He skidded to a halt in front of the rickety plastic contraption and grabbed the receiver. It slipped through the blood covering his hand and fell, hanging from its cord. Ángel groaned, snatched it back up again, and jabbed the buttons for 911.
The emergency call went through without requiring payment. “Nine-one-one, what’s your emergency?” the operator said.
“My name is Ángel Medina, I’m a special agent with the ATF,” Ángel said, the words coming out in a panicked jumble. He swallowed and said more clearly, “I’ve been abducted. I’m being held at the address this phone is registered to—”
On the other side of the parking lot, the door to their room slammed open and Jesenia lurched outside. She tottered on her feet, her Glock held in one hand.
“Ángel!” she shouted, and raised the gun.
Ángel whipped around, taking cover behind the side of the phone booth as she fired. Whether due to the head injury or because she wasn’t truly trying to hit him, the shot went wide, cracking into the side of the building with plenty of space to spare.
Still, Ángel couldn’t stay here. “Shit,” he said with feeling, and dropped the phone. He should have hit Jesenia harder.
“Sir?” the operator’s voice came urgently from the dangling receiver. “Sir, was that a gunshot?”
Ángel took off again, with Jesenia in hot pursuit. The blow to the head would slow her down, but not enough, and they were in the middle of fucking nowhere, with no cover anywhere except—
Except that restaurant they’d driven past, a quarter mile away.
Ángel sprinted out of the parking lot and into the sand along the side of the road, running for his life.
Charles had been driving in the dark for what felt like days, his only company the background noises of his team working in the office as they fielded reports from law enforcement agencies across the state and in Wyoming, when Jade said, “Charles!”
“I’m here,” he said, his heartbeat picking up at the excitement in her voice.
“I just got off the phone with the California State Police,” she said. “Ángel called 911 from a motel not far from where you are now.”
Charles’s hands tightened on the steering wheel. “Are you sure it was him?”
“Yeah, I listened to the call myself. It . . .” Jade hesitated. “It ends abruptly, and I heard a gunshot in the background.”
“Jesenia wouldn’t shoot to kill, not at Ángel,” Charles said, as much to reassure himself as Jade. “Not unless it was an absolute last resort.” He had to believe the situation hadn’t reached that point yet. “Do you have the address?”
Jade read it to him, and Charles programmed it into the car’s GPS. As it turned out, the route Jade had extrapolated was impressively close to the one it seemed Jesenia had taken, running almost parallel. With a few not-quite-legal shortcuts, Charles could make it to the motel before one thirty.
“The state police will get there first,” said Jade. “Hopefully they’ll have the situation contained before you show up.”
“I’m not betting Ángel’s life on it,” Charles said, swinging the car into an ill-advised U-turn.
Ángel reached the diner a few minutes ahead of Jesenia, but he was under no illusion that she wouldn’t figure out what he’d done—there was nowhere else he could have gone. Still, he didn’t have to make it blindingly obvious, so he circled around the building until he found the side door.
The restaurant was closed for the night, locked up with the lights off. A thrown rock took care of the glass pane in the door’s top half, and he used a second rock to knock the rest of the glass away so he could reach in and unlock the dead bolt. With any luck, he’d set off some kind of alarm.
The side door entered into the vestibule outside the restrooms. Moving carefully in the dark, Ángel pushed through the swinging doors into the kitchen and glanced around. This was a classic diner setup—the kitchen fronted by prep and pickup areas, beyond which stood a service counter lined with barstools. As his eyes adjusted, he could make out the shadowy bulk of vinyl booths ringing the front half of the restaurant.
Jesenia would catch up any moment. He hurried over to a little desk tucked in the corner of the kitchen, fishing a pair of scissors out of a pen cup. One by one, he snipped the trailing tethers off his wrist and ankle cuffs so they couldn’t be used against him in a fight. Then he moved to the sink, hissing through his teeth as he ran his hands under cold water, washing the blood from his skin and the handle of the pocketknife. His hands still oozed blood after he’d blotted them with paper towels, but at least he wouldn’t lose his grip on the blade the way he had on the pay phone.
