Badge of the Death Game

Chapter 050

Pick up. Come on, pick up.

Duke stood in the middle of the parking garage with the phone pressed to his ear, watching the call timer count upward, sweat running cold down the side of his face. He couldn't remember the last time he had wanted anything this badly. Not a business deal, not a favor from a powerful man, not even the girl he'd spent half his university years chasing. Nothing had ever felt this urgent.

The call was about to drop.

Then it connected.

The relief hit him like a wave. Color flooded back into his face and the words came out fast, almost tripping over each other. "Where are you? Are they dealt with? If it's done, get down here now and cover me, I need—"

Silence on the other end.

The relief curdled.

Duke swallowed. "Who... who is this?"

A quiet laugh came through the speaker. A voice he recognized.

"Using someone else's blade and then breaking it when you're done, Duke. That's cold, even for you."

The phone left his hand before the sentence was finished. It hit the concrete and came apart, pieces scattering across the garage floor. Duke stood over them, staring, unable to form a coherent thought for several seconds.

"That's not possible," he said to no one. "They can't still be alive. There were more than a dozen guards up there."

Then something moved through him, cold and clarifying, and his hands were already digging through his jacket for his car keys before his mind had fully caught up with what his body already knew. He found them, turned, and broke into a run toward his parking space.

Outside, the city was waking up in the worst possible way. Sirens cut through the night air from multiple directions, the sound building as units converged on the block. The firefight Mark had started in the street had drawn enough attention to bring out more than a standard patrol response. Through the gaps in the parking structure, Duke could already see the sweep of blue and red lights painting the surrounding buildings, and the silhouettes of tactical vehicles moving into position.

The Goldport Police Department had sent its special response unit.

Duke didn't stop to think about that. He hit the unlock button on his key fob, yanked the door of the white BMW Z4 open, dropped into the seat, and turned the engine over. The car came alive with a low, powerful growl. He kept his head down, foot already finding the accelerator, and aimed the nose at the parking structure exit.

He didn't look back.

________________________________________

In the fire stairwell above, Soren and Cody were already most of the way down, moving fast, when Evan's voice broke through the earpiece with an edge that wasn't there before.

"Soren. Mark is in bad shape. He needs a hospital right now. I'm not sure how much time he has."

"Get him there," Soren said without breaking stride. "Tell Hank to contact Wilson immediately. Hank will know what to do."

"On it."

Cody was watching the light through the narrow stairwell windows, the red and blue strobing against the exterior walls of the building opposite. His expression had gone serious. "The whole street is lit up. Sounds like we're surrounded. What do we do?"

He didn't say the rest of it out loud, but Soren understood what he wasn't saying. Two people, no support, no overwatch, ammunition at less than half capacity after everything the night had demanded of them. Fighting through a police cordon wasn't a plan. It was a way to die.

"We play it by ear," Soren said. "If it comes to it, we surrender. Hank will find a way to get us out."

Cody nodded, and said nothing more.

They hit the basement level. Soren kicked the fire door open and came through with the MCX Rattler up, sweeping the space. The aftermath of the grenade trap was still spread across the garage floor near the private elevator bay, bodies and debris and the acrid smell of burned propellant hanging in the air. The alarms had finally died down, leaving a ringing quiet.

Then an engine turned over somewhere across the garage.

The white BMW Z4 came out of its space fast, headlights blazing, tires chirping against the concrete as it accelerated hard toward the exit ramp.

Cody raised the MP5 submachine g*n and opened fire immediately. The burst walked across the car's body panels, punching holes through the doors and rear quarter, but the car didn't stop. Duke had his head down and the accelerator buried, and the distance was long and the target was moving. Cody burned through his magazine and the BMW Z4 kept going, the exit ramp already in reach.

Cody dropped the empty magazine and reached for a fresh one.

Beside him, Soren had already settled into his stance. The MCX Rattler came up, the sight picture found the driver's window at over a hundred meters, and he fired once.

The round crossed the garage in a fraction of a second and punched through the glass.

A spray of red hit the inside of the windshield. The BMW Z4 veered hard, crossed two empty spaces, and drove nose-first into a parked car with a crunch of collapsing metal and shattering plastic. The engine died.

Soren walked toward it at a steady pace, firing as he went, putting rounds through the driver's door, the passenger door, and the rear. He kept shooting until he was standing beside the car, muzzle never lifting from the target zone.

Cody came up on the other side and pulled the driver's door open.

Duke Calloway folded out of the seat and onto the garage floor. He'd taken multiple hits. His eyes were open wide, fixed on something that wasn't there, and the wound in his face was still bleeding freely. The gold-rimmed glasses were gone, lost somewhere in the chaos of the night. Without them, he looked smaller than he had in life.

Cody looked down at him for a moment, then looked up at Soren.

Before either of them could speak, the sound of heavy engines filled the entrance of the parking structure. Two armored police vehicles rolled to a stop and blocked the exit completely, their bulk sealing the ramp from wall to wall. The rear doors swung open and tactical officers poured out, moving in a disciplined stack, the point man behind a riot shield, the formation tight and professional as they pushed into the garage.

Soren set the MCX Rattler on the ground and straightened up with his hands open and visible.

He'd worn that uniform himself. He knew exactly what these men were capable of, and he knew the difference between a fight that could be won and one that couldn't. Sunvale's tactical units weren't at the level of what he'd trained with back in West Cascadia, but they weren't far off. With no ammunition to spare, no overwatch, and no exit, resistance meant a body bag.

Cody followed his lead without hesitation, setting down his weapon and raising his hands.

They waited.

________________________________________

At exactly three in the morning, the metal door of a solitary cell in the Goldport Police Department swung shut with a heavy clang that echoed down the corridor.

Soren looked around the small room, hands cuffed in front of him, and let out a quiet, tired laugh. The last time he'd been in a space this size was in the Frontier Republic. At least this one had a cot.

The police didn't yet know what to make of any of it. The Crownline Royal Hotel had gone dark during the outage, leaving no usable surveillance footage from the critical window. Every person inside who might have been able to explain what had happened was dead. That left the officers with two living individuals pulled from a garage full of bodies and spent brass, and no clear framework for deciding who they were. Hotel staff? Guests caught in the crossfire? Or the people who had started it all?

The connection to the Voss family made everyone cautious. Nobody wanted to make the wrong call on that particular name. So they separated Soren and Cody and put each of them in a room alone, which told Soren something about how seriously they were taking this. Thirty-something people dead in a single night, in what amounted to a small private war fought inside a luxury hotel. The two survivors of that event were not going to be treated as ordinary detainees.

He sat down against the wall, back against the cool concrete, and let his body go still.

It had been a long day. Extracting Wilson, getting back to the range, the phone call, the drive across the city, the breach, the stairwell, Duke's grenade trap, the garage. Less than twenty-four hours, and somewhere in the middle of all of it, several dozen people had stopped breathing. His body understood what his mind was still processing. The fatigue was bone-deep, the kind that settled in behind the eyes and made the edges of everything soft.

He was asleep before he'd fully decided to close his eyes.

Time moved without him. The cell stayed dark and the city outside went through its quiet pre-dawn hours, and by the time the light under the door had shifted from black to grey, the police had finally assembled enough personnel to begin formal questioning.

They never got the chance.

Two Rolls-Royces pulled up to the front entrance of the Goldport Police Department and stopped. Graham Wilson stepped out of the lead car in a fresh suit, his posture unhurried and entirely composed, followed by several men in dark jackets carrying document cases and wearing the kind of glasses that suggested they billed by the hour.

At the same moment, in the chief's office on the upper floor, the desk phone rang.

The caller ID read: The Mayor's Office.