Tequila Mockingbird (30 page)

So intent on finding Miki or Damien, Connor didn’t see the stool headed straight for his face until its edge caught him across the nose, and he went tumbling over, driven back from the force of the blow. He tasted blood and sucked in more stinging air, choking on his metallic-tinged spit.

The foggy air parted, and a shadow stretched over Connor. Blinking away the tears streaming from his abused eyes, he saw someone cross behind the counter. Suddenly, Miki stood over him, brandishing a heavy barstool. The singer wound up again, obviously intent on bashing Con’s head in.

“Miki!” Connor shouted, throwing his arm up to fend off the blow. It came anyway, and Con felt his right arm shudder when the metal stool hit. A sharp pain shot up to his shoulder, and his hand went numb, his fingers tingling.

The barstool rose again, then faltered. Miki peered through the smoke, and Connor spotted a thin trickle of drying blood streaming down from a cut on the musician’s cheek. The fierce look on the man’s face eased somewhat, and he slowly tilted the stool sideways.

“Connor?” Miki’s querulous rasp was broken by a series of coughs. “That you?”

“Yeah, you stupid—” Con cut himself off, remembering the mercurial singer still wielded a lethal weapon. “Are you okay? Where’s Damie? We’ve got to get you guys out of here.”

“Yeah, I’m okay.” The stool dropped to the floor with a clatter. Then Miki bent over, grabbing Connor by the arm to help him up. “But fuck, I’m glad to see you. Damie’s been shot.”

I don’t know, Miki. The words… hurt too much, you know?

Dude…. Forest, trust me, man. I know.

And you still write them down. Why? Why the fuck go through it again?

So maybe someone else who’s out there doesn’t have to feel so fucking alone.

—
Home Studio Session #5

“S
HOW
ME
where he is. Then get out into the fresh air.” Connor tried shaking the feeling back into his arm, but it was stinging from Miki’s attack. Shit, his forearm hurt, all the way up to his teeth and into the base of his skull. “We need to get you guys out of here.”

The studio was a mess of cables and equipment. If he hadn’t known better, Con would have thought it’d been tossed, but the Sound’s space became a storage area for the damaged coffee shop, and he dodged more than one stack of paper goods to get to the recording area’s open door. The smoke was thinner in the recording studio, but the air was still cloudy and astringent.

Miki stumbled as he walked, and Con caught him by the shirt before he fell over. The man snarled softly, yanking himself free, and continued to pick his way through. His knee was obviously giving him trouble, and he was a bit unsteady as he wove through the boxes, but Connor kept his hands off the man. Miki kept his head down, coughing a few times as he went.

Connor was unfamiliar with the Sound. Other than helping Forest move a few boxes into the back room, he’d not been to the space. He got turned around once after losing Miki in the shadows. The lights in the Sound were off, and if not for the clatter coming through the broken window, the place would have been quiet. At some point, probably when the fire crews arrived, someone’d turned off the power, because the Studio’s windowless interior was pitch black.

“My phone’s broken. Guy jumped me, and I went down. Must have hit something hard,” Miki said as Con was digging his phone out of his pocket. “Can you turn yours on? I need the light.”

“Yeah, getting it out now. Tell me where he is and call out. Get us some help.”

“Down the hall, to the right.” The man’s face appeared saturnine in the yellow glow coming from Connor’s screen. “Come on. Reception’s shit there. Too much steel and crap inside the building.”

The hallway was clear enough. Certainly wide enough, but then Connor figured it would have to be to get equipment in and out of the area without too much difficulty. The door at the end of the hall was open a bit, and a very faint glow shone through the crack, nearly too faint to see except for the deep shadows in the enclosed space.

“Miki?” Damie’s voice reached them, a soft, wavering call. “Fuck, dude. I hope that’s you.”

“Yeah, Con’s here.” Miki moved faster, then disappeared into the room with a quick slide of his body through the door.

Connor reached the door and tried to pull it farther open, but it refused to budge. A fast sweep of his phone’s screen around the area told him why. The mechanism was damaged, and there were bits of wood planks hanging from the frame, thick, heavy nails poking out from the broken pieces.