“Ángel!” Jesenia called—from outside the diner, but not far.
The kitchen’s back door was clear on the other side of the building from the side door. Ángel unlocked it but left it shut, crouching down beside the massive flattop. From here, he’d have cover from gunfire as well as a straight shot to the back door if he needed a quick exit.
“Ángel,” Jesenia said, much closer this time; he guessed she was standing by the door he’d entered through. “I’m not chasing you down in there like a child.”
He stifled a snort. She wasn’t willing to come in here because he had the advantage of surprise and familiarity with the environment.
“Come out now, and I’ll forgive you.”
He didn’t speak. Any noise from him would give away his position.
Her heavy sigh was audible all the way across the diner. “Ángel,” she said, her voice stern, “if you don’t come out now, I’ll go back to the motel, start knocking on doors, and shoot anyone who answers.”
Oh God. Ángel steadied himself against the side of the flattop as he considered her threat. She was bluffing; she had to be bluffing. She’d never escape after something like that.
Maybe she didn’t care, though. Maybe she found capture or death preferable to not having him the way she wanted him.
He couldn’t let her return to the motel, but he couldn’t just surrender either. He would have to initiate a confrontation himself—and that was exactly what Jesenia wanted, for him to give up his cover.
Torn by indecision, he flexed his fingers on the knife handle. He was debating his few unappealing options when approaching police sirens split the air.
“Oh, Ángel,” said Jesenia. “So you did call the police. Bad boy. Now I have to take care of them too.”
The police would respond to the motel first, to the pay phone from which Ángel had called 911. They’d find it smeared with blood, and he had been bleeding while he ran; he’d left a blazing trail along the sand all the way from there to here. The cops would find their way to the diner in a matter of minutes, with no idea what they were walking into.
“You’re causing me a lot of problems,” Jesenia said. The crunch of gravel signaled her retreating footsteps.
Cursing under his breath, he crept out of his hiding place. He grabbed a bottle of degreaser with his free hand and padded back to the side door, watching Jesenia stride away across the parking lot.
Unfortunately for him, there was no quiet way to move across gravel. He bounced on the balls of his bare feet and then took off as fast as he could, rushing Jesenia from behind.
She heard him coming and turned around, lifting her pistol, but she couldn’t get off a shot before Ángel bulldozed into her and brought them both to the ground. She gasped as she landed hard on her back, and he capitalized on her disorientation by spraying the degreaser into her eyes.
Screaming, Jesenia lashed out blindly with the Glock. He dropped the can to block the blow, but he made the rookie mistake of leaving his face wide open. She smashed the heel of her hand into his nose hard enough to drive him off her and onto his ass.
She struggled to her knees, her eyes bleary and bloodshot, her temple gashed open from where Ángel had hit her with the phone. Ángel shifted his weight backward and kicked out one foot, striking her wrist. As she yelped and dropped the pistol, he lunged
forward with the knife.
She grabbed his attacking wrist and yanked him off-balance, seizing the nape of his neck with her other hand and hurling him face-first into the gravel. Ángel coughed, dust clogging his nose and mouth, and struggled to throw her off. She had a good grip on him though, squeezing his neck and wrist to ensure pain compliance.
He let go of the knife. When her hold loosened in response, he slammed his elbow back into her gut. She backed off and he squirmed free, spinning around to face her on his knees.
With an enraged cry, she flung herself at Ángel, wrapping both hands around his throat. She shoved him onto his back and straddled his waist, her face screwed up in concentration as she strangled him.
He locked his left foot around her ankle and plucked hard at her hands, releasing the choke. She unbalanced, falling forward, and he thrust his hip up to roll them over. Jesenia was an experienced fighter though, and wrapped her free leg around his waist so he couldn’t disengage.
