In the Den of Wolves

Chapter One

Tyson Ford barely registered the cruiser’s redlined engine. Amanda Miller had been missing for six days, and by sunrise she would either be alive or washing up on Ocean Beach.

The bodies of six prior women had been discovered in the same place over the previous three years. Each of them had been first reported as missing persons, and each of their bodies were discovered exactly six days after their abduction.

Amanda Miller was the latest to disappear, a doe-eyed twenty-year-old coed grabbed outside her apartment six days ago. Neither Ford, her distraught parents, nor the citizens of San Francisco wanted her body to be the seventh found lolling along the three-and-a-half-mile stretch of Pacific coastline in the early hours of the morning to come.

Which was why Missing Persons had acquiesced to Homicide taking point on the investigation. And that decision had set Ford on a suspect named Terry Willard.

A guy in the crosswalk in front of him wearing a three-piece suit and over-ear noise cancelling headphones didn’t hear the siren, and Ford swerved through the intersection, running aside a panhandler, barely missing a guy with a falafel cart. The guy with the headphones turned and flipped him off.

San Francisco.

He had run across Terry Willard a few times during his stint in the Divisadero Personal Crimes Division. A Confidential Informant who had played the get out of jail card enough times to catch Ford’s attention.

Amanda Miller had been taken from her home in the middle of the night.

No broken glass. No sign of struggle.

No blood.

No note.

Nothing.

Her faculty advisor at the University of San Francisco had called her parents after she failed to show for an 8 am appointment on Monday. Her landlord had entered her apartment on Tuesday afternoon.

Surveillance in the neighborhood on the day of her disappearance put Amanda on the way back to her apartment at 7:53 pm.

Her cellphone was missing, as were her keys and an overnight bag.

Whoever had taken her had done an amazing job of making it look as though she had simply gone away for a few days. All that was missing was the poof of smoke.

The similarity between Amanda Miller’s disappearance and six previous murders had been enough to get the ball rolling two days ahead of the typical 48-hour waiting period to file a report.

Time was the pattern. He knew when and where the killer planned to put the body and knew how to work backward from there to locate Amanda Miller.

It was the time that had broken the case open for Ford.

He knew that Amanda had been taken some time after 8 pm and that the bodies were being dumped sometime around 8 pm a week later. A dozen cops and an FBI profiler were convinced that the timing was linked to the lunar calendar, or the setting of the sun in summer, or freeway patterns.

But Ford remembered that 7 pm was also a common time for Alcoholics Anonymous meetings in the city. Terry Willard’s alibi in a previous and unrelated crime had been attending a 7 pm AA meeting at the Park Presidio Methodist Church, less than a mile from where the previous six bodies had been dropped, and less than a mile from where Amanda Miller had been taken.

Terry Willard had been at his AA meeting the night that Amanda Miller was abducted. A meeting that began at 7 pm and ended promptly at 8 pm. Willard had even spoken last at the meeting. Just to give himself the cover, Ford reasoned. Ford had heard a similar alibi in the presence of his former partner, years before, when Terry had howled: “How could I do that, Sam? I was crying my guts out over all the bad things I did when I was drinking. With a room full of people crying along.”

But this time Terry had cut out right after the Lord’s Prayer. Plenty of time to be stalking women six seconds after eight. About the time that Amanda had disappeared.

The patterns pointed in a single direction, toward a single conclusion.

Ford just hadn’t proved it yet.

The muscles beneath Terry Willard’s sagging, fallow skin constricted and released, first involuntarily, then voluntarily, in an odd twisting from which Ford drew a deep sense of vindicated hope.

Standing on Terry’s stoop, the sounds of the neighborhood around him, Ford rocked gently on the balls of his feet. “Terry, I hope you don’t mind me dropping by. I’ve got a case that I need your help on. Do you have a minute?”

Terry’s right arm rested on the door of his first-floor walk-up apartment in a brick building near the corner of 19th and Lake as he put his body in the gap between frame and threshold.

