Page 36 of Nikki Sinatra: For Her Lover

“What’s the easiest way to get inside a residence?” Mick asked Nikki before they drove off.

Nikki stood with her car door open, moving from side to side the way she often did when she was in deep thought, as all the other men watched her too. Then she looked at Mick. “The easiest way to get inside is to be invited inside,” she said.

Mick inwardly smiled. Very few people he respected more.

She had the intellect to be great, he thought.

He nodded. “Go get invited,” he said to her.

“You’ll be our distraction, and then we’ll be yours.

If they’re unfamiliar with guard work on this level the way I believe they are given their movement patterns, then they will overreact to your arrival. ”

“And if they aren’t green, Uncle Mick?” asked Reno. “And if they don’t overreact?” He was onboard with the idea of Nikki, a woman, going in first, but it was still scary.

“If I’m wrong, although I’m not,” said Mick, “but if I am, then Nikki will know how to improvise. She’s my underboss. She knows what she’s doing.” Then he looked at Nikki. “Go get invited inside.”

Nikki was beyond pleased to have Mick’s full support.

This was her problem and she had to solve it.

She got in Roz’s Bentley even as the other men were wary of the plan.

They couldn’t understand how Mick would have such an outsize confidence in Nikki’s abilities.

She was a good, smart, levelheaded girl, they all would admit that.

But she was a still a girl. Reno and Sal especially couldn’t get over that little fact.

But Nikki didn’t need them to get over it. The decisionmaker made the decision. She was going in.

That was why she got into Roz’s Bentley as Mick, Reno, Sal, and Monk piled into Mick’s Escalade.

They drove the two miles to the farm. But as Nikki headed for the gate entrance, Mick turned down a side road to head around the back street that would lead them to the back of the property.

Mick’s heart was pounding. He didn’t show it, but he had his concerns too.

No mission was without concerns and Nikki, though a woman of great judgment in most situations, sometimes missed the boat.

And those times infuriated him. He was relying on her natural instincts that would allow her to forget everything, including Teddy’s recovery, and focus like a laser beam on getting it right.

But as Nikki drove toward the property where Jackson was believed to be holed up, she couldn’t help but think about Teddy.

All those hours he had to endure in surgery.

All those machines that surrounded him. How could she not think about her husband?

Her soulmate? He’d go through fire for her and she knew it.

The least she could do, she felt, was to go through that gate and take care of business.

With her game face on, she drove right up to the property gate where the guards she had already spied were laughing and talking and hanging around the booth.

When they saw her car approaching, they immediately pulled up their rifles and aimed them at her.

Nikki stopped outside the gate. The man she assumed to be the lead guard, the only one in fatigues, walked around to the driver side window with his rifle aimed at her the entire time.

She pressed down the window as he began barking out orders.

“Put your hands where we can see them!” he yelled out.

Nikki quickly did as she was told and placed her hands in the air.

“Now step out.”

Nikki unbuckled the seatbelt, slowly opened the door, and stepped out of the Bentley.

“Hands where I can see them,” the lead guard yelled again. Nikki quickly placed her hands back in the air.

“What do you want?” the guard asked her.

Amateurs, she thought happily, just like Mick had said. “Jackson Reeves is expecting me.”

“Why would he wanna see you?”

So amateurish that he unknowingly just admitted that she was at the right place and that Jackson was indeed on the property.

“Who are you?” asked a different guard.

“I’m Nikki Sinatra.”

As soon as she said her name, they all went still. “Ah shit!” said one of the guards and all of them suddenly became more animated.

The lead guard pulled out his Walkie Talkie. “Nikki Sinatra is at the gate,” he blared. “I repeat: Nikki Sinatra is at the gate!”

Within seconds, every guard on the property was at the gate surrounding Nikki. An even bigger rookie mistake Mick predicted would happen. And as she distracted the guards at the front gate, Mick, Reno, Sal and Monk entered onto the property around back.

But up front the guards were escorting Nikki up to the main house.

Once inside, the lead guard hurried up the stairs to a room to the right. “Boss, we got her,” she heard him saying out of view. “Boss, she’s here. Nikki Sinatra is here!”

