Fire Beach: Lei Crime Book 8 (Lei Crime Series) (16 page)

She practiced her relaxation breathing: in through the nose, out through the mouth.
In to the count of three, out to the count of five.
Alert, ready to respond, and at ease. She was safe here, high up and out of sight, and the advantage was all hers. There was no way to have a clue what the hell was going on, and the only way she could help was if someone was escaping and she stopped that.

And for that she needed to be calm, focused, and ready to fire.

She heard the vehicle before she saw it, the throaty roar of an eight-cylinder engine under full acceleration. When the shiny black Escalade appeared, almost up on two tires as it tried to make the turn out of the drive onto the main road, it loomed unnaturally large in the viewfinder.

Cliché gangster car
. She aimed at the front tire on the driver’s side and gently squeezed the trigger.

The recoil smacked her hard enough in the shoulder that she knew she’d have a bruise tomorrow. She ratcheted another bullet into the chamber.

The vehicle didn’t slow.

She tracked it and shot the other tire.

This time the tire blew with a satisfying
bam!
and the Escalade wove back and forth, still trying to accelerate out of the turn. Lei ratcheted another round and aimed at the heavily tinted windshield. It was almost too close, so she took the shot without being certain she had a bead on the driver.

In her haste, Lei’s eye was too close to the viewfinder and the recoil banged it backward, hitting her eye socket.

“Shit!” Lei exclaimed, pulling away. She was going to have a nasty shiner tomorrow. The rifle, already off balance from the recoil, fell off the branch. Eyes still on her target, Lei saw that the glass of the SUV’s windshield had spider webbed but not broken.

It must be bulletproof.

The Escalade was still coming with its husky roar, but now someone put on the brakes directly across from her hiding place. They must have spotted the rifle falling into the underbrush below the tree.

Lei flattened herself against the wood and whipped out her Glock, extending her arms and stabilizing them on the branch. She fired at the driver’s side window.

The glass wouldn’t break.
Sucker is bulletproof, too
. The window cracked at the top, and Lei squinted, carefully aiming for the gap even as she spotted the gleam of a weapon and heard its report.

A slug buried itself in the mango tree a few inches away, kicking up shards of bark.

“Lucky shot, asshole,” she growled, and fired the rest of the clip at the gap in the window.

The driver must have decided Lei had the advantage because the Escalade lurched forward again, rolling along on flat tires.

Lei was done trying to hit anything through the bulletproof glass. She dropped the Glock and pulled the extra she’d stowed in her belt, aiming at the back tires. She hit one, and it made a satisfying smacking sound as the round punched through the tough rubber—but it wasn’t a big enough hole to blow the tire, and the Escalade accelerated on, flapping down the road.

Not going fast—but going.

Lei sat up, holstered her weapon, turned to one side, and slid down from the branch to dangle by her hands, dropping the last three feet into the deep leaf mulch under the tree. She grabbed the fallen sniper rifle and her spent Glock and ran back toward the SUV, already digging Ohale’s keys out of her pocket.

Terence Chang was sitting upright, eyes wide with alarm, as Lei beeped open the vehicle and jumped in, cramming in the key and turning it on.

“Let me out,” he pleaded. “Gimme a gun. Let me help.”

Lei didn’t dignify this with an answer as she threw the truck into reverse and then blazed forward, laying down rubber as she made the turn onto the main road. Captain Ohale’s vehicle hurtled down the narrow road after the fleeing Escalade.

“Get on the floor,” she told Chang, freeing her weapon beside her. She hooked the radio off the dash. “Officer needs assistance! In pursuit of a black Escalade.” She named the highway. “Suspects armed and dangerous, escaped compound from SWAT raid.”

“Ten-four, Officer. Please identify yourself.”

Lei identified herself, driving as fast as she could on the weaving, narrow road.

The Escalade couldn’t have gotten that far ahead of her, and yet it seemed it had. She began to wonder if she’d somehow whizzed past it, if they’d ducked off the main road and found a way to hide. She passed a great chunk of cast-off tire, and then another, and finally there was the vehicle, pulled over on bare rims.

Lei came up behind the vehicle and stopped on the shoulder. The smell of hot metal and burned rubber penetrated the SUV, and a bullet burst a halo of cracks in the windshield as they fired on her.

Lei threw herself sideways. Thank God Ohale’s vehicle appeared bulletproof too. Lei dropped down below the dash, ramming another clip into her Glock. “Stay down!” she yelled at Chang again.

“No shit!” Chang exclaimed.

Hunched under the steering wheel, Lei considered her options. She didn’t want the suspects getting out and fleeing on foot, but sticking her own leg out and getting shot didn’t seem like a good idea either.

