Had he been in recruiting? For the military?
Jim came back into the corridor, shut the door, and leaned against it, crossing his arms over his chest and looking like he wanted to punch a wall.
“Are we clear?” Matthias demanded.
“Pretty much.”
Abruptly, he noticed the holes in Heron’s shirt. “Good thing you’re wearing a vest, too.”
“What?”
Matthias frowned. “You’ve been hit—”
All at once, his brain coughed up another piece of the past: he saw the pair of them in a stainless-steel room, a cold body on a slab between them, a gun up, a trigger getting pulled…at f**king Heron. By himself.
“I’ve shot you in a morgue,” Matthias breathed. “I’ve shot you…right in the chest.”
20
Perfect frickin’ timing, Jim thought as Matthias stared at him like he’d sprouted a horn in the middle of his forehead.
This was so not a good situation for that memory of his to come back online: Clearly, someone from XOps was on Matthias’s trail. It was the only logical explanation—although that wasn’t what was blendering his brain.
Devina had evidently saved their asses.
She had come, gone Ginsu, and left. And as the demon never did anything that didn’t benefit her, he had to wonder just how much a part of the game this assassination attempt had been. Maybe none—after all, if she wanted to influence Matthias at his crossroads, she needed him to be alive whenever that came.
And Jim had obviously not been doing a bang-up job of protecting the f**ker.
“I shot you…” Matthias repeated.
Jim leveled a get-over-yourself stare. “You want a medal for it? I’ll buy you one off the Internet. But before you go all existential, that’s what they make bulletproof vests for, right?”
“You weren’t wearing one.” Matthias took off the sunglasses and narrowed his eyes. “And you aren’t now.”
“Okay, right, we’re in a public place with a dead body full of slugs that came from our guns. Do you honestly think it’s a good call to hang around and to chat?”
“I know him.” Matthias pointed to their attacker. “I just can’t place where.”
“Look, I’m going to take this trash out. If you’d be so kind as to take your motherfucking ass back to your hotel room—”
“Tell me. Or I’m not going anywhere.”
For a split second, Jim remembered oh, so clearly, why he’d always referred to the guy as Matthias the Fucker.
“Fine. You were his boss.”
“Just what kind of a boss was I?”
They did not have time for this. “Not one I liked, I’ll tell you that.”
“I was yours, too…wasn’t I.” When Jim didn’t say anything further, the guy bared his teeth. “Why the hell are you stringing me along. One way or the other, I’m going to put it together, and all you’re doing is pissing me off.”
Shit. There was a very real possibility the guy wouldn’t move, and Devina would come back—or nearly as bad, the cops or hotel security would turn up.
“Fine,” Jim said gruffly. “I’m afraid if you know, you’re going to end up in Hell. How’s that.”
Matthias recoiled. “You don’t look like a Jesus freak.”
“I’m not one. So can we cut the bullshitting and get moving?”
Matthias shuffled to his feet, hooked his cane over his shoulder, and went to the dead guy’s ankles. “You’re not dodging the question forever.”
“What the hell are you doing?”
“We’re going to deal with this together—”
“No, we’re not—”
The sound of sirens cut the argument off, and they both looked at the door. With any luck, the cops would pass by, the volume finding a bell curve as the badges closed in and kept the f**k going—
Nope. Someone had seen something, heard something, and done the 911.
As a car screeched to a halt in the alley, Jim wanted to take the easy way out—just whammy Matthias into a trance, poof the stiff, and bend the mentals of the blue unis who were, at this very moment, getting out of their vehicles with flashlights. But the mind-meld shit was tough to do to more than one person at a time. And lighting the corpse on fire would tell the CPD exactly where they were.
Hopefully, those boys in blue would waste some time looking around the alley.
“Shut. It,” he barked as he grabbed Matthias around the middle, swung the guy up over his shoulder, and started to book it down the hall.
“Arrrrrreee y-y-you f-f-f-fucking k-kidding mmmmm-m-m-eee—”
The bitch session was cut short, either because Matthias swallowed his own tongue from the rough ride, or because a brain hemorrhage took over thanks to the paint mixing. But goddamn it, they made it to the end of the fifty-mile corridor, and this time, Jim didn’t have to hide his blasting the lock. Bursting through, he—
Oh, shit.
—ran right into the back of one of the hotel’s restaurants.
The good news was it appeared to be the facility used to serve breakfast and lunch out of; the place was a ghost town, the cook tops and stainless steel counters all cleaned up and battened for the off shift. Unfortunately, the B and E had set off the security alarm, and red lights were flashing in all the corners.
“This way,” Matthias said, pointing to a set of double doors with round window cutouts in them. “And put my ass down.”
Jim unloaded the guy and they took off again, passing by a stove as long as a football field and then a sink big enough to wash an elephant in. As they pounded across the red-tiled floor, Jim looked around for a control panel for the alarm system, some kind of motherboard, but of course they wouldn’t put it in the middle of all this Emeril Lagasse. Besides, even if he could disarm the thing, the signal had already been sent.
Busting through the pair of swingers, they went into an open layout of square tables set for hungry people who wouldn’t show up for toast and eggs for another seven hours—
On the far side, the tinted-glass walls that separated the eatery from the lobby were showing a trio of running people who had to be hotel security.
He and Matthias both looked to the left, where floor-to-ceiling drapes were drawn back to frame old-fashioned, double-hung windows.
No discussion. They gunned for the only exit they had a chance at. And to Matthias’s credit, he didn’t try to play hero when they got there; he pulled up short and let Jim unlock the switch and grab the brass handle on the base of the sill.