Will was frustrated. Three days later, they’d stayed at three different motels, and there was no sign of Churkin. Well, she was definitely in the area. Twice they had triangulated her, but neither he, Diana, nor Nick had actually laid eyes on the woman.
One of Stelian’s men had spotted her, and they tried to close in. After the first time Churkin had slipped the noose, Stelian had taken Diana to pick up a spare car. It was registered to a woman he knew, who was willing to say she’d loaned the car to them should anything happen—which was as legal as they would likely get.
When Will asked after the owner, Diana had whispered, “She’s mafia. She’s completely loyal to Nick. He’s good at that.”
He’d noticed. Though Diana hadn’t yet called him brother, she was loyal to him, too. Will only nodded and took a moment to be grateful that Stelian turned out to be Diana’s family. Had he been a rival trying to steal Diana from him, Will didn’t know what he would have done.
This time when they sighted Churkin, they had three cars circling in, but the woman simply disappeared on them again. It seemed she was in town cleaning up the pink-meth house mess. Key players were dying in strange ways. The police were baffled and Nick wasn’t responsible. While they could possibly tip the cops and get Churkin arrested, that plan wasn’t in anyone’s best interest—except maybe Churkin’s.
Will didn’t doubt a good coordinated effort could bring the woman down. But she would at least injure if not outright kill someone in the process. Officers were bound by the law; they couldn’t just shoot the fuck out of her because they thought it was the right thing to do. They would have to wait until she struck first, and her firsts were often lethal. Should the police take her into custody, a good Kurev bought-and-paid-for lawyer would get her right out. Even Stelian said so. His lawyers had squeezed some of the Vasilescu players out of tighter spots than the one Churkin would be in. So the three of them had to rely on themselves.
The good news was there was still more to do to clean up the evidence from the meth houses, so chances were there would be more opportunities to catch her. But it wasn’t the timing or Churkin’s continued success in eluding them that frustrated Will: it was Diana.
The turmoil had invaded her. He should have expected it. Diana had roots, and when she didn’t have them, she grew them. She’d wound Reese into her life—and lost her. Stelian had dug himself a spot in Diana’s world, though Will was convinced she would have done it herself had Stelian not. She decorated their house and tried to cook them meals. Worse, she had believed she was Diana Kincaid.
The age difference between them was greater than the paper trail would show. The gap was larger still. He once lived as an adult man—he’d gone to college right out of high school, dated, fallen in love, married, and had a family. Diana had none of that.
The chasm between them was created of his own poor judgment. He never should have said that he hadn’t married her. He’d been angry, thinking about Sam and Bethy and his own stupidity.
For years now, he stayed cold. He loved Diana, but they were each other’s only option. If he were cosmically pulled from this life, taken back to a time before Sam and Bethy were killed, and given the chance to choose, he would have chosen his life of ignorance. It wasn’t bliss. When he was honest, he acknowledged that he and Sam fought often over his workaholic tendencies and her desire to move into the next social level before he’d fully moved into the one they were on. Toward the end, they’d fought about her passive-aggressive secrecy that led him to come home early, thinking he might catch her in the throes of an affair.
It was only now, when Diana pointed out that they were no longer Diana and Will, and thus no longer married, did he begin to think, to see the need to thaw. Occasionally, she hinted that they could go their separate ways if they wanted, suggesting that it might be safer to split up.
Knowing full well that she was testing out his answers didn’t change the ice that was suddenly painful after he’d finally started to warm up. He didn’t know if she was worried that leaving was what he wanted, or if she was preparing him for her exit. Neither was good.
With the chase in full swing for Churkin—with the danger of the assassin turning things around on them at any given moment—there was no time to sit down and discuss their future together. Besides, he wasn’t sure they even had one.
Nick was leaving the state appointed shrink’s office when the message came through. He kept the phone off while he was in session. He hit the button in front of the therapist, letting it look like a show of respect. In truth he only agreed to it because getting an important message while he was in would start him into a tailspin. It would lead the shrink to stop saying things like “tell me about your relationship with the new trainees at work” to “what bad things might happen if you don’t check this message?”
Nick wasn’t sure he would be able to resist saying, “An assassin might kill the only family I have that just might actually love me, and once she dispatches my only real sister, she’ll come after me.” Yes, that was bound to earn him years of future therapy. Sooner or later he’d tell the shrink something the man would be able to construe as “harm to others” and that would tie Nick up in legal issues and indictments. He kept the phone off. It was the only way to appear relaxed. When he couldn’t pull that off, he blamed it on watching Reese die—he didn’t have to fake the shakes or burning in his eyeballs—and it would buy him more time on leave.
So he headed out to the car, his regular cell phone bleeping as it booted up. From the glove compartment, he took out the burner and checked it. He, Diana, and Will had all bought local disposables and mostly left them on.
