Chang’s sense of danger proved to be no less impressive than his sense of style in men’s fashions.
After choosing the delivery truck as their surveillance post, Carson and Michael had disabled the ceiling lamp in the cab and had left the driver’s and the passenger’s doors ajar. When they got out of the truck, the doors made no sound; no sudden light betrayed them.
Nevertheless, having knelt to fire a third round, the coup de grace, into the back of Beckmann’s head, the killer sprang to his feet. He swiveled toward the sixth truck in the row of fourteen identical vehicles-their truck-and squeezed off two shots.
The first bullet struck an iron-bell note from the chassis and ricocheted into the night. The second pierced the windshield.
In her years as a cop, Carson had never been shot, less because she was cautious than because she was bold. She often played by the book-but only until she intuitively knew that playing by the book could get her killed.
Chang was the employee of a Chinese corporation. He headed its Division of Competitive Intel, which meant- bluntly put-that either by thievery or by bribery, he acquired technological trade secrets from other corporations. He wasn’t a former military man or an agent of a government intelligence service. Until now, violence was not in his criminal repertoire.
Surely he’d become aware of Carson and Michael by some stroke of luck, not because his perceptions were those of a highly trained operative. Somehow aware of their presence but not of their exact positions, he’d fired two rounds in their general direction, which was a waste of ammunition and a panicky response to having been caught in the act of murder.
This company hack, this amateur, was no match for two former New Orleans homicide cops who were now highly motivated private dicks with office overhead to pay and a growing family to support. Carson at first saw no need to retreat from a corporate bureaucrat even if he was homicidal.
Confident that the lightless parking lot behind her provided the shooter with no silhouette at which to aim, she raced toward him. Beyond her quarry, the security lamps on the warehouses backlit him, and even without the assistance of a night-vision camera, she could see him far better than he might be able to see her.
Carson ’s initial boldness was vindicated when, instead of again firing blindly, Chang snared the shopping bag with which he’d arrived and the attache case that Beckmann had dropped when shot. He sprinted toward the nearest warehouse.
Running, Carson was aware of Chang putting more ground between them in spite of his burdens, and of Michael off to her right. She remained aware as well of Scout, their seven-month-old daughter back at the house, not because she possessed the psychic power of remote viewing, which she did not, but because she was a mother now, with responsibilities that had not burdened her when she had been a kick-ass cop in the Big Easy.
She had often been called a mother before she was one, mostly by thugs and druggies and corrupt cops who didn’t relate well to the straight arrows on the force, but they hadn’t been praising her commitment to child- rearing.
In those days, she would never have imagined that she would want a child, let alone that she would get married and produce one. She’d had too much to prove, no time for romance, a husband, a family. She had been intent on discovering who killed her mom and dad execution-style, with bullets to the back of their heads.
The word mother, coupled with six other letters and issued with a vicious snarl and a spray of spittle, never offended her because the creeps who called her that were really using it as a synonym for incorruptible, dedicated, and relentless.
In pursuit of the elusive shadow that was Chang, as her slamming heart synchronized with the pounding of her feet on blacktop, she began to wonder if she was as dedicated and relentless now as she had been back in the day. Maybe her little Scout gave her pause, a reason to hesitate. Maybe Chang was putting ground between them not because he was younger and faster than Carson but because subconsciously she didn’t want to risk getting too close to him and leaving Scout motherless.
Although she yearned to deny it, the possibility existed that she didn’t have the right stuff to be both a mother and a private detective. Perhaps, having given birth to the prettiest baby on the planet, she was henceforth better suited to diapering a butt than to kicking one.
Still to her right, Michael moved out ahead of her, keeping pace with Chang. When they were partners in the NOPD homicide division, she’d always been faster than Michael, driving or running, confident that she could chase down any perp ever born.
Now she was a plodder, her heart racing faster than her feet, her legs heavy. A leaden weight in her abdomen and a constricting upward pressure on her lungs might have been not real symptoms but instead a memory of advanced pregnancy and a reminder of her maternal obligations.
She had become a baby-besotted wifey, a domestic by default, thinking less with her brain than with her heart, cautious whereas she’d once been fearless. She was made submissive by the realization that fate held her daughter hostage and always would, demanding a ransom of worry and prudence, payable in installments by the day, by the hour, forever. On the Highway of the Fainthearted, the ultimate destination might be cowardice.
“Screw that,” she said, and by the time Chang disappeared around the nearer warehouse, Carson sprinted ahead of Michael, to the building.
With her back against the corrugated-metal wall, pistol in both hands, muzzle skyward, Carson hesitated, not because of her baby girl but because-mother or not-she was averse to taking a bullet in the face at point-blank range. She could hear Michael approaching behind her, but she couldn’t hear Chang’s receding footsteps.
Carson no longer enjoyed the advantage of cloaking darkness. The security lamps spread bright fans across the blacktop immediately around the structure.
She lowered the muzzle from the overcast sky, arms out straight, wrists locked. Crouched low, she took the corner fast. In harmony, her eyes and the gun surveyed the scene, right to left, from open ground to warehouse wall.
About sixty feet ahead, Chang ran along a surfline of gray shadows, where the waves of light dissolved against the shore of night.
Carson couldn’t shoot him in the back. She had to catch him, club him-or chase him until he turned and fired and gave her a legal target.
Michael reached her, but she was no longer in a mood to serve only as his backup.
Although encumbered by the shopping bag-which was most likely full of money-and the attache case containing the trade secrets that Beckmann had been selling, Chang was getting away. Carson couldn’t allow that. He had shot at them. Shot at them. Twice. He had tried to make an orphan of Scout. The sonofabitch.
With the confidence of a panther in the wake of a fatigued gazelle, Carson pursued him.
chapter 6
Rafael Jesus Jarmillo, the elected and popular police chief of Rainbow Falls, had not been assigned to the graveyard shift since he was a rookie on the force more than twenty years earlier. He came to work that October morning prior to dawn, with much to accomplish before noon.
Although no crisis had arisen, the watch officer, Sergeant Seth Rapp, and the dispatcher, Valerie Corsair, were not surprised to see the chief. Without a word, Rapp left his post at the front desk and followed Jarmillo through the deserted bullpen, along the hallway that served various now dark offices, and out to the garage, where six black- and-whites not currently in use were ready for the day-shift patrol teams.
A paneled truck stood in the space reserved for the four cars currently cruising the town. Neither the midnight-blue cab nor the white cargo compartment bore the name of a business or any other identification.
The truck had just arrived. Its driver stood watching the big segmented garage door roll down between his vehicle and the dark alleyway behind the police station.
At the back of the truck, as the driver’s partner opened the cargo doors, he said to Rafael Jarmillo and Seth Rapp, “For the Community.”
