LITMIR.BIZ

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hurt.”

      The detective swept past her as three more black-and-white police cruisers rushed up the drive. Half a dozen officers exited the vehicles and ran to the house.

      “That way,” she said, pointing to the kitchen as they approached. One of the police officers disabled the alarm. The silence was more terrifying than the noise. In the quiet, Petra could hear a single question echoing in her mind: What have I done?

      She leaned on the wall for support. Her throat burned. She wanted to pass out. But she needed to know what had happened to her client.

      She stepped toward the kitchen, but Martinez blocked her path. He had removed his suit coat and splatters of blood stained his wrinkled shirt and tie. Over his shoulder, she saw the uniformed police officers administering first aid to Joe. In the distance, she heard another siren, and through the open front door she caught a glimpse of an ambulance racing up the drive.

      “I need to ask you a few questions,” Martinez said, steering her to a dining room that was situated on the other side of the foyer. Two EMTs bearing a stretcher entered the house and immediately went to the kitchen, disappearing from Petra’s view.

      It didn’t mean that she couldn’t hear what they said. “Starting IV fluids,” said a female.

      “Starting IV fluids,” repeated her partner, a male.

      “I see seven stab wounds,” said the female.

      Seven wounds? She tried to picture herself in a frenzy of what—rage? Fear? In her mind’s eye, she saw nothing.

      “Ma’am? Are you okay?” the detective sergeant asked. “Can you answer a few questions?”

      She nodded.

      “Let’s start with your name and why you’re here.”

      “I’m Petra Sloane, Joe’s agent.”

      “Can you tell me what happened?”

      A thousand images flooded her mind at once. Nothing seemed real. “I have no idea. I can’t remember a thing.”

      “You might be in shock,” said the detective. “Take a moment...”

      Martinez’s words trailed off as the EMTs came from the kitchen. Joe was strapped to the stretcher. His eyes were closed; an oxygen mask covered his mouth and nose. An IV was attached to his arm. Petra watched in silence as they placed her client in the back of the waiting ambulance and sped away.

      “I should call someone,” she said, as the final scream of the ambulance’s siren faded into the quiet morning. “His estranged wife, Larissa, maybe. Or...he has a sister in California.” Petra could not recall her name.

      “That’ll hold for a few minutes,” Martinez said. “Let’s get back to why you were here. What can you recall?”

      Why had she come? Petra closed her eyes and brought back as many details as she could muster. The blinding sunlight. The heat wafting off the pavement. Joe’s voice in her ear, quick and clipped, his tone low and almost a whisper.

      “Joe called me earlier and asked me to come over right away. He needed to tell me something. I figured there was another scandal.”

      Martinez removed a notepad and pen from his shirt pocket. He flipped past a few pages before scribbling on a sheet. “Another scandal?” he echoed.

      “He’d done some pretty stupid things lately. The stories were all over the press. It’s my job to portray Joe in the best light possible in the media. So if he’d had any more missteps, I should be the first to know.”

      “And did he say what kind of misstep he’d made?”

      Petra tried to recall exactly what Joe had said. In reality, he hadn’t told her much beyond that he had something important to tell her and heads were going to roll. “I guess he didn’t say anything in so many words. Only that something bad had happened.”

      Martinez wrote in his pad and Petra was forced to wait, grappling with memories that she couldn’t quite make clear.

      “What time did you arrive?”

      Finally, a question she could answer. “About nine thirty.”

      Martinez looked at a fitness tracker he wore around his wrist. “And what transpired between then and now?”

      Petra went cold. She began to tremble. “What?” The word caught in her throat. “What time is it now?”

      Martinez pinned her with his dark stare. “Quarter after ten.”

      The detective thought she had stabbed Joe. She could tell, from the hard set of his jaw and his unwavering gaze. She looked away, because the worst part of it all was that Petra feared he was right.

      * * *

      Ian had gathered his team at an RMJ safe house, a dump of a place in the heart of downtown Denver. The small house had a tiny living room and kitchen on the first floor and two bedrooms upstairs.

      He remembered each and every person they’d hidden away in this little house. A presidential candidate after an assassination attempt. A cleric wanted by a terrorist group. Yet he’d never pictured that he’d be here personally, along with his team, in desperate need of a place to lie low.

      Was this raid, the one that should’ve been their crowning glory, really going to be their downfall?

      They’d gathered in the kitchen, crammed around the small Formica table—Roman, Cody, Julia and Katarina, along with the rest of the team. The air was filled with the electricity of tension and too many unanswered questions.

      Roman was the first to speak. “What the hell happened back there? One minute I’m talking to Comrade Three and the next some FBI agent is telling me to leave the witness alone.”

      Roman’s statement was followed by a chorus of grumbles. Everyone had been just as brusquely routed from the bust.

      Ian asked a question of his own. “How many lives do you think Nikolai Mateev has ruined? Nobody knows his name, and yet his actions—his drugs—have affected almost every single person in this city. Have you ever thought about that?”

      “What are you getting at, brother?” Roman asked.

      Ian shook his head. There was no avoiding the truth. “Jones fired us from the case,” he said.

      Jaws dropped and eyes widened.

      “You’re kidding, right?” Roman almost choked on the words.

      “There was a computer found at the scene,” Ian began. “I took it to my car and tried to hack into the system.”

      “Aw, hell no,” said Roman. “Why would you do a thing like that?”

      “I don’t have time to wait for subpoenas and warrants and technicians in Quantico to analyze data.”

      “What did you discover?” This question was asked by Cody.

      “That Jones isn’t willing to break any rules in order to catch Mateev.”

      “There are laws, Ian,” said Roman. “And if we’re breaking laws then we aren’t any better than Mateev. It’s laws that make us civilized. They make us the good guys.”

      “I guess that’s just it,” said Ian. “I can’t do this anymore. I can’t be one of the good guys if it means that I’ll never see justice served.”

      Julia McCloud was the only female operative at RMJ. From her seat next to Cody, she lifted her hand. “Can you cut the crap, sir? What are you telling us?”

      “Aside from the fact that we’ve been sacked from the biggest case in RMJ history, I’m through. There’s no more we can do here. The agency is done.” The words burned Ian’s throat like acid.

      Was he really going to close RMJ? It was almost as bad as when Petra

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