He couldn’t think about what could have happened to the men if they’d not been found. The smoke was bothering him, and he coughed again, his lungs struggling to get air. With each jerk of his breath, his chest burned, and the watering in his eyes blurred his vision. Blinking, Connor realized he was seeing double, and his face’d begun to itch, prickling fires spreading up from his nostrils and lips. He definitely had to get them out of there before they all suffocated from the spreading smoke.

The fog in the room was good for one thing. It refracted the waning light coming from Damie’s phone, illuminating the man sprawled on the floor. He held a towel up near his face, and Connor saw water dripping from its edge, a drop hitting Damien on the throat. An empty Evian bottle crunched under Con’s foot as he approached, and he kicked it aside, bending over the young man to check his wounds.

“Where are you hit?” Con asked as Miki appeared again out of the smoke. “We’re going to get you out of here.”

“My leg.” Damien scrambled to grab his phone. Tilting it, he showed Connor the wet spreading over his calf. His jeans were soaked through with blood, and the fabric was torn. “Tried walking, but….”

“No, let me see if I can’t get that door open more. If not, we’ll have to squeeze you through.” Connor looked around for something heavy to shove against the door, but nothing stood out to him in the cloudy darkness. He needed to force it open another few feet, just enough to be able to carry Damien through. “Maybe if Miki and I both shoved. Fire department’ll have spreaders, but they’d have to call them down. You can’t sit here in this shit that long.”

“Yeah.” Damien coughed. “Dunno how the fuck Sinjun got it open to begin with.”

Miki was bouncing back and forth on the balls of his feet, a hot crackle of energy fueled by temper and fear. Even in the dim light of his phone, Connor could see the anguish in the man’s eyes when he looked down at Damien. He reached for Miki, gripping his shoulder in a tight clench to reassure him.

“He’ll be okay. Let’s just get this door open,” Connor said firmly. “Then you head out for air.”

The guy was strong. Connor had to give Miki that. Leaning on the door, Connor tested its give and was disappointed to find it practically wedged in place. They couldn’t do much. Too much exertion would strain their already compromised lungs, but he didn’t want to do any more damage to Damien’s leg. Miki came up with another thick metal barstool and wedged it between the door and the frame, nodding at Connor once.

“You push, I’ll pry,” Miki suggested. “Maybe we can move this thing.”

His shoulders picked up the strain when Connor laid into the door. Miki wedged the heavy-legged stool into the opening and began to count. When he hit three, Connor threw his weight into shoving the door open. For a second, it didn’t seem like the door was going to budge. Then they heard a satisfying crash as the lodged mechanism gave way. The door flew forward, unhindered by its hydraulics, and slammed into the outer wall, rattling on its hinges.

“Go,” Connor ordered. “Take my phone and get out. We’ll be right behind you. D, get ready to light our way out. We’re going to be moving fast.”

By this time, his voice was a mess and the edges of his eyes were swelling shut, but Connor made it over to Damien’s side, tapping the man on the shoulder. Hitching his arms under Damie’s legs, Connor lifted him up. His arms smarted a bit, especially the one Miki’d struck, but he cradled Damie’s heavy body as well as he could.

“Just get me out the door, and I can lean on you. I’m too heavy,” Damie said.

“Hold on.” Connor hoisted him closer and led with his shoulder out of the room.

If anything, the smoke seemed to be spreading through the studio, reaching into the far recesses of the hallway and outer reception area. The busted-out window was hard to make out, but when Connor got Damien out from around the front counter, sunlight brightened up the space, outlining the punched-in opening. Shouts were coming from beyond the window, but Connor couldn’t make out who was talking to him. His knee hit the wall, and suddenly there were hands reaching for Damien, and someone took the man from him.

