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“Why am I here?” the Jackal said out loud.
He didn’t answer himself. He wasn’t sure what he was seeking, and why did it matter anyway—
Stopping short, he wheeled around. And then a deep voice said through the darkness: “Don’t shoot.”
Rio opened the door to her dim apartment and hit the remote to shut off the security system at the same time. Stepping through, she let things close on their own and went down a short hallway, leaving the main light off. It wasn’t like the place was big or had a confusing layout: One bedroom, one bathroom, one closet-sized kitchen. With gray wall-to-wall carpeting and platinum-painted walls, she felt like she was living inside an old-fashioned aluminum tin, the kind your grandmother would have kept sugar or flour in on her Formica countertop.
It did the roof-over-her-head job well enough.
As she put her keys and her purse down on the two-top dining table, she realized she’d forgotten to remove her shoes. She always took them off on the mat just inside the door. It was how she changed identities.
Staring down at her black boots, she thought of where they’d gone since they’d been put on at about—what, eight? Eight-thirty? Naturally, as she considered the night’s events, an image of the supplier barged into her mind and refused to obey an eviction notice: It was from just after she’d been hit by the car, after the world had gone spin-cycle on her and she’d braced herself for a bad impact on the asphalt.
That drug dealer’s body had been her landing pad.
She could still picture the low-lidded speculation on his face as she’d looked over her shoulder to discover she was sitting on his hips . . . in a way that would have been sexual under any other circumstances, even though they were strangers.
Funny how bullets, fireballs, and dead bodies had a way of killing the mood.
Shaking her head, she measured the distance to her Welcome mat—and decided to keep going to her bedroom. The whole shedding her shoes routine wasn’t working anymore, anyway. Lately, she was on the streets even when she was here, no matter what the hell she had on her feet.
In the glow from the security lights in the parking lot, the messy sheets on her queen-sized bed were like frosting on a cake that had been slapped on by a baker who didn’t give a crap about their job. Likewise, the comforter was half on the floor from when she’d bolted out of bed at dinnertime. Of course she’d overslept. That was what happened when you didn’t crash until one in the afternoon after having gotten home from work at just before noon.
You’d think being undercover would get you out of paperwork, given how shhhhhh everything was. It didn’t. She had to file reports after every shift, listing with detail who she met, what the tenor and content of the conversations were like, and cross-referencing the intel with other ongoing investigations. But whatever. Part of the job.
Sitting down on the mattress, she let the backpack she’d double-strapped fall to the floor, and as it landed, she heard a chorus of little clapping sounds from inside the folds, as if there were a miniature audience in there and they were approving of her finally being safe behind a locked door.
It was the Motrin. Which she had yet to take. For a leg that she still didn’t know was broken or not.
Rio hadn’t made it into the ER. In the end, she’d stopped just in front of the facility’s revolving glass doors. Staring through them, into the bright light of the registration and waiting area, she’d just kept thinking about her conversation with Captain Carmichael.
She refused to give up. There had to be a way to stay on the case. A loophole. Some sort of persuasion she could throw out.
And so no, she wasn’t going to give her boss a medical reason to ground her. Besides, her leg was feeling better.
Okay, fine, it was numb. So she wasn’t exactly sure what it felt like.
Dropping her head into her hands, she cursed as she rubbed her eyes. When she re-straightened, she was staring at herself in the mirrored doors of the closet.
If the panels were slid back, they’d reveal her closet—and talk about coming up with a whole lot of nothing-much. All she had hanging in there was her funeral dress, her job-interview suit, and a bunch of parkas, fleeces, and other winter wear too bulky to hang on the hooks just inside the main door to the apartment.
Not really much of a wardrobe. Then again, she was one of those people who were just grateful to get the naughty bits covered, to hell with fashion.
“Time for a shower,” she told her reflection as she took off her leather jacket, her fleece, and her Kevlar vest.
