I entered the main dining room.
And finally found myself dwelling in a moment I’d salivated over and dreamed about, craved and feared and loathed and talked about, for nearly a decade.
Him.
I had come around a large wooden pillar, moving low, moving while crouched, in case anyone was anticipating where my cabeza would appear.
“Ten cuidado,” said Diego Correra.
He looked different from what I imagined. I almost didn’t perceive him as him. And you know why? This is going to sound weird. Because he looked exactly like his pictures. I never expected it to be so real. So vivid. Like seeing a celebrity. An evil superstar.
It was a bit surreal and robbed me of my focus for a moment.
“Slow!” he said.
He had a hostage. He had a girl by the throat. I had discovered him before he even had a chance to reload a gun. We were in a standoff. He had a jungle knife and was holding it against the jugular of a tall, skinny adolescent.
“Drop the blade!” I yelled at him.
He didn’t. He repositioned himself so she became his full armor. He knew his angles. My guess is he’s done this before. She literally blocked every square inch of his body I could’ve had a shot at.
I kept my aim at a small sliver of nothingness lurking just outside the edge of his neck, on the off chance the girl squirms even a tiny bit sideways and exposes a lethal target for me.
She didn’t. But she could. She might.
And there we stood.
I doubt I meant as much to him as he did to me, but I could tell this wasn’t an ordinary encounter for Dickbag Correra. He was sizing me up. Finally getting a chance to put the face to the name.
“Be careful how you aim, Amanda, you might hit me.”
I had to think of a way to lull him a bit. Defuse the tension on his end. “Let’s just relax, Diego, I don’t want you dead,” I lied.
“Drop the gun, or I cut her open right in front of you.”
Dear God, please tell me that’s not his own daughter.
“I’ll poke the bottom of her brain,” he said. “Right in front of you. And her coma will be on your conscience. Forever.”
“My orders are to bring you in alive, Diego. You’re no good dead. Let’s just walk out of here. Both of us. No harm.”
He didn’t respond.
“What do you say,” I said to him. “Deal?”
There was a ton of gunfire occurring behind me. My estimation is that most of the families were taking deep cover at this point, which meant my platoon would be trying to overtake the fight. I could hear our HK submachine guns and I could hear enemy AK-47s. Everyone shooting at everyone.
Diego was growing skittish in front of me. He could tell his hombres outside were losing. I could see it on his face. Which meant he was becoming a man of desperation. Which was not ideal. For either of us.
“Drop the knife!” I yelled at him.
“Wait.”
“Drop the knife!”
“Listen!”
And just when I thought I might watch a grown man crumple, he did the unthinkable. He plunged the blade into her throat. Up her chin, into her head, twisted the blade so the hole became a cross. He did it because he knew I would stutter for just that one split-second as my chess opponent committed a move I just didn’t think professionally possible, and then he, Diego, descended down an entrance to a wine cellar, disappearing from the room, just as I let three bursts from my gun smash uselessly against the wall above him.
Dear Lord.
The girl slumped forward.
Rita came running in. “Medic!” she called out, hurrying over to tend to the girl. As Kyra ran right for the wine cellar entrance, driven by killer instincts, knowing exactly what had just happened without even seeing it, firing into the dark entrance, then turning back to check on me.
She called into the radio headset. “Condor Five, I have positive ID on Dickbag, heading into a wine cellar on the southwest corner.”
Kyra saw me frozen there. She knew I was having a moment.
“Colonel, form up?” she asked me.
She was waiting for me to organize a posse, to form up. You don’t want to just ram yourself down into a dark tunnel alone with a psychopath. Going in solo would certainly mean getting shot or walking into explosives.
“Colonel, can we form up?” Kyra asked again, flipping her night vision goggles on. Diego was running as fast as he could down along a tunnel that was guaranteed to lead him wherever we didn’t want him to be.
But I didn’t wait for that posse. I didn’t even call it in. I ran straight down into the darkness. Straight after him.
Now or never.
Chapter 39
There were lots of kids down here. And moms. And maids. And chefs. It was unlit. It was one of those tunnels we hated to raid. Chaotic. Confusing. Dark. Wrong.
I was in kill mode. Bearing a heightened sense of detail. Whenever one of the bandits ahead of me, hidden among the sporadic pockets of cowering civilians, would rise up and point a gun at me, I would end him. One shot. Forehead. Bam. Dead.
Heightened sense.
I kept moving. Kept pursuing. I’d entered Hades itself. Small torches here and there. The pervasive sounds of various women crying in fear set against a backdrop of eerie silence. I could hear my own breathing. Like jogging laps on the track back at Pendleton. Just hearing myself inhale. Just finding the calm in the respiratory rhythm. Exhale. I descended a few stairs to enter a deeper corridor, this one intermittently lit by bare bulbs, creating darkness punctuated by semidarkness punctuated by darkness again. I could see a few women up ahead fleeing from my oncoming presence but no sign of Diego.
Then, bam, another shot from my gun, piercing another one of the thugs who was crouched among the kids.
Heightened.
“Colonel! Slow down!” called Kyra from way behind.
