Deadly Pursuit

by Ann Christopher

  Jack was dead and he hadn’t even told her good-bye.

  Jack, just like everyone else in her entire life, had left her.

  “Amara,” Billy Bob began gently.

  The room spun and Amara slid off the bed to the floor, where she screamed and screamed and screamed.

  Kareem sipped from his fizzing flute of Krug, watching his guests and experiencing the kind of satisfaction he hadn’t felt since this nightmare began.

  It was just a small and late dinner party with a handful of people because a big blowout tonight would be tacky and Kareem was all about class and taste. That was why he’d brought out the Krug, which he’d been saving for a celebration. A moment like this needed expensive wine.

  What did he have?

  An acquittal, with his whole life in front of him.

  Jackson Parker dead at the hands of Hector’s shooter and in a zippered bag on his way to the coroner’s office, with a bullet in his chest and a tag on his big toe; and, best of all, a fresh chance with his wife.

  They still had some problems to work through, though, and last night hadn’t gone well. That was why she was upstairs rather than here by his side. But everything between them would be different now that he was free. Now that she knew he’d never let her go, they could work on their marriage from the ground up and everything would be okay.

  Picking up his fork, he went to work on the lamb chops. He was chewing with pleasure when he glanced up and caught Mama’s eye down at the other end of the table.

  What the hell was she looking at him like that for?

  Like he had a big smear of shit on his face. What was wrong with her? She’d been acting funny all day, but he wasn’t about to let anything harsh his mellow tonight. Not tonight.

  Kerry was late, though. The party couldn’t hit full swing until his top man got here, but he’d slap Kerry on the wrist for his tardiness later.

  Wiping his mouth, he replaced the heavy linen napkin in his lap and tapped his glass with his knife. Everyone paused and looked around, and he smiled benevolently on them like the gracious host he was. “I just want to thank you all for coming tonight on such short notice—”

  “We heard there’d be food,” someone called, and they all laughed.

  “—and for being here with me celebrating this wonderful night. The judicial system works, right? Go figure.”

  They laughed again, and he raised his glass for the toast. “To the American justice system—”

  A sudden, violent pounding on the front door stopped him dead.

  Around the big table, everyone froze, their eyes wide.

  No.

  He’d heard that sound before, but … No. It couldn’t—

  Kareem started to rise, tried to flash his guests a reassuring smile, but that was when the shouts of what seemed like a hundred voices came through the walls, loud and clear.

  “Police! Search warrant!”

  “DEA! Search warrant!”

  And then, right before his disbelieving eyes, while he was crouched over his chair, half up and half down, the heavy front door with its beveled glass detail shuddered, splintered and flew open.

  A stream of people paraded in, an invading army right here in America, all suited up in dark gear with helmets, goggles, boots, gloves and assorted battering rams and assault rifles, all pointed at Kareem and his scared-shitless guests, who couldn’t hold their hands up and hit the floor fast enough.

  Everywhere Kareem looked, he saw a snarling face over a weapon pointed at his chest. Everywhere he looked, he saw three tall letters on every jacket, emblazoned in yellow and taunting him here, at his dinner party to celebrate his renewed freedom:

  DEA.

  No.

  Kareem stood all the way up and squared his shoulders. They weren’t going to take him out like this. Not in his own damn house in front of his friends and—

  The goon in front stepped up and gestured to the floor with his pistol, which he held in both steady hands. Brady; Kareem recognized him through the goggles and the gear.

  “Get down, Kareem,” he said.

  Behind him, the other agents fanned out to loom over the facedown guests and search them for hidden forks or some shit.

  Fury such as he had rarely known roared up from Kareem’s chest, burning his neck and face with its heat. “What the fuck do you think you’re—”

  Without warning, Brady flashed into movement and elbowed Kareem in the gut. Kareem sank to his knees like a cinder block, winded, and Brady’s heavy and hard foot in his back helped him the rest of the way down. Before Kareem could even blink, Brady’d cuffed his arms behind him.

