Bloodshot - Cherie Priest [130]
Unfortunately, the moment I moved the camera I felt like I’d turned over an hourglass. Whereas before we were only being sneaky and taking our time, now we’d done something that could reasonably draw attention.
Now we had to work fast.
“Let’s find this office and get the fuck out of here,” Adrian suggested.
I didn’t have any other plans, so I agreed. I looked at the nearest door and saw the number 443, then said, “Okay, so it’s on that side of the hall, evens, odds. It must be down there.”
I pointed. He nodded.
And then we heard it. Not a footstep, not a creaking door. Something worse. That goddamn static of a communication device. Faint, but not very distant.
Adrian and I looked at each other. We looked at room 443, which was the wrong room, but the nearest room.
My partner froze beside me, only for an instant. His second instant was devoted to blocking me, like he was tougher than me and could protect me or something. Must’ve been years of ingrained training, I guess, because there was no way he was tougher than me. One of us could take a couple of bullets and keep on ticking. One of us couldn’t.
I shoved back, almost smashing my shoulder through that little window on the door. The whole thing whapped open and we toppled inward just in time to dodge the first wave of fire from the north end of the hallway.
They tore around the corner—suited men, at least. Not commandos, in case that mattered. Their guns were shiny and blazing, and their aim was none too bad. I felt a bullet’s hot breath graze my leg as I flew half backward, half sideways, totally dragged by Adrian, into the office.
He swung a leg around and kicked the door shut behind us, as if that’d slow them down longer than a big old sheet of construction paper might. “They’re on to us!” he declared.
“No shit, Sherlock!” Though to his credit, he didn’t ask anything dumb like “What do we do?” I was the one who blurted out that particular question, even as I was looking around for something big and heavy to block the door.
God bless him forever, he was already bringing down a floor-to-ceiling filing cabinet like a lion on a wildebeest. It toppled down in front of the door, but not so fast that I didn’t see a swarm of shadows through the frosted glass. The glass broke. Either the cabinet nicked it or the sheer weight and shake of its falling rattled the thing apart in its frame.
I followed his lead and nabbed the other big-ass cabinet and yanked it down, then shoved it into place. It was huge and sturdy; the pair of them would’ve done the French Revolution proud so far as improvised barricades went. But there were two main problems in our cute little plan.
One, they wouldn’t hold forever. Two, we’d shut ourselves inside. And we weren’t even in the right office, so it wasn’t like I could pull a repeat performance of the Holtzer Point smash-and-grab.
We were locked in, several offices over from the one we needed, and armed men were outside trying to extract us. And they were prepared to do it the hard way. The harder the better, I suspected.
“We have to get out of here,” I said.
“And into room four fifty-one” he said, amending the obvious.
“At this point, I’d settle for just ‘out.’ We can try again, come back later. Maybe—”
“Maybe what?” He almost shouted it at me, which was totally unnecessary. “Come back sometime when they don’t expect us? Because it’s pretty fucking obvious they expected us, Raylene!”
“Fine!” I shouted back at him. The guys outside were trying to ram the door, but since they didn’t have much room to back up in the narrow hallway, they weren’t getting a lot of leverage out of it. Mostly they were making a whole lot of noise. “Fine, they were expecting us! Nothing I can do about it now, okay?”
He was already ignoring me, which was fine. I wasn’t saying anything important anyway. His eyes scanned the ceiling hard, and my eyes joined them. “What are our options?