Girls With Guns

by Ali Vali

  I placed a boot on Dante’s back and ordered Cash to attack if he said a word, hoping he believed Cash would follow such a specific command. For all I knew, Cash thought I was telling him a story about hamburgers. Perez rolled off her pal, but before she could get her footing, I snatched her bag of cash and jammed my gun against her jaw.

  “Say a word and you’re dead.”

  She shook her head. “Your threats mean jack shit. If I don’t get out of here now, I might as well be dead.”

  “Not my problem.” I tossed her Cash’s leash. “Let’s put your special outlaw skills to work. Tie up your friend. Nice and tight.”

  She sat stubbornly still at first, but after a few shakes of my gun, she grudgingly complied. Memories surfaced of the last time I’d seen her and how she’d tied Jess to a chair and left us both to die. Red-hot rage almost made me pull the trigger. But that whole dead-or-alive thing was pretty much a myth in the bounty-hunting world. Killing Perez would mean lots of paperwork and a long interrogation, especially considering my record for run-ins with the law. Jess had intervened plenty of times in the past on my behalf, but after all she’d been through because of this bastard, no way would I call on her for help on this one.

  Another option would be to deliver Perez to the folks who’d put me on her trail in the first place. No doubt they’d love the chance to deliver a slow, torturous death to the woman who’d double-crossed them. The idea of Perez in pain was pretty damn satisfying, but how much fun would it be if I could never tell anyone? Jess was cool, but she was a cop to the core. Besides, turning Perez over to the cartel would mean she’d never get the public shaming she absolutely deserved.

  It was time for me to step up, and taking Perez in alive was the only way to close this episode of our lives. I thought back to my conversation with Cris in the bar. If I played my cards right, I might even be able to use Perez’s capture for more than the bounty I’d collect.

  Chapter Seven

  “You’re making a big mistake.”

  I glanced over at Perez in the passenger seat, hands cuffed behind her. I’d gotten Cris to drive me and my haul of felons back to Leroy’s so I could get the Bronco, and then I sent her home for the night. Her wide-eyed expression when she drove away told me she was more than a little scared of what I might do next, but I had to admire her spunk for playing a role in my adventure.

  Maybe I was making a big mistake, but not in the way Perez meant. My fantasy move was to push her out of the car while we were riding at top speed, then laugh while the semi behind us flattened her into the asphalt. Instead I just sighed and said, “Maybe I am.”

  She shot a look at Dante, who, guarded by Cash, was sacked out in the backseat, still out of it from his plunge into the concrete, and then she leaned across the seat. “I’ve got money. Lots of it. You’d never have to work again.”

  “Maybe I like to work. It’s not that hard, you know. I just wait for stupid people to fuck up, and then I drag them in. You know, like cops do. You remember that, don’t you?”

  “I was a good cop.”

  “You were a bitch.”

  “Is that what this is about?”

  Her gall blew me away. “Seriously? You’re crazy. You kidnapped Jess and nearly got us both killed, not to mention, you totally ripped off your psycho Mexican Mafia buddies. They’re still looking for your ass. Hell, I’m doing you a favor taking you in.”

  She huffed and made a big show of trying to get comfortable, which was damn near impossible considering how tightly I had her cuffed. My small foray into torture. We rode in silence for a few minutes before she started up again.

  “What about him?” she asked, jerking her chin to the backseat. “Why did you bring him along?”

  “I have some questions for him when his headache passes.”

  “He’s not going to give me up.”

  “News flash, Perez. You’re already up. Besides, what I have to ask him has zero to do with you.” I caught a breath to consider how much I wanted to reveal. Perez didn’t need to know I was currently serving on a jury. She didn’t need to know my business at all, but she might know something more about Dante. I gave up a tiny bit of gossip, hoping for more. “He’s an eyewitness in a case I’m investigating.”

  “Doubtful. Dante’s not the type to see and tell.”

