“Stay down,” Jason demanded to the woman beneath him on the snow.
Yvette nodded. Her eyes were wide, but he detected more common sense than fear in them. She’d been trained for hostile situations.
He scrambled around to the end of the truck bed and crouched low, pulling out his gun. He swept a look around the rear taillight. No movement in the parking lot. Aiming out into the parking lot, he didn’t spy the shooter.
Jason’s exhale fogged before his face.
The growl of a snowmobile engine firing up alerted him. He sighted a flash of silver that would place the machine in the alleyway behind the antique shop two buildings down.
“I’m going after him!” he called to Yvette. “Get inside the station!” His protective instincts forced him back to the front of the truck where she now crouched. “You got this, yes?”
She nodded. “Go!”
“Tell Marjorie to call Alex here.”
His snowmobile was parked ten feet from the back door. Firing it up, he navigated forward out of the parking lot and to the alleyway. He waited until he heard the other snowmobile reach the intersection of Main Street and the corner of the block. The driver was dressed all in black. No cap or earmuffs, and he didn’t wear gloves.
“Not a resident,” Jason confirmed.
Confident that whoever drove the snowmobile was the one who had shot at Yvette, he gunned the throttle and his sled soared forward just as the other snowmobile took off through the intersection.
Gun tucked in the holster at his hip, he would not fire on the shooter until he could confirm he was indeed the suspect. Worst-case scenario would see him chasing a kid out for a joyride. But his gut told him this was his man.
Picking up speed as he passed through the intersection, Jason saw the suspect turn and spy him. Jason performed a circling motion with his hand, signaling the man to pull over. A press of a button on the handlebar turned on the police flasher lights.
That resulted in the suspect kicking it into overdrive.
Jason had expected as much. He was a hundred yards behind but intended to close the distance before they got too far out of the city. On the other hand, he was an experienced snowmobiler, and even if the suspect had some skill handling a sled, he wasn’t dressed for a ten-degree day or a race through the frigid air and newly drifted snowpack.
The road heading north out of town had been plowed by Rusty Nelson early this morning. Jason’s machine soared along the hard-packed snow that had formed on the tarmac. Perfect track for racing snowmobiles. In these conditions, he could handle this six-hundred-pound machine like a dream.
He thought momentarily of how close Yvette had come to taking a bullet. Why had she been standing outside? He’d seen her camera on the ground. Taking photos? He should have been more clear about her staying inside.
Was the shooter a replacement for the previous hit man? Dirty business, that. But all was fair in spies and deception. If that was what was going on.
Jason had been capable of such dirty dealings. Once, he’d been sent in to replace an inept field asset, but termination had not been a requirement. And yet the same could have happened to him after he’d missed the kill shot. He’d been taken in so easily by the female agent. Had truly believed she was on his side. Damn it!
He gripped the handlebars and ripped the throttle, cutting the distance between himself and the shooter.
Had Interpol issued an official agent termination order for Yvette? Because she had read sensitive data? It was possible yet highly unlikely. But if so, her boss was either trying to save her neck or cut her throat.
The suspect veered from the main road and took off across the ditch. Snow sprayed in the sky, glittering against the too-bright sun that proved deceptive in that it wasn’t able to warm this frozen tundra.
They headed northeast. That direction would not allow an easy escape.
The falls, the town’s namesake, sat half a mile ahead. Frozen this time of year. Always fun to take the cat out on the slick riverbed, but if a person didn’t know the area, the falls could prove dangerous. He and Alex put up orange warning flags and stretched a bright orange safety fence before the falls, but it seemed every few years some unfortunate soul crashed his snowmobile or took a flight over the falls, which dropped twenty feet to boulders below.
* * *
AFTER JASON LEFT, Amelie squatted near the tire for a while. Back flat against the front quarter panel and palms against her forehead. That had been a close call.
She should have never been out here to give the shooter such opportunity. Taking pictures, of all things.
The glint of something silver caught her eye. She crawled toward the pushed-up snow that demarcated the edge of the parking lot in front of the truck. Something was wedged into the snow.
She started to touch it, then got smart. Pulling her sweater sleeve down over her fingers, she used that as protection to grip the object and pulled it out.
This was what had been fired at her. A dart with a red tip.
“Not cool,” she muttered, because the implications were creepier than if it had been a bullet.
Springing up, yet staying bent and low, she crept over to the building, plucking up her camera along the way, and then around to the front door. She quickly went inside and rushed to Jason’s office to close the door. Marjorie must still be downstairs tidying up the cells.
She pulled open Jason’s desk drawers and in the second one spied some plastic evidence bags. Dropping the dart into the bag, she then sealed it.
Patting her hip for her phone, she cursed the fact she’d given it to Jason. She looked around the desk for a weapon, but there was only a locked gun case with one rifle in it.
There was another hit man?
Of course, they wouldn’t let this rest without eliminating the target. Whatever this was. And whoever they were.
As she settled into Jason’s chair, fingers gripping the arms tightly, Amelie asked herself plainly if Jacques Patron were friend or foe.
Her father had valued his friendship with Patron. And her mother—well, she didn’t remember her talking about the man. Perhaps she’d even avoided him. Amelie recalled a few times when her mother had bowed out of joining her father over drinks with Patron at a local taproom.
Had Patron gotten into dirty dealings? Was he protecting himself?
And was he dead or alive?