“Inspector...” Terry said, his voice obviously trying to find level, trying to find a name that would match the threat in front of him. The oscillation read guilt and terror to Ford.

“Ford. Inspector Ford. You were a Confidential Informant for my former partner, Sam Jones. You remember Sam?” Ford offered his best Arkansas bred “aw shucks” smile, which, as intended, drew some recognition.

“Ah! Of course. Of course I do. Didn’t he retire?” Terry asked.

“He did, Terry. And I know that you answered some questions earlier this week. About the disappearance of Amanda Miller.” Which drew no reaction from Willard. At least, not the reaction Ford wanted, but that didn’t disprove his theory. “I hear you’re working down at the Safeway.”

“Yeah. A good job. Keeps me in this dump, but I can’t complain. It’s a lot better than moving back to Louisiana.”

“Yeah, I bet. I don’t miss Arkansas, but the barbecue is better back home, am I right?” Ford asked with a warmth that sounded feigned even to him.

Terry nodded at the perfunctory warmth, but Ford saw his knuckles turn white from the pressure he was using to lean himself on the doorframe. Ford didn’t acknowledge that he knew Terry had been forced out of Ouachita Parish for window-peeping on the wife of a particularly influential Baptist minister. Rather than have Terry register as a sex offender, the local constabulary had taken a nightstick to the man’s walnuts until they were no longer operational. A brutal and illegal form of justice that hadn’t slowed Terry’s misbehavior.

San Francisco was the endpoint of a westbound migration that had allowed Terry to avoid a growing number of convictions for crimes Ford knew he had committed. The only thing that had kept him out of jail so far was the “generosity” of Ford’s former partner as payment for Terry’s prodigious squealing.

“Can I come in?” Ford asked.

Terry stammered something incomprehensible. He must have expected this question, but the moment it happened, Terry seemed unprepared for the reality. Very casually, Ford let his right hand rest on his SIG Sauer semiautomatic pistol.

“Sure,” Terry stammered. “Sure, officer, though, you know, I’m on my way to AA. I go to a meeting every Sunday night at 7 pm. Don’t miss it. Seven years sober, can you believe that? But I’m not the kind that could do it alone. Only with God’s help, you know?”

Ford walked past Terry, but stayed aware of the man’s movements, ready for an ambush, but settling for the Terry pushing the door closed and turning the deadbolt with a heavy ka-thunk.

“I like what you’ve done to the place,” Ford said, staring at the order of a tiny space clearly kept up for appearances. Art-deco, 1950s Palm Springs modern. All hand-me-downs or reproductions, but all done beautifully. A teal flat-bottom couch low to the ground, white pillows, and a picture of a sandy beach on the wall. A lava lamp and plush white rug in the shape of a teardrop complementing the hardwood floors.

“Rent control. Thank God.” Terry shared modestly.

“Yeah,” Ford said, just moving the conversation forward, his focus all around him. “May I sit down? Don’t worry about your meeting. I’ve got your whole evening planned out.”

Ford caught the wariness of the man sitting down in front of him, both of their movements synchronized. Ford stared across the space between them and took stock, knowing that criminals sweat and stink of the sewers they crawl out of.

“It must not have been fun getting castrated like that back in Louisiana?”

Sans witty repartee this time, Ford got a tight death stare across a white-lacquer coffee table strewn with Condé Nast magazines.

Ford pressed on. “Sam always appreciated you dropping tips on the other pedophiles and voyeurs.”

“I’m not a pedophile,” Terry said with solid finality.

“No? How old is Amanda Miller?”

Ford expected Terry to bolt for the door or pull a gun at the name drop, but instead he just stiffened in the shoulders. Almost imperceptibly, but visible to Ford’s trained eye.

Which was fine. He still had time.

At least he hoped he did.

Amanda Miller couldn’t feel her toes. She couldn’t feel her fingers. She couldn’t feel the clothes on her body, though at least she could sense that they were there.

Her last memory was of the men’s hands. The thick, callused, groping hands.

