“Let’s go,” Hawkins said, and got on the radio. “Dylan, we’re headed back up.”
“It’s Zach, copy that. Dylan is already on the move.”
Good, he thought. From what they’d seen tonight, it was going to take everything Steele Street had to prevail—and prevail they must.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Sweet, so sweet. Monk could see them up there, peeking out of the wreckage, the resolve on their faces revealed with every lightning flash.
Here, he decided, was the fight he’d been wanting, in the last place he would have ever expected to find it—with a couple of women.
The one bitch had already shot him, but she was weaponless now. He’d disarmed Skeeter Bang-Hart, too.
This was going to be short and sweet—very sweet.
He never saw it coming.
Near the top of the rafter, he lunged for Skeeter, ready to jerk her out of the wreckage and shake her until her neck snapped—but it wasn’t to be.
She caught him in the throat with the heel of her boot in a strike so fast, so pure, he was amazed even as it sent him staggering. He was even more amazed when he lost his balance and fell backward down the rafter into a crashing heap on the floor.
Bitch.
He rose to all fours and took stock of himself, struggling to breathe, to swallow. She could have killed him with that strike, crushed his larynx. A lesser soldier would have already been dead.
He started to his feet, when the sound of someone coming drew his attention to the far end of the loft. From behind the rafter, he watched and waited as a shadow warrior slid into the darkness of the room.
Conroy Farrel—well armed, superbly skilled, and hunting.
Unexpectedly, Monk felt the first stirrings of redemption move within his blighted soul. This was the fight he’d come from Bangkok to get. To test himself against this man.
He let his gaze drift to the body at his feet. Kneeling, he smoothed the white lion’s mane of hair back off the death-flattened face. Lancaster would soon have what he had so wanted: Conroy Farrel dead, his body broken, his life bled out of him.
Con slipped silently into the room.
This was the place. Dust still drifted down from the ceiling, shaken loose by the room-jarring pounding he’d heard on the way up. Rain was coming down through a hole in the roof, gusting in with the wind, backlit by the lightning racing across the sky. It ran down a broken pipe off to his left and was pooling around a rat’s nest of exposed wires hanging uselessly off a smashed stereo system.
There was so damn little justice in the world—but he would take what he could here. Take it in his fist and make it be what he needed it to be: Jane safe. His enemies vanquished. His life … his life—fuck! He couldn’t see his life, not if she died here because of him.
He closed his eyes on a harsh breath and focused on the moment at hand. Jane Linden was a street rat, he reminded himself. She was tough, a fighter, and she was here, so close, within his grasp.
Lancaster’s beast was here, too, in this broken room open to the night sky and the rain. The smell of him filled the loft, overpowering everything else, the metallic stench of him assaulting Con’s senses.
“Monk!” A woman’s voice rang out from high above him, not Jane’s. “Scott Church! I know you, MNK-1. I can help you. I know what went wrong!”
The slightest scuff of a footfall sounded twenty yards to the north of Con, at the other end of the loft, and he moved out, continuing around the perimeter of the room, always keeping a wall at his back.
The loft had been destroyed, the ceiling caved in, the furniture broken and getting soaked, and somewhere in the mess was the beast she called Monk.
He could smell the guy, but he couldn’t see him—yet. All he needed was one good shot, and he had his Wilson Combat .45 cocked and unlocked, ready to deliver it.
“Randolph Lancaster lied to you, Monk.” The woman kept talking, her voice cool and clear. “But I have Dr. Patterson’s files, his records.”
Con kept moving, one silent step at a time. He’d heard the name Patterson before, attached to the rumors of the subpar Thai lab that had tried to take up where Dr. Souk had left off.
“I know what Patterson did to you,” the woman said, “and I know how to fix the mistakes he made.”