by David Archer
“Now, Mr. Reddick,” she said. “There’s no need for threats. Believe me when I tell you that I considered the possibility of my own death when I embarked on this little enterprise, so that’s not really something I'm all that frightened of. How do you think your wife feels about that, though? Do you think she’s ready to die for you today?”
Chance stared hard at her. The gun held to Gabriella's head was a Glock, a nine millimeter automatic that was becoming extremely popular, especially since it found its way into so many police departments. It was a single action model and the hammer was cocked back. If the woman holding it squeezed even the slightest bit on the trigger, it would go off and Gabriella would die instantly.
“Those witnesses are probably already on their way to new lives,” Chance said, “and there is no way you can get to them now. Your ‘little enterprise,’ as you call it, has been a massive failure, so there’s no way in the world you are going to walk out of here, unless it’s in handcuffs. If you try anything else, then I will simply kill you right where you stand and you’ll be carried out in a body bag. It’s entirely your call.”
The woman smiled. “Put your gun on the floor and let me walk out with her, and I will let her go when I'm safely away from here. I may be beaten, but I won’t be captured.”
Chance shook his head. “That’s not something that’s gonna happen. You are not going anywhere, and especially not with her.” Chance kept his eyes locked onto the woman’s, and he could see that he was beginning to get through to her. For just a split second, she pulled her gun away from Gabriella’s head, and that’s when Gabriella decided to make her own move. She threw her head back and bashed the other woman’s nose with it, then grabbed her gun hand and pushed upward. The gun went off, blasting a hole into the bathroom ceiling.
The woman shrieked, then grabbed Gabriella’s hair and yanked. She kicked Gabriella’s ankles at the same time and she went down, and then the woman’s gun hand started to move to aim at her again.
Chance fired, automatically aiming for the gun, and his many hours of shooting practice paid off. The bullet struck the barrel of the gun and it flew out of her hand while Gabriella rolled away from her.
Chance leapt forward and grabbed the woman by the hair as she was holding her injured hand and put his own gun in her face. She tried to struggle for a moment, but then made a growling sound in her throat and surrendered.
The gunshots had alerted Agent Roberts, who was in the next room, and she came bursting into the room with her gun drawn. She almost shot Gabriella as she was trying to get to her feet, holding the gun that the woman had dropped, but then realized what she was seeing. She raised her weapon at the last possible second, removing her finger from the trigger she'd nearly squeezed, and a wide-eyed Gabriella carefully held the gun out to her, grip first.
“What the hell is going on here?” Roberts demanded, and Chance pointed at the woman he was holding onto.
“Our new friend here seems to be the lady we have been looking for. I guess she was working with Garrett and thought grabbing Gabriella was a way to make me do what she wanted. She thought she could use my wife as a bargaining chip to get the witnesses after all, but Gabriella decided not to play along. She put up a fight, and that let me get off a shot at her gun. That’s the one Gabriella just gave you, by the way.”
Roberts stared at them. “Reddick, that’s Angeline McMillan. She’s the Deputy Director of the U.S. Marshals Service. She’s the one that was working with Garrett and company?”
“Must be,” Chance said. “She wanted the witnesses bad enough to threaten to kill my wife over it.” He turned to Gabriella. “You okay, honey?” he asked, and she nodded, but there were tears running freely down her face.
“I'm okay, I was just so scared, Chance,” she said. “Oh, God, I thought she was gonna kill us both! When she moved the gun, I just automatically started to fight back. That was kind of stupid, wasn’t it?”
“It was great, honey, it was absolutely perfect! It couldn’t have been better if we had planned it out. And now we’ve got her, finally.”
“Yeah, you did.” Roberts shook her head at him. “Chance, this is going to be a major shakeup in the government. How the hell could she have gotten mixed up in all this?”
Chance shrugged. “I will let you guys ask her those questions,” he said. “I just want to take my wife home.”
Roberts stared at Ms. McMillan for a moment, then holstered her own weapon. “Answer that question,” she said. “Why in the world would the Deputy Director of the U.S. Marshals be involved in selling out protected witnesses?”
McMillan sneered at her. “Get your head on straight, Agent,” she said. “Do you honestly believe this story? I knew about Garrett, and I have been trying to find out who else he was working with all along. I followed Mr. Reddick here and tried to talk to him about it, and he pulled a gun on me.”
“You lying bitch,” Gabriella said, her eyes wide. “You grabbed me by my hair and put a gun to my head! You threatened to kill me if my husband didn’t tell you where to find those witnesses!”
“Yes, so? My job is to keep them safe, and I don’t trust some civilian PI to do that. God only knows whether those witnesses are even still alive. Reddick and his partner might have already killed them, already collected the money.”
“Oh, please,” Roberts said. “You were caught red-handed. Do you honestly think you can lie your way out of this?”
McMillan grinned. “Do you have any idea how many secrets I know? The Attorney General himself wouldn’t allow you to prosecute me. I’ve had to pull his fat out of the fire too many times. Go ahead, arrest me. I can just about guarantee you will spend the rest of your career in an FBI property room. There are far too many high-ranking officials who would be afraid to cross me, darling. Now, you can either go along with my story and come out a hero, or you can run the risk of being prosecuted for wrongful arrest.”