  He kept his foot on his back as though he enjoyed it.

  Gasping with the pain in his ribs, which was bad enough, and the frustrated humiliation, which was worse, Kareem turned his nose out of the Indian rug and glared up at Brady with his one available eye. “Tha—that’s unnecessary force, isn’t it, Brady?”

  Brady shrugged, clicked the safety back on his weapon and holstered it. The pressure of that boot between Kareem’s shoulder blades increased. “Yeah. I’ll feel terrible about it, too, when they put a warning letter in my personnel file.”

  Kareem’s lungs pumped harder, trying to adjust. “Raided another one of my empty warehouses today, have you?”

  “Actually, no.”

  Brady removed his foot and, bending down, hauled Kareem to his feet so they could face each other. Kareem had the terrible sinking feeling Brady wanted to see his reaction when he told him this next part. “Today we raided one of your warehouses with drugs in it. Guess what we found?”

  Despite himself, despite all his best efforts, Kareem felt his jaw drop with horror.

  “We’re still logging it all, but we figure it must be, oh, two-hundred-and-fifty kilos of the Mexicans’ finest heroin and coke. Oh, and there was some Mary Jane in there, too, wasn’t there?”

  “Yeah,” said a passing agent.

  “So,” Dexter continued with that smug sarcasm that made Kareem want to rip his face from his skull with his fingernails, “I’m not real good on the math, but I’m thinking at, say, twenty-eight large a kilo, we’re looking at a haul of about seven mil. That’s a pretty good day for me.”

  Kareem couldn’t help himself. “Yeah, but you lost Parker today, didn’t you?”

  They stared at each other.

  Then Brady elbowed him again in the same spot and renewed agony erupted, shooting out of every pore in Kareem’s body.

  “That’s for Parker,” Brady said as Kareem dropped to his knees. “And for Wolfe and Reed.”

  Kareem gritted his teeth, refusing to cry out. “I’m going to sue you for every last fucking dime—”

  “Feel free,” Brady said, looking around. “Anyone see how poor Kareem here got injured?”

  The answers came in a chorus from the nearby agents.

  “Not me, boss.”

  “I didn’t see nothing.”

  “I was looking the other way. Sorry.”

  Through the searing pain and the taunting, one thought crystallized for Kareem.

  The one new person who knew about the warehouse. The one person who should have been here tonight, but wasn’t. The one person he’d trusted.

  “Kerry,” he roared.

  Kira packed two hours later, after the agents had finished searching the house.

  It didn’t take long.

  A toothbrush and other toiletries, a couple pairs of jeans and a few sweaters were all she threw into her rolling carry-on. All the designer clothes and shoes stayed right where they were in her Mariah Carey closet.

  She took off her fake diamond ring and left it in its crystal bowl on the nightstand. Too bad the feds wouldn’t recover any money off it if they seized it. The taxpayers could stand to recover a little something after all the damage Kareem had done.

  Standing in her bedroom for what she knew would be the last time, she felt nothing but relief. That, and emptiness.

  Now was the time to do
it because it was now or never. How long was she going to wait for the perfect moment? Until she was seventy and they’d celebrated their golden anniversary?

  She’d wanted to get past the trial to see if he was convicted. Well, he wasn’t convicted but the trial was over. She’d wanted to sell her ring for the money, but she didn’t have the ring. She’d wanted to get her degree and now she had her degree because she’d sailed through her last finals today.

  “Going somewhere, Mrs. Gregory?”

  Dexter Brady’s slow drawl came from the doorway and it sparked prickles of something—she wasn’t sure what—along her skin. Even so, she couldn’t face him. She took one last look around, and then she was ready.

  “I’m leaving my husband.” She edged past him, wheeling her suitcase behind her. “Maybe you can call me Kira now.”