A memory of fighting, clawing, kicking, screaming, with every ounce of energy. The fury pouring out of her, like the tears that ran down her face, and the phlegm that she’d spat from her mouth, and the urine that she had squeezed down her leg and onto the man who had taken her.

She hadn’t bothered to look at his face, but she fought, jerked, squirmed, screamed, and kicked with a strength that she was willing to sustain until her death.

She wasn’t going to be raped. She wasn’t going to be pulled apart. She wasn’t going to comply.

But there had been another man, another man holding her arms. And no amount of fire in her belly would have been able to give her muscles the power to escape. Oh god, she thought.

It wasn’t just tobacco. The men smelled of evil. Stank of it. A stench that turned her stomach even before the disgusting rough cloth stifled her nose and mouth.

A pervasive fog had overtaken her as she breathed in. Unwillingly, yet involuntarily.

And now she was coming out of it.

“How long have you and Lou Coffee known each other?” Ford asked, settling into the threadbare chair, resting his elbows as lightly as he could on the midcentury armrests, and staring across at a crestfallen Terry Willard.

“Who?” Terry asked too automatically.

“Lou Coffee. He was your sponsor in AA for a little while, before he went back to drinking,” Ford said, mirroring Terry’s disinterest, as if the whole conversation was a waste of time.

“I don’t know him. You must’ve got your story wrong. And you know we don’t talk about what goes on in the program.”

Terry tried to match Ford’s tone, but his shoulders stayed hunched, his stare too dead-on, probably pointed right above Ford’s eyebrows in poorly manufactured eye contact.

“Do you know how many judges are in AA?” Ford asked. Terry’s contrived stillness reminded him of a rabbit frozen in highway headlights, not sure whether to stay put or turn tail.

“No,” Terry finally answered, his stare flat, and Ford thought, Just like a gator that doesn’t know if you’ve noticed it lurking under the water yet.

Terry’s apartment no longer seemed quaint. It seemed stifling. “You’re getting awfully quiet, Terry.”

“I’m interested in where this is going, Inspector. You learn more by listening.”

“That’s right, Terry. You do, so I started to listen. I knew that you were ratting out the other people in your AA meetings, telling my former partner things that he could use to move his investigations along. Might not have been admissible in court, but they tied together a lot of loose ends. You helped make Sam’s career. I listened, and I remembered.”

No reaction, so Ford kept going. “Of course, going after a search warrant for the sponsor of a guy in ‘The Program’ would be pretty weak. Judges don’t like that kind of thing, because judges are sometimes in the program just like everybody else.

“Hmmm,” Terry said, disinterested.

“Which was why we didn’t even think of asking for a warrant for Lou’s house on the lake.”

And that hit paydirt. That drew a look so full of fury that Ford knew without a doubt that he was close to the motherlode.

For the first time, Terry’s Adam’s Apple bobbed.

Ford’s feigned disinterest dropped. “Now, Terry, here’s the truth. I think you and Lou were keeping Amanda Miller somewhere near his cabin, and I think you’re bringing her back here, tonight, for one last goodbye.”

Gabriella Suarez looked at the clock on the cruiser’s remote communications display, which registered just shy of 7 pm. The dusky light and shadows framed the construction yard she was scanning from a vantage point that obscured most of the cruiser from the yard’s front entrance. The heavy machinery, cement, and steel that was moved to-and-fro from 7:30 am to 5:30 pm were eerily motionless, and the stillness and anticipation were making her antsy. Gimme a high-speed chase and a shootout any day, she thought.

But she waited, hands in her lap, eyes forward. Not fidgeting, not chewing her lip the way her grandmother had always smacked her for, because that was what it was going to take to get Amanda Miller out alive and pull one more shitbag rapist off the streets.

At least, that was the plan.

This construction yard was less than a two-minute drive from the church where Terry Willard had been seen a week ago at precisely 8:02 pm. It was the perfect place to hide a vehicle massive enough and loud enough to fit into the chaos of the streets of San Francisco. A vehicle that stood out and blended into the day-to-day city scenery at the same time. Some evil genius shit.