But as the other guards were leading Nikki to a chair in the wide-open, paneled room downstairs, Nikki noticed that the boss wasn’t to the right side of the upstairs, but to the left side as Jackson Reeves suddenly appeared on the landing.

When he saw Nikki and Nikki saw him, he immediately raised his weapon.

Nikki immediately grabbed a guard and flung him in front of her as Jackson began firing wildly from upstairs, hitting his own guard.

At the same time, the side door of the house was busted down and Mick, Reno, Sal, and Monk ran into the living room firing their weapons too. The other guards began firing back at the intruders as Nikki grabbed the rifle of the now deceased guard in front of her, ready to fire on Jackson.

But when she looked upstairs again, Jackson was gone.

Knowing she had to stop him above all else, she kept the dead body in front of her as she made her way around the perimeter of the room.

Mick, Monk and the Gabrinis had pulled back into the kitchen area as their cover, and the other guards began hurrying in that direction, rightly viewing them as their immediately threat. They continued to fire toward the kitchen area as they moved toward that corner.

But Nikki began moving upstairs. She tried to drag the dead man up those stairs with her, to provide her cover, but he was dead weight and no way could she carry him up.

Inside the kitchen area, when Mick saw that the Gabrinis and Monk Paletti had it well in hand, he hurried around the kitchen to the side hall.

He made his way into the living room from that hall, and saw that the guards were distracted with his crew.

When he saw Nikki hurrying upstairs, he hurried behind her. He was going to be her cover.

But to his relief, she had it well in hand too. As soon as she neared the top of the stairs, the lead guard came out from the right side of the landing and attempted to fire on Nikki as if she was unawares that he had gone up those stairs.

But Nikki was well aware and ready. As soon as she saw the first whiff of him, she began firing.

She took him out before he could fire a single shot.

He fell down the stairs, right past her and Mick.

When she glanced back at his tumbling body, that was when she saw that Mick was behind her.

Seeing Mick was all the fuel she needed. She hurried on up those stairs.

When they got on the landing, Nikki looked to the right where the lead guard had gone, but saw nothing worth exploring. She looked to the left where she knew Jackson had come from, and she hurried in that direction. Mick followed behind her, but kept his eyes on the rest of the upstairs rooms.

There were several closed doors upstairs. Nikki kicked the first door open, but nobody was in that room.

She kicked the second door open, but nobody was in that room. The same with the third room too.

But when she got to the fourth room, and she kicked that door open, she saw a leg and immediately moved back to the side, falling against Mick, as gunfire rang out of that room.

Mick moved in front of Nikki and waited for a lull.

As soon as the gunman stopped firing, Mick stepped into the doorway and fired, ripping a bullet into the arm of the gunman, not to kill him, but for the sole purpose of knocking the gun out of his hand.

He knew Nikki needed answers. And he did too.

It worked. The gun fell out of Jackson Reeves hand, causing him to grab his arm, and Mick and Nikki hurried in. Mick kicked Jackson’s assault rifle away from him, and Nikki grabbed up Jackson and slammed his back against the wall.

She held onto his shirt as she spoke to him. “Why did you try to kill me and my husband?” she asked him.

Jackson Reeves was gaunt, like a little old man when she remembered him as a towering figure the few times she saw him before he got locked up.

But now he was a shell of that person. A shell that still harbored hatred in his eyes.

“The same reason I killed Juda and Emilio. They killed my babies because of what you and those two assholes did. I killed your husband, which I’m proud to say, but I was really trying to kill you. ”

“You failed to kill either one of us, which I’m proud to say,” said Nikki. “And you won’t get the chance to kill anybody else.”

But as she said it, Jackson pulled a knife out with his left hand.

Mick saw it, but Nikki heard it flick open at the same time, and she grabbed his hand just as Mick fired a fatal bullet through Jackson’s head.

He wasn’t taking any more chances with that bastard.

And neither was Nikki. She turned that knife toward Jackson’s side, and shoved it through.

If he wasn’t dead from that bullet wound, he was dead now. He dropped to the floor.

They heard several more shots downstairs, and began to run in that direction, until Nikki remembered something else. “He didn’t go where Jackson was,” she said.