  “Shows what you know. He says he saw another guy get gunned down at Leroy’s. Word is he even testified about it. What I didn’t know until tonight is that he’s Mexican Mafia.” I’d seen the telltale tattoo in the parking lot and knew immediately something was off. Either the prosecutor or Dante had made a point of hiding the fact Dante was a fellow gang member of Manny Cruz, the dead guy. My guess was they didn’t want to give the defense room to argue that Dante’s testimony was colored by his affiliation with Cruz, but I sensed there was more to it than that. I decided to start by finding out how Perez fit in. “My big question is why an MM member is working with you at all after you double-crossed them.”

  She blew off my question and asked one of her own. “Who got shot?”

  “Manny Cruz. Your pal Dante says a Texas Syndicate guy named Rey Navarro did the deed.”

  “That’s not the whole story.”

  “I’m just telling you what he said.” I slid a hand into my pocket and pulled out my phone. “Hang on a second.” Perez was a freakin’ know-it-all, and I planned to let her tell me everything she knew. I punched at the phone pretending to check a text, but instead I turned on the voice recorder and set the phone in the cup holder with the screen turned toward me.

  “Are you late for dinner? Keeping the little woman waiting?” Perez asked with a smirk.

  I resisted the urge to pop her in the jaw. It was my turn to goad her, not the other way around. “Dante seems like a pretty straight-up guy.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding. The only thing he’s good at is playing both sides. If any of his buddies found out he was working with me, he’d be blood out in an instant.”

  I didn’t have to ask what she meant. Anyone who worked in or around crime knew the Mexican Mafia had strict rules about membership: blood in, blood out. You gotta kill to get in and you gotta die to get out. “So why did he risk it?”

  She laughed. “You’ve always underestimated me. You think when you and your girl Chance tried to bust me, you scared me away? I’ve got connections in the department you know nothing about. Dante and a few others were smart enough to realize revenge doesn’t pay cash, but I do. I get the product and they spread it around.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t get the connection. What does Dante have to do with Manny Cruz and Rey Navarro?”

  She sighed like I was too stupid for words. When she opened her mouth to school me, I prayed the recorder was still on.

  “Dante and Manny were both working with me, but Dante got tired of sharing his cut. He told Manny a Syndicate guy held up some of his dealers and stole his part of the take. So when Dante pointed out Navarro at the bar that night, Manny went nuts. He started shouting at Navarro, telling him to pay up or else. Bartender told them to take it outside, and next thing you know, Manny gets shot.”

  “I don’t get it.” I was legitimately confused. “That sounds exactly like what Dante said happened.”

  She smiled and lowered her voice to a whisper. “Dante had never met Navarro before. He just knew the guy was Texas Syndicate. He points him out to Manny and lets them duke it out. So, here’s the deal. I was at Leroy’s that night to meet Dante. I’d just pulled up in the parking lot when Navarro hightailed it out of there. He shot Manny, all right, but Dante finished him off.”

  I glanced at the backseat, but Dante was still out. For all I knew he might be dead. “Why the hell would he do that?”

  “Think about it. He and Manny were splitting all the business I brought them. He doesn’t want Manny to find out he’s been double-crossing him. Along comes some other idiot and guns Manny down. Manny’s lying there bleeding out, and he suffocates him with his own jacket,
then waits as long as possible before calling for help.”

  It was a lot to take in, and my first instinct was to write off Perez’s wild story as a pack of lies. But she sure had a lot of details, and I couldn’t figure why she’d lie. I did have another question, though. “You saw all this go down and didn’t help Manny out? You with all your cop training couldn’t try and save one of your own guys?”

  “Too much at stake.”

  Classic Perez. We were about a block from the jail now. I pulled off the road into a warehouse parking lot, picked up my phone, and shut off the recorder.

  “What are you doing?”

  Her tone said she was hoping I was gonna let her go. Yeah, right.