“We’re going to keep them covered and wait for backup,” Lei said.

“I’m okay with that,” Chang said.

She was starting to like him. She was pretty sure he didn’t feel the same.

The minutes seemed to pass like hours. Lei poked her head up periodically to see if anyone was trying to get out of the SUV, but so far, no movement.

Finally, the scream of sirens, and now they were coming from both directions—from Hilo and from the compound.

Some of the SWAT team must be back on the road to respond to her call. Sure enough, one of the SWAT vehicles overshot her spot and spun to face the Escalade. Pulling up behind it, arriving from the other direction, were two regular police cruisers.

The SWAT leader opened his door. Lei spotted Stevens in the passenger side. The leader used a megaphone. “Driver of the Escalade. Put your hands on your head. Get out slowly, and you won’t be harmed.”

A long moment passed. Then the shattered but unbroken window of the Escalade rolled down. A gun fell out and clattered into the road. “I’m unarmed,” a voice called. “But I can’t get out.”

Lei knew that voice.

She sat up and opened her door, shouting at the SWAT leader, “He’s disabled! You have to approach the vehicle and help him out.”

No one moved. The SWAT team appeared to be conferring. The police officers had taken defensive positions behind their doors.

This was taking too long, and she wanted to get an eyeball on Ray Solomon herself. Lei darted out from behind her vehicle door and over to the SUV. She couldn’t see anyone else through the heavy tinting on the windows, so she slid along the side below the windows’ edge as she approached the driver’s door, her weapon ready

Lei could see Ray Solomon’s face, tense and frowning, his hands on top of his head, reflected in the rearview mirror. She reached him and gave the front door a sudden yank to open it and surprise anyone waiting to take a shot. Ray must have been leaning on the door, because he fell out of the vehicle at her feet, landing on the pavement with a grunt. Folded beside the driver’s seat was a wheelchair.

“You,” Ray Solomon said, his distinctive golden-brown eyes narrowing on her face.

If it weren’t for those eyes, she wouldn’t have recognized Ray. The young man she remembered had been handsome and well built; he had taken pride in his body and his ripped muscles.

The man who landed at her feet must have been close to three hundred pounds, his lower body flopping and useless. But she recognized the hate in Ray’s eyes from the last time she’d pulled him out of a car. She couldn’t help the twist of guilt and regret in her guts, because it was her bullet that had paralyzed him.

The SWAT team surrounded the vehicle, opening the doors. “Clear,” the commander said.

“Where’s Anela?” Lei asked Ray.

Ray spat. It landed on her jeans-clad leg. “Long gone. Find her yourself.”

Lei felt a hand on her arm and knew it was Stevens’s. She backed away from Ray as the man was surrounded by the SWAT team, lifted and carried to one of the cruisers. She turned to her husband but didn’t have time to speak as Ohale rolled up in another of the SWAT vehicles. He got out and joined them.

“Good work, Lei,” the captain said, holding up a neatly wrapped kilo of what looked like crystal methamphetamine. “We have a huge bust here. It was a good raid; no fatalities, thanks to non-lethal ammo.”

“Did you get Anela Chang?” Lei knew her voice was high-pitched with anxiety.

Stevens finally spoke. “Wasn’t among the prisoners. Thought she’d be in the SUV.” His face was grayish, his hair matted to his head with sweat, and Lei frowned at the sight of the red bubbles on his mouth. She reached up. Her fingers came away from his lips bloody.

“You’re injured!” she exclaimed. Stevens seemed to deflate all of a sudden, his knees buckling, and he sagged between Lei and Ohale. His breath sounded ragged and wet, and Lei felt panic jolt through her as Ohale caught Stevens and they lowered him to the road.

“First aid is on the way. Think he overdid it back there with his burn injuries, and he took a round to the back of the vest.”

“Got something to cover him up with in the back of the truck,” Ray yelled from the rolled-down window of the cruiser. “We won’t stop coming after you until you’re gone.”

Lei spun and stomped across the road toward Ray, but Ohale caught her arm. “Don’t let him bait you,” he said. “You’ve done enough. We’ll get them all. Don’t worry.”

“Come and hit me, Texeira,” Ray yelled. “Come and hit the man you crippled. You’re a dead woman walking, bitch!”

The officer driving the patrol car rolled up the window and pulled away. They heard Ray’s muffled shouts for longer than they should have.

Lei knelt next to Stevens. His face was white, his eyes closed, and she heard the fluid bubbling in his lungs as he struggled to breathe. “Where’s that ambulance?” she cried, and heard its wail finally approaching.

