To the untrained eye, the Charger parked across the street could pass for a real police cruiser. Quentin had spent four years behind the wheel of an Atlanta PD Crown Vic, and to him the dark blue sedan looked as fake as Lincoln on a Benjamin. The wimpy-ass bull bar on the front was a dead giveaway. If the driver rammed that piece of shit through anything stronger than a screen door, he’d wind up picking pieces of that Hemi V8 out of his skull.

Quentin and his yellow lab crossed to the other side of Sandcherry Drive, lined with middle-class homes and sculpted lawns. The smell of fresh-cut grass hung in the air. “Slow down, Razor,” he said—just a man and his dog out for a casual stroll. He sold it well, which wasn’t hard to do since that was his original plan, but the driver might think otherwise about a Black man walking through a mostly white subdivision. He sauntered up to the driver’s window all la-di-da and laid-back. “Evening, officer.”

“Good evening to you too,” the driver said. White male. Late twenties. Short, dark brown hair. Medium build. Dark sunglasses kept his eye color a secret. While the blue uniform looked real enough, it fit too flat against his chest. He definitely wasn’t vested up.

Officer, my ass!

“We don’t get much police activity in this neighborhood. Should I be worried?”

“Why would you be worried? I’m sure you can handle just about anything … Mr. Kane.”

Quentin stopped cold. “How do you know my name?” The situation could go sideways fast, and he was standing in the middle of the street, ass out. His piece was locked away four doors down, and Razor was a lover, not a biter. Was this someone he had put in the clink, now out and looking for a little tit for tat?

“We know a lot about you. That’s why we’re here. But we don’t have much time.”

Quentin scanned the inside of the car. “We?”

The man checked the street both ways, then glanced back over his shoulder. “It’s clear.”

A head popped up in the back seat, and the rear window slid down. A white woman wearing a gray baseball cap and a man’s oversize, tan hooded jacket looked at him with frantic eyes. “Mr. Kane, my brother is in a lot of trouble.” She tucked a wayward lock of long, brown hair under her cap with fingers that poked out of fingerless, black padded gloves.

Workout gloves? That didn’t track with someone dressed like a sneak thief riding around in a fake police cruiser with a poser behind the wheel. Quentin leaned over and peered through the window. Her legs were small for her size, probably the result of muscle atrophy. They could be wheelchair gloves.

“Since you’re the one doing the talking, I assume this man here isn’t your brother.”

“No, he’s not.”

“What kind of trouble, ma’am?”

“It’s hard to explain and will be even harder for you or any other sane person to believe.”

Getting dragged across broken glass seemed more appealing than heading back to his achingly lonely house, once filled with a love and happiness that now only existed in picture frames. But something hard to explain and hard to believe sounded like it had too much stink on it to tackle without a big bowl of alphabet soup—APD, FBI, DHS, CIA.

“I’m sorry, ma’am. I’m not a detective anymore. I think you should go to the police.”

“The people he’s in trouble with aren’t your regular criminals. These people are shadows. They only come out of hiding when they’re on the move, and they’re on the move tomorrow morning. We don’t have time for search warrants and police procedures. If we don’t stop them now, no one in the world will be able to stop them. Ever. But you can. Single-handedly.”

Tires screeched at the north end of the street. A white van barreled toward them.

“They’re coming!” the driver yelled. “Get down!”

She shoved a small, wooden box through the window. “Take this.”

“No. Wait. I don’t know what you expect me to do.”

“Everything you need and need to know is in here. Take it. Please. And hide it.”

Quentin took the heavy box. It rattled as he jammed it into the inside pocket of his track jacket.

The driver yelled, “Run, Mr. Kane! Run!”

The V8 revved like a horde of screaming demons, tires squealed, and the Charger launched southbound down the street.

“Come on, boy.” Quentin and Razor ran north through a cloud of smoke and the smell of burning rubber as the van screeched to a stop in front of his house.

Shit!

It had barely stopped when three men dressed in all black jumped out and ran straight for him. He scaled the fence into his backyard and sprinted onto his patio. Seconds later, they popped over the fence, agile and quick. They had him cornered. Three to one. Big mistake.

The one leading the trio walked right onto the patio and stood there like he was the Big Bad Wolf. A brawny, real tough-looking guy. The kind that brushed his teeth with a chainsaw. When he opened his mouth, Quentin heard the rumble of a tornado. “Where is it?”

“Jumping the fence wasn’t cowardice, guys. It was an act of mercy. Now get the hell out of my backyard.”

