Authors: Leslie A. Kelly
Tags: #Fiction, #Romance, #Thrillers, #General, #Contemporary, #Suspense, #Thriller
Pitch Black (43 page)
A bunch of them blocked the damn road.
On any day there would be discontent. On this particularly sweltering July one, tempers were flaring. Hers not the least of them.
In the time it had taken to crawl two blocks in the unmarked sedan, she’d seen one woman faint, two fights break out, and a group of children sprawl on the sidewalk in exhaustion. Flag-draped rednecks glared at Japanese tourists—the slanty-eyed foreigners just as unwelcome as the burqa-wearing ones in their minds. Everyone sweated and cursed and bitched and shouted.
But they didn’t leave. Morbid curiosity always ensured they wouldn’t leave once they’d made it this far.
She could have roared in on full emergency response, dispersing the crowd spilling into the street with her siren and her horn. She didn’t. Because if the people heard about the murder, they might get a little itchy. Might start stampeding, in fact. Washington was quick to panic these days. And she didn’t particularly want to add any boot-crushed grandmas from the Midwest to her already backbreaking caseload.
“Christ, I think there are as many people in line now as there were yesterday for the rededication.”
Ronnie glanced over at her partner, Mark Daniels, who looked as impatient as she felt. The cynic in her couldn’t help saying, “Yeah, but this is nothing compared to the crowds who lined up to gawk at the rubble that first year.”
No, it definitely wasn’t. As soon as the military had begun to allow visitors to view the destruction wrought in October of 2017, D.C. had become the hottest tourist destination in the world. People had clamored for the chance to say they had seen the site of the worst terrorist attack in history.
Goddamn ghouls.
“I guess you’re right.” He leaned back in the seat, crossing his arms over his brawny chest and closing his eyes. “Wake me up when we get there.”
She laughed softly. “Who was she?”
Her partner didn’t bother looking up. “A stripper from the Shake And Bake. I always thought it would be fun to be the pole for a walking pair of jugs, but I think I’m gettin’ too old for that stuff.”
He wasn’t even forty. Nowhere near old, in brain or brawn, though his weary tone hinted at his recent late nights. Daniels had been edgy lately, pushing limits, taking risks. She couldn’t say why. Nor could she say she wasn’t worried about him.
“Hard living. You’d better slow down.”
“Look who’s talking.”
“Hey, my ass isn’t hanging off a bar stool seven nights a week. And the only poles I see are the ones holding up the lights in the park where I run.”
Mark’s lips twitched a little, though his position never changed. “I keep telling you Ron, a body’s only got so much runnin’ in it. You better save it for our visits to the East Side. One of these days when you’re chasing some banger, you’re gonna run out of run.”
Ahh, Daniels wisdom. What would she do without her daily dose of it?
Ronnie didn’t have time to wonder, because they’d finally reached the turn-off for heavily barricaded 17
th
Street. Ignoring the glares of the pedestrians who grudgingly got out of the way, she turned and drove past a picket line of armed soldiers dressed in urban fatigues.
This was the only vehicular route into or out of the north quadrant of the area once called the National Mall. An area that had, just yesterday, in a ceremony full of as much pomp and ceremony as could be accomplished behind a wall of bulletproof glass, been rededicated by the president as Patriot Square.
The place had another name on the street. Just as most New Yorkers still called the 9/11 site Ground Zero, most people around here called this The Trainyard.
“Stop the car,” a stern voice ordered as she slowly cruised toward the iron-and-barbed-wire fence. The voice had come out of one of the dozen body-armor wearing troops fronting the gate, every one of whom had a weapon aimed directly at her face. Talk about a welcoming committee.
Eight years ago, when she’d been just a rookie cop and the U.S.—more than a decade after 9/11—had seemed relatively safe, a flashed badge would have gotten her past any roadblock. Times were different now. Much different. So without a word, she threw the car into park, killed the engine, and put her hands up.
“Let’s go,” she told her partner.
Daniels put his hands up, too, and opened his eyes. The bags under them spotlighted his weariness, not to mention his hangover. Ronnie was seriously going kick his butt later for showing up on the job in such a pathetic state, especially on a day like today, which was shaping up to be a really shitty one. Bad enough on any normal day when they were rounding up the latest gang-enforcer or Pure V dealer, Pure V being the hottest new street drug, a cheap variation of Vicodin. But it was much worse now, when they had to come to this side of town and undergo a thorough inspection.
