LITMIR.BIZ

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find a man bigger than Asia. At six foot six inches tall and almost three hundred pounds, Asia had once told her he’d gotten his name because his mother had sworn she was birthing a continent when he’d come into the world.

      “I never managed to find a partner bigger than me, but I definitely hit easy street when they put you with me.” He laughed, a deep, robust sound that filled the car. “Hell, I love it that I got a partner who can kick ass better than me any day of the week.”

      Cassie loved having a partner whom she trusted and respected. Asia, along with his wife Serena and their four children were so wonderfully normal. And in her thirty-years on earth, Cassie had had very little normal in her life.

      “Hey, Serena’s making that rice dish you like so much on Sunday. She asked me to ask you if you want to come over around two and eat with us.”

      “I thought you hated that rice dish,” Cassie said as they pulled into the underground parking area.

      “I do. I’m planning on sneaking a couple of steaks on the grill.” He grimaced as Sammy began yelling and kicking in the back seat. He looked back at Cassie. “You go on, get out of here. It’s past time for us to be off. I’ll process this schmuck and you can head home.”

      “Thanks, Asia.” She bounded out of the patrol car and headed inside to get her personal belongings. It had been a long day and she was exhausted.

      The station was relatively quiet. Wednesday nights were usually easy ones. The cops called it the midweek recovery day…the perps of the city were either resting from the past weekend or preparing for the next.

      As she made her way to the desk she shared with Asia and four other patrolmen, her fellow cops greeted her.

      “Hey, Cassie, we heard another one bit the dust.” Officer Gomez held up two thumbs.

      She grinned at the attractive Hispanic man. “We got lucky, spotted him strolling down the sidewalk like he didn’t know he had eight warrants against him,” she replied. Gomez laughed and shook his head.

      “Looks like you’ve got a secret admirer,” Jim Johnson, a vice cop said as he finger-combed his scraggly beard.

      “What do you mean?”

      He pointed toward her desk at the back of the room. “It was delivered just a few minutes ago by some overnight delivery service.”

      A long-stemmed white rose stood in a slender gold bud vase. A blood-red ribbon was tied to one end of the rose and the other end to a cell phone.

      The sight turned Cassie’s blood cold. No way, she thought as she moved on leaden feet to the desk. No way in hell were they going to sucker her into coming back. She didn’t care what was happening. She didn’t care what was at stake.

      She leaned a slender hip against the desk and untied the rose from the compact phone. She knew the phone was impossible to trace and the favorite mode of communication for three groups of people…terrorists, drug dealers and the agency. This one hadn’t come from any drug dealer or terrorist.

      She stared at the number pad. All she had to do was hit the redial button and she’d be connected to somebody who would tell her what they wanted her to know.

      She didn’t want to know anything. The phone would only be active for a little while, then the activation would be stopped and she’d toss it in the trash.

      Irritated by the mere sight of it, she grabbed the vase and the phone and threw the entire mess into the garbage can next to her desk.

      “Ah, somebody is really in the doghouse when pretty flowers and a free cell phone don’t even work,” one of the officers teased.

      She only wished it were something as simple as a boyfriend in her doghouse. She unlocked the desk drawer and retrieved her car keys from the jumble of items inside. Forget it, she told herself as she walked to her car parked behind the station house.

      She had a relatively uncomplicated life now. She wasn’t about to risk it all to go back to work for the agency. She’d left that life five years ago and had never looked back. When they didn’t immediately get a phone call from her they would know she was out of the game permanently.

      The agency had a name…SPACE…acronyms that stood for Special Personnel Against Criminal Elements. It was a secret, covert group run by John Etheridge, head of Homeland Security for the United States.

      Cassie had been recruited by the agency when she was at the Police Academy in Los Angeles. She’d given SPACE four years of her life, working dangerous assignments all over the world. But she’d left the agency five years ago and vowed she’d never go back.

      As she got into her car she drew a deep breath of the early summer night air. After so many years on the West Coast, Cassie had grown to love the Midwest’s four seasons.

      Early summer scents brought with them a curious blend of pleasure and bittersweet pain. Kansas City was the city of her early childhood, a childhood that had ended abruptly and inexplicably on the streets of Los Angeles when she’d been eleven.

      She consciously shoved thoughts of her past aside as she started her car. She tossed her hat into the back seat of the car, then began the thirty-minute drive from the station house to her ranch in the northern suburbs.

      She yawned and checked the clock on the dash. Almost one o’clock. If she and Asia hadn’t spotted Sammy the Snake on the street, she would have already been snuggled into bed and fast asleep.

      When she finally pulled into her driveway, she cut the engine and tapped her short nails against the steering wheel. A restless energy had begun to build inside her as the vision of that darned white rose played and replayed in her mind.

      If it were earlier she’d have gone to the gym and worked it out. She could always throw some jabs on the punching bag in her spare room, but it was too late and she’d promised Max she’d meet him for breakfast early in the morning.

      White Rose. It had been her code name. Another life, she thought. That life had nothing to do with the one she’d carved out for herself over the last five years.

      She got out of the car and walked up the sidewalk to her front door. She couldn’t help but feel a burst of pride. Her sidewalk…her front porch…her home and nobody could ever take it away from her.

      She would never again sleep on the street or in the shelter of a cardboard box or beneath the thick concrete of a highway overpass. She would never again go to sleep and be afraid of what the night might bring…of what the next day would bring.

      Security. It’s what she’d finally attained in the last five years and nobody and nothing would make her risk it. She unlocked the front door, stepped inside and disarmed the security system.

      When she closed the door behind her, she knew she wasn’t alone. She didn’t hear a sound, smelled only the scent of lemon oil and glass cleaner from her cleaning frenzy earlier in the day, but she knew in her gut someone had either been inside recently or was still here.

      The living room was dark except for a thin stream of illumination that seeped through a crack in the front curtains from a nearby street lamp.

      Moving slowly, stealthily, she reached with her right hand into her pocket and pulled out the knife she’d had since she’d been thirteen years old.

      The intricately carved handle fit perfectly into her palm and when she tapped the button on the side the switchblade shot out with a faint sound. Not exactly police issue, but she never left home without it.

      She shifted it from her right hand to her left, grabbing the sharp point as adrenaline pumped through her. She could hit a target faster, more accurately with the knife than she could with her gun. The knife had kept her alive for many years on the streets.

      Her living room was sparsely furnished, as was the rest of the house. There was just enough light to see that there was nobody in the living room. Everything appeared to be just as she had left it when she’d gone to work at three that afternoon.

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