There was a message from Phil Megan. Churkin had been spotted in the Buckhead area. No address was needed. One of the Kurev meth locations had been there. After this, there was only one house left; if they didn’t catch Churkin today, they would stake out the other location and be ready.
The message was thirty minutes old. Diana and Will would already be on the way, Diana from Druid Hills—where Churkin had possibly been spotted yesterday—and Will from the College Park area. The pink meth business was shut down, and officers were combing the records, but the gated home still stood. Though it was empty, it was cordoned off with yellow police tape, much to the dismay of the wealthy and upstanding neighbors.
Nick was still probably closer than Will given weekday traffic. Diana would be there first.
Shitshitshit.
She could not be trusted to wait. She wanted Churkin as badly as he did. Although she hadn’t been romantically involved with Reese, Diana had been friends with her since the academy. Nick wasn’t sure she didn’t hate the assassin as much or more than he did. DNA aside, Churkin’s death would leave them both sleeping easier.
Nick faced the additional time lag of having to stop and put on his body armor. Luckily his rental property was nearly on the way and the extra time would pay off in the change of clothes. He could wear a light leather jacket, dark jeans, boots—fighting gear—things he couldn’t wear to his shrink appointment. Lord knows the shrink would have had a field day if he showed up to his session in a bulletproof vest. So he stashed the Kevlar in the trunk, packed alongside a rifle, his handgun, and a damned good excuse for all the firepower.
Traffic was a bitch and he didn’t doubt for one minute that Churkin had picked this time of day knowing that they would come for her and knowing full well there wasn’t much they could do to speed the process. He was simply grateful that he hadn’t yet heard that Diana or Will had laid eyes on the woman. None of the three of them was supposed to go after her alone, and all were supposed to tell the others when they had seen her themselves.
His hand nearly shook as he unlocked his front door and casually waved to the old woman next door out watering her plants in her housedress.
He’d planned what he wanted to wear, knew where all of it was, and moved as fast as he could and still get the Kevlar on right. He’d taken pointers from Will and Diana, cut slits in the base of cargo-style jeans so he could access his ankle holsters easily. The jeans were loose enough to cover a handful of felonies, but not loose enough to look like he was aiming to commit one.
The thin leather of the jacket would protect his skin as well as clothing could. The scar on the side of his head reminded him that he shouldn’t be afraid of bullets, and a sudden searing memory of the “For Sale” sign in front of Reese’s house reminded him that he should be. Ignoring the sudden layer of ice that formed on his skin, he shoved his way back out the door, into the sunshine and behind the wheel of his car. He drove out as fast as he reasonably could.
Still, he wasn’t fast enough.
The phone vibrated quietly in his pocket, and he was pulling it out even as he cranked the wheel to make the turn through the neighborhood. He knew all the back streets here—the residential, the alleyways—and he used them to his advantage. The text message was from Diana.
+ waiting
The plus sign meant she had a positive ID on Churkin with her own eyes. The waiting was what they’d agreed on, and they also agreed they would alert each other on the course of action should the agreed-upon course change. He was glad she was waiting and he hoped she wasn’t lying.
The phone buzzed again before he even set it back down.
this sucks
He chuckled out loud—for the first time since he’d bantered with Reese after pulling on their clothes and coming out of the bedroom. Diana wasn’t lying. Or if she was, she was far better than he’d counted on.
It would be hard for her to sit and watch and to not engage the woman. Taking turn after turn, he hovered just above the speed limit but far below what he could justify to himself. As always, he wondered if he was really faster back here on residential streets with the stop signs and low speeds than he was out in traffic. The internal debate kept him from losing his concentration and imagining what might be happening.
He was relatively certain that Diana had already typed the message that she was forced to engage Churkin. That she was just sitting there with her finger on the send button, waiting for what she’d already written to become true.
Sure enough, he was two miles away—two long, slow miles—when the phone buzzed again.
And there she went.
Shit.
Diana was now on foot, actively involved with Churkin. With no backup. Word had not arrived that Will had made it on the scene. Nick was willing to bet the whole of the Vasilescu holdings that Will was running the same concerned crap through his own head although Will was probably hiding it better than Nick was.
Nick careened through lefts and rights, barely even slowing at a few stop signs he knew remained largely unwatched by officers. He rattled over speed bumps in private lots just to jump from one road to another. The whole time he prayed Diana got the upper hand and Churkin wound up six feet under.
Pulling up behind Diana’s car, he practically jumped out. His sister and Churkin were nowhere in sight. Real fights were like that—they didn’t stay in a tidy ring: they ran, they rolled, they fell out of bounds as though the boundaries were never there.
Stilling his heart rate, he listened and searched.
He spotted the other car first: Will’s blue sedan. So Will had gotten here ahead of him and hadn’t texted. That meant he had seen the fight and didn’t have time; he immediately got involved. Reminding himself that he was a bona fide detective, he went to the blue car and stood by the driver’s side door. He scanned the area, looking for whatever Will must have seen to have bolted without sending the promised text.
