She landed on her shoulder. A spike of pain took her breath. Her left arm went numb and useless. She rolled onto her stomach and pushed herself up with her right arm. After taking a few staggering steps to regain her balance, she took off in a sprint. Behind her she heard the bathroom door crashing open.
A blast from a shotgun deafened her and sheared off an upper branch of a young mesquite tree. She kept running. It fired again, striking a boulder and creating shrapnel that struck her legs like darts.
How many misses would they get before hitting her?
There were no city lights, only a sliver of moon. The darkness made her a more difficult target, but it also prevented her from seeing more than a few feet ahead of her. She ran blindly, stumbling over rocks, scrub brush, and uneven ground.
Please, please, please.
Then without warning, the earth gave out beneath her. She pitched forward, grabbing hold of nothing but air. She was helpless to catch herself before smashing into the ground and rolling, sliding, falling.
Chapter 1
Six days earlier
Trapper was in a virtual coma when the knocking started.
“Bloody hell,” he mumbled into the throw pillow beneath his head. His face would bear the imprint of the upholstery when he got up. If he got up. Right now, he had no intention of moving, not even to open his eyes.
The knocking might have been part of a dream. Maybe a construction worker somewhere in the building was tapping the walls in search of studs. An urban woodpecker? Whatever. If he ignored the noise, maybe it would go away.
But after fifteen seconds of blessed silence, there came another knock-knock. Trapper croaked, “I’m closed. Come back later.”
The next three knocks were insistent.
Swearing, he rolled onto his back, sailed the drool-damp pillow across the office, and laid his forearm over his eyes to block the daylight. The window blinds were only partially open, but those cheerful, skinny strips of sunshine made his eyeballs throb.
Keeping one eye closed, he eased his feet off the sofa and onto the floor. When he stood, he stumbled over his discarded boots. His big toe sent his cell phone sliding across the floor and underneath a chair. If he bent down that far, he doubted his ability to return upright, so he left his phone where it was.
It wasn’t like it rang all that often anyway.
Holding the heel of his hand against his pounding temple, and with one eye remaining closed, he managed to reach the other side of his office without bumping into the bottom drawer of the metal file cabinet. For no reason he could remember, it was standing open.
Through the frosted glass upper half of the door, he made out a form just as it raised its fist to knock again. To prevent the further agony that would induce, Trapper flipped the lock and opened the door a crack.
He sized her up within two seconds. “You’ve got the wrong office. One flight up. First door to the right off the elevator.”
He was about to shut the door when she said, “John Trapper?”
Shit. Had he forgotten an appointment? He scratched the top of his head, where his hair hurt down to the follicles. “What time is it?”
“Twelve fifteen.”
“What day?”
She took a breath and let it out slowly. “Monday.”
He looked her up and down and came back to her face. “Who are you?”
“Kerra Bailey.”
The name didn’t ring any bells, but it would be hard to hear them over the jackhammer inside his skull. “Look, if it’s about the parking meter—”
“The one in front of the building? The one that’s been flattened?”
“I’ll pay to have it replaced. I’ll cover any other damages. I would have left a note to that effect, but I didn’t have anything on me to write—”
“I’m not here about the parking meter.”