  He pivoted to watch her go. “We can give you a ride. I’ve spoken to the U.S. Attorney’s Office about getting you into WITSEC—”

  Well, there it was. Everything she’d hoped and prayed for and she no longer gave a damn. No one had protected her last night, had they? There was no protection from Kareem. None at all. Anyway, she knew nothing that would help the feds, other than she’d once seen Kareem take too many aspirin.

  So Kira kept walking toward the staircase. “No thanks. I don’t need your help.”

  He called after her with alarm in his voice, but she ignored him. At the bottom of the steps, she turned into the living room, where Kareem sat, handcuffed, on one sofa, and his mother sat on another. Kareem’s lawyer, Jacob Radcliffe, had arrived, and they all looked around when she walked in.

  She only had eyes for Kareem. “I’m leaving.”

  He smirked. Even handcuffed, arrested and facing the prospect of hard time in federal prison, no one did smug quite like Kareem. “You’re not leaving. You belong to me. We settled that last night.”

  There was no point arguing with him. Whether he believed she was leaving for good or not was his business, not hers. Either way, she’d be gone.

  Without another word, she headed for the front door, which, conveniently, hung at a crooked angle off its hinges, and pulled her cell phone out of her pocket to call for a cab. She didn’t have much money, but she had enough to get her started.

  Behind her, reality finally seemed to be sinking into Kareem’s thick skull. When he yelled at her, she heard the rising panic in his taunting voice. “Kira. You can’t go nowhere. You’re nothing without me. You don’t have shit without me. Now get your ass back here. Kira. Kira!”

  Kira paused to think about what she had and whether he was right.

  She had her degree. She had a few clothes and a little money. Best of all, she had Max—whom she and Wanda had found shivering in the woods behind the house last night—waiting at the kennel for her where he was safe.

  No, she decided. Kareem was wrong.

  She left, walking out the door without a backward glance.

  Chapter 32

  Mount Adams, Washington, One Month Later

  “So, we’ve got a deal?” Katie O’Farrell recapped her pen and extended her hand over the table.

  “We’ve got a deal,” Amara said.

  They shook and Katie grinned the grin of the well pleased, as she should. The old Amara generally didn’t bargain and encouraged her clients to take their chances on the jury and Amara’s skills as a lawyer. The new Amara realized that life was short and not all fights were worth fighting.

  This case, where Amara’s client was caught dead-to-rights selling to an undercover vice cop, fell squarely into that category. Better for her idiot client to plead out than face serious jail time.

  Not that Amara gave half a rat’s ass one way or the other.

  If forced at gunpoint, Amara doubted she could come up with anything she cared about, starting with the watered-down red dreck in her bowl that someone in the kitchen was calling chili. Dispirited, she swirled her spoon in it and wished—God, she wished—she had a bowl of Jack’s chicken and noodles instead.

  Over at the grill was the new fry cook, a woman who didn’t know which end of a spatula was up. Her soups were thin, her pork chops tough. To add insult to injury, she didn’t fill out the white T-shirt, jeans and apron anything like Jack had.

  Katie followed her line of sight. “Things aren’t the same without Chef Hottie, are they?”

  “No,” Amara agreed.

  “And I miss J-Mart. His brother’s an ass. He only gave me two packs of crackers with my salad the other day.”

  “I know.”

  Katie twisted back around and settled against the booth. “How was your vacation?”

  Amara stared at her.

  Vacation. Hah.

  She thought of the shootings and near-shootings and the absolute terror. She thought of the white-hot pain of a bullet tearing into her flesh. She thought of the would-be assassins. And then she thought of Jack’s arms around her and his whispering voice in her ear. She thought of his smile, his kiss and his touch.

  “Vacation was perfect.”

  “I’m thinking you need to get your money back. You don’t look so good.”

  Amara knew how she looked: thin and wan with dull eyes and a mouth that had forgotten to smile. If she lived another fifty years she imagined she’d look the same way.

  “I’m a little tired,” she said.

  Tired was such a small word to describe how she felt now that even the simple acts of rising in the morning and dressing for work were as monumental as clawing her way to the top of Denali with only her fingernails to keep her hanging on.

