The words “get down” had barely left her mouth before the sting of a bullet sliced across the outside of her hip, left side. Adrian hit the ground on his back because she’d tackled him. Her mother would be so proud of the life choices that led her here.
Like the gentleman he was, Adrian wrapped his arms around her and shifted her to the side between him and the car. So his body shielded her from bullets. Or, more anyway.
Megan bit back some choice words and sat up. She bent her legs and pulled out the keys to her car. Definitely time to go. She clicked the locks and reached above her head for the handle of the passenger door.
Adrian lifted up and fired twice over the hood of the car. Then he ducked back down, a frown on his face.
She said, “Watch out,” and cracked the door open. Now she just had to get around it so she could climb in. Then, of course, she’d have to start it and drive away without getting shot through the window. First things first.
“Meg—”
She didn’t even let him finish her name. She crab crawled around the door and started to climb in. Ouch.
“You’re running away?”
She gritted her teeth. “Already been shot. Don’t want to get hit again and end up a chalk outline on the street.”
“You’ve—” He blew out a breath. “Megan, keep your head down.” Then she could swear she heard him pass her and open the back door. But he wouldn’t. He couldn’t have. Because that would mean he intended to stick with her, and that was the last thing she needed right now.
Megan glanced between the seats.
Yep, he was snaking into the backseat.
The glass of the rear door on the driver’s side shattered. She screamed without realizing it, or even being able to control it. That happened sometimes. These days, at least. Adrian lifted up and shot through the now open window.
His FBI badge, tucked on his belt, caught light from somewhere and flashed.
“Get out of my car.”
“You wanna go, then drive!” he yelled back. “He’s used up a whole lot of shots. If he isn’t out by now, he will be soon, but the cops will have heard it.”
He shifted and that badge flashed again. Tears blurred her vision. Megan bit back what she wanted to say and heard police sirens. She had no intention of answering any questions from local law enforcement about what she was doing here. Or who she was.
Her life was way too complicated for that.
She twisted the key and heard the car engine turn over. Got herself as much in the seat as she could and glanced up for a second. She stuck the car in drive and hit the gas. Twisted the wheel. Megan waited until they were at the first corner before she sat up, stepped on the brake and turned the corner.
They were hardly home free. She’d have to keep watch on her mirrors for a tail, but they were at least out of immediate danger.
She glanced in her rearview but couldn’t see Adrian’s face. “I don’t suppose you want to get on the horn with someone in the FBI and call off those cops?”
She heard him shift in his seat. “Are they behind us?”
“No, but they’ll be wanting to know what that was.” She waited for a second. When he said nothing, she said, “Well?”
“No.”
Just one—infuriating—word. Megan wanted to roll her eyes, but she was way beyond being annoyed. “I never asked you to follow me there.”
Silence.
“I got away fine. There was nothing in the house, anyway. And those guys were low level. Zimmerman must have sent them back to tie-up loose ends.”
“Which, by definition,” he said, “means there was something to find. Otherwise it wouldn’t have needed to be destroyed.”
At this point Megan wasn’t even sure Zimmerman was more than a man with a plan and the means to cause major destruction. She wanted to pray for the wisdom to know if he was also the blackmailer who had been causing so many people serious hurt. But the words just wouldn’t come out.
If she got honest with God, asking for what she needed, her failings would only be all the more obvious. She needed forgiveness before she could bring to Him her list of things she needed. There had been a wall between her and her Father in heaven since…
She couldn’t think of that.
Not when it put a lump in her throat she had to swallow and cough to clear.
“You okay?”
“No,” she fired back. “I got shot.”
“Pull over now,” he yelled at her.
“No.”
Adrian cried out in frustration. It was almost satisfying. Almost.
She turned a corner, biting her lip at the pain in her hip. It was a graze. That was all. No biggie. But it stung, and she just wasn’t in the mood for verbal sparring she wouldn’t win. She didn’t fight when she couldn’t bring her A-game. That wasn’t how she did things.