He didn’t see anything. But he heard it.
His feet were flying before his brain processed anything. He ran toward the sounds: a grunt, a smack, a yell.
He was wrong. They were in a ring. The privacy fence of the backyard kept them in a limited space; the yellow police caution tape and the foot traffic that had been through here in the last week probably kept the neighbors from calling it in. The police were notably absent, which Nick understood. There were never enough officers on the force to guard a house with no expected danger attached. The FBI had gotten hold of this place, and Nick was certain Churkin had waited until they had abandoned it.
The downfall to that reasoning was that she was killing off the witnesses, disappearing the grunts on the street who made the op work. The people working for him on the street figured that out pretty quickly. If the feds had, too, then they were likely watching. But he was already here. There wasn’t much he could do about it now.
Nick was ready to run in, but like Will, he couldn’t. Diana and Churkin faced each other. Though Will stood with a gun in each hand, he couldn’t get a bead on the assassin because she was keeping track of him. She kept maneuvering herself just beyond Diana. He needed a head shot.
The confidence with which Will held the guns was nearly disconcerting, one in each hand, his finger along the barrel, just like Diana had done when taking out the bank robber. His feet were planted and he did not look like some idiot gangbanger with his gun gripped sideways. Will shot to kill.
Churkin held a crowbar—who knew where she got it—and a tactical knife. She aimed the bar up and the knife down.
Diana held something he didn’t think he’d even seen before: small, long-handled sickles. And she stood deathly still.
He was taking in the scene when he realized, although Will couldn’t take the shot, he could. Nick was lifting his gun, two-fisting his hold as he’d been trained, and almost ready to yell out to Churkin that he was a police officer and she needed to stop. He started to squeeze the trigger when she went into motion.
Nick fought to catch his breath as he watched them.
Churkin was so fast he didn’t think Diana would be able to block the strike from the crowbar as it came down from overhead, but she did. Punching her right fist in the air brought the handle of one of the sickles up, making it cross contact with the steel rod and stopping it cold. Before he could process that move, he saw that Churkin was using the opening to come in with the knife low at Diana’s midsection. The “low” part was what made it not work.
Diana lifted her knee almost to her own chin and swept sideways, blocking the attempted blow and coming across between them with her left hand. Somehow she shifted her grip on the sickle and jammed it under Churkin’s ribs with the back of the metal curve.
A grunt involuntarily flew out of the Kurev woman and she stumbled backward, the weapons still in contact over their heads. Diana turned that sickle, too, catching the wider end of the crowbar and attempting to yank it from Churkin’s grip. Churkin held tight. Nick shifted his stance, still trying to get a shot at Churkin’s head that wouldn’t go wide and kill his sister instead. He wasn’t ready to pull the trigger.
A moment later, he realized it was a good decision as Diana pushed forward into Churkin.
He’d been wrong before. The last time he’d seen the two women fight he’d just taken a Percocet and he’d attributed their actions to his state of being high as a damn kite. Now he knew he hadn’t been nearly as high as he’d thought. They really did fight like that, and he was out of his ever-lovin’ league.
Nick re-aimed his weapon, still trying to track Churkin’s head, only this time Will was coming up behind her. One gun was pointed down at her leg and the other up at her head. He wondered if Will was good enough to shoot out a leg.
In police work, it was never recommended to go for limbs for a variety of reasons. One of which was size of the target and another was that a stationary object and a moving one had almost nothing in common. Will looked as though the leg—a long, skinny one at that—posed no problem for him.
He looked as if he were in a trance as he moved the gun a fraction of an inch . . .
And Churkin whirled on him. Her boot kicked out at him, which Will deftly avoided with a backward jolt, but as soon as the arc passed his torso he was pushing into her space again. Nick could see all of it happening at once: Churkin bringing the crowbar up to smash into Will’s head, and him seeing it coming, getting in too close.
Nick saw his sister coming up behind Churkin, trying to push in from the blind side. But the woman was extending her other arm backward, the tactical knife slashing upward with surprising strength and forcing Diana to block it before she came any closer.
Will brought the gun up to Churkin’s chest—he had to know she was wearing armor like all of them—it was a strike rather than a shot. He pulled the trigger.
The force was too great.
The crowbar, gripped in Churkin’s hand, was around behind Will’s head because he’d stepped in so close; the arc was set to miss him completely.
But the blow of a point-blank bullet into Kevlar changed her whole trajectory and threw her backward with a sudden force that Diana didn’t predict because her view of Will and the gun had been blocked by the other woman. It was all his sister could do to get out of the way of the knife coming right at her. She jumped and just made it.
Nick stayed where he was, watching the whole scene down the sight of his 9mm, waiting for one clear shot of Churkin’s head. He didn’t get it.
As Churkin blew backward, he heard rather than saw the hard metal the woman held make contact with the back of Will’s head.
Will dropped like a stone.