Twisted and Tied (Marshals 4)

“Shut the fuck up,” Dorsey griped at Eli, who’d spoken. “Miro, did you turn in somewhere? Because it looks like we lost you on the last corner.”

“The fuck do you mean, you lost—Miro, where the hell are you?” Becker yelled.

But I’d run flat-out after Kage for at least eight blocks, and we were on the fifth floor now. I was done being able to form words.

I heard Kage hit the door that led to the roof—it had a panic bar, and that sound, like a giant rubber stamp, was hard to miss—and charged out into the open after him. From where I was, maybe ten feet behind him, the sound of leather-soled shoes scraping over the rough concrete sounded like nails on a chalkboard, and the noise added to my quickly ratcheting fear the closer they got to running out of roof.

I thought Kage was going to stop.

There was no way he wasn’t going to stop.

As many times as he had said to me, “Marshals don’t jump off buildings, Jones,” I would have bet my life on the fact that when the other guy took a running leap toward the next building over, Kage would come to a stop. He didn’t. He followed, and I was so astonished that I found myself sliding awkwardly, my feet slipping on the gravel, arms windmilling for balance, out of control for a moment as I finally came to a bracing halt at the edge of the building I too would have had to hurdle as I’d just watched Kage do.

And then came that second, my life in a blur up to that moment when I realized the one person I knew I could always count on… was gone.

No one but Ian could ever understand what Kage meant to me. It was cliché, yes, but I’d never had a father; there was never an older man who took me under his wing, never one who was both mentor and guardian, not just because he had to but because he wanted to. I would never be the same from this second on.

What was worse was that I knew him even better after just one awkward, ridiculous, scary dinner in February. One weird Valentine’s Day, and everything was different. It wasn’t like we were buddies or that I understood at all how his mind worked, but I did know how much he loved his husband and what lengths he would go to keep him safe. It wasn’t every man who took a bullet for someone he loved. Ian and I knew a secret others didn’t, because he hadn’t even told the rest of the team he’d been shot. Instead he simply showed up for work the following Monday, having taken the two days of vacation already on the books, like nothing remotely interesting had happened. Since he liked to look bulletproof, Ian and I saw no reason to muck around with that perception.

I knew the loyalty I saw him give his men, give me and everyone else who worked for him, extended to his friends as well. He worried about his family, his friends, his team, and honestly, just seeing him grounded me. But now….

My heart clenched, my stomach sank, and my breath caught as I closed my eyes for a second and tried to reconcile what I believed in—his invincibility—with what I’d just seen—his death—before I stepped up to the wall and peered over the side.

There, braced on a thin lip of what could only be called an ornamental flight of whimsy on the architect’s part—no more than molding on the building—was Kage, dangling by a one-handed death grip over a fifty-foot plunge, holding on to the guy he’d been chasing with the other.

I nearly dropped dead.

“Take him,” Kage growled while heaving the guy up to me.

I couldn’t have done it. Ian couldn’t have done it. It required muscles neither of us possessed and the ability to deadlift at least two hundred pounds. And he was doing it from basically the shoulder alone.

I was strong, but not like that, and I couldn’t imagine the concentration needed to keep the guy from falling in the first place.

I grabbed the fugitive, realized I was looking at none other than Kevin Gannon—which was why, of course, Kage took off after him in the first place—hauled him up over the edge, and then cuffed him. “Don’t move,” I warned. Normally I put a knee on a suspect’s back when I had them on the ground, but this guy wasn’t fighting or squirming. He just lay there, limp.

“No,” he said between gasps, “not moving.”

Bending back over, I saw Kage had both hands on the top edge of the roof. I leaned forward to offer him a hand.

“Secure your prisoner, Jones,” he ordered gruffly before he pressed himself onto the ledge, turned to sit and swing his legs around, and then stood.