Free Hard Case VI: The Killer Inside (John Harding Book 6) by Bernard Lee DeLeo Page A

still on their feet fired on the giant target bulling into the upper room: me. Not taking any direct hits from the panicked guards, I blitzed the one in front of me as Lucas and Casey followed me through with pinpoint precision death. We weren’t here to take prisoners. That task was to fall for now on Crue and the minions.
    * * *
    Angela Barrios huddled in the corner of her closet under a clothing pile. Her heart raced after talking with a man who claimed he would help her, but she must find somewhere else besides her home to wait. Angela spotted the two policemen from the station before they saw her in the street. With no place to run, she hurried back into her small apartment on the second floor of the Tijuana tenement house. She heard them bang on her door, ordering her to open it. Angela remained where she was, praying they would assume she had left already without searching for her too closely.
    Angela clenched the loose clothing in her fists as the door to her apartment banged open, stabbing memories of how happy she had been only days ago. Gerald Smithson loved her. Smitty, as his friends called him, repeated it even as the police dragged him away. Now, he was probably dead, and these men would soon kill her too. Worst of all, Angela had no idea why. She could plead with them if she knew what they wanted. As the sliding door on her closet slammed open against its stops, she knew her visit to the police station had been a huge mistake. First a laugh sounded above her before the pile of clothing was ripped away.
    “Stand her up,” a woman wearing a dark Muslim hijab facial mask ordered in heavily accented Spanish.
    The policeman who had tossed aside her clothing cover grabbed Angela’s arm, yanking her painfully to a standing position in front of the woman.
    “Is this the one who asked about the man taken?”
    “Yes.”
    “You will come with us, little bird,” the woman said. “Your man has been most uncooperative. With you bound next to him, I am sure he will be more helpful.”
    “But what is it you want? We have done nothing wrong,” Angela pleaded. “I will help you. What is it you want to know?”
    The woman laughed at her. “We want nothing from you, little bird. It was a mistake not to have taken you the first night. Bring her. We will go to the house with her man before we move them both. Cut her so she knows not to scream.”
    “No! I will say nothing. I will not scream! You won’t even need to bind me! Please!”
    The woman laughed again, obviously amused with the effect her threat had on Angela. “Very well, little bird. Do not make a peep or we will skin you. Bring her unbound as if she is merely being taken for questioning willingly.”
    With one of the policemen in front, Angela in the middle, and the second policeman behind her, the woman in the hijab followed out the door. They did not get far. The sounds of stun-gun arcs, followed by the bodies of the two policemen catapulted back inside the room to the floor, momentarily shocked the woman formerly giving orders to a standstill. A grim faced blonde woman ran at her, pistol whipping her to the floor. When she cried out, the door slammed shut, and the blonde put a knife tip under her right eye.
    “Hi there. I’ve been listening to you mess with my sister,” the blonde said in Spanish, making a small incision in the woman’s skin under her eye. The blood trickling down her cheek inside the hijab froze the woman in mid motion as she had been about to grab her head where she had been pistol whipped. The hijab was torn from her head and tossed aside by the blonde. “What the hell’s the mask for. Do you think you’re Zorro? Nobody messes with my sister Angela. Ain’t that right guys?”
    Her minions echoed the sentiment with amusement while restraining and gagging the two policemen. Silvio comforted Angela.
    “I’m Lynn. You can call me mistress. I heard you tell my sis you know where her man is. That’s good. That will save us a lot