  I dug through the console and fished out a second pair of handcuffs. She asked me again what I was doing, but I ignored her. I stepped out of the Bronco and opened the rear door. Dante was starting to wake up, so I had to move fast. I cuffed his hands first, then loosened the knots in Cash’s leash. Cash sniffed at it, but I nudged him away because I had other plans for the bright-red rope.

  *

  A couple of stops on the way home meant it was after three in the morning when I finally pushed my way through the front door. Cash, who was usually up for anything, dragged behind me, a walking embodiment of the term dog-tired.

  Normally, hauling a fugitive in and getting the paperwork I need to collect my money takes an hour, two tops, but tonight was different since I’d bagged a bonus prize. Booking Perez was easy. Her warrant was active, and the deputy at book-in processed her with just a few keystrokes.

  Dante was special, though. He wasn’t on any wanted lists, but after hearing Perez’s story, I wasn’t letting him go. Navarro might have shot Cruz, but the rest of the jury deserved to know the whole story about what went down that night.

  I sweet-talked the deputy into listening to the tape I’d made on the drive to the jail and got her to roust the prosecutor, Rebecca Reeve, out of bed just before midnight. Rebecca wasn’t very happy about any evidence that cast doubt on her case, but she did the right thing and called Bea Watson to the jail for a powwow.

  By the time they finished grilling me about how I’d run into Dante and gotten Perez to talk, I was beginning to feel like I was the one on trial. But they both told me the judge would cut me loose from serving as a juror and might even order a mistrial. I didn’t spill that Cris had followed me to Leroy’s and was with me when we spotted Dante at Shorty’s. If she wanted to rat on herself, fine. But no way would I get her blackballed from being a professional juror. She’d earned the right to sit in judgment.

  I kicked off my boots in the entry and stepped softly through the house, careful not to rattle the bag in my hand, hoping Jess was up but not wanting to wake her. Cash crashed onto his bed in the corner of the living room and quickly snored his way to sleep, while I made my way to the kitchen. It was five o’clock somewhere and I needed a drink. I opened the door to the fridge and was pondering my choices when I heard Jess’s voice directly behind me.

  “Are you ever not hungry?”

  I glanced back at her. Her eyes were bright, but her hair was smashed against her head and she was wearing only a robe, which told me she’d been in bed. I laughed. “I think you know the answer to that.” I shut the door. “How late did you work? Did you get any sleep at all?”

  She shrugged. “Not too late and not much. I hate to admit it, but I think I’ve gotten used to you being in bed with me.”

  “You say that like it’s a bad thing.” I used a joking tone, but part of me wondered if she was having regrets about what we’d become. It’s one thing to be fuck buddies, but live-ins and I-love-yous are a whole other level. I set the bag in my hand on the counter and pulled her into my arms. “I get that you could do a lot better.”

  She whacked me on the ass. “Don’t be a jerk. I want you. It’s just that sometimes, I think you’d rather be on your own. You know, not have to account to anyone else.”

  She was right. Sometimes I did want that, probably because I didn’t really know anything different. Not until the last couple of months anyway. I’d kinda gotten used to dinner at a table, a light left on late, and her gorgeous body next to me in bed every night. I tugged her back toward me and whispered in her ear. “You. Just you. That’s all I want.”

  She kissed me, and her smile tingled against my lips. When we finally broke for air, she leaned against the counter and bumped into the orange-and-white Whataburger bag I’d set there. She pointed at it and said, “Why were you digging for food in the fridge if you had a sack of food already?”

  I took a deep breath. I’d never done this before and wanted to get it right. “Well, actually, that’s for you.”

  She looked from me to the bag and scrunched her brow. She reached in and pulled out a breakfast taquito wrapped in bright-orange paper with a sticker that read Bacon. Her smile was big and broad. “My favorite.”

  “I know. But there’s more.” I pointed at the bag and shifted from one foot to the other while she rooted through the napkins and salt and pepper packets.