The trash hadn’t been picked up at Amanda Miller’s building last Sunday, but a neighbor had sworn that she saw a recycling truck stop in the alleyway at just past 8:15 pm.

The drive between the neighbor’s place and Amanda Miller’s took just about 8 minutes.

Terry Willard had gotten really fucking efficient.

The distance to the last body found at Ocean Beach?

Less than a quarter mile.

Suarez and her partner, Tyson Ford, had gotten a good look at this yard two days ago. The cranky manager hadn’t been too jazzed about it, but he’d allowed them to pick apart every piece of equipment. Every nook, ass-crack, and cranny. There hadn’t been a single shred of evidence, not a whiff of forensic voodoo, to make anyone think that Amanda Miller had ever set her tiny size-six foot here.

The DA had shelved the warrants, the captain had ordered them off the case, and everyone else had gone back to chasing dead ends while Suarez stared at the evidence hiding in plain sight.

It was the darkness around her that she felt first. Then the bouncing and jostling.

Sounds were coming through the drugs that made Amanda’s brain soggy, but she couldn’t pull them into coherence. She blinked, tried to focus.

Her hands. She could feel her hands tied together behind her.

And what must be a blanket wrapped around her, blocking out the light.

The rocking, muted sounds felt familiar. Her brain pawed listlessly for the memory like a drunk grubbing for change in the drive-thru. She was being moved. In a car. In the trunk of a car? Oh god.

She knew that other girls had been kidnapped.

She knew that they hadn’t survived.

That the police had found their bodies washed ashore.

She wondered if they had all been in this place, wondered if they were asking the same question: why them? Wondering if they would be saved. Wondering and praying with all of their life force. Not for salvation, but for vengeance.

She wanted these men to die.

Wanted it worse than anything that she had ever wanted in her life.

Suarez checked her watch again. 7:13 pm. Damn. She was regretting the second cup of matcha that had come with the Reuben she’d devoured before she and Ford had gone their separate ways an hour earlier. She leaned left, leaned right, trying to find a position that didn’t squish her bladder to bursting.

She wondered how Ford was doing with Willard.

The two of them had been partners for exactly ninety days. If there had been a honeymoon period, it was long past. The wedding dress had already been dry-cleaned, vacuum packed, and moved to the attic. They were already deep into the yawning daily grind of thieves and lowlifes. The career she had dreamed about since she was nine years old.

Suarez’s parents had moved to the Bay from Puerto Rico via New York. They’d found the Big Apple harder living than the islands, and the Bay had offered the family a chance to start over with public schools and opportunities that could maybe lead to a solid middle-class existence if you put all your blood, sweat, and tears into it.

Gabriella’s baby brother, born two years after her, had shared the same bedroom with her until his death at age seven. Run down by a drunk driver not even fifty feet away from their house in Oakland. The driver hadn’t even swerved. And served six months of a five-year sentence.

Suarez decided to become a cop.

Snap. Just like that. Became fascinated with injustice, with right and wrong, in a way that drove her to an almost pathological relationship with the truth and lies that you tell to get away with anything in this life.

Like, say, convincing her parents that she was attending City College of San Francisco while actually attending the Police Academy in Glen Canyon Park.

The formal printed invitation to the graduation was followed by the predictable wailing, begging, and screaming.

She’d expected the drama. Puerto Ricans were like that. An island culture that appreciated the value of secrets, and the inevitable cathartic explosion when they were unearthed.

She had waited another two years to tell them she was a lesbian. And two years more to inform them about the time she’d spent working undercover in a drug gang.

It had been four years of working in the Chief’s office on Special Assignment before she’d been able to tell the fam that she had earned a battlefield promotion to Homicide Detective with the early retirement of Sam Jones.

The most coveted job in the force. Working alongside a guy who’d worked for THE guy who put homicide and the SFPD on the map.

This time Suarez’s parents had beamed with pride. They’d gotten used to the danger and exhaustion that their daughter lived in by now, though hadn’t completely gotten used to the lesbian thing. That was still being ground into dust in the whispering moments that her parents shared debating who had failed whom. Whatever.