After they had been given the nod by the sergeant in charge, they stepped out into the bright sunshine, and were each immediately approached by different security teams.
“Sloan, D.C. Police,” she said as soon as one of the men reached her, his weapon still trained on her head. Another soldier stood directly behind his left shoulder, and a third was holding the leash of a thick-chested, sharp-toothed K-9.
Never lowering his semi-automatic, the first soldier held out his other hand. She passed over her badge and photo I.D., then moved away from the car for a thorough search. Both of the vehicle, and of her.
He examined her badge. The gun came down. But he didn’t holster it.
His mouth barely moving, and his face expressionless, he asked, “Weapon?”
She nodded. “Glock. Rear holster.” Ronnie knew better than to reach back and offer it up herself, which was why she hadn’t made any proactive move toward it before exiting the car. Her head would have been a slushy pile of brain and bone on the sidewalk the second these hard-nosed troops had seen a weapon in her hand.
“Take off your jacket.”
She did, glad to lose the extra weight of the dark, city-issued clothing. Ronnie missed the way she had dressed during her early years as a detective—the pre-2017 days of wearing street clothes on the job. But the way the whole country demanded confirmation and re-confirmation of every person’s identity, she figured it wasn’t surprising that every cop now had to be in uniform. All the way up to the Chief of the National Department of Law Enforcement.
“Spread.”
Assuming a customary position, she went completely still, arms extended at her sides, legs apart. Without saying a word, the men got to work. One of the soldiers removed the 9 mm and spare clip off her back and stepped away to examine them. Another appeared out of nowhere with a digital scanner. He passed it over her upper arm like it was a can of beans at the grocery store, looking for the microchip that was implanted in the arm of every law-abiding American citizen.
The non-law-abiding ones didn’t like them so much.
Neither did the civil rights fanatics who had been among the loudest screaming against the idea several years ago when the government had first tried to get its citizens to voluntarily submit to implantation.
Glancing at the data on the tiny screen, the soldier nodded toward the sergeant. “Identity confirmed. Sloan, Veronica Marie, born Arlington, Virginia, January 5, 1993.”
One step closer. But still not done.
Clipping a state-of-the-art, super-powerful sensor to his hand, the sergeant moved in beside her. He was so close she could feel his breath on the side of her face and smell the sausage he’d had for breakfast.
“Don’t move.” He bit the words out from a jaw so tight it could have been used to crack a walnut.
She was tempted to promise she wouldn’t, but that would constitute moving her mouth and she really didn’t want to get shot or clubbed today. So she just stood there waiting for him to finish.
Showing no emotion, he ran the miniscule device over her entire body, his hand less than a centimeter away from her clothes. If he got any kind of thrill off of scraping his palm across her nipples, he at least had the courtesy not to show it.
The metal detector trilled as it passed over her holster, the button of her pants, the microchip implanted in her arm, the hook of her bra, even the metal eyelets of her shoes. It also gave a soft beep as it moved near her right temple, which made him pause for a moment, double-check the reading, and tug her hair out of the way to study the side of her head. He obviously saw nothing . . . the incision had been tiny and right up against her hairline.
“If you check my records, you’ll see a code for that,” she explained, risking the mouth move.
The soldier stared at her, then stepped away to glance at his scanner screen. He might be curious about why she was authorized to proceed into highly secure areas when she obviously had some kind of unexplained metal in her head, but he was professional enough to not ask.
After a moment, he stepped back. His stare shifted to her face. A beat. Then he moved on.
DON’T LOOK AWAY and DON’T EVER STOP are available electronically and in trade-size paperback. They’re also available as a Boxed Set on several e-platforms.
Want to know more about Leslie and her books?
Leslie A. Kelly is a New York Times and USA today Bestselling author of dozens of novels. She writes sexy contemporary romance novels as Leslie Kelly…but when you see that middle initial, you’ll know you are in for a dark and bloody ride. Leslie has recently reissued her very popular Black CATs series, originally published by NAL in 2009. She is also the author of the dark-and-deadly Veronica Sloan thriller series.
Leslie lives in Maryland with her husband and daughters. You can find her online at: