Inheritance

“You’ll get a message when we have the location specifics.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Carter climbed in and sat down next to Reese. She inched as far away from him as she could.

Torres looked into the van, her gaze pausing on Reese. “All right. See you later, kids.” She slammed the van doors shut, and they were in the dark until Carter reached past Reese to bang on the panel separating the cab from the back.

“Lights, Wilson,” he called.

A moment later a dome light snapped on. Reese heard the van’s driver-side door close, and then the engine turned on. As the van started to move, she looked at Amber. Her hair was matted on one side with dirt, there was a dull bruise on her cheek, and her wrists were bound together in her lap. Dirt from the basement floor was smeared all over her knees and shins. She gave Reese a pointed stare, her jaw clenched tight, as if to say We have to get out of here.

Reese nodded very slightly—she didn’t want Carter to notice—and glanced at David. She was vaguely surprised to see that he was still wearing his tie. It hung askew from his loosened collar, now soiled with the blood that had trickled down from his face. There was a black stain on his cheek from his nose to his mouth, and even though Reese knew he healed quickly, the sight of it made her stomach lurch. His eyes turned to hers briefly.

Carter’s watching me, he thought.

Torres is helping us, she told him. He kept the surprise from his face. She said the van will stop, but we have to get out on our own. We have to take out Carter and the man in black following us.

Shit.

They rode in silence for a while as they tried to come up with a plan. Reese knew that the three of them would have to work together, but even if they all attacked Carter at the same time, it still seemed like a long shot. The man was big and solid and bristling with weapons, and he wasn’t going to be nice to them. And then if they did get past Carter, there was the special agent to contend with.

I have to get Carter’s gun, she told David. That’s the only way.

David’s gaze lowered. Reese guessed he was trying to assess the soldier’s weapons. Finally he thought: I’ll kick him.

What? That’s not gonna do much.

I’ll kick him in the face. When he’s distracted, grab the gun.

She stretched her wrists against the plastic restraint. We need to cut these off.

We’ll take his knives too.

What about Amber? You need to tell her. There was no way for Reese to communicate with Amber when the whole width of the van was between them, but David was sitting only a few inches away from her. She sensed David’s dismay as he realized this, and for a second his eyes flickered toward Reese.

Okay, he thought. She saw him begin to move incrementally closer to Amber.

It seemed to take forever, because Carter was keeping his eyes on both David and Amber, but when the van turned a corner, David used the momentum to slide up next to her. After they rounded the bend, Reese saw that his leg was pressed against Amber’s, and she was keeping a carefully blank face.

A beeping sound came from Carter, and Reese watched out of the corner of her eye as he removed a device from his pocket. It looked like a cell phone, although it was encased in some kind of thick, protective covering. He pressed something on the screen and then held it up to his ear.

“Wilson, we have the location,” Carter said.

Wilson’s voice could be heard through the phone, tinny and unclear.

“Christ, you gotta be kidding me,” Carter said, disgruntled. “Fine. Five minutes.”

I told her, David thought to Reese.

She glanced at Amber, whose face was slightly flushed, her eyes lowered.

She’s in?

Of course she’s in. David seemed a little rattled, and Reese wondered what else he and Amber had communicated, but this was definitely not the time to ask him.

Carter slid the phone into a holster on his hip next to one of his knives, and Reese tried to visualize where his gun was. It was on his right hip, next to her. The phone was toward the front, and the blades and an extra ammunition clip were attached on his left. Thinking about how she could grab the gun made nervous sweat break out on her skin. She had gone shooting with her mom once before, when a particularly nasty case had terrified her into believing she needed to teach Reese how to handle a gun. Reese had thought her mom was crazy at the time, but in retrospect, maybe her mom had done her a favor. They had gone to a police shooting range and her mom’s friend Jose Gutierrez had walked her through the whole thing: loading the clip, the stance she should take, how to aim. The only thing she remembered clearly now was that the handgun scared her half to death the first time she shot it, the kick jerking her arms back so that the bullet completely missed the target. She was no expert on guns, but Carter’s weapon didn’t look that different from the one she had shot. She desperately hoped it wasn’t. She was grateful that he wasn’t carrying a machine gun.

The van began to slow down, and Reese tensed up. She looked at Amber and David. They tried to appear relaxed, but she could tell they had noticed too.

You ready? David asked.

No, Reese thought.

The van pulled to a stop. Reese thought her heart was going to jump right out of her chest, and nothing had even happened yet.

On my count, David told her. One, two—

She was definitely not ready. David leaned back against the van wall and kicked Carter straight in the face with both feet, shoving the soldier’s nose back. Blood spurted from his nostrils as he let out a guttural cry, and David kicked him again before he could recover. Reese heard the awful crunch of cartilage as Carter’s nose broke.

Reese lurched at the soldier, her bound hands extended to tug the gun out of its holster. To her utter shock, she got to it before Carter noticed her. The gun was heavy and cold and she scrambled to her feet, trying to point it at him. He lunged at her, blood pouring down his face, and managed to shove her backward into the rear wall. Her head slammed into the steel.

“Wilson!” he shouted. “Wilson, get in here!”

David was on his feet trying to drag Carter away from Reese, who had backed up into the corner, but the soldier threw him off like a fly. David smashed into the doors. In the second that Carter was distracted, Reese raised the gun, bracing herself as she aimed for his leg. She squeezed the trigger just as Amber seemed to come out of nowhere and plunged the heel of her shoe into Carter’s neck. The noise of the gunshot was so loud in the enclosed space of the van that Reese’s ears began to ring. Carter collapsed, screaming. The bullet had torn into his stomach, and Amber was standing above him with her shoe still in her hand, blood dripping from the heel and onto a horrible-looking gash on Carter’s neck.

“Oh my God,” Amber cried, face white. “You shot him. You shot him!”

“Are you okay?” Reese asked, appalled by how close Amber had come to the bullet. “I didn’t know you were going to do that—I could have shot you!”

“I’m okay,” Amber said, although she looked like she was about to pass out. She dropped the shoe, and it bounced off Carter’s twitching body and onto the metal floor of the van. She backed away, bumping into David, who was trying to unlock the van doors.

Reese pushed herself to her feet and edged around Carter. His eyes had rolled back in their sockets, and he seemed to be on the verge of falling unconscious. The doors opened and Reese felt the night air blowing into the vehicle. She noticed that one of the knives on Carter’s belt was gone—David must have grabbed it somehow—but the phone was still there. Before she could second-guess herself, she knelt down and pulled it off his belt, juggling it in her bound hands with the gun, and jumped out of the van.