Free Donna Joy Usher - Chanel 02 - Goons 'n' Roses by Donna Joy Usher Page B

out with stained mattresses. The only exit was the way we’d come in and that was almost too scary to contemplate. However, the thought of being trapped there till the Russians came back was even scarier.
    ‘You ready to kick some Russian arse?’ Martine asked.
    ‘Hell yeah.’ My voice was full of bravado.
    Our bags lay on the ground amidst their strewn contents. Our phones, money and anything that could be used as a weapon were gone, but the Duct Tape lay where they had discarded it. I threw it into my bag with the rest of the stuff they had left, while Martine crept up the stairs and pushed her body against the trap door.
    ‘Shit,’ she said. ‘It must be locked from above.’
    Damn it. Even though we had chest bumped (which is really hard to do with a six foot drag queen in three-inch heels) and fist bumped, and swore, ‘we’d make those Ruskys pay,’ I’d really been hoping for a clean escape. We hadn’t come off so well in round one, and I didn’t have high hopes for round two.
    ‘What do we do?’ she said.
    ‘Well, they have to come back down here sometime, so we turn off the light, hide under the stairs and hit them over the head with the chairs.’
    It sounded like a good plan. Of course if more than one of them came down we were in trouble, and if all three of them came we were in all sorts of strife. And then of course there was the dark, but I solved that dilemma by turning on my torch.
    I wasn’t sure how long we’d been waiting when we heard the trap door rattle. All I knew was that my torch was getting fainter and fainter, and that my pulse rate was in indirect proportion to the brightness of the light.
    The trap door lifted, a small beam of light shone down the stairs and an accented voice said, ‘Little vun, I ‘ave a present for you.’
    Christ , it was Dmitrij. I was suddenly intensely glad that I was hiding under the stairs and not bound and gagged in my room.
    I counted the sound of his feet coming down the steps. When he got to eleven, and I knew he would be reaching for the light switch, I slammed my chair over the back of his head.
    He let out a satisfying, ‘Ooof,’ and slumped to the ground.
    I dropped the seat, grabbed our bags, and sprinted after Martine up the stairs and down the corridor to the front door. This time it was locked. It felt like forever while Martine wrangled with it, swearing and cursing under her breath until she finally turned the handle and yanked open the door. We heard a yell from behind us as we raced down the stairs and into the night.
    We had planned the escape from the house, but we hadn’t planned what we were going to do after we escaped. I had thought they wouldn’t chase us once we were free. I was wrong.
    We sprinted across the road towards the Stratosphere. I looked back and saw Boris pelting down the front stairs with Vladimir behind him.
    ‘We need to blend in,’ Martine yelled over her shoulder.
    I wasn’t sure how she was planning on doing that. The only time I had ever seen her blend in was when she was on stage with a troupe of drag queens.
    A crowd of people clustered near the entrance to the Stratosphere. We darted through them and then I spied a smaller door off to the side. ‘In here,’ I said. I dived through the door and stood just behind it peeping out at our pursuers.
    ‘Hiyee,’ a chirpy voice said.
    ‘Hi.’ I glanced over my shoulder at the owner of the voice. A petite blonde stood behind a desk, wide eyes staring at Martine and me. I looked back out around the door. The men paused in front of the tower and scanned the crowd for us. When they couldn’t see us, they went through the main door into the tower.
    So, ummm, you two are wanting to jump?’ The extra chirpy voice said.
    ‘We sure do,’ Martine said. I could feel her looking over my shoulder.
    ‘You just need to sign here.’
    Two clipboards with pieces of paper on them were shoved in front of us. I grabbed one, flipped the pen out of the top clip and