Taken by the Con

Or someone from his past had already caught up to him.

* * *

As people brushed past on the busy sidewalk, Lucia reached for her gun, unsnapping her holster. The atmosphere had tensed and shifted. If someone approached her or Cash, she would defend them.

Before her transfer to Benjamin’s white-collar crime team, Lucia had worked in the violent-crime division on a complex murder-for-hire case. Her contributions to breaking up a ring of Egyptian nationals selling their services as assassins had led to fifteen arrests and fourteen convictions. Unfortunately, several of the well-known assassins who were part of the ring remained out of reach.

Her old team leader had let her know that the assassins still at large could seek revenge and target the team who had broken up their lucrative business. A few months had passed without any whisper of a threat. Lucia had been lulled into a sense of security that shattered the moment her instincts pricked that something was wrong.

Her instincts had served her well at the Bureau. She couldn’t have explained why or how she knew trouble was near. Just as she had known by their treatment of her as the only female member of the violent-crime division that they were looking for a reason to kick her off the team.

In the end, it hadn’t been something she’d done or hadn’t done. It had been her success that gave her boss a reason to request a promotion for her. A promotion to a better-paying, higher-ranking open position in another unit.

She and Cash returned to her vehicle. They got in and she turned the key. The eerie sensation of being watched wouldn’t subside.

The car didn’t start. She paused a moment and heard the sound of the battery whining. “Get out of the car! Run!” she yelled.

Lucia opened the driver’s-side door and rolled, covering her face and head. Car horns blared at her and she narrowly avoided being struck by oncoming traffic. Cash had heeded her warning and was standing on the street looking at her strangely. Maybe the car was old and needed a new ignition. Maybe the engine needed a tune-up. Maybe that first faulty turn was driver error.

Then Cash was next to her, lifting her to her feet. “Lucia, what is—”

The car exploded, the boom echoing against the tall buildings around her, a blast of heat hitting them and knocking them to the ground. Heat burned up Lucia’s side. Cash covered her, shielding her. Something hit her leg hard enough to send pain radiating up her body.

Lucia had been in the line of fire before, but she hadn’t experienced the impersonal coldness of an assassination attempt. Her follow-up thought was just as terrifying. It hadn’t blown the first or second time she had started the car that day. Either someone had put the bomb in the car while she had been on the sidewalk talking to Cash or someone had been watching her and waiting to detonate the bomb. Either way, a killer was close.

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