“Megan.” He sounded supremely frustrated.
When he didn’t say anything else, she said, “It’s a graze on my hip. It needs seeing to, but its fine.”
“I don’t believe you.” His voice almost sounded sad. “And I don’t trust you. I’m trying figure this out, so we can work together to find Zimmerman. Why are you so convinced that you need to do this by yourself?”
He’d been through FBI training, so he could read people. That was how he knew. But Megan didn’t like it. She wanted to be able to hide her feelings, her fears. Apparently she was doing a poor job of it.
“I don’t do partners.”
“So you’ve said.”
She gritted her teeth. “Maybe…” She had to swallow. “Maybe we could…share information, or something. Check in. Tell each other what we learn.”
After all, why else would she have offered him her number?
He said nothing.
Megan kept talking just to fill the silence, even though she knew that was exactly what she was doing. “I might not want to be partners, and that’s my business. I have my reasons, and I’m not about to explain them. But it doesn’t mean we can’t come to some kind of agreement.”
She barely knew Adrian. She wasn’t about to explain all her hang-ups to him. Especially not when he’d nearly arrested Alexis a short time ago. One look at Megan’s new friend—her teammate Bradley’s new wife—and anyone could see she’d never have been involved in a kidnapping. Especially when the victim was Bradley’s own sister, and her best friend.
Which brought her thoughts back to the blackmailer.
The man behind all of this had torn lives apart. He’d hurt people. Killed two of the Double Down agents. That had rippled through the entire crew at Double Down. The latest people to be put under the spotlight were Mint and Emma, still laying low so the blackmailer couldn’t get to Emma and try to leverage her into doing something else for him.
Daniel Zimmerman was going down. If it took her cooperating with Adrian Walker, FBI special agent, then fine. She could suck it up and do it. Otherwise lives were at stake, and she was actually risking innocents just to keep her independence.
No way.
“So what do you say, Walker? Do we have an agreement?”
He hadn’t meant to snoop. She was hurt, so he’d been checking the duffel on the back seat for some kind of first aid kit or bandage, or something.
Adrian turned the badge over in his hand. An FBI badge.
Megan was an agent?
“Walker?”
“Yeah.” It came out sounding like he was miles away. All he could do was stare at the badge in his hand. Leather folder, ID photo. Megan Perkins, Special Agent.
She sighed.
His brain spun. There were a few scenarios he could see being in play here. She was retired, but kept the badge. Unlikely. She was a current agent on assignment here. Maybe undercover with Double Down, investigating them for some reason. Could be they were up to something and she’d been tasked with figuring out how deep it went before the bureau swept in and arrested them all. But then why put her on the search for Zimmerman? That was a major conflict of interest. Not to mention she couldn’t very well investigate Double Down if she was out looking for a crooked FBI agent.
Which left the possibility that she was the crooked agent. Maybe she was even working for the blackmailer…or she was the blackmailer.
Adrian blew out a breath.
“You okay back there?”
“Yeah,” he said, aware he sounded like a dim whit. “Fine.”
Was she dirty? There had to be a reason she’d been the one out looking for Zimmerman by herself. The one who wanted to walk away instead of facing those two men. The one who’d let a man go, after Adrian had faced them down and killed one. Was there a sinister reason why Megan had just wanted to leave and allow any evidence in the house to be destroyed?
Adrian had two choices now. Get out of the car and leave her, regroup, get backup and come back to sweep her up—meaning he’d be looking for not one, but two rogue FBI agents. And on the off chance she hadn’t been playing him this whole time, he’d find out the truth of her situation from people he could trust.
The second option was that he could stick with her. Play this game she insisted on leading them through. See if she made contact with either Zimmerman or the blackmailer—or Zimmerman, the blackmailer.
Either way he had not only one FBI agent to find but another one to deal with as well.
