PROLOGUE #2
Luca lowered the phone. Set it face down on the table. He could perhaps fire off a discreet 911 call and let them track his location, but he guessed any suspicious moves would seal his fate. He unfortunately didn’t share Ella’s deft fingers.
‘You don’t need to do this,’ he said.
‘Shut up. Raise your hands.’
Luca raised his hands slowly and kept them at shoulder height.
‘Good boy,’ she said.
She stepped further into the kitchen. Luca guessed there were about six paces between them now.
Maybe four, but still too far to rush her.
The DEA guys had drilled that into him all week.
Distance was everything in a confrontation.
If someone had a gun on you and they were more than four paces away, your odds of disarming them were practically zero.
You’d be dead before you closed half the gap.
‘Where’s your weapon?’ she asked.
‘I don’t have one.’
‘Lies.’
‘Come and check if you want.’
Doyle took one step closer, then clearly thought better of it. ‘You’re a fed too. Of course you have a gun.’
‘Feel free to look around.’
‘Shut up. Where is she?’
‘My gun? It’s not a she.’
‘No. Ella Dark. Where is she?’
Keep her talking, Luca told himself. Talking meant thinking, and thinking meant hesitation. ‘You mean you don’t know?’
‘No. I don’t.’
Luca stayed calm and tried to put himself in Doyle’s head, despite the volcano of dread erupting in his stomach. He now realized that the only reason Doyle hadn’t shot him already was because she was looking for Ella and she didn’t know where she was.
He could use that.
‘She’s on a case far away, and isn’t coming back for a long time.’
‘Bullshit. You asked me outside if I wanted to wait for her. So where is she?’
Could he rush her? Could he close the distance before she squeezed the trigger?
A speedy individual could cover six feet in under a second, but a bullet covered it in under a millisecond.
The math didn’t work. The math would never work.
Every self-defense instructor Luca had ever trained under had said the same thing: don’t try to outrun a round.
You’d lose that race every single time. Doyle most likely had fifteen rounds loaded and one in the chamber, so she could miss half the bullets and still kill him twice over.
‘I was just being nice. I knew you’d say no.’
She took half a step closer. To Luca’s right, the coffee machine quietly pinged. The water had heated up.
‘You’ve got one more chance to tell me where she is.’
‘I told you. She’s in Ohio or Chicago or somewhere. If she was here, she wouldn’t be calling me at nine in the morning, would she?’
The woman’s hesitation was written all over her twitchy legs. She’d no doubt come here with two objectives: kill Luca Hawkins and find out Ella Dark’s location. However, she couldn’t do the former without completing the latter.
Luca analysed his proximity to Doyle and realized she was now two paces away.
Not ideal, but in Philadelphia, the close-quarters combat instructor at the DEA had mentioned something in his lecture.
DEA agents found pistols pointed at them on a weekly basis, so you needed to know the best way to disarm an attacker.
Forget the gun. Focus on the person. Guns don’t decide to shoot. People do. So you don’t grab the weapon. You control the wrist, collapse the elbow, and rotate the barrel away from your center line. You make the gun point somewhere that isn’t you, and then you make it yours.
The guy had made it look simple, but he’d also been doing it for twenty years and could dislocate a man’s shoulder with less effort than it took to open a jar.
Luca didn’t have that kind of weight behind him, but Doyle was a slight woman at about 5’4. He was fairly sure he could beat the shit out of her using just one fist.
‘I don’t buy it!’ Doyle screamed, and the mask finally slipped. The dry, composed woman was gone. He silently willed her to scream louder. Alert the neighbors. Maybe one would call the police?
But then what? They’d knock on the door and Doyle would empty sixteen bullets into him and go out in a blaze of glory.
No. That wouldn’t work. He had one chance to make good on this, and that chance was fast approaching.
Beside him, the coffee machine began to pour water into Ella’s favorite mug.
‘I don’t know what you want me to say. She’s not here, and won’t be for a long time.’
He tracked the coffee machine out of the corner of his eye.
The water was still pouring. He could hear the mechanical stutter as it forced the last of the liquid through the filter and into the mug.
He knew this machine. He'd used it every morning for three months.
He knew the rhythm of it the way you knew the rhythm of your own breathing.
First came the gurgle, then the hiss as the pressure equalized.
