Then again, why didn’t Hood try to make contact and simply ask? Claire had made it seem like her son was just a guy who made a lot of mistakes but wasn’t evil. Still, Widow didn’t know why he would risk abducting his daughter and leaving so fast. The guy was probably on parole, which meant he was under restrictions to check in with his parole officers, and so on. Of course, the limitation might’ve been for him to stay in the state of Texas, which was a big place.

  Maybe Hood had planned to call his mother when he reached Romanth and tell her everything was fine and beg her forgiveness. The whole situation could’ve been a simple fix. However, Claire seemed adamant about trying to rescue Jemma. In fact, she had died trying to get her back. Therefore, Widow had to rethink his earlier assumption, because it made no sense. There must’ve been something dangerous about Hood having the girl, because Claire felt it necessary to go after them on her own. She didn’t tell the cops, which Widow understood, but she also didn’t bring anyone with her. She came alone.

  Widow turned a corner onto a four-lane road that was the next block over from the Sheraton. The road was empty of moving cars. He could see in both directions for a good six blocks and several stoplights, and there was no traffic.

  Just then, a pair of headlights pulled out from a street up ahead and turned toward him, slow. The lights pulled up close to him and stopped.

  Widow’s natural survival instincts set in because a pair of headlights stopping out in front of you on a dead street at night was almost always bad, or at least suspicious.

  The car stopped twenty feet in front of him, and both of the front doors jacked open. Two people jumped out. First, the passenger jumped out. He was a big guy in a suit and tie about his size. Then, the driver got out. She was harder to see. The lights behind her shone around her silhouette. And that was how he determined it was a woman. She was small, but curvy enough to be unmistakably female.

  The woman said, “Freeze!”

  Widow couldn’t see them in great detail because the headlights were on bright and blinding him, but he knew by their approach and stance, and of course, the word freeze, that they were holding guns and pointing them straight at him.

  10

  Widow learned two important lessons years ago. First, never run from the police. Always obey them. Especially if they have a gun pointed at you. The second lesson was never to trust people who pointed guns at you.

  He lifted his hands straight up into the air and said, “Guys, I’m frozen.”

  The woman said, “Good. Stay there.”

  The man approached at a steady speed but a little hesitantly, like he was approaching a tiger that had escaped from the zoo.

  “Who are you guys?”

  “FBI,” said the woman.

  “Badges?” Widow asked.

  “We got the guns here!” the man said.

  The woman said, “First, we need to restrain you and check for weapons.”

  “No one is restraining me. No way,” Widow said. He didn’t shout it or reply with severe rebellion in his voice. He simply stated it as fact, which it was. Widow had been arrested many times. He knew the procedure. He knew the players in this space. Widow understood what was real. These two had an air of deception about them. Which didn’t mean they weren’t law enforcement, but FBI? No way.

  “We’re giving the orders here!” the man said.

  “We’ll show you badges after,” the woman said.

  Widow stayed quiet. He waited.

  The guy stepped closer. He moved into the glare of the headlights and stood about four feet from Widow. He shouted, “Turn around!”

  Now Widow had more evidence that they weren’t FBI. The guy had a Colt Anaconda, which was a big Dirty Harry gun, but not the same model. Old Clint used the Smith & Wesson Model 29, but both used big forty-four Magnum cartridges. As far as power, they weren’t much different. Only gun nuts would argue the differences. Both of them would take a man’s head off, and Widow knew it. This wasn’t a common weapon in law enforcement, and by "not common," Widow figured "not at all" was more accurate. The Colt Anaconda was a beast. It fired bullets that didn’t just blow a hole through something—they removed that something. They made that something, not something.

  In fact, Widow couldn’t imagine any department anywhere allowing any guy to carry it. Widow knew it wasn’t standard issue by the FBI. It was possible to use one’s own firearm with approval, but Widow was fairly certain the FBI didn’t have this policy. Of course, he could’ve been wrong, but he doubted it.

  Widow pivoted like he was going to comply with the demand. He had been an undercover cop of sorts, and he knew how to deceive the enemy. Widow had learned all the methods and had even invented some. He slumped his shoulders in an “I surrender” pose and turned.

  Looking visibly relaxed, he pivoted on his right foot, toes out, and then he swung out, hard. He jacked to the left, out of the line of fire, in one quick movement. The guy didn’t fire, which told Widow he wasn’t a cop and wanted him alive. A cop or FBI or whoever would have fired in self-defense.

  Widow used the landing on his left foot and his momentum to execute a quick disarm move he’d learned in the SEALs.

  The guy was right-handed and pointed the Colt Anaconda with both hands. His right-hand index finger was in the trigger housing. His left hand gripped lower. Which makes for a harder disarm, which is one reason professionals hold their gun with both hands. But there were still options available, and Widow knew them all. He expected the guy knew some as well.