I had vastly outpaced her, violating mission protocol, letting my emotions get to me, opting for a dangerous tactic, but I was in a different consciousness right now. My value system had been inverted. I didn’t care about my own safety. I just needed Diego down. More than I needed my own life, I needed his. I needed to possess it.
I emerged into a room, a sort of cave or antechamber, with three women huddled on the floor off to the side in an anonymous clump. They had their faces buried, their long dresses covering their bodies and their limbs.
He had to come through here. He had to. But I couldn’t see him in the next stretch of passage. And it was a long stretch.
There’s no way he sprinted that fast. That would be two hundred meters in under ten seconds. That’s faster than the Olympics. And while I was standing there, overanalyzing, overcalculating, overthinking, as Amanda always does, it happened.
I heard a pop.
The front of my chest poofed with red air. Red spray. Like I’d been hit from behind by a sledgehammer.
I had been shot. From the rear.
By one of those women.
By someone who was dressed as a woman.
By Diego. In a dress.
I could hear him reload. Shotgun blast. The only reason I was still standing was because he fired too close behind me, missing my heart but hitting my shoulder instead. Shotgun shells hurt. I could now answer that question whenever someone asked me at parties. Hey, does that shit hurt? Yes, it goddamn does. While he reloaded, while this eternal split-second continued to elapse, I spun around and one-handedly rifle-butted him in the jaw with my HK. His head snapped back, then he lurched forward and bear-hugged me in a full tackle. The women shrieked. They must have been his wives or sisters. Or both. We started to wrestle. Clawing at each other. It wasn’t the cinematic fistfight you’d pay twenty bucks to watch at the IMAX. No. It was two people scraping their talons at each other’s everything, trying to get any kind of physiological advantage. Him dead-tired from sprinting, me dead-tired from being alive the past decade.
And that’s when the first ray of dawn smil
ed upon my cloudy life.
I cracked his wrist bone backward making him yelp in pain, then bent his elbow backward, hyperextending it. Then broke it. Broke his arm.
And broke him.
He was done.
Rendered inept. Fight over. He was thoroughly at my mercy, as I stood there maintaining my superior leverage on his fractured elbow, leaving him now gasping on his knees.
He was waiting for me to fire my pistol at him. I had a sidearm. Available. But I hadn’t even taken it out of my holster.
I had him.
When he saw this, saw what was not happening, he did something I didn’t expect. He started laughing. And after a half minute of this, this genuine amusement, this borderline inexplicable joy, I had to know.
“What’s so funny?” I asked.
“Hahaha…” he petered out, to collect himself, to say the following. “I kill your friends, I kill your husband, I kill your ugly daughter, her ugly sister…I do all that…and you don’t have the balls to do anything back.”
“I’m above you,” I said to him. “I’m above your world. I’m putting you in jail.”
“I own the damn jail, you lonely cunt!” He spat blood on the floor. Proudly. “I’m already free. While you stand there! Frozen like a statue. Like a statue commemorating my power. I’m already free. That’s how untouchable I am! Because I am to your people the most precious thing your country could ever want. I am stability, you gaping cow.” He stood up, gathering Socratic steam. “Your bosses…and your bosses’ bosses…will never let me die. In fact…I’m gonna tell them that they should take you by the hair and—”
BAM!
He dropped to the floor. Dead.
Shot by Kyra.
Smoking gun in her hand. She didn’t move for a moment. She stood there catching her breath. Then she leaned over to whisper to the bloody pulp of his skull: “Amanda Collins is a lawful person…but I’m not.”
And there we stood. She and I. With Diego on the floor.
We got him.
Each in our own way.
We got him.
Epilogue
That was eleven months ago. That was also one pregnancy ago. Rita, the baby machine, got busy with Mr. Rita several weeks after that mission, and cranked out another baby girl. Gorgeous enough to earn her the name Kyra Jane. She was born right in their house because Rita’s womb was either too efficient or too lazy to wait for the hospital ride.
Kyra, the original version, started dating one of the firefighters from church. Theoretically it was a courtship, but they were going on those ambiguous non-date dates where nobody in the equation is sure if they’re actually on a date or not. And that fog has lasted six weeks now. Welcome to modern social combat. I don’t miss it.
Me, I was sitting on the porch, clutching two wrenches while arguing with a carburetor. And that’s when a pair of government feet creaked onto my wooden front steps.
There stood Officer Teeth himself.
Warren Wright.
To be honest, I wasn’t even mad. The closure on Diego’s case was handled in such a deft way that my name was kept out of every single news article and military document. That was my deepest wish. Anonymity. And I know Wright’s department, deep within the bowels of his behemoth administration, must have made that happen.
“Colonel,” he said. His greeting.
“Agent Wright,” I said back. Trying to sound cool.
He stood there a moment, probably intending to conjure up small talk to disguise his real purpose, whatever that would be, and looking shy about it. For the first time ever. Shy. “You managed to locate the number five guy on the North American Most Wanted list. And you managed to take him down in the middle of his own army. Never got a chance to say thanks.”
“And?”
“And…it was impressive. You must’ve had help.”
Oh, so that’s it. “Look, slick, if you’re here to try to…”
“No. I’m not here to ask that question.”