Adrian slipped his phone from the inside pocket of his suit jacket and took a photo of the badge. Then he emailed it to his boss, Special Agent in Charge Hank Cromwell, who had assigned him to report back on what Double Down knew about the blackmailer.
They’d been chasing the blackmailer for months. And while they weren’t all that convinced the blackmailer was an FBI agent from Baltimore based on evidence they had gathered so far, it was possible. If Daniel Zimmerman wasn’t their suspect, then Adrian would put money on him knowing who it was.
Either way, when they found him they would also find the blackmailer.
“I’m gonna find a pharmacy and make a pit stop. I need supplies.” He could hear the pain in her voice.
“Is it bad?”
“Well, I’m making a mess on the seat, that’s for sure. It’ll be a pain to get the blood out of the upholstery.”
Adrian frowned. “I’ll look up a pharmacy on my phone.”
“I thought that’s what you were doing a second ago.”
The frown didn’t let up. “I’ll find the closest one so you can get what you need.”
She didn’t say anything. And he wasn’t going to explain anything. They both had their secrets. They weren’t friends, or partners. She herself had said she didn’t “do partners”—whatever that meant. Maybe she’d been burned before. FBI agents worked with other agents, but they didn’t have assigned partners. So what had happened to her?
Megan was a mystery he didn’t have time to solve right now. Not when his job was to find Zimmerman.
“Take the next left,” he said. “About a mile up there’s a 24-hour store.”
“Okay.”
He directed her to the pharmacy and went inside himself. When he came out he half expected her to be gone. He’d probably have thought about ditching her in the same circumstances. The job always came before other people’s feelings—especially when those people were professionals. Perfectly capable of taking care of themselves.
Megan was a strong woman. In the past couple of weeks he’d seen her get hurt in a gunfight and still carry on. That same day two of her Double Down teammates had been killed when their RV exploded—another incident related to this that his boss was looking into.
The blackmailer had retasked a UAV on American soil and used it to attempt to cripple Double Down.
Adrian felt for them. He’d seen the pain in Megan’s eyes at the funerals for the two men and in the days since. He’d even been at the meeting where they’d ID’d Zimmerman. His emotions had been entirely too tied up in this whole thing and that had to stop. He needed to get his heart out of this, even though he just felt for them like anyone would. It wasn’t about the situation. Or Megan.
He needed to get back to being a professional.
“Scoot over, and I’ll drive,” he said, tossing the bag on the back seat. There wasn’t anything he could do about the stain on the driver’s seat, so he ignored it as he drove them to the hotel where he’d booked himself in for the night. The kind of room with two queen beds. Would she mind sharing? It would be much easier to keep an eye on her when he could literally keep an eye on her. Not in a creepy way. He was capable of being a professional, thank you. Just because Megan was a beautiful woman didn’t mean he couldn’t control his basic instincts. Be a gentleman. If she agreed.
“A hotel?”
He nodded.
“I hadn’t gotten around to booking a room.” She studied it like it wasn’t the same as every other chain hotel in America. “I’d probably have slept in my car, to be honest.”
“This way you can clean up in an actual bathroom. Added bonus, you can sleep in a real bed.”
She eyed him, but he got out of the car. She had a gun. He figured if he did lose his mind and actually try something, she’d just shoot him anyway.
When she got out, she said, “Can you grab my duffel from the back?”
Adrian did so. They used the side entrance, and he walked her up to his room. He set the duffel on the floor in the bathroom and she went in, locking the door behind her. He took the time to change into jeans and a T-shirt, figuring it would be at least a minute before she was done so he was safe.
His phone screen illuminated. He looked at the screen, which flashed to show the email from his boss. A reply to the report Adrian had sent in.
Bring her in.
Adrian frowned, then flipped his phone face down on the table. From behind the bathroom door, there was a loud thud. “Megan?”
He strode over and knocked. “Megan, you okay?”