  Widow rocketed his left hand down from eye level and clamped his hand down on the back of the guy’s hand, just below his wrist. He jerked the gun down and to his right. Widow stepped in and nailed the guy square in the face with a headbutt, not a deadly one, which he could’ve administered—easily. He wanted the guy stunned and disoriented, not dead or broken.

  The big guy had been wearing a tie, what color Widow wasn’t sure, but it was a regular tie and not a clip-on, another piece of evidence that the guy wasn’t FBI. FBI agents and Secret Service agents and anyone else in a professional position that dealt with the criminal element knew to wear a clip-on tie. A guy who wore a regular tie and planned to be in a street fight had better be prepared to be disarmed and led around like a dog by his tie.

  And that was exactly what Widow did. He gripped the guy’s tie with his left hand and jerked it far back over the guy’s shoulder. It was enough to choke him to death if Widow had wanted to.

  Widow planted his feet, locked them into place like they were reinforced with solid concrete and rebar. He pulled the guy far down to the ten o’clock position and pointed the Colt Anaconda at the woman.

  He said, “You, freeze!” No yelling. No shouting. Just plain English.

  The woman from Kill Team B had misjudged this drifter, and she knew it. He’d disarmed her colleague about as fast as she’d ever seen anyone do it. She wasn’t even sure she could’ve done it that fast or gotten the drop on her partner.

  She stared down the sights on her Sig Sauer and said, “Who the hell are you?”

  “Who the hell are you?” the stranger replied.

  “We’re—” She started to say FBI, but Widow interrupted.

  He said, “Don’t give me that FBI crap!”

  She said nothing.

  The drifter said, “I saw you following me way back near Rough Creek. On the interstate.”

  She sidestepped back closer to the car. She wanted to shield half her body from him and possibly dive and retreat behind the car.

  “Don’t move! Stay where you are! Answer the damn question! Why’re you following me?”

  The woman didn’t answer. She didn’t know what to say. She was taking too long to come up with something, and she knew it.

  The stranger didn’t wait for her to answer. He jerked his gun hand—fast—and shot her partner in the back of the calf.

  Widow fired the Colt Anaconda, and the muzzle flashed as one bullet rocketed out and blew away the big guy’s calf muscle. The muscle and flesh exploded, and blood misted out, spraying across the front of Widow’s pants.

  The guy erupted in a scream unlike any Widow had heard in a long while. Widow jerked down harder on his tie, both to silence him and to keep him standing up and not toppled over.

  He said, “Answer me, or he gets another!”

  The woman stayed quiet, but she gave Widow a confirmation that they were definitely bad guys, which he had been pretty positive to begin with. The woman confirmed his suspicions because she was looking around the streets. She was checking to see if anyone had heard the gunfire. She was looking for potential witnesses. Only bad guys look for witnesses. Everyone was subconsciously aware of the cell phone camera. Somebody fires a gun in an urban area, and twenty people show up with their cell phone cameras rolling. The modern smartphone made everyone a potential broadcaster.

  But Widow wasn’t worried about being filmed, nor was he worried about witnesses. He had done nothing wrong or illegal. At least not here tonight, he hadn’t. But he noticed lights switching on at the top floors of a nearby building. Most of the other buildings were commercial and mostly office spaces. They were not in use at this hour, but one building had people inside it, and they were gathering at the windows to check out the gunshot.

  And then the woman did something that shocked Widow.

  The driver shot her partner. She jumped back behind the tire of the Dodge Charger and opened fire. She shot him three times in the chest. All good shots. She had real talent. The guy kicked back and into Widow. They both toppled backward.

  Widow squirmed out from under him and blind-fired back. He heard the boom of the gunshots. He had fired three times. In the same second, he heard Clang! Clang! Clang! This meant that his return fire had climbed up the hood of the Charger.

  The clang sound hadn’t been the typical “bullets hitting metal” sound Widow had heard many times before. There was a deeper tone to it, like artillery shells hitting the side of a bridge. Then there was a whistling sound, and smoke rose from the engine. It was probably the radiator. Widow was surprised the engine was still running and hadn’t completely shut down or choked or even caught fire.

  Widow had always been trained to keep track of his surroundings, but it was a quiet and dark city street. He had forgotten, and he was cursing himself for it now. Luckily, city streets are not empty things, not even at night. There was a long, full bike rack. Widow scrambled toward it and dove behind several mountain bikes. A bicycle isn’t the ideal hiding place to protect one from enemy fire, but twenty parked bikes come packed with a lot of steel and rubber. It wasn’t ideal, but when you thought about a car nowadays, if you left out the engine, they were all fiberglass, which was no greater protection than thin metal.

  The woman looked up over the hood and saw Widow. She jumped up and fired two rounds, and both clanged around in the metal of the parked bikes.

