His fingers tightened around the handset, its casing creaking under the strain. “Come in when you’re done,” he finally said. “I’ve been doing some thinking. Maybe there’s a way to nail his ass.”
“Sounds good,” Jesse Munro replied. “I’ll be there in an hour.”
SATURDAY
1
SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA PRESENT DAY
The doorbell chimed shortly after nine A.M. on a lazy, sunny Saturday morning.
Michelle Martinez was in her kitchen, emptying a dishwasher that had been stacked far beyond anything the laws of physics could explain while accompanying the rousing choral outro to the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Under the Bridge” that was belting out from the radio. She looked up, used her forearm to sweep back the chestnut-brown bangs that kept playing games with her baby blues, and gave a gentle yell in the direction of the living room.
“Tom? Can you get that, cariño?”
“You got it, alteza,” came a reply from the front of the house.
Michelle grinned, threw a glance over her shoulder at her four-year-old son, Alex, who was playing out in the backyard, and got back to emptying the cutlery tray. In the background, the lead Chili was lamenting the dark days he’d spent chasing speedballs in the bowels of LA. She loved that song, with its haunting guitar intro and its epic closing chorus, despite the emotions its lyrics stirred in her. Being a retired DEA agent, it was a world of pain and devastation that she knew well. But right now, what she loved far more was when Tom called her that—your highness. It was so not her, so wildly off the mark, and the sheer absurdity of it never failed to tickle her.
He usually said it when she asked him for something, which didn’t happen that often, not even with her consciously reminding herself to do so every once in a while. The fact was, there wasn’t much that Michelle Martinez couldn’t, or wouldn’t, do for herself. She was as self-sufficient as a military spouse, which is exactly what her mother had been, something that had probably been ingrained in her by watching her mom all those years while growing up on army bases in Puerto Rico and New Jersey. It was that self-sufficiency, combined with her iron will and her intolerance for bullshit, that had got her into all kinds of trouble—she’d been expelled from a handful of schools before dropping out of high school altogether—but it was also what had helped her straighten up, get herself a General Education Diploma, and parlay her wild streak, her sharp tongue, and a series of brushes with the law into a meteoric, if ultimately cut short, career as an undercover agent of the Drug Enforcement Administration.
The thing was, guys didn’t appreciate feeling like you didn’t need them. At least, that’s what her girlfriends kept telling her. Apparently, it was some vestige from man’s hunter-gatherer days, and, truth be told, they weren’t all wrong. Tom seemed to enjoy the occasional request, whether it was for something as trivial as opening the front door or for something more, shall we say, intimate. And it had generated the alteza nickname that she’d grown to love, one she far preferred to the various macho nicknames her fellow agents had for her back when she was on the force. Alteza was much smoother on the ears and had an old-world, romantic ring to it. It was a word that triggered a little grin at the edge of her mouth every time she heard him say it.
The grin didn’t last long.
As the chorus gave way to the song’s closing solo guitar strums, the next sound she heard wasn’t as pleasing.
It wasn’t Tom’s voice. It was something else.
Two sharp, metallic snaps, like someone had just fired a nail gun. Only Michelle knew it wasn’t a nail gun at all. She’d been around enough sound-suppressed handguns in her life to know what the automatic slide action of a real gun sounded like.
The kind that fired bullets that killed people.
Tom.
She yelled out his name as she sprang to action, propelled by instinct and training, almost without thinking, as if the threat of death had triggered some kind of Pavlovian reflex that took over her body. Her eyes quickly picked out the large kitchen knife from the mess of cutlery, and it was already firmly in her grip as she rounded the counter and hurtled toward the kitchen door.
She reached it just as a figure emerged from it, a man in white coveralls, a black cap, a black pull-up mask covering his face from the nose down, and a silenced gun in his hand. The split-second glimpse she got of him shouted out some vague features—thickset, bad skin, what looked like a buzz cut—but most of all, she was struck by the unflinching commitment that emanated from his eyes. She took him by surprise as they almost collided and she leapt at him, pushing his gun hand away with her left hand while plunging the knife into the side of his neck with the other. His eyes saucered with shock, and the blade had pulled down his face mask, exposing his thick, black Fu Manchu mustache just as blood spewed out of his mouth. He dropped the gun and reached up for the knife with both hands and grappled with it, but Michelle had plunged it in deep and it was solidly embedded. She’d also clearly hit his carotid as blood was geysering out of the wound, spraying the doorjamb to his left.
She wasn’t about to hang around and watch. Especially not when her gut was screaming at her that the man probably wasn’t alone.
She threw a flat kick at the gurgling intruder’s midsection, sending him crashing into the wall of the hallway, away from the fallen handgun, which was lying there, tantalizingly close. She bent down to grab it when another man appeared, at the other end of the hallway, similarly masked and armed. The man flinched with a stab of shock at the sight of his bloodied buddy, then his eyes locked on Michelle’s and his gun sprang up in a solid, two-fisted grip. Michelle froze, caught in the crosshairs, staring death in the eye, right there, in the hallway outside her kitchen—but death never came. The shooter held his stance for a long second, long enough for her to dive at the handgun, spin around, and loose a couple of rounds at him. Wood and plaster splintered off the walls around him as he ducked out of sight, and she heard him yell out, “She’s got a gun.”
There were others.
She didn’t know how many, nor did she know where they were. One thing she did know: Alex was out back. And it was time to hightail it out of there and get him to safety.
Her mind rocketed into hyperdrive, focused acutely on that single objective. She darted back and took cover behind the kitchen wall, tried to ignore the pounding in her ears, and listened to any sounds coming at her from the front of the house, then she made her move. She fired off three quick rounds down the hall to keep them guessing, then rushed across the kitchen and flew out the patio doors, running to the drumbeat of survival as fast as her legs would carry her.
Alex was there, on the grass, orchestrating yet another epic confrontation between his small army of Ben 10 figurines. Michelle didn’t slow down. She just stormed over to him, tucking the gun under her waistband without breaking step, and scooped up his tiny, three- and- a-half-foot frame in her arms and kept going.
“Ben,” the boy protested as a toy flew out of his tiny grasp.
“We gotta go, baby,” she said, breathless, one arm clasped around his back, the other pressed down against the back of his head, holding him tight.
She sprinted across the lawn to the door that led to the garage, stopping to glance back only once she reached it, her heart jackhammering its way out of her rib cage. She saw one of them appear through the patio doors just as she flung the garage door open and ducked inside, fiddling with its key to lock it behind her.