Shadow Men – 11 – Rafe and Steele

Rafe took the blond down with a fast roundhouse kick followed by a chop to his throat. Steele fired once and Lou, who was still stunned at the swiftness of the knife attack, was thrown backward by the force of the shot, blood and brains spattering the huge man.

The behemoth had switched his gun to his other hand. Now, with a wide grin on his face, he pulled the trigger. Both Rafe and Steele moved but not quickly enough. The bullet hit Rafe's thigh and he dropped to the floor. That didn't stop him from firing back at the same time Steele did. The behemoth growled in pain as both shots hit him, but kept firing.

"Damn, it's like trying to stop an elephant," Steele said in frustration as he made a dash to the side of the room. A heavy lamp stood on a table there. He hefted it and hurled it at the man. The man ducked as Steele had expected. With the man's concentration momentarily broken, Steele took careful aim and fired. The bullet entered the man's cheek and traveled up and back. It left a large hole in the back of the man's head as it exited. For a moment the man stood there as if unaware of what had happened. Then he fell to his knees and face forward onto the floor.

"Don't they know to search people if they plan on taking them captive?" Steele shook his head in disdain as he knelt beside Rafe. He was about to check his wound when they both heard a faint moan from the fallen Jensen. They immediately turned to him as he tried to say something.

Steele leaned in and heard, "… brick… fireplace… inside…" Then Jensen's voice gurgled out and he was dead.

"Fucking mess," Rafe growled as he tried to get up. Steele put an arm around his waist to help him stand, then ordered him to sit on the unoccupied chair. After he retrieved both their knives and wiped them clean on Lou's shirt, he gave Rafe's back to him and used his own to cut open Rafe's pants so that he could see how much damage had been done. "You'll live," he told him a few moments later. "Don't move 'til I see what this place has in the way of a first aid kit."

"Such sympathy," Rafe said with a low chuckle.

"You want sympathy, get a girlfriend." Steele walked quickly to a door at one side of the room, opened it, shook his head and tried the second one. Behind it was a bedroom with a bathroom off of it. There he found what he needed and came back to kneel beside Rafe. Expertly he cleaned and bandaged the wound. When he was finished, he immediately crossed to the fireplace.

He used his knife to test the joints between the bricks. "Got it," he said after a few minutes. He pulled the brick out and stuck his hand into the deep space behind it. "We have lift-off." He began taking out rolled-up papers wrapped in plastic. When he was finished, he went to find something to carry them in and returned with a pillowcase.

"Now we get out of here," Steele said after the papers were packed up. He helped Rafe stand and, with his arm around his partner's waist and Rafe's arm over his shoulders, they left the cottage.