  Finally, she pulled out the cardboard envelope the guy at the all-night copy shop had said would keep the contents safe from taquito grease. She set the bag down, tugged the envelope open, and pulled out the photo. I held my breath while I watched and waited for her to figure out what she was looking at.

  She pointed at the face in the photo. “Perez?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tonight?”

  “Yes.”

  “She’s in jail?”

  “Yes.” I could say yes to her forever. “And she won’t be getting out.”

  This time she pulled me close and held me hard against her. Slow, wet drops fell against my neck. I hated that she was crying, but I loved that they were tears of relief. We stood there, holding each other for a while, content just to be, before she looked into my eyes and said, “I have only one question.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Why is Cash’s leash tied in a bow around Perez’s neck?”

  My turn to smile. “Because she’s your present. Happy Valentine’s Day, baby.”

  Hammersmith

  Michelle Grubb

  Chapter One

  Belinda Reilly stared at the projector screen. Image upon image flashed before her. Every face filling the large screen was the face of a dead person. She was looking at dead people. Although she was an officer of the law, she’d only seen a handful of dead people in real life, all of them from vehicle accidents or natural deaths—gruesome, yes: mangled people crushed inside metal or decaying corpses rotting inside musty old houses. Death was never pleasant. This, though, was different. The people she was staring at had chosen to die, and they had chosen to take others with them. It was the first time she had deeply considered what the term “suicide bomber” actually meant. By design, it was a short-term occupation. By design it signified the end of your existence. Bel began to understand the enormity of the title, the calling, and the complete and utter waste of life.

  Bel had recently joined the prestigious anti-terrorism unit in London, a division of the Security Service, operating out of MI5. Within the unit sat three specialist task forces. Charlatan was an above-ground response team trained to act quickly and efficiently following a terrorist or attempted terrorist attack. Orion consisted of the nerdy brains behind the outfit and the general all-round sneaky bunch. Orion heard and saw things in a super-spy way Bel had only ever imagined after watching Hollywood movies. The task force she was assigned to was called Hotstream—a description of the air that pumps through underground tunnels as a train approaches the platform in summer. Hotstream was the entry-level task force, designed to accomplish two results. First, it allowed new officers a chance to learn crucial aspects of counterterrorism while providing them with specialised negotiation and interrogation skills. The officers in Hotstream undertook constant education—beyond the initial induction—while patrolling the underground. Second, the skills learnt in Hotstream formed th
e basis for further training and advancement into Charlatan and Orion.

  The original official title of the unit was the Underground Terror Alert Response Team. Whoever came up with that name must have been having a bad day because UTART was scrapped the moment Conrad Rush, the head of the unit, bothered to pen the acronym. The revised acronym, LUATRU (London and Underground Anti-Terrorist Response Unit), was the result of a swift name change, and the Charlatan, Orion, and Hotstream task forces were born. The unit was highly regarded and revered amongst its peers. Its purpose was simple: keep London safe.

  Bel was one of only five new members on the Hotstream task force, and it was rumoured that over two hundred officers from all over Britain had applied for the positions. It was a welcome change from her last posting in Norfolk. Being the only female cop in a rural community was fraught with danger, usually in the over-consumption of tea and cake, so London would surely be the exciting change of pace she’d craved while gaining valuable experience in counterterrorism. She’d thought long and hard about her career progression, and when the opportunity arose to apply for this role, years of taking on every undercover job she had been offered—no matter how dreadful the conditions or boring the operation—were finally paying off.

  Bel recalled the words of her superior upon being offered the job. “You have one of those faces, Belinda. You blend in.”

  He was right. She wasn’t ordinary looking—her previous girlfriends had never complained—she simply had the ability to alter her look and blend in. “It’s important not to draw attention to yourself,” he had said. “Your short hair is perfect. It’s more adaptable in disguise.” He’d cocked his head to one side. “Be best if you lose the highlights, though. Plain brown is less distinguishable. The plainer the better.”