Hurry!
She sent up a quick, silent prayer then pulled herself forward in an army crawl.
* * *
MAX CROUCHED DOWN, his pistol out in front of him while he whispered into his cell phone and made his way down aisle five toward the front of the store again.
“Searching for remaining three gunmen. What’s your ETA?” he asked his SWAT team lead, Dillon Gray.
He reached the end of the aisle and looked left, then right, before crouching by the endcap. He paused, listening for sounds that might indicate where the gunmen were hiding.
“Roger that,” he whispered in answer to the instructions over the phone. “I’ve got five customers and four employees locked in the cooler from the inside with good cover. There are coats in there, so they’re okay for now. Searching for additional customers. You guys need to get in here ASAP, full SWAT gear. These yahoos may be stupid and disorganized. But that makes them unpredictable and dangerous.”
A noise sounded from the east end of the store. He looked down the next aisle. Clear. He jogged to another endcap, heading east.
“Negative,” he whispered in response to Dillon’s next question. “No clue what they want. As soon as the cashier screamed, they started shooting. Erratic though, as if they don’t know how to handle those M16s they’re waving around. Thankfully no one’s been hit yet except the one gunman I took out.”
With his fellow SWAT team members apprised of the situation, he put his cell phone away so he could focus on finding the one customer he knew was unaccounted for.
Bex.
* * *
AS PLANS WENT, hiding behind a waist-high clothing rack of “I Dig the Pig” Piggly Wiggly T-shirts probably wasn’t the best one Bex could have made. But when she’d seen the end of a rifle emerging from one of the side aisles, she’d dived behind the closest cover she could find. Unfortunately, the T-shirts were apparently good sellers. There were barely enough left to conceal her.
She held her breath as the gunman crept past her hiding space. He was dressed in black jeans and a black T-shirt and was wearing sunglasses. She supposed that was his idea of a disguise, but he clearly was young—probably barely out of high school. The other gunman she’d seen a few minutes ago had a black ski mask over his face and the build of someone older, maybe late twenties. Both of them were carrying wicked-looking rifles.
The guy in sunglasses turned down the aisle she’d left just a minute earlier. She let out a shaky breath, then crept to the side of the display, ready to zip down another aisle to get to the front of the store. That’s where she’d last heard the sound of a pistol. And she was betting that pistol belonged to Max.
She leaned forward, looked left, right, then—oomph! A hand clamped over her mouth and she was yanked backward behind the shirts.
Bex struggled against her captor, twisting and writhing in his grasp.
He pressed his cheek against hers and held her so tight she could barely move.
“Be still, Bex. It’s me, Max.”
She froze, then went limp with relief.
He slowly lifted his hand from her mouth, as if he didn’t quite trust her not to cry out. She half turned to look at him, nodding to let him know she wasn’t going to sob hysterically and give away their position. Or at least she didn’t think she was. Cowering from gunmen was an entirely new experience for her. She could very well start screaming like a madwoman any second.
Apparently Max had more faith in her than she did. He loosened his arm around her waist and let her go. She was about to ask him what she should do when he edged to the right of the display. His whole body was tense, alert, as he ducked lower and slid his pistol into the holster at his waist. What was he doing?
A gunman, the one in the ski mask, stepped out from behind a stack of bagels and English muffins, his gaze zeroing in on Bex through a gap in the clothing rack. She ducked behind another shirt, expecting to feel a bullet slam into her any second. The gunman rushed forward, his sneakers visible beneath the clothes.
Bex jerked her head toward Max. But he wasn’t even looking at her. He was poised like a runner, one leg down, one up, balancing on his fingertips like he was about to take off in a sprint. Ski mask guy stopped directly in front of the rack, looking down at Bex. He started to raise his gun.
She squeezed her eyes shut. The air rushed beside her. The squeak of a shoe sounded on the floor. She heard a grunt, then...nothing. She was still alive. No bullets had ripped into her body and thrown her to the floor in a pool of her own blood.
“Bex,” a harsh whisper sounded. “Move. Now.”
Her eyes flew open. Impossibly, Max stood towering over her, ski mask guy hanging limply over his shoulder, his arms dangling toward the ground. Max jerked his head, motioning for her to run to the aisle directly across from them.
Stunned that she was still alive and could run, she darted forward, stopping a few feet down the aisle and looking back.
Max was lowering the unconscious—dead?—gunman to the floor under the rack. Bex swallowed, hard. Moments later, Max stopped beside her with a confiscated rifle in his hand.
He frowned. “Are you all right?”
She looked past him at the body visible beneath the obscenely cheery pink and green shirts. A shiver ran up her spine over their close call but she forced a nod.
After a quick look to the far end of their row, Max checked the rifle’s loading, then yanked out his pistol and shoved it toward her.
“Remember how to use one of these?” he whispered.
She swallowed. “Sure. But I haven’t fired one in years.”
Something dark passed in his eyes, and she knew he was remembering one of the many times long ago when he’d taken her to target practice. When other boys waffled between wanting to be a pilot or a fireman or maybe a professional football player, Max had never wavered in his desire to be a detective and SWAT officer like cool Chief Thornton, who’d visited Destiny High every year on career day.
Max had loved the idea of piecing clues together and solving crimes as his main gig. And then, when the situation called for it, putting on full SWAT gear and storming some criminal’s compound to rescue hostages. It had been his dream. And seeing him now, so calm and focused, she knew that if anyone could save her and the other customers, it was Max. But only if she followed his instructions and let him do his job.
She took the pistol, careful to point it away from him and keep her finger on the frame, not the trigger, as he’d drilled into her so many times.
He gave her a nod of approval and pivoted toward the back of the store again, then the front, as if scoping out their situation. Then he dropped to his knees and peered in between the bottom shelf and the one above it on both sides of the aisle they were on. He hesitated, as if thinking something through. Then he was pushing boxes of noodles and pasta behind the jars of spaghetti sauce. When he’d cleared a spot a couple of feet wide, he grabbed her arms and