Grunting with the effort of holding down her thrashing body, Ángel turned the tables and clutched her throat, even as his battered hands screamed their protest. Jesenia glowered up at him, shifting with one hard undulating movement.
Too late, Ángel realized she was still armed.
She pulled the stun gun out of her pocket and jammed it into his side. His scream cut off in his throat at the all-encompassing pain, every muscle in his body locking up and convulsing as his nervous system flooded with electricity. He toppled off Jesenia to sprawl out on the gravel, twitching uncontrollably, his breath coming in frantic, shallow gasps.
She pushed him all the way onto his back and punched him in the face. He couldn’t even cry out.
“Stay here,” Jesenia said. She staggered to her feet, retrieved her Glock from where she’d dropped it, and started back toward the motel.
Ángel didn’t have a choice—he couldn’t move. He had no control over his body, jerking like a beached fish, pain sparking all up and down his nerve endings. He stared up at the night sky and concentrated on breathing through it.
Once his muscles were obeying his brain again, he rolled stiffly onto his stomach. He was just easing himself onto his hands and knees when he heard two gunshots in quick succession from the direction of the motel.
“No,” he moaned, knowing deep in his gut that neither of those shots had taken out Jesenia. With every inch of his body pulsating with agony, Ángel began to crawl, dragging himself toward the diner.
He had to get to cover before she came back for him.
Charles careened into the motel parking lot with squealing tires, barely remembering to pull the key from the ignition before he jumped out. A state police car was parked a few feet away, its swirling lights bathing the lot in red and blue, but the cops themselves were nowhere to be seen.
Some of the motel residents had emerged from their rooms, gathering on the sidewalk and the second-floor balcony, whispering among themselves—but they were all facing outward, as if the emergency wasn’t taking place inside the motel itself. Frowning, Charles scanned the surroundings until he found the pay phone by the office. Its receiver hung from the cord, coated with blood, and more blood was smeared along the box and on the ground.
His stomach lurched. Fuck, he had to get these people out of the possible line of fire.
Jogging over to the cop car, he pulled his badge from his pocket and flashed it at the small crowd. “ATF!” he said, raising his voice loud enough to be heard on the second floor. “Everybody please return to your rooms and lock your doors. Don’t answer for anyone but a uniformed police officer.”
Though a few people obeyed, the others shifted restlessly on their feet, exchanging uncertain glances.
“Now!” Charles barked with every ounce of fury and anxiety boiling inside him.
Several people jumped; one by one, they turned and scattered back to their rooms. Once he was sure all the civilians were safely locked away, Charles drew his gun and headed for the pay phone.
This had to be Ángel’s blood. He’d called 911 from this phone, and Jesenia had interrupted him with a gunshot—though if she’d managed to hit him, there would have been more blood than this. The spatter on the ground was more indicative of a small, dripping wound. It led away from the motel, of course; Ángel would have wanted to get her away from innocent people.
Where would he have gone, though? Charles had a vague memory of passing a diner down the road, but it had been dark, empty. If the responding police officers had come to the same conclusions he had, they should have caught up to Jesenia and Ángel already. Unless . . .
“Oh fuck,” Charles said. He took off into the sand, following the blood trail, gun held at the ready.
Thanks to the flat ground, Charles saw the huddled shapes long before he reached them. Putting on a burst of speed, he sprinted toward the crumpled bodies of two uniformed state police officers. There was nobody else around and nowhere an attacker could hide, so he dropped to one knee and felt for the first cop’s pulse.
Nothing.
“Shit.” Charles shuffled over to the second cop, relieved to see that she was still breathing, albeit shallowly. Her lips were flecked with blood, though, and her pulse was thready.
She’d been gutshot in the side of her abdomen. Charles pulled off his jacket and wadded it up, packing it around the wound to try to stem the bleeding. He grabbed the radio off her belt.
“Dispatch, come in.”
“Proceed.”
“This is Special Agent Charles Hunter with the ATF,” Charles said. “You have two officers down near the scene of a response call at the Desert Wind Motel. The perpetrator is still at large and she’s almost certainly still armed. You need to get backup and a medevac out here immediately.”
