Page 39 of Benny

She and Benny stepped outside as the first squad car pulled up. Benny set his phone on the porch railing next to her gun and raised his hands high while Jordan concentrated on keeping pressure against her wound.

The first officer leapt out of his vehicle with his weapon leveled at them over the roof of his car. “Step forward! Hands in the air!” he ordered.

They complied, and Jordan repeated everything she’d told the dispatcher, then motioned to the bloodstain on her shirt with her chin.

“I’m on paid leave right now, pending the investigation into the shootout the other night. My personal weapon is right here, and other than that, we’re unarmed.”

A second patrol car screamed in, and the officer jumped out. He recognized Jordan immediately. “Jesus, Gonzalez, are you all right?” Then he saw the blood. “Holy shit, you’re hit. Ambulances are on the way. What’s the status?”

The first officer had relaxed somewhat but still kept his weapon trained on them. Jordan understood. There were still potential threats inside.

“One dead inside, two gravely injured and one unconscious by the door. There’s also a box near the front door. We need to be careful with it because I don’t know what’s inside. That’s how the first man gained entry while the others came in through the back.”

A third patrol car pulled in, lights flashing, its siren cutting off, then a familiar SUV turned onto the street.

Dev, probably with one of the other SMS people. He couldn’t have gotten here that fast from Benny’s call… unless they’d been sitting surveillance somewhere nearby.

An ambulance pulled in a moment later as the third patrol car disgorged two officers who went inside and cleared the house.

Jordan was glad Benny had ignored her earlier suggestion to hide, but who the hell were they going to say he was?

The first officer holstered his weapon when the officers inside shouted that the house was clear, then escorted them toward the ambulance. “You know the drill. Stay here and let the EMTs check you out.”

Dev stepped out of the SUV with Tate in tow. “You two all right?” he asked.

With no one but the EMTs close enough to see, Tate surreptitiously slipped Benny a wallet, which Benny tucked into his back pocket.

“What the hell happened, CJ?” Tate asked, confirming that the wallet contained his new identity. “I mean, I know you’ve got a nose for trouble, Johnson, but this is ridiculous.”

Okay, so he was officially Chance Johnson. CJ. So be it.

Jordan breathed out a quiet sigh of relief as the EMT tended to her wound. “It’s just a graze,” he said. “It’s going to hurt like a bitch, and you’ll be sore for a while, but you should heal up just fine.”

Chapter Twelve

Neighbors were starting to come out onto their stoops now that the gunfire had abated and the equivalent of half of LVMPD had shown up. Jordan knew it was the officer-down call that had brought them, and she appreciated the support more than she could say.

She turned to Benny-slash-CJ and kept her voice low. “Damn it, you shouldn’t have charged him. How’s your shoulder?”

There were lines of fatigue around his eyes, and she knew the strain was probably from his wound healing. Thank God the nanites were still active.

“It’s healed, but I can still feel them moving around in there. It’s fucking bizarre.” He gestured slightly toward his right shoulder, letting Dev and Tate know where he’d been injured.

“Well, at least the bounty’s been removed from my head,” Jordan said, loud enough for the EMT and one of the nearby officers to hear. “That was La Sombra in the flesh.”

Then another car pulled in, and she recognized the driver as Sheriff Neil Donovan. Damn, she’d warranted royalty. He climbed out of the plainclothes sedan and walked over to the ambulance, studying her with a critical eye. “You okay?”

“Yeah. It was just a graze.”

Benny had faded back and now stood with Dev and Tate.

“We’ll get your formal statement later, but run it down for me,” Donovan said.

“My friends from St. Michael’s Solutions got me this bolt-hole under an alias, then gave me some protection while they were at it.” She tipped her head toward Benny, Tate and Dev, deliberately not specifying which one of them had been with her.

“My cat was checking something out on the street, and when I looked outside, I saw a white panel van that shouldn’t have been there. A delivery guy knocked on the door a few minutes later and asked for me by my real name, not the alias we rented the house under. I yanked him inside, but he was the distraction. La Sombra came in through the back with two henchmen. My friend subdued the delivery guy. I shot the two henchmen, then La Sombra and I ended up in a standoff. My friend distracted him long enough for me to take the shot. He’s dead. Not sure about his bodyguards. The delivery guy is just unconscious.”

The sheriff grunted. “That’s some fast moving.”