mag—assuming there had been thirty to begin with. It was not like her to lose count. Another sign of getting old.

  “Head in the game,” she berated herself, wiping grime and blood from her face. She needed a pistol, that much was certain, so that she could aim and fire one-handed. Maybe then—

  She felt that scorpion sting again, in her right thigh this time. It rocked her on her feet, and as she tried to back away another perfectly weighted blade plunged into her right hip, deep enough to chip bone.

  “Shit,” Lola whispered.

  Blair crouched beside the foremost vehicle, an alligator grin on her face. She’d used Jared as a distraction—hell, as a sacrifice—and it had worked. As Lola watched, she plucked another knife from her bandolier and flashed it through the smoky air. Lola twisted sideways and avoided it by an inch. She raised the M4 one-handed and sprayed off a few hopeful rounds. Blair rolled to her right with a nimbleness that Lola hadn’t had for twenty years. She came up with both .45s in her hands but wouldn’t chance the lethal shot. Instead, she weaved toward Lola, closing the distance between them with daunting speed. Lola managed to squeeze off another round—it went well wide—then Blair knocked the M4 out of her grasp. It bounced off the hood of a nearby car and dropped out of sight. Lola threw an elbow and a knee, but Blair blocked both with no real effort, countering with a front kick to Lola’s right thigh. It was a deliberate, exact strike that drove the knife there deeper into the muscle.

  Lola folded at the knees and tumbled down a shallow embankment, stopping at the chain-link fence that separated the warehouse grounds from the rail yard. The night took a slow, frightening loop. Gunfire boomed and echoed.

  Blair’s outline floated on the bank above her, framed by dirty light.

  “Jimmy wants you alive,” she said. “But I want to give him your fucking head.”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  The caustic odor of propellant choked the air, and gun smoke drifted in white rags. Jimmy Latzo had reappeared. He stepped around the bodies of his fallen soldiers, picked up a rifle, and fired into the sky until the mag was dry.

  “Motherfuckers!” he screamed. His eyes were broad circles, and even from a distance Brody could see the damnation in them. “You fucking fucks. I’ll fucking kill you fuckers!”

  He threw the empty rifle away, picked up another, and pumped rounds into the line of vehicles behind which Brody had taken cover.

  “Motherfuckers!”

  Brody scrambled to a different position. The visibility wasn’t as good but the cover was better. Until that point, he’d primarily been laying down suppressive fire, letting his mom do the heavy lifting, but seeing Jimmy set a rock tumbling through him. Everything shook. His blood chilled. It was all he could do to keep from leaping over the cars and running at him with his gun blazing.

  Jimmy emptied this second rifle, picked up another. The remaining soldiers rallied to his side—five of them in a ragged line. Two had lower body wounds. One had blood pouring down his face. They still packed firepower, though, and they could still use it. Leo Rossi—Brody’s other friend from Bayonet, who’d held a gun to Molly’s head—stood at the far end of the line.

  Brody blind-fired to set them on their toes. They retaliated, all weapons smoking, spent shells helicoptering to the ground. Brody moved to yet a new position and braved a glance. The shooting stopped. The smoke lifted. Jimmy motioned his guys to flank the vehicles while he held the front. Brody halted them with a splash of gunfire. He hit one of them, a lucky shot, and the thug dropped, screaming, clutching his knee. It wasn’t all luck, though. Leo Rossi had fired a couple of reflex shots. One went wide. The other punched through Brody’s leather jacket and ripped through his side.

  Shot I’ve been shot I’ve been—

  The pain was like a forest fire in miniature. A raging, wicked thing. Brody hit the ground in a heap, then pushed himself against the wheel of the car. He clutched his side. Blood seeped through his fingers.

  “Come on, you motherfucker,” Jimmy yelled.

  Brody looked at the blood on his hand, then at the AR-15. He didn’t know where his mom was, and couldn’t depend on her now. This was down to him. One bullet. That was all he needed. One sweet, precise shot to blow the life out of Jimmy’s body.

  He nodded. This was it.

  Fuck you, Jimmy, he thought, and
broke from cover, bringing the gun to his shoulder. He rose through a haze of pain and anger. He even heard it. A wild engine sound. A kamikaze cry. Leo and the other thugs faded from view. The bodies, the blood, the warehouse . . . it all faded. Only Jimmy remained.

  He expanded in Brody’s eye. In that second, he was the entire world.

  This was Jimmy Latzo. Mobster. Torturer. The Italian Cat.

  This was the man who had killed his father.

  Brody locked him in his sights and pulled the trigger.

  Nothing.

  He pulled the trigger a second time. And a third.

  Zilch. Zip. The gun was spent.

  Brody sagged. His heart curled up and died. The rest of his body would follow, he thought, although he could still hear that wild engine sound, that kamikaze cry. Jimmy’s guys mounted their rifles and prepared to shoot, but Jimmy raised one hand and held them.

  “No,” he growled. Craziness spilled from his eyes. His scars were flushed and glowing. “This motherfucker is mine.”

  He lifted his rifle and took aim, then a bright white light covered everything.

  * * *

  Headlights—high beam—raced toward them. The police, Brody assumed, even though he couldn’t see the splashy beat of their reds and blues. His mom had suggested they wouldn’t venture out here, but this much gunfire, even in Carver City, surely couldn’t be ignored.

  Jimmy and his goons squinted, throwing up their hands to deflect the light. Brody did, too, but not before he saw that this wasn’t the arrival of Carver City’s finest. It was a pickup truck. A silver Sierra 1500. His mom’s truck, no less.

  Molly behind the wheel.

  She took the gravel track at startled-cat speed, grit flying from the rear tires, the engine—that kamikaze cry—filling the night. She didn’t stop. She didn’t touch the brake. Brody caught a glimpse of her—or imagined he did: grinning deliriously, hair hanging across the bruised side of her face, hands gripping the wheel.