I heard a familiar rasp in his voice. A twang. Something I couldn’t place. He was staring at me. His smirk etched on his face with God’s permanent marker. Then I started thinking a thought that just couldn’t possibly be true, a thought that occurred to me once a long time ago but got instantly dismissed.
“Then what are you here for?” I asked.
“Well, it’s certainly not to get you to betray your source. That would be lame.” He sighed. “Fuck my fucked-up life.”
I knew it!
“I’m here to buy you a beer,” he said.
“You’re the Fat Man,” I quietly exclaimed, scrutinizing his face, his body, his tailored suit. Refusing to believe it. “No…there’s…if you…no…”
And so he came clean. “Third time you and I ever talked on the phone I was trying to think of a decent code name for myself and literally had no idea what to tell you. So…since I had just eaten two pints of Ben & Jerry’s…and felt bloated…I figured…” he presented himself, arms outstretched. “Fat Man.” He patted his gut for reference, his six-pack. Proud of his irony. “I know it’s a bit ironic—”
“No, I can see it.”
He stopped. Almost hurt for a second, then saw my deadpan face and infinite sarcasm and started laughing. Then he shifted gears. “Sorry about Mexico City. I had to cooperate with General Claire ‘The Hair’ Dolan, otherwise she’d sniff me out.”
We paused for a moment. We worked well together. It’s a shame I had to say no to what I already knew he wanted.
“I’m here to offer you a job,” he said.
“I’m retired,” I replied.
As usual, Warren Wright wasn’t really listening to me. He continued talking as if I hadn’t just said whatever I just said. “We have a situation,” he informed me. “In Europe. We can’t take care of it with proper channels.” He cleared his throat. “You’re the improper one. You’re the one we need.”
“You know I’m gonna tell you I’m out. You know I’m gonna tell you my whole career has been a hunt for one man and now that this one man is done, I’m done.”
He smirked. Wider.
“Which you’re not even hearing,” I said, realizing it. I put the carburetor down. I stood up. “Fine. One beer.”
“So you’re in?”
“No. But I’ll let you have the privilege of arguing with me.”
“Good,” he said, opening the passenger door to his truck for me. He met my eyes and smiled. “I’ve earned it.”
Little
Black
Dress
By James Patterson
with Emily Raymond
Prologue
I spotted it on the Bergdorf sale rack: see-through black chiffon layered over a simple black sheath, cut to skim lightly over the hips and fall just above the knee. Paired with a thin gold belt, there was something Grecian, even goddessy, about it.
It was somehow subtle yet spectacular. Not a dress, but a Dress.
When I tried it on, I was no longer Jane Avery, age thirty-five, overworked editor at Manhattan’s Metropolitan magazine and recent divorcée. I was Jane Avery, age none of your business, a card-carrying member of the media elite, a woman who was single and proud of it.
Even at 40 percent off, the Dress was a minor fortune. I decided to buy it anyway.
And that purchase changed everything.
Chapter 1
In the opulent limestone lobby of the Four Seasons New York, I handed over my Amex. “A city-view king, please.” No tremor in my voice at all. Nothing to betray the pounding of my heart, the adrenaline flooding my veins.
Am I really about to do this?
Maybe I should have had another glass of rosé.
The desk clerk tapped quickly on her keyboard. “We have a room on the fortieth floor,” she said. “Where are you two visiting from?”
I shot a glance over my shoulder. Honestly? About twenty-five blocks from here. My knees were turning into Jell-O.
Behind me, Michael Bishop, a thumb hooke
d in the belt loop of his jeans, flashed his gorgeous smile—first at me, then at the clerk. “Ohio, miss,” he said, giving his muscled shoulders an aw-shucks shrug. His eyes were green as jade. “Mighty big city you got here, darlin’,” he said, a drawl slipping into his voice.
“Oh—Ohio,” the clerk repeated, like it was the most beautiful word she’d ever heard. She looked like she was unbuttoning his shirt with her eyes as she handed me the room key.
Very unprofessional, if you ask me.
But then again, how professional was it to check into a hotel with one of Metropolitan’s freelance writers—who, by the way, had obviously never even been to Ohio?
If he had, he’d have known they don’t talk like cowboys there.
Michael Bishop lived on the Lower East Side of Manhattan; I lived on the Upper West Side. We’d known each other since our first years in the magazine business. Today we’d met for lunch, to go over a story he was writing for Metropolitan. The café, an elegant little French place with fantastic jambon beurre sandwiches, was close to my office.
It was also close to the Four Seasons.
We’d laughed, we’d had a glass of rosé—and now, suddenly, we were here.
Am I really about to do this?
“If you want tickets to a Broadway show or reservations at Rao’s, the concierge can assist you,” the clerk offered. By now she’d taken off Michael’s shirt and was licking his chest.
“Actually,” I said, “we have other plans.” I grabbed Michael’s hand and pulled him into the elevator before I lost my nerve.
We stood in front of our reflections in the gold-mirrored doors. “Really?” I said to mirror-Michael, who was as gorgeous as the real Michael but yellower. “Ohio?”
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