Badge of the Death Game

Chapter 046

The gunfire from the floors below was distant but unmistakable. Cody glanced across at Soren, and Soren felt the same thing register behind his eyes. Something had gone sideways. The timeline had collapsed ahead of schedule.

He ran through it quickly. Had the caller sold them out? It didn't quite fit. Everything the man had said pointed to him wanting Julian dead tonight. Why burn that now? But the question could wait. On the other side of the fire door, voices had started up, and then came the sound of a door opening.

There was no more time to think.

The gunshots punched through Julian Voss's sleep like a fist through paper.

He was upright before he was fully conscious, shouting at the door. "What the hell is going on out there?!" He shoved the two women beside him aside without looking at them, grabbed his underwear off the floor, and was pulling it on before his feet hit the carpet.

In the suite's living room, two of his bodyguards had already crossed to the window and were peering down at the street below, trying to make sense of the muzzle flashes and running figures in the darkness.

Julian pushed through the bedroom door. "What is it?"

"Gunfight downstairs, Young Master. Not sure what's happening yet."

The word landed wrong. Julian stood very still for a moment, something cold moving through his chest. He pulled his phone from his pocket and tried to call Duke. The screen showed a large X where the signal bars should have been.

The cold feeling spread.

"Now," he said, his voice dropping. "Send someone down. Get the security teams up here. Now."

"Yes, sir."

One of the bodyguards pulled open the suite door.

The two guards posted in the corridor turned at the sound.

At the far end of the hall, the fire door exploded inward.

Soren came through at a dead sprint, MCX Rattler up and already firing before the door had finished swinging. Three controlled bursts, each one placed. The two guards in the corridor went down before either of them could raise a weapon. The third, the one who had just stepped out of the suite, caught a round in the lower abdomen. The impact spun him back through the doorway.

He was a professional. Even with a bullet in his gut, his training took over. He got a hand on the suite door and hauled it shut behind him, then drew his pistol and found cover, pressing himself into the gap between the sofa and the wall.

"Protect the Young Master!" His voice came out ragged but loud, carrying the full weight of a man who knew he was probably dying and had decided to be useful about it.

The other bodyguard inside was already moving, one hand on Julian's arm, pulling him back toward the bedroom. The safe room. Get him to the safe room.

Out in the corridor, Soren and Cody moved up on the suite door in a tight stack, Soren leading left, Cody a step behind and right. Two suppressed shots finished the bodyguards still down in the hallway. Cody unclipped the single throwable he'd been carrying all night from his vest: a concussion grenade. He pulled the pin and held it up briefly so Soren could see it, then shifted to the hinge side of the door.

The situation on the other side was unknown. At least one armed man was in there, possibly more, and a wounded, cornered opponent was exactly the kind of opponent who fired blindly through doors. Walking through the fatal funnel without preparation was how people got killed.

Soren didn't walk through it.

He slung the MCX Rattler to his left hip and reached behind him with his right hand.

The Remington M1100 came off his back. The chamber was already loaded, six slugs ready to go.

He pressed the muzzle flush against the door just above the lock and pulled the trigger.

The shot was enormous in the enclosed corridor. The lock mechanism disintegrated, brass and steel fragments spraying inward. Before the echo had settled, Soren racked the action and put a second slug dead center into the door panel. The round tore a fist-sized hole through the wood and the impact blew the door inward on its hinges, swinging it hard into the room.

The bodyguard behind the sofa opened up the instant the door moved. Pistol rounds punched through the open doorway and buried themselves in the wall on the opposite side of the corridor, none of them finding anything to hit.

Cody stepped out from the hinge side and threw the concussion grenade through the gap in a single clean motion.

The detonation shook the walls. The pistol fire stopped.

Soren was already moving. He came through the doorway low and fast, breaking left toward the corner as he crossed the threshold. The bodyguard behind the sofa was still there, stunned, trying to reacquire a target. Soren put a slug into the center of his chest. The ballistic vest absorbed the round but the impact drove the man flat. Soren was already pivoting, sweeping the rest of the living room. Cody came through a half-second later, covering the right-side angles that Soren's movement had left open.

The living room was clear.

Soren stepped over the downed bodyguard, pressed the Remington M1100's muzzle to the back of his skull, and fired once. Then he moved to the bedroom door.

Cody took up position on the opposite side of the frame without being asked.

Soren reached into his shell carrier, pulled three buckshot rounds, and thumbed them into the Remington's magazine tube. He checked the count, confirmed it was sufficient, and lined the muzzle up with the bedroom door lock.

Inside the bedroom, the two women were already dead. The surviving bodyguard stood with his back to the wall beside the door, pistol in a two-handed grip, muzzle trained on the frame, waiting.

Behind him, Julian Voss was crouched in front of a low metal door set into the baseboard of the far wall, barely a meter tall, his fingers shaking as he worked the combination dial on the safe room lock. He kept spinning past the numbers. His hands wouldn't cooperate.

"Why is there no signal in here?" he hissed under his breath, voice cracking. "Why hasn't security come up yet?"

He spun the dial again. Wrong. Again. Wrong.

The bedroom door came apart.

Two slugs, one into the lock and one dead center into the panel, blew the door open and sent splinters across the carpet. The bodyguard fired immediately, working through his magazine as fast as he could pull the trigger, round after round punching through the open doorway. For a man alone with a pistol, he was doing everything right.

But the magazine ran dry. The slide locked back with a sharp mechanical snap that filled the sudden silence like a verdict.

Soren was already through the door.

One slug, point-blank.

The bodyguard's head came apart from the collar up. The force of it threw what remained backward, and the spray caught Julian full across the face and chest. Something solid landed in his open mouth. His throat worked on pure reflex.

He swallowed.

A boot connected with his ribs and put him on his back on the carpet.

Julian Voss, half-n***d and covered in blood that wasn't his, looked up at two masked figures and found that every threat he had ever made, every order he had ever given, every person he had ever broken, had not prepared him for this moment in the slightest.

"Don't kill me," he said. His voice had gone very small. "Please. Don't kill me."

Soren looked at him for a moment, then glanced at Cody and gave a single nod.

Cody produced two zip ties and knelt down. He looped one around Julian's thumbs and one around his wrists, pulling both tight, and stepped back.

Soren crouched to eye level and spoke without any particular urgency, as though he had all the time in the world.

"I have a few questions. Answer them honestly and I may consider letting you walk away from this."

He held up one finger.

"First. Besides you, who else knows the combination to your safe room?"

A second finger.

"Second. Where is your father right now in West Cascadia? Is he planning to return anytime soon?"

A third.

"Third. Where is all the cash from the hotel and the casino kept?"