  Maybe tomorrow would be better. This was the mantra that kept her putting one foot in front of the other. Maybe tomorrow.

  Scooting to the edge of the booth, she stood and grabbed her coat, the purple scarf she’d finally finished knitting, and her briefcase, desperate to be anywhere but here in her own skin.

  “I think I’ll just go on home,” she said.

  Katie called after her, concern contracting her brows as though Amara had announced plans to undergo a lobotomy. “I thought you had more work to do tonight.”

  “Nah.” Amara waved and kept moving. “I need to work on my knitting. I just started an afghan.”

  Pausing only long enough to shove her arms into her coat and sling her briefcase over her shoulder, Amara went out into the night, ducked her head against the wind, and trudged down the sidewalk toward her car. After twenty feet or so, her brain registered the sound of a big engine pacing her right at the curb and she looked to her left in time to see a dark SUV roll to a stop and the passenger side door fly open.

  Out climbed a big guy with dark pants and a jacket emblazoned with her least favorite letters of the federal alphabet:

  DEA.

  “Well, well, well.” Watching him approach, she wrestled with the primitive urge to smash his unsmiling face with the business side of her briefcase. “If it isn’t Special Agent Mateo Garciaparra.”

  “If it isn’t the DEA’s biggest pain in the ass.”

  “What are you doing here? I thought you belonged to the Cincinnati office now.”

  “I’ve got business here.” He jerked his head at the car and held the door open for her. “Get in. We need to talk to you.”

  For the first time in a month, she felt the kick of adrenaline as it surged through her body and reminded her she wasn’t dead—not physically, anyway. Planting her hands on her hips, she stood firm with no intention of getting into the car with this idiot.

  “Why’s that? Have you finally decided to explain why I couldn’t attend Jack’s funeral? Or maybe you’re going to explain why the DEA’s finest walked him out of the courthouse in full view of a sniper rather than sneaking him out through the underground garage, which is the normal procedure when there’s a threat?”

  Cocking her head, she tapped her lip with mock concentration and hope. “Or could it be that you’re going to explain why he was issued a vest that was so faulty it let a bullet right through, no problem. I
s that what you want to talk—”

  “I want to talk about your letter-writing campaign, ma’am. Complaining to our senator and every other higher-up with a mailbox? Not cool.”

  “What?” Oh, this was too much. Waaay too much. “You have the nerve to complain about my behavior when I am merely trying to get to the bottom of your administration’s incompetence and—”

  “Shut up and get in.”

  Excuse me? Federal officers weren’t supposed to talk to taxpayers like that, and she was about to tell him so when he grabbed her upper arm, swung her around and all but threw her into the passenger seat.

  “Ma’am,” he added, like that one polite word could disguise the fact that she was being abducted off a public street. Before she knew what’d happened, Mateo Garciaparra, kidnapper extraordinaire, had jumped into the seat behind her and they were pulling away from the curb and speeding off into the night.

  “What the hell are you doing?” she screeched, addressing the driver, Mateo, the guy sitting beside Mateo in the backseat, God, and anyone else who might be listening. Her legal training kicked in and she asserted her rights. “Where are you taking me? Because if you’re charging me with something, you need to charge me. And if you’re not charging me, then you should release me—”

  The driver, a dark-skinned guy with no traces of mercy or humanity in his expression, looked over at her with his implacable gaze. “You might want to do a little less yakking and buckle your seat belt,” he drawled. “Ma’am.”

  It was on the tip of Amara’s tongue to tell him exactly what he could do with his seat belt, but then they turned the corner onto the highway entrance ramp, whereupon he stomped the accelerator into the floor.

  She buckled up and lapsed into a seething silence while she made a mental list of all the things she was going to sue the federal government for—false imprisonment, for one, assault if a bruise showed up on her arm, for another.

  Cheered slightly by this prospect, she stared out the window and was surprised when, less than ten minutes later, they exited and followed the signs to a small private airport.