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“Fan—knife. I’m woozy. Fan is down. I need, fuck. Damn fucking hospitals.”
She was losing consciousness. “Sunny,” she muttered. “Chen killed her. I was too late.”
Michael didn’t say anything when she was done with her story. She didn’t tell him everything—he didn’t need to know, for example, that she’d been sleeping with Colton or that it was the last night she’d seen her partner before he was killed. But she told him about finding Sunny dead, chasing Chen, wanting to kill him but not being able to shoot him in the back.
“You did the right thing,” he said.
“Did I? All this would have been over eight months ago if I had killed him.”
“Shooting a man in the back as he’s fleeing—”
“Fleeing? Running because he killed a woman in cold blood.”
“You’re lucky the knife didn’t kill you.”
“Yeah. And for my trouble, the FBI almost let Chen walk because I apparently violated his civil rights. He claimed I targeted him because he was a Chinese American, and Bryce Thornton was happy to believe it.” She paused. “Sorry. I guess I’m still angry about the whole thing.”
“I would be, too.”
“And there he is,” Kara said, watching Lee’s patrol vehicle drive through the gate. They were sitting across the street. She would wait until he came out in his personal car—a late model Acura—and then she’d call him. “This is going to be fun.”
Michael groaned. “Really, Kara, you and I need to discuss your definition of fun.”
Tom agreed to meet with them at a pub well outside of his precinct. Though he was twenty minutes late, Kara didn’t doubt that he would come. She’d told him she’d show up at his house and make a spectacle if he bailed on her.
Tom Lee was a short, stocky cop of Chinese heritage. Kara had known him, but not well—they didn’t run in the same circles, didn’t work the same cases.
He eyed Michael with suspicion.
“Michael Harris, my partner.”
“You’re not LAPD,” Tom said.
“FBI,” Michael said.
“Shit.”
“Sit,” she told him. “This is off the record. For the next ten minutes, you have immunity. Besides, we haven’t read you your rights.”
Michael was obviously uncomfortable, but she ignored that. She knew she couldn’t offer Tom Lee anything official, but she could offer him the freedom to walk away tonight.
She needed answers.
She said to Tom, “I know why you were transferred, what I don’t know is why you aren’t sitting in prison right now.”
Suddenly, Michael got up. “I’m going to sit at the bar,” he said and walked away.
She was surprised, but grateful. He sat at the end where he could watch both her and the door.
“I thought it was just for show, you going over to the FBI,” Tom said, looking over at Michael. He gulped his beer.
“Nope, I’ve been working my ass off for them. The real deal.”
“Is DC as bad as LA?”
“I wouldn’t know. My boss runs the Mobile Response Team, so we’ve been all over the country. My team is solid. I don’t care about anyone else.”
Still, Tom had one eye on Michael.