Roberts stared at her for a moment, then looked at Chance. “Too bad you didn’t shoot her when she was pointing the gun at your wife,” she said. “Or did you?”
She turned without a word and walked out of the bathroom, and straight out of the hotel suite. Chance stared after her for just a moment, then turned back to McMillan. Her eyes were wide as she stared at him, and they grew even wider when he reached under his jacket and drew the Maxim again.
“You wouldn’t dare,” she hissed.
“Gabriella,” Chance said. “Go out and wait with Agent Roberts.”
Gabriella looked at him for a moment, then turned to look at McMillan. “You people never should’ve threatened our children,” she said, and then she also left the room. When the door to the suite shut behind her, McMillan’s eyes were wider than ever.
“Look, you can’t do this,” he said. “I’ll make it worth your while. I have money, lots of money that nobody knows anything about, just let me walk out of here. That’s worth $10 million to me, and it can all be yours.”
Chance looked at her for a moment, then grinned. “I don’t need your money,” he said. “But I do need justice.”
He squeezed the trigger, and Angeline McMillan dropped dead to the floor.
Chance heard a noise and looked around, just in time to see Special Agent Roberts come running back into the room with Gabriella right behind her. Gabriella took one look into the room and then turned away, but Roberts stepped inside to stand beside Chance. She looked him dead in the eye and said, “I thought I heard a gunshot.”
“You did,” he said. “This woman was trying to hold my wife hostage to force me to give up the witnesses, and her gun went off. I fired once to try to disarm her, but then I had to shoot again to stop her from shooting me.”
Roberts nodded. “That’s what I thought,” she said. “Now, let’s get your wife in here and make sure our stories all match up.”
Epilogue
Grandma and the boys were quickly moved to a different hotel room, and then Chance, Gabriella and Agent Roberts were a
ll taken back to the FBI office to give their statements, All three of them told the same general story, and Chance and Gabriella were released only an hour later. The news spread quickly through television and Internet that Angeline McMillan, the Deputy Director of the U.S. Marshals, had been killed as a result of an investigation into corruption in the Marshals Service. Her actual role in the corruption was being withheld, pending a thorough federal investigation.
The next morning, Chance and his family, accompanied by Special Agent Roberts, returned to Las Vegas. Chance took Roberts directly to the safe house and introduced her to Darrell Johnson, and then she made the calls to confirm that he was alive and well. Christina Johnson was released less than an hour later, with all charges dismissed. She and Darrell went to his parents to explain what had actually happened, and then began the process of helping little Darrell come to grips with it all.
The witnesses were transferred to another department in the Witness Protection Program, although several of them kept their original handlers. Special precautions were taken with those who were most in danger, to ensure that they would be available to testify when their times came. Joyce Whittington was overjoyed when a pair of U.S. Marshals showed up at her house in Topeka, to let her know that her husband was alive and well and that she would be joining him within a couple of days.
“We done good, Chance,” Pete said the next morning, when they were back in their office. “Both cases brought to a successful conclusion, and we even saved a lot of lives.”
“That’s what it’s all about, right?” Chance asked. “Doing the right thing?”
“Sure enough,” Pete said. “Why, I…”
He cut off when the door opened, and they looked up to see Special Agent Roberts stepping inside. Chance got to his feet as she approached him.
“Something I can do for you, Agent Roberts?” he asked.
She grinned at him, and motioned for him to sit down again. When he did, she took the chair beside him.
“I just figured I should stop by,” she said. “Just so you know, I have officially dropped the investigation into your extracurricular activities. After working with you, it seems I have come to the conclusion that you are not such a bad guy, after all.”
Chance raised his eyebrows as he looked at her. “Well, that’s awfully nice of you,” he said.
“But,” she went on, her eyes suddenly stern. “That doesn’t mean I’m going to always look the other way. We need to understand each other, Chance. I’ll accept that what you do sometimes has value, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to let you go crazy around this town. There’s an awful lot of corruption here, and I don’t want you out there trying to clean it all up by yourself.”
Chance watched her eyes for several seconds, then grinned. “Who, me? As I recall, that’s your job. I’m just a lowly little private eye in training, remember?”
Roberts smiled. “And that’s exactly how I want it to stay.” She got to her feet and turned to leave, but stopped by Josie and leaned down to whisper something to the girl. Josie’s eyes were suddenly big and round, and she looked up and nodded.
When Roberts was gone, Pete looked over at Josie. “Okay,” he said, “give. What was that all about?”
Josie turned her wheelchair around and looked at him. “She, um—she told me to keep doing such a good job of riding herd on you guys.”
Chance and Pete looked at one another, and both of them chuckled. Chance got to his feet and stretched.
“Come on, Pete,” he said. “I need a ride.”
“Yeah? Where we going?”
“Johnny Fargo’s. He left me a voicemail last night that my truck is ready.”
