LITMIR.BIZ

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mirror and seeing piercing green eyes in a stern face, short black hair, and nothing familiar about any of it, I’m going to need some answers.

      Knowing he was already on borrowed time, he hit the gas and sent the truck thundering downhill. There wasn’t any road or track, but he got lucky—or else he knew the way—and didn’t hit any big ditches or deadfalls. Within ten minutes, he came to a fire-access road. Instinct—or something more?—had him turning uphill rather than down. A few minutes later, he bypassed a larger road, then took a barely visible dirt trail that paralleled the main access road.

      The not-quite-a-road was bumpy, jolting him back against the seat and wringing curses from him every time he hit his injured shoulder. But the pain kept him conscious, kept him moving. And when he hit a paved road, it reminded him he needed to get someplace he could hide, where he’d be safe when he collapsed.

      Animalistic instinct had him turning east. He passed street signs he recognized on some level, but it wasn’t until he passed a big billboard that said Welcome to Bear Claw Creek that he knew he was in Colorado, and then only because the sign said so.

      His hands were starting to shake, warning him that his body was hitting the end of its reserves. But he still had enough sense to ditch the truck at the back of a commuter lot, where it might not be noticed for a while, and hide the keys in the wheel well. Then he searched the vehicle for anything that might clue him in on what the hell was going on—or, failing that, who the hell he was.

      All he came up with was a lightweight waterproof jacket wedged beneath the passenger’s seat, but that was something, anyway. Though the fading day was still warm with late summer sun, he pulled on the navy blue jacket so if anyone saw him, they wouldn’t get a look at his back. A guy wearing dirty jeans and a jacket might be forgotten. A guy bleeding from a bullet wound in his shoulder, not so much.

      Cursing under his breath, using the swearwords to let him know he was still up and moving, even as the gray-brown of encroaching unconsciousness narrowed his vision to a tunnel, he stagger-stepped through the commuter car lot and across the main road. Cutting over a couple of streets on legs that were rapidly turning to rubber, he homed in on a corner lot, where a neat stone-faced house sat well back from the road, all but lost behind wild flowering hedges and a rambler-covered picket fence.

      It wasn’t the relative concealment offered by the big lot and the landscaping that had him turning up the driveway, though. It was the sense of safety. This wasn’t his house, he knew somehow, but whose ever it was, instinct said they would shelter him, help him.

      Without conscious thought, he reached into the brass, wall-mounted mailbox beside the door, found a small latch and toggled the false bottom, which opened to reveal a spare key.

      He was too far gone to wonder how he’d known to do that, too out of it to remember whose house this was. It was all he could do to let himself in and relock the door once he was through. Dropping the key into his pocket, he dragged himself through a pin-neat kitchen that was painted cream and moss with sunny yellow accents and soft, feminine curtains. He found a notepad beside the phone and scrawled a quick message.

      His hands were shaking; his whole body was shaking, and where it wasn’t shaking it had shut down completely. He couldn’t feel his feet, couldn’t feel much of anything except the pain and the dizziness that warned he was seconds away from passing out.

      Finally, unable to hold it off any longer, he let the gray-brown win, let it wash over his vision and suck him down into the blackness. He was barely aware of staggering into the next room and falling, hardly felt the pain of landing face-first on a carpeted floor. He knew only that, for the moment at least, he was safe.

       Chapter Two

      Chief Medical Examiner Sara Whitney’s day started out badly and plummeted downhill from there.

      It wasn’t just that her coffeemaker had finally gone belly-up. She’d known it was on its last legs, after all, and simply kept forgetting to upgrade. Sort of like how she kept forgetting to replace her anemic windshield wipers because they only annoyed her when it was raining. Or how she hadn’t yet gotten around to having the maintenance crew that served the Bear Claw ME’s office fix her office door, which stuck half the time and randomly popped open the other half.

      No, it wasn’t those petty, mundane, normal irritations that had her amber-colored eyes narrowed with frustration as she worked her way through her sixth autopsy of the day, dictating her notes into the voiceactivated minirecorder clipped to the lapel of the blue lab coat she wore over neatly tailored, feminine pants and a soft blue-green shirt that accented the golden highlights in her shoulder-length, honey-colored hair.

      No, what annoyed her was the memo she’d gotten from Acting Mayor Proudfoot’s people, turning down yet another request to hire new staff, even though she’d only proposed to replace two of the three people she’d lost over the past year—two to the terrorist attacks that had gripped the city in the wake of a nearby jailbreak, one to the FBI’s training program. What annoyed her further was the knowledge that she was going to have to work yet another twelve-hour day to catch up with the backlog. It didn’t help that her three remaining staffers—receptionist Della Jones, ME Stephen Katz, and their newly promoted assistant, Bradley Brown—were all taking their lunch breaks glued to the TV in the break room, with the police scanner cranked to full volume as they followed the manhunt that was unfolding in Bear Claw Canyon, not half an hour away.

      Sara didn’t want to think about the manhunt, or the fact that the combined Bear Claw PD/FBI task force had lost two men in an op gone bad, leading to the manhunt. She didn’t want to think ahead to those autopsies, and felt guilty for hoping the dead men weren’t any of the cops or agents she knew. She also didn’t want to think about the fact that until terrorist mastermind al-Jihad and his followers were brought to justice, people in and around Bear Claw were going to keep dying.

      She didn’t want to think about it, but she had to, because it was happening even as she stood there, elbowdeep in the abdominal cavity of an overweight, chainsmoking sixty-three-year-old man whose badly clogged arteries suggested an all too common cause of death. The autopsy was routine, but the events transpiring outside Sara’s familiar cinder block world were anything but.

      Bear Claw City was at war.

      It had been nearly ten months since al-Jihad had managed to escape from the ARX Supermax Prison north of Bear Claw Creek, gaining freedom along with two of his most trusted lieutenants. Since then, it had become clear that al-Jihad’s network was deeply entrenched in Bear Claw, twining through both local and federal law enforcement.

      Each time a conspirator was uncovered and neutralized, new evidence surfaced indicating that the internal problems extended even further, and that al-Jihad was continuing to unfold an elaborate, devastating plan that the task force just couldn’t seem to get a handle on. The cops and agents had uncovered pieces and hints, but the terrorists’ main goal continued to elude them, even as the groundswell of suspicious activity seemed to suggest that an attack was imminent.

      Of course, the general population knew only some of what was going on. Sara knew more than most because her office was intimately involved with the BCCPD, and because she was close friends with a tightly knit group of cops and agents, three couples plus her as a spare wheel.

      The seven friends had banded together the previous year when FBI trainee Chelsea Swan—though back then she’d been one of Sara’s medical examiners—had fallen in with FBI agent Jonah Fairfax. Fax had assisted in the jailbreak in his role as a deep undercover operative, only to learn in the devastating aftermath that his superior was a traitor and he’d been unknowingly working on al-Jihad’s behalf. Sara, Chelsea, Fax and the others had managed to foil al-Jihad’s next planned attack, but they’d only managed to capture one of the terrorists, Muhammad Feyd, who’d proven to be a loyal soldier and had defied all efforts to get him talking.

      Al-Jihad and his remaining lieutenant, Lee Mawadi, along with Fax’s former boss, the eponymous Jane Doe, remained at large even now, ten months later.

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