It wasn’t the first time. He’d been too close to an IED on a ranger mission once, been knocked nearly twenty feet from the explosion. But back then, he’d had a team to drag him out of the line of fire, get him on a medevac helicopter. Now, he was alone, and he had no one to blame but himself and his desperation to close this case.
He’d told his team he suspected Eric. He hadn’t told them he was meeting Leila’s uncle.
“Looking for this?” Joel asked, holding up Davis’s FBI phone and then setting it on the counter near the front of the shooting lane. “I’ve known you were FBI for days.” An ironic smile lifted one side of his lips. “Eric told me. After I knocked you out, I turned the phone off.”
His team couldn’t track him. Davis swayed a little on his knees, felt nausea rise up his throat. How hard had Joel hit him?
“Sorry,” the man said, seemingly reading his mind. “Couldn’t take any chances you’d wake up before I was ready.”
“And now what?” Davis croaked, his voice sounding as off as his head felt. “You shoot me? You honestly believe this won’t come back to you? This isn’t exactly a good site for a botched mugging.”
Joel’s lips twisted into an angry snarl. “You think I don’t have a plan for you? You think this is going to be hard for me? After what I had to do to my own brother? I had no choice then. Neal figured it out. Believe me, if there’d been another way—”
“He wasn’t in on it?”
“Neal? Not follow the rules when it came to his company, his baby?” Joel snorted, a nasty, jealous sound. “No way.”
“It was you all along,” Davis stated. “Did you step in after Leila’s mother died to help your brother out, or did you just see an opportunity right from the start?”
He heard the anger in his own voice, knew it was for Leila. She’d been right about her father. He wished she hadn’t been so wrong about her uncle.
“I took over the company for Neal,” Joel bit out. “He needed me. It was the two of us again—mostly—like it had always been growing up. Back then, he tried to look out for me. Our parents were no picnic, you know. This was finally my chance to repay him.”
As Davis remembered how Leila had mentioned the abuse her father and uncle had suffered from their parents, Joel continued. “We’d been so close once. But as we got older, we grew apart. Then he got married, something both of us swore we’d never do. I tried to be happy for him, but I never quite knew how. When they had Leila, Neal wanted me back in their lives and so I came.” The bitterness turned wistful. “But when his wife died, I knew it could be the two of us against the world again.”
Melinda would be fascinated by the psychology here. Davis’s mind was drifting, probably the concussion. He shook his head, trying to focus on what mattered, but only managed to make it pound harder, putting zigzagging lines over his vision.
Focusing made his head hurt worse, made him feel like he might pass out again. But if he did, he wouldn’t be able to talk Joel out of shooting him, and he’d never wake up again. So he pressed on. “Leila is just collateral in your quest for money? Isn’t the millions you’ve already made illegally off that company enough? You needed to kill soldiers, destroy your niece, too?”
The anger turned to fury, enough that Davis imagined he could rush Joel, take him down. But it was wishful thinking. The man was too far away, and even when he wasn’t moving—or didn’t think he was moving—Davis felt like he was swaying back and forth.
“That armor wasn’t supposed to kill anyone.”
“Yeah, you sound all broken up over it,” Davis snapped, unable to help himself as an image of Jessica—proud in her army uniform, showing him a picture of her three kids—filled his mind.
“Look, those parts were cheaper, sure, but they were going to be sold to someone. How was I supposed to know they’d fail so badly? You think I wanted that kind of scrutiny?”
Davis gritted his teeth, trying to hold in a nasty response. Eighteen soldiers and seven locals had died in Afghanistan, and Joel Petrov was still thinking about himself.
“As for Leila, she never should have found out anything was wrong,” Joel said. “When her dad convinced the board to put her in the CEO role, I thought it was perfect. She was too young for the job, too trusting of the people she loves.” He frowned, deep grooves forming between his eyebrows, then he shook his head and muttered, “She never should have stopped the gun production,” as if what had happened was Leila’s fault.
“You can’t go back now,” Davis said. “She let me into the company. She knows I’m FBI. If something happens to me—”
“She’ll blame Eric, the way I intended,” Joel said, finishing for him. He glanced at his watch. “And now, I’m sorry, but I’m finished talking.” He centered the pistol more carefully, steadying it.
“This won’t work,” Davis insisted, putting a hand to his temple, the knock to his head or the blood loss making him way too woozy, making his brain feel like it was several steps behind.
“I’m sorry,” Joel repeated, and Davis closed his eyes, knowing he was out of options.
Bullets traveled faster than sound, so Davis didn’t expect to hear anything, but a noise made his eyes pop open.
“Uncle Joel, stop!”
Leila stood behind Joel, out of breath and looking horrified.
Joel shifted sideways, so she wasn’t directly behind him, then took a few steps forward, toward Davis. But he turned his pistol on Leila.
“You shouldn’t be here,” he said, a note of finality in his