She’d more than earned this promotion, but Suarez knew that she had only been installed in the Homicide department due to the circumstantial appointment of Acting Chief CiCi Freeman, a thick, no-nonsense woman who had been wasting away overseeing security at the airport until the former chief got run out of town after a failed bid for mayor.

Suarez knew that in the hands of Chief Freeman, she was riding a heat-seeking, satellite-guided missile to the top, and that being a Latina and a lesbian was a stick in the eye of every mansplaining and misogynist asshole in the Force. She was a statement and a manifesto earned through her hard work, clearance rates, and willingness to do what others wouldn’t. And she wasn’t going to let them forget it.

And Terry Willard and Lou Coffee were going to get the needle. They just didn’t know it yet.

But Suarez did.

The rest of the SFPD could read about it in the headlines the next day.

“You know, Terry, killers don’t usually work in pairs,” Ford said as he took stock of the time. “Kidnappers, sure. Killers…not so much. You know why? They try to use each other as alibis, but inevitably they get their stories twisted together. It always ends badly. Hard to keep the band together, if you know what I mean.” Ford reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone. The movement drew a slow spine-straightening from Terry. “But you and Lou Coffee, you two are definitely a pair. Do you mind if I record this?”

“I do, actually.” The rage hadn’t left Terry’s voice, biting at the edges of his statement.

“Well, then we’ll just let it roll, for fun. Not admissible into evidence.”

“Get out of my house, man. You can record that.”

He’s sweating now, Ford thought as he poked his caged animal. Just a little more, and he knew Terry would break.

“Just one last question, Terry. How is your partner going to feel about you not showing up to the rendezvous point? The staging yard for all that heavy equipment. I mean, if you don’t show, do you think he’ll ever trust you again, with you being a known snitch and all? Maybe he’ll get a little concerned. Maybe you become a liability. Because I can tell you one thing, Terry. I’m not going anywhere. I’m going to make it my personal mission in life to make sure you never leave my sights again. Ever.”

In his mind, Ford had planned on Terry breaking down in a fearful cringing confession. Not a panicked lunge from his chair, not the flailing rush to the kitchen, and certainly not the snub-nosed .38 that he snatched from the space between the fridge and the counter.

Terry broke, but not with a whimper, and suddenly Ford wasn’t in control after all.

That was where training kicked in. In the less than three seconds it took Terry to cross the tiny apartment and get the gun in his hand, Ford had his SIG Sauer P226 aimed and waking the neighbors.

Two shots fired. A tight pattern honed by years of training, but Ford’s training didn’t involve firing sitting from a thrift-store chair at a grown-ass man who’d hidden behind the corner of the wall separating the kitchen and the living room and was now firing his weapon wildly. Ford flung himself behind the cover of the sofa as bullets pelted at the upper walls and ceiling.

Ford squeezed off a round just to keep Terry honest.

Three more blind shots from Terry attempting to become a cop-killer came excruciatingly close before Ford squeezed a round that shattered Terry’s elbow. Ford heard the gun hit the floor and heard the wail that followed.

Ford slowly removed himself from cover, his firearm centered on the man writhing on the linoleum. Ford found himself panting as though he’d just sprinted a mile.

He kicked Terry’s gun out of reach as the screams of nearby rent-controlled tenants and their barking dogs faded into his awareness and made a decision they would both come to really appreciate later.

He yanked Willard sideways, zip-tied his good wrist to one of his ankles, and started applying pressure to the sputtering wound with one of Willard’s retro-styled tea towels.

Fuck.

Here Ford was. In a kitchen with a wounded suspect. No confession. No warrant. No probable cause.

And no Amanda Miller.

Ford breathed in, breathed out, tuned out Terry’s moaning and cursing, holstered his weapon, and tried to find one good thought to hold onto through the undeniable shitstorm that had just thundered onto his doorstep.

This was why cops had partners.

“Fuck!” was a welcome word.

Even through the fog of the drugs and the cocoon of the blanket, Amanda heard the man cursing. Sensed the car rocking her body as the driver flailed in the cabin beyond. She could almost feel his anger channeled through the drive train, through the brakes, and into the tiny wormhole in which she was slowly blinking things into coherence. Still too slowly. She pressed through the fog to grab onto the word.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck!”

Apparently, things weren’t going as planned. A tiny prickle of hope and a snarling hunger for her kidnappers’ flesh gripped her simultaneously, stabbing through the numbness like pins and needles in a bloodless limb.

She felt the door slam, the shaking and wavering of the metal, and waited.

And waited. The hope curling in her belly just as spiked and nauseous as the dread. Almost worse. Like she’d swallowed a rusty medieval torture weapon, bubble-wrapped in a fog of drugs. The pressure in her skull growing, the numbness holding her tighter than the blanket, and, further inside, a resolve for revenge.

All she could do was wait and hold herself together inside her body.

She heard footsteps. Would it be now? Would they…what would they… Her brain slogging through deep water to put a picture to what that was, the only clear thought that she couldn’t let them. I can’t let them…

She heard footsteps outside walking away.

And then silence.

A long, long silence.

She could feel her body, wired and fighting against itself. Trying to be alert and ready even as the narcotics tried to drag it back into the dimness, fear turning her belly hot and sick. Completely still but for her nerves twitching, ready to rip themselves out of her skin and run like hell for the hills. Holding it all together, deep in her core, was the iron resolve to get through this.

Which brought something like warmth. Shored up her limbs, steadied her nerve, girded that commitment to staying alive.

Suarez hadn’t fully committed to her feelings for Ford yet, but 90 days in, she was leaning, begrudgingly, toward tolerance, despite his school-locker-room body wash. It was not an unreasonable price to pay for a partner who talked straight, didn’t participate in departmental hazing rituals, and most importantly, let her do the work.

What still got under her skin was that Ford was despised by the other cops in the department. “That’s my bag, baby,” she had told him early in their arranged marriage.

And it was. She thrived on the contempt of her fellow officers and the sniping by the anachronistic culture that had brought the city the highlights of oppression, race riots, and outrageous police misconduct in arrests and sentencing. But with Ford, she found it hard to stir up the animosity she enjoyed spreading around like nitrogen on topsoil. He was just so goddamned earnest. His rabid single-mindedness was something personally familiar, but she was wary to hitch her star to anyone. A thought that was interrupted by her bladder kicking her like a mule on this one-woman stakeout, with an hour left to go until Lou Coffee’s planned arrival.

Ford was supposed to be sweating Willard. That was the plan. He’d stay tight on Willard until his partner, Lou Coffee, showed and she called it in. They both figured Amanda would be nearby.

There was a port-a-potty just beyond the fence of the commercial equipment yard that she was surveilling. The siren call of tinkle time was playing louder than the chatter on the SFPD cruiser’s dispatch.

Suarez looked around at the silent yard. Eleven-ton commercial loaders, backhoes, flatbed 18-wheelers, and knocked-around dump trucks. The only murmur was the quiet whistling of the wind off the Bay as it kissed the chain-link fence keeping her on the other side of the honey-bucket.

Fuck it. She grabbed her radio, found an opening in the chain link, and committed to keeping it to #1 as she pulled the door closed and toggled the plastic latch to “locked.”

She used the hover method in the stench of the port-a-potty and was smart enough to carry wet-wipes. After a successful squeeze, she felt enough relief to get back to being annoyed at Ford.

She kicked the flimsy plastic door open and was blown backward by a .38 to the chest.

Her head hit the rear wall, knocking the plastic back, and one foot scrambled to find purchase as the other slid straight into the hole she had just squatted over.

The bleeding made Ford’s decision easy. Despite his efforts, a slowly growing crimson paisley was expanding under Terry Willard, threatening to run up under the Formica cabinets.

He dressed Terry’s wound as best he could with kitchen towels and duct tape and called in the scene, staying on the line long enough to be sure that dispatch was rolling an ambulance.

Eight minutes out. He tried not to pace and saw that his shoes had left bloody streaks across the tile.

