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“Dennis?” he called, still not seeing his man anywhere. “You know you’re not supposed to call me directly. I haven’t told the boss about this because I don’t want to get you in…”
Then the man froze. Glued to the ground, nails through his feet. He had sudden recollections of attacking the girl in the old factory, how she’d battled him and his companions out of some superhuman desperation and fought off three much larger men. The girl clearly had the brawn, and the memory of being bested by someone half his size still stung like a pit of nettles.
The incident in the old factory had been an anomaly. No one outsmarted the Diamonds. No one, no matter their strength or status, could escape them.
But as he looked at old man Dennis tied to a chair, he realized he’d been wrong.
“Dennis, what the f….”
From behind, a mass of arms wrapped themselves around him, brought him crashing down onto his back, spine against a solid floor. Two women appeared in his clouded vision, two pistols jammed against his temples.
“Ugh!” he screamed upon impact. The force knocked the wind out of him, sent him dizzy. He reached in a vain attempt to fight back, but the gun barrels against his temples made him reconsider. “What the hell?”
Dennis was the first to offer an explanation. The bound old man, writhing and struggling in his restraints, looked a sorry, pathetic sight. “I’m sorry Nathan. They made me do it!”
The girl had beat them again.
He’d walked right into her trap.
***
Agent Ella Dark wasn’t in this tavern on business. She didn’t have a gun to this man’s head for the good of law enforcement. This wasn’t an active FBI case.
This was personal.
Twenty-five years ago, Ella Dark witnessed something no five-year-old ever should. She found her father dead in his bed. Murdered, despite what the autopsy reports and police files said. For years, she’d agonized over the incident, replaying it over and over like a movie reel and torturing herself for answers. Some people told her it was all in her head, told her she was trying to draw blood from a stone. But the blood she saw as a naïve five-year-old was perfectly real, splattered across the floor of her father’s bedroom, only to find later that the official report had labeled Ken Dark’s death as cardiopulmonary failure.
But Ella had followed the trail, from items in her father’s locker to an abandoned building where she’d been jumped by three mysterious attackers. Now, she and her partner, Mia Ripley, had put a plan into action to capture one of these nameless assailants.
And their plan had worked.
She and Ripley had snuck into the Black Horse Inn after hours, subdued the owner, Dennis, and made him call one of his contacts under the pretense of discussing business. Dennis had been the one to lead Ella to the old factory where she’d been attacked, and only in retrospect did she realize Dennis had been part of this little underground group all along. Dennis hadn’t expected her to connect the dots, but she had.
Now she had one of her attackers at her mercy.
“Nathan, huh?” Ella said as she pulled his cap off and threw it across the room. “You’re one of the little shits that jumped me, aren’t you?”
Nathan showed his palms in surrender. People always showed their true colors with a gun barrel in their face.
“I do what I’m told,” he yelled. “Please, don’t kill me.”
“Your pleas are no good here, buddy. Here’s what’s going to happen. You’re going to tell me who you guys are, how you know me, why you tried to kill me. Then, if you’re lucky, I mightnotput a bullet in your head. You understand?”
Nathan violently agreed. Spit collected at his lips in fright. “Yes. Please don’t shoot.”
Ella hauled the man to his feet, threw him against the corner. The back of his head collided with the wall but Ella didn’t care. When this conversation was over, even she wasn’t sure if she’d let him live or not.
“Who are you?” she screamed.
“I work for the Diamonds,” Nathan said. “The Red Diamonds.”
Ella already knew. The Red Diamonds were at the heart of D.C. and Virginia’s criminal underworld. They’d existed for as long as Ella had been alive, and their name was usually whispered during conversations of missing people and mysterious deaths. They had a wide range of establishments to their names – casinos, loan companies, liquor stores – that helped them launder cash and hide in plain sight.
“Why did you lure me to that building?”
“Him.” Nathan pointed at Dennis. “He gave us the tip-off that you’d be there.”
Ella looked over at Dennis, pathetically bound to his chair. She’d trusted that man, assumed he was nothing more than a lonely old man looking for companionship. She should have known better.
