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8
The pip-sized Latinashifted into some kind of flow state that Clarissa couldn’t begin to follow but she knew would be the envy of any Special Ops grunt.
Taz Cortez shed her NTSB site investigation pack. By the time the hard hat clipped on the side hit the pavement, she’d bodychecked Jeremy, sending him stumbling backward over a firehose thick with water pressure. He landed heavily on his own huge site investigation pack. If Clarissa had wanted to shoothim,he now presented a much smaller target lying flat on the ground.
Using her deflected momentum and the distraction of the falling packs and Jeremy, Taz leapt behind Clarissa. She shook a fighting knife out of her wrist holster and into her palm.
The sharp snick as she flicked the blade release and locked it in place was in some ways the loudest sound of the whole screwed-up evening. It wasn’t remote, like the jet flying overhead, or a piece of the strange silence that was the disaster.
It was close, inches from her ear—and very personal.
It became impossibly more personal half a heartbeat later.
Still squatting precariously in her Manolo Blahnik suede ankle boots, she didn’t dare move. Taz had fisted one hand in Clarissa’s long blonde hair. With the other, she pressed the blade against Clarissa’s throat enough that she could feel how sharp the edge was.
This wasn’t Taz’s namesake nonlethal Taser.
A trickle of sweat slid down her throat; at least she hoped it was sweat and not blood.
“Drop it!”
Too paralyzed to move, Clarissa hesitated. She kept forgetting quite how fast Taz was with a knife.
Taz twisted her fist more tightly in Clarissa’s hair.
“Fuck! Ow, already! Okay! Okay!” she set the sidearm slowly onto the pavement.
“Knock it toward Jeremy.”
She did.
Jeremy, still on his butt, picked it up like a poisonous snake. He didn’t appear to know how to hold it properly. At least he was no threat.
“Are you going to play nice?” Taz eased the knife a millimeter off her neck, but it was a crucial millimeter. Now Clarissa dared to breath.
“Bitch!”
“That’s Colonel Bitch to you. I’ve been reinstated.” Colonel Taz Bitch Cortez sounded completely cheerful.
“No wonder this country is so screwed up.”
“Times ten to you, Director Reese. Now what are you doing here, stripping the dead at the site of a plane crash? It’s not like you to get your hands dirty.” With a repetition of that awful, slick-steel sound, Taz’s knife was gone and once more out of sight. She stepped over to take the gun from Jeremy. The Sig Sauer P226 looked like a cannon in her small hands, and there was no question that she knew what to do with it.
First Clarissa checked her throat. Sweat, not blood.
“My driver.” She fished the keys out of his pocket and wiggled them at Taz as she stood. She looked down at Taz. With the heels of her suede boots, Clarissa towered more than a foot over Taz, but that did little to improve her feeling of security.
Taz cleared the magazine and chamber, then stuffed the P226 into her vest pocket. “I’ll make sure it is properly returned to the CIA at a time when I don’t have to worry about you shooting me in the back with it.”
“Don’t tempt me.”
Jeremy had clambered to his feet, but was staring at the fire.
“Not much to investigate after that inferno, young Jeremy. There was an explosion shortly after it hit, so I doubt if there was much to find before the collapse either.”
“There’s always something.” He pulled a small notebook out of his multi-pocketed vest exactly the way Miranda Chase always did. She could see that he was noting the time and place. Then he squinted up past all of the lights toward the clear sky gone darkest blue and made another note.
But Taz was watching her. “You saw it.”