As soon as the ambulance arrived, he’d be filing an Unusual Occurrence Report for firing his weapon and an investigator would confiscate his weapon before putting him in a room to take a statement. And the case, and Amanda Miller, would be beyond his reach. She practically already was.

The inquiry would take days, maybe weeks.

And the clock was ticking.

Right now, his partner was alone watching the construction site. With no backup.

Though she had her cellphone and the cavalry the push of a button away, Ford reasoned anxiously, running his hand through his hair and inadvertently smudging red streaks across his face.

With Terry’s garbled wails in the background, Ford dialed Suarez’s number.

Five long rings, and then her voice on a recording: “Suarez. Message. You get the idea.”

When she didn’t answer the second time, the rising dread and potential hopelessness of the situation kept his mind racing harder and faster, like a foaming at the mouth racehorse on an endless track.

What if there was a third guy?

What if Lou Coffee arrived early?

What if he got the jump on her?

Then she’s in danger.

And Amanda Miller isn’t the only one who is going to die.

He’d already blown his end of the deal, royally. Full-on nuclear meltdown failure. His options were limited and exceedingly poor.

He could call the duty officer and order additional reinforcements, admit that he and Suarez had been running a scheme off books.

He could call his station captain, a man Ford knew wanted nothing more than to get his hooks further into his flesh.

He could make an anonymous call to 911, but dispatch might or might not take him seriously enough to get to Suarez in time.

He could flee the scene but couldn’t in good conscience leave behind a wounded man. Not even Terry Willard, so he dialed the number that he had been given in case of emergencies. A line he had never used, one for which he knew he would pay a heavy price. But at least he might save Amanda.

Maybe even his partner.

Suarez had three seconds to register the fact that though her chest felt like it was caving in, the lethal force of the bullet had been dissipated by the vest she wore.

But the vest wouldn’t offer much from the head shot that she saw coming.

Her ears were ringing but she heard her assailant’s voice. “Where’s your partner?” Lou Coffee snarled for what she realized was a second time, voice cold as ice. The man was big and pasty with rounded shoulders and a pointed stubbled chin. A Neanderthal. A clodhopper.

A motherfucking murderer, Suarez knew. His willingness to blow her to kingdom come in the port-a-potty without even waiting to see the whites of her eyes proved it to her.

“Where’s Amanda?” She spat in return, trying for punchy, though the air in her lungs was so diminished that she didn’t even hear the words over the pounding of her skull.

“About to go for a float.” Coffee looked around, lip curled, and Suarez could read in his eyes that he was weighing options. The sound of the gun being fired once, and the second shot to come. It would be a lot of commotion. And her partner unaccounted for.

She saw the decision in his movements, his full force of being focusing on her, the gun coming up with crosshairs fixed just above her eyes.

She was injured. Immobilized with one foot in a shithole, her gun in her hip holster but resting up against the toilet seat, its leverage helping to keep her from sliding further down the hole.

“Wait…” she said, stealing a glance into the space just beyond Coffee. There was no monologue to come, but he didn’t know that, and the words gave her a click, and the look turned him just enough to create a space.

In that slice of a second she let herself drop, falling a bit farther into the toilet as her sudden movement drew an explosion from Coffee’s gun. A double-tap that hit just above where she’d dropped, no more than a few inches, and another bullet already in the chamber.

But by then her left hand was on her ankle, her legs akimbo, everything moving fast, and her fingers wrapped around the snub-nose throwaway revolver she kept strapped to her leg. A secondary weapon that wasn’t meant to be fired while still in its holster, but fuck it.

The .38’s chamber gases burned away the flesh on her foot as she pulled the trigger. Once, twice for effect, and three more times for good measure as she found center-mass in a crosswise hail of bullets in a Honey Bucket.

She heard one more shot from Lou Coffee’s .38 at the same time that she felt the wallop knocking her backward by one shoulder. Things got fuzzy after that. She fell just a bit further, saw Coffee’s body crumpling like a doll as a black fog rose up to smother her vision.