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“We’ve got movement outside,” Holt reported. “Four bogeys converging. Talley, move your teams in.”
“Move to intercept,” Special Agent in Charge Aidan Talley radioed to his perimeter teams outside.
“Ariel,” Jax said; the team agreed they’d be the contact with him, given the trust they’d established with Ariel the past few days. “Wrap this up.”
“Did you sell me out?” he asked Barbas. “With the info Fitzpatrick provided?”
“I might have connected the dots for the higher ups at the Agency. Sold them a story about how you weren’t cutting off your family’s most lucrative ventures.” He finished Ariel’s wine, then tilted the glass toward his protégé. “You were avoiding those intentionally.”
“The only thing that was intentional was building a better case, like you told me to do.”
“But you didn’t do the other thing I told you, did you?” He glared daggers at the ring on Ariel’s left hand. “You just couldn’t leave him alone.”
As if his statement warranted an exclamation mark, gunfire erupted outside.
Barbas’s gaze whipped from Ariel to the street outside the plate glass window, then back to Ariel, who broke into a grin. “Thanks for clearing my name, traitor.”
Barbas bolted out of his seat, the chair falling behind him. He stumbled back, nearly falling in his haste to flee, only to find himself hemmed in, everyone else in the restaurant now on their feet, in position and blocking his path to the door. Wide-eyed, he whipped back around to Ariel. “What’s going on?”
“Bogeys contained outside,” Holt radioed.
Inside, Mel stepped forward. “Target is contained inside as well.”
“Nowhere to run, Damian,” Ariel said as Fletcher and Agent Talley strolled out from the breezeway, Feb on their heels.
Fletcher sidled to his ex-husband’s side and laced his fingers with Ariel’s. “You want to do the honors, Agent Talley?”
Aidan circled behind the team’s true target and produced a pair of cuffs. “Damian Barbas, you’re under arrest. You have the right?—”
“Fletcher?” Feb interrupted. She’d stopped halfway between the breezeway and the end of the bar where Jax stood. Head tilted, topknot bobbing, a confused expression streaked across her face. “There’s a red spot on your back. How did you get curry there?”
Jax whipped their gaze back to Fletcher.
Not curry.
The dot from a rifle’s laser sight.
Jax dove in Feb’s direction. “Sniper—get down!”
NINE
Feb stood in front of the bar, watching the blue and red lights of the patrol car outside bounce off the freshly painted walls and good-as-new shiplap ceiling. Both still intact, as with all but one of the plate glass windows. A moment later, the patrol car pulled away from the curb, its lights fading as it turned the corner, the street falling back into nighttime darkness but for the streetlights and the stand-up shop light Hawes and Holt had on the shattered window they were boarding up from the outside.
Reality seemed not, everything unreal—the events of this evening, the events of the past week—but Feb was still standing and so was her restaurant, the lights burning bright inside. Though it was noticeably less crowded than it had been a few hours ago, only Hawes and Holt outside, Jax in the kitchen, and Mel and Brax striding back inside from the cold. Feb would also like February to go back to normal San Francisco temps.
“Well, all in all,” Mel said as she and Brax wove through tables, “one broken window and a single bullet hole isn’t too much to fix over the weekend.”
Feb fingered the hole in the front edge of the bar. “I might leave this. Gives the place some character.”
Chuckling, Brax leaned against the barstool beside her. “This place is full of character already.” His gaze took a lap around the interior before landing back on her. “Really, Feb, it’s a great place you’ve got here, and the food is dynamite.”
“You know already Ariel said the same,” Jax added as they emerged from the breezeway.
“How is he?” Feb asked. “And Fletcher?” She’d been hiding in the dry goods pantry like Hawes had told her to when Fletcher had barreled in through the back door—right into Hawes’s chokehold. He’d halted Fletcher’s forward motion in a flurry of quick, efficient maneuvers, until something over the in-ear comms had caused Hawes to loosen his hold on the struggling detective. Fletcher had shot out of his arms like he hadn’t been stopped at all. He’d sprinted up the breezeway to the dining room, Hawes behind him, Feb behind Hawes.
Only it hadn’t been over.
“Fletcher’s fine,” Brax said. “Just some bumps and bruises. The gunshot wound to Ariel’s shoulder was a through and through. Docs are more concerned with the head injury he got from tackling Fletcher to the floor. They’ve medically induced a coma.”
