She felt the truck fishtail as Margaret steered them off the street onto the long driveway and heard small rocks bouncing against the undercarriage. When they came to a skidding halt, Margaret put the truck in park and jumped out. Tan Lily kept her head down and kissed her daughter’s hair, trying to comfort her even while her own heart and mind raced with fear. The back door opened, and she turned to see Margaret’s outstretched hand.
“Come,” she said. “We need to get you inside.”
Tan Lily lifted herself off her daughter and pushed Shen Li to the open door. The little girl moved without hesitation and wrapped her arms around Margaret’s neck and clung to her chest. Tan Lily followed Cher from the truck and hurried to keep up with the CIA Security Protective Officer carrying her daughter to the house.
They scampered inside and raced for the stairs. Margaret bounded up the steps with Shen Li in her arms, and Tan Lily followed barely two paces behind with the cur hot on her heels.
“What’s going on?” Tan Lily asked.
When they reached the room at the end of the hall, Margaret lowered Shen Li onto the bed and pressed a soft hand onto her shoulder. “Do you mind if Cher stays with you?”
The fear etched on Shen Li’s face eased, and she smiled at the dog who scampered close and kissed her cheek. She giggled softly and wrapped her arms around the dog’s neck. “Can she, Mama?”
Tan Lily looked up at Margaret and saw the older woman nod, then forced a smile for her daughter. “Of course, my precious.”
She leaned over and kissed her daughter gently on the forehead before turning for the door. She felt light-headed as she followed Margaret into the hall and closed the door behind them.
55
Punky winced when the medic removed the last piece of metal from her abdomen where the bullet had managed to penetrate her body armor. She knew she would have been dead without the vest, but it pained her to admit that Camron had been right in insisting she wear it. She looked up at her supervisor, who grimaced and put his cell phone away.
“Bad news?” she asked.
Camron pinched his eyes in thought, but he nodded. “That was Jax.”
She shoved the medic away and sat up. “Jax? What’s going on?”
“He said they’re increasing the threat level and…”
Punky jumped up from the gurney and gritted her teeth against the pain and sudden bout of vertigo. Camron held up a hand to stop her, but she shoved him aside. “Let’s go.”
He shook his head. “You need to go to—”
But she wasn’t listening to him. She jumped from the back of the ambulance, spotted his black government Chevrolet Tahoe with dark-tinted windows, and made a beeline for the driver’s door. His heavy footfalls chasing after her were all the evidence she needed to know he wasn’t about to let her run off on her own again.
“I’ll drive,” he said.
She opened the driver’s door and climbed in behind the wheel. “The hell you will. I’ve seen you drive, and we don’t have time for that.”
Camron looked like he was going to argue with her, but he relented and jogged around the nose of the SUV and climbed inside next to her. Punky had the Tahoe in gear and her foot to the floor before he had even buckled himself in. “Whoa, Punky! We want to get there alive.”
But she ignored him. She still felt light-headed and sluggish, but the idea of letting the Chinese assassin who had shot her get to Tan Lily and her daughter was all the motivation she needed. She had let her guard down once before and took three gunshots to the chest for it. It wouldn’t happen again.
She raced the Tahoe through the community center, then skidded around the corner at the intersection onto West Bernardo Drive. She held the SUV’s plastic steering wheel in a white-knuckled grip, longing for her Challenger’s Alcantara-wrapped steering wheel — and its almost endless supply of horsepower.
“You need a new car,” she muttered, guiding them across the overpass and onto the interstate headed north.
“I’d like to live long enough to drive one,” he said, clutching the grab bar on the A-pillar while flinching as she weaved them through traffic at over one hundred miles per hour.
Punky’s eyes darted across the freeway several car lengths ahead, projecting their path as they raced into danger. With one hand on the wheel, she fished her cell phone from her pocket to call Jax. She needed to find out what was waiting for them when they got there.
Jax opened his eyes and saw steam rising from his car’s crushed nose, but the ringing in his ears was the only thing he could hear. He leaned back into the seat and winced at the throbbing in his skull, then tentatively brought a hand up to his forehead to feel a large knot growing where it had impacted the steering wheel. Even cushioned by the air bag, he felt far worse than he had expected.
That was stupid, he thought, remembering with sudden clarity how he had turned his compact German sedan into a missile and aimed it at the assassin in Punky’s stolen car.
Assassin.
The thought was enough to erase the cobwebs that kept him fixed in place, and he scrambled to free himself from the seat belt keeping him immobile. He needed to get back to Tan Lily before it was too late.
It took some doing, but Jax managed to release the buckle and pry the door open. He pulled himself free from the wrecked car and stumbled out onto the driveway, scanning the carnage around him with an odd sense of detachment. The Dodge Challenger had damage to its driver’s-side rear quarter panel and was spun around with its nose pointed away from the safe house. The driver’s door was open, but the front seat was empty.
Filtered sunlight glinted off spent brass casings littering the ground, and he spun to look through the gate at where a Ford Raptor pickup truck sat idle with its doors open.
What the hell happened?
Jax reached back for the comforting feel of his Glock 9mm pistol but stopped when he felt his phone vibrating in his pocket. Still scanning the entrance and the surrounding grounds for any sign of the assassin, he pulled his phone from his pocket and answered without looking at it. “Yeah?”
“Jax!”
“Punky?”
“What the hell is going on?”
As if that simple question had suddenly brought everything into focus, he jumped into action. He ran past the bright blue muscle car and entered the gate code into the control panel and listened to the electric motor whine as the gate swung open. “The key,” Jax said.
“What?”
Jax didn’t wait for the gate to swing open fully and wedged through, then ran for the idling pickup truck. He didn’t know where its occupants had run off to, but he only needed to get back to Margaret and the safe house before it was too late.
“He said she’s the key. Hurry.”
Tan Lily followed Margaret down the hall while contemplating her options. She knew Shen Li was tucked away in a bedroom with Cher and would be safe, but she wasn’t willing to sit around and do nothing while things spiraled out of control.
“Base, Road One,” a breathless voice said over the walkie-talkie in Margaret’s hand.
The older woman brought it to her mouth and pressed the push-to-talk. “Go ahead.”
“Target has moved into the woods west of the property. There’s no sign of him, but we are pursuing on foot.”
Margaret stopped in front of a door at the end of the hall and entered a code into the keypad set into the wall. The light turned green, and the door unlocked with an audible click. “Base copies,” Margaret said, turning the knob to open the door into a darkened room. “Break. Road Two, come in.”