A gruff-voiced woman grabbed Connor’s arm and guided his leg over the edge of the broken window, gently encouraging him to lift his leg up a bit farther. He pulled himself out, cold air hitting his bare chest and back. At some point, he must have hurt himself, because a spot on his shoulder blade seemed raw, and Connor felt the sticky tack of blood clinging to his skin. Once fully outside, he blinked, startled by the sudden flare of light in his eyes, but the rush of cold air in his lungs felt good, and he inhaled hard, coughing out as much of the smoke as he could.

“Sit down, Lieutenant,” the woman ordered. “I’m going to wash your eyes out. From what we can tell, there’s only a bit of capsaicin in the smoke solution, but it’s enough to sting. I’m going to run a flush and check you over. When I’m done, I’m going to give you some electrolytes in some water, and I want you to drink it. It’ll help your throat.”

The flush was cold, or at least felt cold, and Connor sighed at the relief, trying to keep his eyes open under the rush. She repeated the flush twice, then handed him a towel to pat away the moisture. A bottle of water was shoved into his hand, and Con thanked the woman before sipping it. Wiping away the wash coming from his smarting face, he looked around him and grinned when he spotted Miki sitting a few feet away.

“Hey, St. John!” Con caught the man’s attention. “Do me a favor.”

“What?” Miki sounded worse than Connor felt, but the snarl was still there, and the sound of it made Con smile.

Leaning over the space between them, Connor pointed at the man’s phone and said, “Call your boyfriend. I told him I’d give him an update once we found you. I don’t do that, he’ll come kick my ass.”

“Fuck. I’m fine. He worries too much, but okay,” Miki snapped back but took the phone anyway, his fingers flying over the screen. “Shit, I didn’t even get the damned sticks!”

“I
NEVER
should have asked them to go down there.” Forest tried taking a step forward, but pacing in the waiting room was next to impossible.

Mainly because it was full of Morgans—both cop and otherwise. He’d spent a couple of Sundays at the house, but Forest’d never encountered the clan en masse. Even in the large area set aside for waiting families, they were overwhelming.

He was pretty sure he now knew what it felt like to be a penguin in a kiddie pool full of leopard seals.

He just didn’t have a glacier to hide behind.

“It’s okay, kid,” Kane said, patting Forest absently on the shoulder. It might have been meant to be a light tap, but the hit rattled Forest’s teeth in his skull. “Damie’s tough. And Miki….”

Kane didn’t finish what he was saying. Instead, the large man paced off toward the ward doors, only to be turned around before he could push them open by a sharp word from his father. Kane glared back for a moment, then paced back off, hands on his hips and spine taut and firm.

“Worse than trying to keep them in their playpens,” Donal muttered under his breath to Brigid.

“Yer the one who yelled at me when I tied them to the tree,” she shot back, her voice rolling along with Donal’s heavier accent. “It was good enough for my gran.”

“Yer gran also taught ye how to spit chewing tobacco when ye were three.” He rolled his eyes. “Thank God, yer mum put a stop to that nonsense.”

“Now yer scaring the boy.” Brigid reached out to snag Forest’s hand. He let her pull him closer, grateful for her arm as it slid around his waist. “It’ll be fine, love. All of them are stubborn bastards. Don’t know what you were thinking when ye fell in with this lot.”

“The boy’s a lot stronger than ye think,” Donal said, winking at Forest. “How are ye holding up, son?”

“They’re a bit….” He searched for a word to describe the sheer presence of Morgan around him. “
Intense
, and I’m scared. Scared shitless.”

“It’s okay to be scared, son.” Donal wrapped his arms around both of them, squeezing lightly before letting go. It was like being hugged by a redwood, but Forest thought it felt nice. “But I’m telling ye, they’ll be fine. Injuries weren’t bad, and the doctors just want to make sure they get their pound of flesh.”

Forest was mollified, but the Morgans didn’t seem to get the “they’ll all be fine” memo. Even Quinn, the quietest of the Morgans, glowered and simmered from his place against the wall. A young nurse tried to move him to reach into a cabinet next to his elbow, and she was pushed back by the sharpness of his hard green eyes. Apologizing to the woman, Kiki dislodged her brother. Shoving him aside, Kiki aimed him toward a less trafficked part of the room.