Page 1 of Floodgates

Chapter 1

THE SHOT went off over my head, exploding the horrible framed picture of dogs playing poker. I had always hated it, had complained that it didn’t belong in our upscale office close to Jackson Square, but shot into a million pieces was a fate I had never imagined it having.

I dove under the desk and crouched there, hearing men going from room to room, yelling out that there was no one there to whoever was still in the room with me. I knew they were waiting, hesitating, because they weren’t sure if I had a gun or not. If they’d known where they were, the answer would have been self-explanatory. But if they had checked, they would have never been there to begin with.

They were in the wrong place on an early Wednesday morning in October because someone hadn’t done their homework. They didn’t know at this point that they’d made a mistake. They would, and there would be hell to pay on their end, and there was some consolation in that for me, but it didn’t help at the moment. I was still about to be dead at thirty-three because someone had, again, confused one brother for another.

Weighing my options, I considered going out the window or out the back. I had seconds to decide. The window would be faster, but it had a frame, and since the building was a historical one, chances were good that it was sturdier than it appeared. There was no guarantee it would give under my weight. Plus, I didn’t have much space to build up momentum, and there was the glass to consider. The back door was safer all the way around… if I didn’t get shot. The “if” was kind of funny since, when we moved to our office from the old one close to the Embarcadero, and I had brought up his infamous brother to him, Dimah Mashir had assured me that, honest to God, nothing exciting was ever going to happen. His brother, Kirill, was the one involved in nefarious pursuits; he, Dimah, was the legitimate one. As I ran around the office, a lamp exploding beside me, papers blowing up off my desk, chunks of bookcase whizzing through the air, the whole room blasting apart, my only thought was that if I lived through the attempt on my life, I was going to rip my partner a new one.

Flying into the hall, I hit the wall hard, bounced off, turned, and saw a guy running in with what looked like a semiautomatic pistol in his hands. I wheeled around and took off in the opposite direction, toward the back. The only advantage I had was that I knew where I was going and they didn’t.

I skidded around the corner, went right, then left, through the small staff kitchen/breakroom, into the conference area, out the other side, and down the stairs to the door with the panic bar. What didn’t help was that the door had an alarm—it was a fire exit—so the bells went off the second I hurled it open. At least I had a little head start.

Up and over the chain-link fence, and then I came down on the hood of a car on the other side. I lost my footing and banged hard, bounced, and then slid off into gravel. Normally, I was a bit more coordinated than that, but as I had been in the process of making coffee since the cup I’d had on the way in wasn’t enough, I was not at the top of my game.

Hearing sirens in the distance, I covered my head with my arms as I ran, completely missing the calf-high chain sectioning off the parking lot. I tripped forward down onto the hood of a parked black Mercedes Benz. It was lucky I fell, though, so that the bullet hit my left bicep and not the back of my head. Sometimes it just didn’t feel like luck until the end.

THE COPS came, and, of course, the second I gave my name—

“Tracy Brandt.”

—the question came.

“Brandt?” And then, “Any relation to Inspector Alexander Brandt, now Agent Brandt?”

What was I going to do, lie? “Yes,” I groaned. “He’s my brother.”

They wouldn’t have known—no one knew every Drug Enforcement Agency agent off the top of their head—but Alex had started out as a cop here in San Francisco, so a lot of guys knew of or remembered him. So the officer nodded slowly before turning away and yelling over his shoulder, “Call Brandt over at DEA!”

The whole time I sat in the back of the ambulance getting checked out, answering questions fired at me, I was hoping and praying that my brother would come alone. I wasn’t up to seeing his old partner. The fact that they didn’t work together anymore improved my chances.

“You’re bleeding,” the EMT noted.

Checking my left bicep, I looked where she was pointing. “Bullet must have grazed me.”

“We need to get you to the hospital.”

“Oh yes,” I said happily. “Let’s do that.”

The look she gave me was funny. Apparently most people weren’t excited to go to the hospital. But it was a quick trip, and by the time we were on our way and I thought about whom I could possibly see, as opposed to whom I was hoping to avoid, it was too late.

The day was going from bad to worse.

I WAS sitting on the little bed in the ER, waiting to be bandaged up, having had the lavage already—fancy word for “rinse”—when my phone rang. I answered without checking the caller ID because I was bored.

“Tracy.”

Just the sound of the man’s voice, his accent, told me who it was. “Dimah.”

“Are you hurt?”

“I was grazed by a bullet, nothing serious.”

Silence.

“It’s okay.”

“No.”