Then a pause for five seconds, where the machine sat in silence, and you thought it was done.
Then the absurdly loud ping that was way too invasive for a kitchen appliance.
Ella had complained about it a dozen times. She’d said it was like living with a smoke detector that went off every time you wanted a cup of coffee. Luca had laughed about it then. He wasn’t laughing now.
The gurgle was slowing.
‘You’re lying,’ Doyle said. ‘She’s closer than you’re saying. I know she is.’
‘Feel free to call her,’ Luca gestured to his phone.
‘You call her.’
The machine hissed. The pressure valve released with a soft gasp, then the hiss died.
One.
‘Sure, if you want me to.’
Two.
‘Yes. Call her. If you give anything away then-’
‘Can’t promise.’
Three.
‘You will promise!’
Four.
Luca’s thighs tensed. His hands began to sweat. He shifted his weight forward, fractionally, onto the balls of his feet.
Here went nothing.
Five.
The ping tore through the kitchen like a gunshot – and Doyle flinched.
She briefly turned her gun in the direction of the sound, and Luca exploded toward her, toward her wrist. He clamped both hands around her right forearm and drove forward with everything his legs had.
A gunblast eroded his eardrums, then another, and plaster dust from the ceiling rained like hail.
Doyle's high-pitched wails sounded somewhere beyond his scope of hearing, and she thrashed and kicked, but Luca pushed her forward and slammed her into the kitchen unit.
Doyle’s gun fell from her grip and skittered across the counter. Luca reached beside him, grabbed the mug of boiling hot coffee and swung it into the side of Doyle’s face.
Doyle shrieked an inhuman sound as scalding coffee drenched her skin. The smell of burnt flesh and dark roast filled the kitchen in the same sickening breath. Coffee and shards and blood, all at once; a brown and red mess that sprayed across the counter and the wall and the front of Luca’s shirt.
Then Doyle crumpled. Her legs went out from under her and she hit the kitchen floor hard.
One hand clutched her face, the other was bent at an angle that hands were not supposed to bend.
She tried to get up. Luca put her back down with a compact fist that Ella would have approved of.
Doyle’s head bounced off the linoleum and she went still.
Luca had always wondered whether he had it in him to hit a woman, and now he had his answer.
But this, he reasoned, was no woman.
Coffee dripped from his forearm onto Doyle's jacket. There was blood on his knuckles, and he didn't know if it was hers or his, and he didn't care.
Then he picked up the Glock and pointed it at the woman on his kitchen floor and held it there.
Doyle looked up at him through a mask of coffee and blood. One eye was already swelling shut. Her broken wrist lay across her stomach. She didn’t speak.
‘Move and you die,’ Luca said.
On the table behind him, his phone rang.
Luca kept the gun trained on Doyle and reached back with his free hand. He didn’t look at the screen. He didn’t need to.
He answered and said, ‘Ell. It’s over. She’s on the floor. I’ve got her gun. She’s not going anywhere.’
Ella screamed something down the line but Luca didn’t catch it, because there was a knock at the front door. Three hard raps.
‘Police! Open up!’
***
Three hours of driving later – and barely dropping below ninety the whole time – Ella turned into her apartment’s parking lot and saw three cruisers.
Lights off but present, parked at angles that said this is a scene rather than this is a routine call. An ambulance too, doors open, but nobody inside it. There was yellow tape across the entrance to her building that an officer was already pulling down.
And Luca.
He was standing beside the nearest cruiser with his arms folded and a paper towel pressed to his right hand.
There was something brown down the front of his t-shirt.
His hair was a mess. He was talking to a uniformed officer and nodding at whatever the officer was saying, and he was upright and breathing and alive.
Ella pulled her car across two spaces at a diagonal, killed the engine before the vehicle had fully stopped, and got out. She left the door open. She left the keys in the ignition. She left everything because none of it mattered.
She crossed the lot at a run.
Luca saw her coming. He said something to the officer, who stepped aside, and then he turned to face her.
He didn’t move toward her. He just stood there with that paper towel on his hand and a look on his face that she couldn’t read because her eyes were blurring and the parking lot lights had turned into smeared orange halos.
She hit him at full speed and wrapped her arms around his neck. ‘Hawkins,’ she breathed. ‘What the hell happened?’
‘Yeah, sorry I didn’t call back. Me and the cops have been… busy.’