The Big Bad Wolf came at him with a punch that could fell an oak tree. Quentin blocked it and caught him with a reverse roundhouse kick dead in the face. He dropped to the concrete patio floor. Lights out.

Hisssss.

Some kind of spray hit Quentin in the face. Liquid fire filled his eyes. He screamed and threw up his hands. When the spraying stopped and he dared to open his eyes, he couldn’t see. His eyelids and most of his face were paralyzed. He waited, listening on a microscopic level, hearing only the birds chirping in his Yoshino cherry trees and Razor barking on the other side of the fence.

“Where is it?” a nasally voice said, two steps away on Quentin’s right flank.

Got him. In a flash, Quentin vaulted over and slammed the guy’s ass to the concrete with a one-arm shoulder throw. The last man didn’t make a sound. Smart move. This guy wasn’t going to give away his position so easily.

A sharp pain lit up the left side of Quentin’s neck. A needle.

His knees buckled, and the next thing he knew, he was flat on his back and hands were rummaging through his pockets. “Get the f-f-fuck ah me.” His tongue weighed a ton, half as much as his arms and legs. A hand ripped the box out of his pocket, and the world faded away.

Eden Stone’s red Mustang Shelby GT500 shot around a curve, the tall Georgia pines ripping past on both sides of the highway. Straggling in on CP time the first day? No, sir, not when she was sitting on enough horses to pull a train through molten lava. After all the hard work she had done to overcome the “me Tarzan, you Jane” shit she had put up with in her male-dominated profession, no way, not a chance in France.

Shelly wasn’t the F/A-18 Eden used to fly, but she wasn’t street legal either. The car roared into a deep bend in the two-lane highway as Otis Redding crooned “(Sittin’ on) the Dock of the Bay” on the radio. Eden rounded the curve, and when she crested the small hill, the brake pedal hit the floorboard.

Oh no! Water!

Invisible hands crushed her chest as intensely as the force of seven Gs in the Super Hornet had when she was in the navy.

Big lake, little bridge.

Bridge? Dental floss was more like it. Two narrow lanes a half mile long. If she hadn’t been about to firewall the gas pedal, she would’ve had time to stop and turn around. Now she was already on the frigging thing. Some way around Atlanta’s I-75 this turned out to be.

An oncoming rusty orange pickup edged over the centerline.

If he didn’t get his ass out of her lane …

She hammered the horn, then flashed the headlights. The lake seemed higher than before, an imagination gone wild. The calm water jumped to life with little dancing spouts as the leading edge of the rain stormed in from the west. If she didn’t know better, she’d swear the raindrops were wearing cowboy boots and stomping on the roof as they swept over her. She turned on the wipers and throttled those babies up to max power, but the downpour was already blinding and the wandering pickup disappeared between wipes. Guardrails. Someone with a good imagination or a bad sense of humor had the nerve to call them that. More like strips of corrugated aluminum foil.

There’s no room for error. That old voice from her navy training days was back. That stalker. It sent her stomach into a tizzy, and the two strips of bacon she’d had for breakfast were playing tennis with the egg. The warning awoke something deep inside her that had been dormant for years. Through the windshield, the two-lane bridge became the flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, and the lake turned into the Pacific Ocean. The sound of the pelting rain became the waves crashing against the hull of the ship.

Please, not now. She forced the images out of her mind and attacked the horn.

Moving back into his lane, the man in the pickup gave her one half of the peace sign, then zipped by.

After a barely discernible bump, it was over. No more bridge. No more water. Just glorious land and lofty Georgia pines again. Christ’s sake! If that was all it took to knock her off her game, she might as well find the nearest skyscraper and take a long walk off its shortest ledge. The prick’s crappy driving shouldn’t have bedeviled her so. Clearly, her harrowing past wasn’t far enough in the past. It might never be.

Minutes ago, she had been bursting to prove she was up for her latest challenge. Maybe she wasn’t. She had been masquerading as the perfect little Black pilot for so long, she had forgotten it was all a façade. Lesson learned.

She glanced down at her new navy-blue suit and white blouse, and that old familiar feeling of being unworthy of the uniform washed over her, the feeling that she had put a gleaming veneer on top of a rotting tooth.

Tough turkey. It was go time. She gunned it toward Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, where her dream commercial aircraft awaited that she would get to fly for the first time. A smile flirted with the corners of her mouth.

Wow! I’m going to get to fly a Combi.

She couldn’t let her past rob her of that opportunity. She couldn’t let her secret surface. Today or any day. If she did, the FAA would strip her of her wings, and she wouldn’t be allowed to jump two feet off the ground without a boarding pass.