“Roger that, Agent. Do you have an exact location?”
He holstered his gun and fumbled one-handed with his phone, reading off their current GPS coordinates. As he spoke, the cop beneath him stirred and opened her eyes. She blinked down at her bleeding stomach and then let out a small, frightened gasp.
The dispatcher promised that backup and medical assistance were en route, only a few minutes out. Charles let go of the radio and took the cop’s hand.
“Help is on the way,” he said. “Hang in there.”
He looked up at the darkened diner, which was well within sight now. Seconds later, a shot rang out in the distance and a bright muzzle flash blazed behind the windows.
He stiffened, preparing to jump to his feet, but he caught himself and glanced down at the injured cop.
“Go,” she said.
“I can’t—”
“Go,” she said again, pushing weakly at his arm.
He folded her hands over the jacket, instructing her to keep pressure on the wound. Then he leaped up and drew his gun in one motion, running for the diner.
Around the side, a large section of the parking lot’s gravel was disturbed and stained with blood, dark wet patches glinting under the sickly yellow light thrown off by the lampposts. A stun gun lay abandoned near the mess. Charles snatched it up as he passed, approaching a side door that hung open, its window broken.
He heard fighting inside, grunts and curses and the thud of flesh impacting flesh and hard objects. At least that recent shot hadn’t been fatal.
Moving warily in the dark, Charles entered the vestibule and crept into the kitchen, then eased around the corner behind the service counter. He saw Ángel and Jesenia locked in a life-or-death struggle for a gun, trading blows and banging into the booths and the walls as they stumbled across the floor. Neither gained any advantage.
Charles’s initial exhilaration at seeing Ángel alive was swamped once he took in Ángel’s poor condition. He was bleeding from the face and hands and feet, and there was something off about his body’s movements, a sluggishness that Charles had never seen in him before. It was a small consolation that Jesenia wasn’t faring much better, her face streaming blood from a nasty head wound.
Cha
rles aimed his Glock, but he couldn’t shoot—they were too close together and moving around too quickly. Even if he were able to hit Jesenia accurately, the bullet could go right through her into Ángel.
Shoving the pistol back into its holster, Charles readied the stun gun and came out from behind the counter, bearing down on Jesenia from behind.
Ángel saw him first, his face going slack with shock. Unfortunately, this warned Jesenia, and she spun around. The gun she and Ángel had been fighting over went flying, clattering onto the linoleum floor and sliding away under a nearby booth.
Charles lunged at Jesenia with the stun gun. She blocked him with a hard chop right at his wrist that numbed his hand, throwing a simultaneous punch at his throat. Though Charles was forced to drop the stun gun, he jerked back in time to evade the bulk of the punch’s force. Still, the pressure was enough to send him stumbling away in a coughing fit.
When Ángel tried to reengage Jesenia, she nailed him in the groin with a hard side kick that slammed him into the table behind him. Ángel yelped as his hips cracked against the edge and he tumbled sideways, crumpling to the floor in a ball.
Jesenia faced Charles in a defensive posture, her blood-streaked face twisted with rage. He had to get her away from Ángel, who was in no physical condition to be fighting and seemed to be weakening further by the moment.
Seizing one of the barstools at the service counter, Charles swung it in a wide arc and smashed it into her with all his might.
As well-trained as she was, she couldn’t rival Charles’s raw strength; the blow knocked her right off her feet. She landed hard but rolled with the momentum, picking herself up halfway across the room. Charles dropped the stool, moved around to interpose himself between Jesenia and Ángel, and reached for his Glock.
Time to finish this.
Ángel groaned and uncurled his body, squinting at Charles and Jesenia on the opposite side of the diner. His body shook, leaden with the cumulative effects of sedation, blood loss, and electric shock. He could barely feel his cut-up hands anymore, and his nose had bled into his mouth, filling it with that nauseating sickly-sweet taste.
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