BOOK 4
PERSONAL ASSET
Prologue
The last six months had been crazy for Chance Reddick. A few months earlier, he and his partner, Pete Dixon, had stumbled into a case involving a corrupt government official who was selling out protected witnesses, and they had been instrumental in shutting down the entire operation. The government, in a rare display of generosity, had rewarded them handsomely and the publicity had brought them a lot of business. Pete Dixon Investigations, the private eye firm the two of them were now partners in, had suddenly gotten busy. Local businesses were clamoring for their help with everything from shoplifting cases to corporate espionage, and they had been getting tons of requests from individuals for more serious cases. In the first month after the witness protection case alone, they’d tracked down two kids who were taken by non-custodial parents, recovered half a million dollars’ worth of stolen jewelry and cleared a man of murder charges, and Pete had decided it was time to get serious about the business.
They’d moved to a newer, larger building that was just a block off the Strip, one that had formerly housed an accounting firm. The owner was an old friend of Pete’s and let him have it for a good rate, and the layout—several offices and conference rooms, as well as a fancy lobby—immediately led to Pete suggesting they hire more investigators.
The conversation came up as they were having lunch one day, and Pete seemed pretty adamant about it.
“You and me are running ragged,” Pete said, “trying to keep up with all the work coming in. Even Josie is swamped, just doing all the internet work. We need help, Chance, and with all this work coming in, we can afford it. You know how many protection jobs I’ve had to turn down this month? People around here know Pete Dixon, and seeing me back in the game seems to be getting some of them excited. If we are going to keep up with the work, we need help.”
“You’re the boss,” Chance said. “You know the business a lot better than I do, I'm just an apprentice.”
“Apprentice, my ass,” Pete said. “Wasn’t for you, Chance, I’d still be at the bottom of a bottle. You helped me pull my act together, Chance, but let’s face it: you and me are running ragged trying to handle everything by ourselves. We need some help.” Pete glanced around to make sure no one could overhear them and leaned close. “Besides, it’ll leave you with more time to handle cases that need your special touch.”
Chance grinned. His “special touch” had found its place in Pete Dixon Investigations. There were far too many cases where justice failed, and Chance considered it his personal mission to make sure that failure didn’t happen as often as it could. Pete Dixon had been a beneficiary of that mission, which was one reason the two were so close.
His devotion to justice had begun a few years earlier, when his little sister had been murdered simply because she was with the wrong person at the wrong time. Chance had grown frustrated with the police, who were unable to touch the drug cartel that was responsible, and had taken matters into his own hands. In order to deliver “justice,” however, he had been forced to make a deal with the devil. He had literally enlisted the help of the rival cartel’s top man, whose son had been the target of the murderers.
After the job was done, Chance had realized that it had given him the greatest thrill of his life, and had mistakenly concluded that he was a natural born killer. When college life became too boring a short time later, he accepted employment with the cartel leader who had assisted him, and was assigned by an underling to track down and kill a woman whose husband had allegedly stolen millions of dollars.
That woman, it turned out, was Gabriella. After spending some time around her, trying to locate the missing money, Chance came to the conclusion that she knew nothing about it. He could not bring himself to actually kill her, and so he finally ended up going against the man who had given him the assignment. That man, it turned out, had actually been the thief who stole the money, and Chance handed him the same kind of justice before it was over. As a reward, the cartel dropped all interest in Gabriella, and she and Chance were married not long after.
Since then, Chance had simply looked for people who deserved the kind of justice he meted out. One such case had led him to enlist the aid of an alcoholic former private investigator, and the two had become fast friends. Chance had given Pete Dixon
a reason to sober up, and he was back in the business. It wasn’t long after that when Chance asked Pete to teach him to be an investigator, and Pete Dixon Investigations came into existence as a partnership between the two of them.
Chance had heard from his grandmother all his life about Raguel, the Angel of Justice, and he thought of himself as one of Raguel’s assistants. Pete was fully aware of Chance’s “hobby,” and had already ensured alibis more than once.
“I'm with you,” Chance said. “A couple more people would make it a lot easier for both of us, and maybe take some of the strain off Josie. If we could find somebody to handle all the office work, she could stick to doing the computer investigations.”
“Yeah,” Pete said. “And I got just the gal in mind.”
The decision was made, and Pete started looking for new staff. Chance was happy to let him handle the hiring, and wasn’t terribly surprised to see a couple of new people turn up in the office. It seemed that Pete’s previous reputation, now that he was sober and back in business in a serious way, was enough to make people want to work with him. The first person he hired was a lady named Carol Musgrave, who was experienced at managing the office details for an investigative service, and Josie breathed a sigh of relief.
Jake Claridge was next. Jake was an exceptionally bright young man of twenty-eight who had only recently graduated from college, where he had run a double major in Criminal Justice and Psychology. His high IQ enabled him to come out of it all with a double degree that would almost let him write his own ticket anywhere. He had tried to get on with the Las Vegas Police Department, but had failed the physical because of a record of childhood asthma.
However, Jake’s father had been a Vegas cop and had worked with Pete Dixon on more than one occasion. He’d heard that Pete was back and hiring, so he suggested Jake contact him. With his criminal justice degree, he could qualify for a PI license that would let him work for the firm, so Henry Claridge had made a phone call. Pete and Chance hadn’t hesitated to put him on the payroll, and his education and knowledge had come in handy more than once already.