Mick looked at her. “What?”

“That guard I took out up here,” she said, pointing to the guard that was lying dead at the bottom of the stairs. “When he came up here, he went to the right. But Jackson came out from the left side.”

They looked down the right-side hall, but saw nothing but a couple of closed doors.

Without saying a word to each other, Mick gave her cover as she moved to that first door and kicked it open. But when the door flew open and she saw a woman seated in the middle of the room, she was shocked. “ Mrs. Cabrera ?” she asked.

Mick moved into the room beside Nikki. He was shocked to see an old lady too. “Who’s that?”

“Apparently the boss,” said Nikki. “That’s Emilio’s mother.”

Mick frowned. “His mother? Working with the man that killed her son?”

“My son killed my children, and his children,” said the lady Nikki remembered as young and beautiful, but was now old and bitter.

“We were determined to take out everybody responsible. That’s why I bribed those guards to get Jackson out of that prison.

We’d been talking for years. Plottin’ and schemin’.

I visited him in that prison for years. And our scheme was hatched.

And we got them all. Except for you,” she said so bitterly that it made Nikki’s skin crawl.

“But today is your unlucky day,” the woman said with a yellow-teeth smile, and that was when Nikki and Mick both saw that she had a remote control in her hand.

“ Bomb !” Mick and Nikki both yelled out to alert their crew downstairs as they both ran out of that room and down that hall as fast as they could run. “Bomb! Bomb!” they were yelling. “Get out of the house!”

But Mick knew there was no way they were going to be able to run down those stairs in time. As Nikki was about to run downstairs, he grabbed her, ran with her to the end of the hall, and threw her with all the strength he had out of that second-floor window, shattering the glass.

But just as he threw Nikki, the woman pressed that button. And the house exploded.

The force of that explosion threw Mick so hard that it threw him out of that window right behind Nikki, as the entire house buckled.

Reno, Sal, and Monk had finally neutralized all of those guards and were just about to run up those stairs to assist Mick and Nikki when they heard them yell out bomb ! They ran out of the front door just as the house exploded. They were thrown too, across the yard, but they were otherwise okay.

They got up quickly and ran along the side of the house. Nikki had landed on one bale of hay and Mick had landed on another bale. But whereas Nikki was getting up with only a few scratches on her arms, Mick was still laying there.

They all tried to grab him and help him up, to get him further away from the explosive house, but Mick snatched away from them. “Do I look like a got damn invalid?” he barked out at them.

But Reno wasn’t scared of Mick. “Actually you do,” he said, and they all laughed.

All except Mick. It took some effort, as every bone in his body was aching, but he managed to pull himself up. Alone.

They all got further off of that property and piled into Roz’s Bentley to flee the scene before any emergency personnel could show up. Mick and Nikki got in the back seat, with Sal ending up in the middle. “Ain’t this some bull,” he complained.

Reno sat up front with Monk. Monk was their driver.

Remarkably, and despite all of the running and falling they did getting out of that house, his trademark hat remained on his head.

Reno couldn’t believe it. “That explosion knocked me on my ass,” said Reno, “but even it couldn’t knock that big-ass hat off your head. ”

Monk laughed.

“Just drive me to my Escalade dammit,” said Mick, who was in severe pain. “I’ll take it from there.”

Nikki and Sal looked at each other. Mick was in so much pain he could barely sit up, and he was going to drive?

When Monk drove around the back road where the Escalade was parked, and Mick tried to get out, Nikki pulled him back down. “We got you, Pop,” she said to him with that unblinking sincerity in her eyes.

Mick knew there was no way he could drive. Nikki’s insistence only proved it. And he nodded. But with a caveat: “Wreck my Escalade,” he said to her, “and your ass is dirt and I’m the shovel.”

It was so corny that all of them laughed.

But Nikki was all about the business. “Let’s go see Teddy,” she said as if she was the boss. And when she got out of Roz’s Bentley and got behind the wheel of Mick’s Escalade, leading the way, Reno, Sal, and Monk were all thinking the same thing.

Maybe, just maybe , they thought, she was a boss after all.

Nikki, in their eyes, was one of them.