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“This is ridiculous.” Dante grasped the door handle and twisted it. To both their surprise, it turned. Glancing at André, Dante turned the handle as far as it would go, pushing the door open as he did so.
It opened into a bland—and empty—living room. The laminate floor was covered by an area rug and a sectional couch took up one corner. On a nice day, visitors would look out on the backside of the cliff. In front of the couch was a coffee table with an oversize book of the history of the area and a three-ring binder labeledInformationdisplayed on it. André noted the binder was only a half-inch thick.
Something that sounded like a moan came from the next room. André and Dante glanced at each other and nodded. Splitting up so André could take one side of the archway and Dante the other, they moved closer.
They hadn’t needed to be stealthy. Just inside the kitchen lay a man in a pool of blood. His own, presumably, since he was bleeding from his gut and had his hands pressed against the wound in a futile attempt to stop the flow.
“Mike Jensen,” André stated.
“The fuck? It isJensen,” Dante exclaimed. He dropped to his knees next to the man and pulled his hands away from the bloody mess. What he saw wasn’t pretty and André had to force himself to look at it. The wound looked mortal to him, but he wasn’t a surgeon.
Spinning around, he jerked drawers open until he found a stack of kitchen towels. Kneeling on Jensen’s other side, André stacked the towels together and pressed them against the wound. They quickly turned crimson.
“How do you know Jensen?” Dante asked.
“He was my partner on the Campos apprehension team.”
They stared at each other and then at Jensen, both drawing a similar conclusion. Jensen was the leak.
“Jensen, who shot you? What the fuck happened here?” André had his phone out again and was already on the line, requesting an emergency airlift. He worried the air ambulance would not arrive in time, but he had to try. He glanced out the nearest window; at least it wasn’t raining sideways anymore.
Jensen lifted his lids halfway, and his lips moved. Whatever he said, André couldn’t quite hear him. Or he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He glanced down at Dante, whose head was cocked so he could listen closely.
“Whatis he saying?”
Dante looked back up at André, his eyes wide. “Campos, he saidCampos.”
“Alonso Campos? Alonso Campos shot Jensen?” André almost couldn’t believe what he was hearing.
Jensen moved his head up and down infinitesimally.
“The fuck? What the fuck did you do? Did you bring him here? You were working with that scum?” And yet the man outside had said that two men were staying in the house.
Jensen had known André moved to Cooper Springs; he’d been at the going-away party. André’s new location wasn’t a secret. But Dante arriving with Dani must’ve been a bonus. And if he was on the take—
“Money... need to go,” he whispered, “after the girl. You... next. I... thought I was smart.” His head lolled to the side.
Dante and André stared at each other.
From a distance came the whomp-whomp sound of helicopter blades.
Ten minutes later, they watched as Jensen was loaded into the copter. The pilot gave him the thumbs-up, and they lifted off again. André didn’t believe in a god, but Jensen was going to need a miracle and André wasn’t sure he deserved one.
They left André’s Jeep behind, and he drove the cruiser. Next to him, Dante called the station for the third time. For the third time, he set his cell phone in his lap and stared out the windshield.
The only thing to do was set a land-speed record to the other end of town.
They had allowed themselves to be lured away from the one person they were supposed to be protecting. And now, Carol—who was supposed to be retiring and living her best life, traveling the United States in an RV with her husband of thirty-five years—wasn’t answering their calls.
They were being drawn into a trap and they both knew it. There was nowhere else to go. Alonso Campos planned on killing them all. Of that, André had no doubt.
André jammed the gas pedal all the way to the floor, and the cruiser lurched forward. Damn, he hoped they had one working cruiser after this was over. Because it was going to be over, and they were all going to survive. He couldn’t allow himself to imagine any other outcome. This bullshit was coming to an end. Whoever’d killed Deputy Trent, injured Deputy Cooper, murdered Simone Maddison, and tried to kill Dante—André’d had fucking enough.
He wasn’t planning on taking prisoners.
“This is absolutely Campos’s work,” André said as they careened around the last corner and the station was in view. “This has nothing to do with your brother. I don’t know why Alonso would kill Trent, but we’ll cross that road later. The fact that you and I specifically have been targeted is the key, and Jensen just pretty much confirmed that. I bet Trent was feeding Campos information about me and Jensen was—what the fuck was he thinking?”
“He was thinking he was smarter than Alonso,” Dante said. “Probably thought he could control him. But Alonso is a snake. The only person he listens to is his brother, and Aldo is out of reach.”