Several ambulances whizzed by, but only one stopped, as the others continued on to work with the injured at the compound. The emergency team wouldn’t let Lei get in as they worked quickly to get an IV into Stevens and put him on oxygen. Lei watched the vehicle pull away, tears blinding her.

“Guess you don’t want to see this right now, but at least it’s confirmation we’ve got the right guy.” Ohale held up a length of unbleached muslin shroud from a box in the back of the Escalade.

“Something to cover him up with,” Lei murmured, repeating Ray’s words.
That murdering bastard.

Chapter 16

S
tevens never really passed out for any of the horrible hours after he’d collapsed in the road outside of Hilo. He desperately wished he could, just float away into the darkness now that he knew Lei and the baby were safe. But he was stuck in his broken corpse, struggling for every oxygen-enriched breath that he could drag into bruised, burned lungs.

He had ample time to reflect on how he should have stayed at the cottage with Wayne and Kiet and sucked on his oxygen bottle a whole lot longer instead of running off to the Big Island to participate in a raid that would probably have gone down fine without him. In the end, he hadn’t been able to do a thing to protect Lei, anyway. Getting out of her car and taking on Solomon in his blacked-out vehicle when none of the SWAT team would even approach?

It’s the final straw.

Stevens kept his eyes shut because there was nothing to see in the hospital room but the plastic oxygen tent around him, the usual equipment, and a tiled ceiling ringed with brown circles of damp. They’d shot him up with some sort of painkiller that dulled the panic out of the struggle to breathe, but he was far from any oblivion.

His mind kept circling back to Lei. Sitting beside the SWAT leader in that vehicle, he’d watched her get out of the car, helpless to do anything as she sidled along the Escalade with her weapon at the ready. He remembered how she peeled the door open and Solomon, who easily could have had a second weapon and plugged her in the head, landed on his back on the pavement and spat on her instead.

It was a feedback loop he couldn’t seem to pause.
It’s the final straw.

He didn’t even know what that meant, but he felt the truth of it.

He must have fallen into a doze because he woke with a painful gasp to the feel of her hand in his. He knew without glancing down what it looked like: smooth, olive-tan skin; short, pale nails. It was so much smaller than his. A sturdy, capable hand that could handle a gun, a bomb, a dog, a truck, a baby.

Her hands didn’t need him for anything.

“Are you awake?” she whispered.

He opened his eyes. His bed was propped at an angle to keep the fluids in his lungs from traveling upward, and she was on the outside of the plastic oxygen tent, a shifting image as if seen through water.

“How are you feeling?”

He shook his head. Speaking hurt too much, but mostly he didn’t have anything to say.

“I was so worried.” Tears gleamed in her tilted brown eyes, one of them purplish and swollen. Yeah, she was attached to him, all right. Michael Stevens, the man who’d take her shit and keep coming back for more, fool that he was. It didn’t mean he had a function in her life beyond sperm donor.

He shut his eyes. Shut her out.

She tightened her hand on his a moment, then withdrew it from beneath the plastic. He heard rustling and scraping and then silence.

A long moment passed.

He cracked his eyelids.

She’d dragged the padded plastic armchair that extended into a bed from the corner and pushed it as close to his bed as possible. Lei was lying on it facing him, hands flat against each other tucked under her cheek, knees drawn up. She had a nasty black eye and scrapes on her arms. Her hair was frizzing out of the ball she’d rubber-banded it into.

She looked dead asleep, her face pale. She’d been so tired since the baby, and today had been intense for everyone.

He wished he could tuck her against him in her special spot, that dip between his collarbone and shoulder. Her head fit perfectly when she lay along his side there, half of a heart he never knew he’d been missing until she filled the space.

Stevens shut his eyes, mad at himself because he knew he breathed easier now that she was beside him.

A cramp woke Lei, a knot in her arm that felt like she’d been punched in that spot. The hospital room was dark but for a fluorescent floor strip and the flashing of small red monitoring lights. Someone had covered her with a blanket, and a paper-covered pillow was tucked between her head and the chair’s frame.

Lei looked over at Stevens. He was shrouded in plastic that gleamed faintly in the reflected lights, his face a formless shadow against the white pillows, but she could hear his breathing.

It was steady, regular. Still ragged and a little wet, but more relaxed.

Lei rubbed the charley horse on her arm. It must not have liked all that climbing in and out of the tree. As she rubbed, she thought of the rest of the afternoon after they took Stevens away. Wrapping up at the compound, moving the defendants to holding at the jail. Giving her statement. A post-raid debrief at the station with SWAT. Saying goodbye to Terence Chang as he was held back for more interviews. Turning over her weapons for ballistics tests. Going straight to the hospital the minute Captain Ohale would let her go.