Flash Point by Colby Marshall Read Free Book Online Page A

what it was.
    Back at the bank door where the group had entered, he joined another black figure carrying a long sword. The two ventured right, out of view of the cameras.
    Jenna jumped up and gestured at where they had exited. ‘Where are they going? The two who were just here?’
    â€˜Which?’ Porter asked.
    â€˜Shit,’ Teva said. ‘So many damned moving pieces. I’ve been following the same one since it started … the guy who looks like he stepped out of the 1800’s. So I don’t know who you’re talking about.’
    â€˜Well, you should,’ Saleda said. ‘Because I’ve been watching Machete Kills since he went in first, and the sword guy just left off camera with him.’
    Saleda’s instinct seemed to have been the same as Jenna’s: watch the first person in. He was bound to be the group’s leader.
    The tech running the footage paused it, backed it up. Pressed play again.
    Jenna looked away at the exact moment she knew the lady in the privacy room was about to be cleaved in two. No need to see that moment twice.
    She returned her gaze the following second though, ignoring the horrible machete scene in favor of locating the figure with the sword prior to his meeting up with Machete. Amidst the flying knives and falling bodies, she spotted the Long-Sword UNSUB on the right hand side of the video behind the teller counter alongside another attacker. The two black-clad assailants each took on one of the two tellers, the one Jenna was watching wielding his sword toward the counter and downward. The video’s angle didn’t show the death that resulted, but Jenna knew the victim to be the slender black female teller found lying face-first on the carpet underneath the employees’ side of the countertop. Jenna had noted during the crime scene walkthrough that it appeared she had tried to crawl toward the exit when she was first knocked under the counter during the skirmish, because her initial fall landed her only a foot or so away from where her pretty blonde co-worker had taken her last breaths. But she didn’t make it far. She was stabbed multiple times in her torso and thighs.
    A golden color flashed in, though Jenna couldn’t readily identify it.
    She let it go, since it didn’t match the other, more important thought in her head.
    â€˜He passes right by where Ashlee had to have been crawling under the counter toward the staircase,’ she said. ‘Back it up one more time.’
    The tech obliged and, again, the team watched the screen as the Long-Sword UNSUB lashed at the teller the angle didn’t show, then stood and exited from behind the counter. He joined up with Machete on the left side of their screen, not far from where the attackers had entered the bank, and they moved out of the frame’s visibility.
    â€˜The staircase is on that side,’ Dodd noted. ‘Someone
did
have to escort Ms Haynie down, give her the message, and lock her in the safe, after all.’
    â€˜One person, though. Not two. She said one guy,’ Teva replied.
    â€˜Doesn’t mean they didn’t head off together at first then split up. One had a separate task while the other scared the daylights out of our favorite living witness,’ Porter said.
    Jenna cringed at Porter’s words. They all tended to kid at times in ways that would make anyone not in their line of work assume they needed etiquette lessons and a Bible, but for some reason, calling the one person who’d survived the carnage ‘favorite’ highlighted for Jenna why surviving might end up being worse for Ashlee Haynie. She’d never escape the images in her head, the screams burned in her memory.
    Another color tried to break forth, but Jenna forced it back. She needed to think not get bogged down.
    Then again, this sickening second by second, blow-by-blow chronicle of the deaths of twenty-one people would soon be etched in the memories of