  Widow shot out the nearest streetlight and then returned his aim to the woman. He waited for her to stick her head out. She didn’t move. He kept shifting his focus from above the car to underneath the car. He stayed down low, but on his feet, not on his knees. Under the pressure of a gunfight, it was natural for people to duck behind cover and drop into a ball. But that was a bad idea because he needed to stay mobile and ready to bounce up out of cover.

  He snapped his head to the right and to the left, fast. He saw that there was a short distance between himself and another parked car on the street. Looking in her direction again, he made a break for it. Better not to be where she was expecting him to be.

  He darted fast, staying behind the bikes, and scrambled to the parked car.

  It was a Volkswagen, but he wasn’t sure about the model and didn’t care to look.

  Widow got up behind the trunk and hugged it tightly. He craned his head and looked back around the corner at the Dodge Charger. He could see the woman’s outline. She stood up and looked back at the bike rack, gun extended, ready to fire, but she didn’t fire. She saw he wasn’t there.

  Just then, they heard police sirens.

  She looked around for him. She didn’t see him, but they could hear voices in the distance. People were coming out of the office building and trying to see what was happening.

  The woman scanned for Widow one last time, and then she holstered the Sig Sauer and stood up. Widow watched her get into the Charger and drive forward twenty feet. She leaped back out and scanned around for him once again, but he stayed hidden.

  The driver scrambled around the front of the car and pulled the passenger door open. She grabbed her partner with both hands and dragged him a few feet around the door. She hauled him up with all of her strength and a little adrenaline, Widow figured. Then she shoved his body into the seat and slammed the door. The guy was dead. She had killed him, but she was recovering his body. She wasn’t allowed to leave evidence behind. That told Widow she wasn’t working for someone who allowed room for mistakes.

  She returned to the driver's seat and hit the gas, heading in Widow’s direction.

  Widow waited until the Charger’s front end was in line with the back end of the Volkswagen. And then he jumped out and took several large steps to the side so he was no longer standing dead-on in her path. He was now at an angle to where he could see the woman through the open driver's side window so he could avoid shattering the windshield. He took aim and squeezed the trigger. The whole thing didn’t last even two seconds. Widow was certain the woman had seen him. They’d made eye contact. But he wasn’t sure if she had tried to slam on the brakes or go for her Sig Sauer.

  Widow fired once only—he wanted to wound, not kill. But firing in such a short span of time when a sports car with a lot of horsepower is gunning by and trying to hit the driver and not killing her wasn’t easy.

  He squeezed the trigger. The muzzle flashed, and the gunshot boomed. The sound echoed in the street and bounced between the buildings until it died in the sky above.

  The woman slumped back and then forward, and the Charger swerved to the right, and the horn blared. The car ran up onto the sidewalk and stopped.

  Widow ran over to it. He jerked the driver door open, pulled her out. The police sirens were getting closer and closer. They were only blocks away now.

  Blood seeped through the woman’s blouse and covered her left shoulder and neck and chest in a wet blackness. Widow wasn’t sure where he had hit her, but it looked like her shoulder, which was good. He needed her alive. He needed to ask her a few questions. She was semiconscious.

  He pulled the door open, pulled her to the back seat, and dumped her on the back bench. She squirmed and cried out, but didn’t fight him back.

  He reached in and felt around where her gun had been holstered. Finding it, he jerked it out. He stepped back out and slammed the door. He tried to get into the driver seat but couldn’t fit. The woman had pulled the seat all the way forward. He reached down and racked it all the way back. Her knees in the back seat bent up with it. He dumped himself down and was amazed that the car was a stick. Then he was amazed the car stopped on the curb so easily. She had jammed the stick into neutral and her foot came off the clutch when he shot her.

  He slammed the door and tossed both guns up onto the dash. He pushed in the clutch, shoved the gear into first, hit the gas and gunned it, and then made a quick shift to second.

  Within moments, he was down the street and turning onto a busy highway. He turned a corner just after he saw two sets of police lights behind him slam to a stop where he had been just moments before.

  11

  The white Dodge Charger ran for another two miles and then stalled out just before Widow could pull onto the highway. He wasn’t familiar with the city he was in, but the Charger had an onboard navigation system built into the dash. He punched the button for the map on the home screen, and then he hit a special emergency button and selected the “Nearest Hospital” feature.

  Widow had shot the woman in self-defense, but he didn’t want her to die. Widow still wasn’t sure what was going on. He didn’t know why they had been following him or why they had tried to take him alive, but Widow was far from dumb. He may not have been the smartest guy in the world, but dumb wasn’t his style. Widow knew they weren’t FBI, and he knew they didn’t intend to take him alive and keep him alive. He also knew they had been following him, at least since he was in the SUV with Leon. After he had parted ways with Leon, they hadn’t continued following her. Therefore, they had been following him.

  He looked back over the seat at the woman. In the streetlights that passed overhead, he could see her face clearly. Right now, she looked to be in great agony. A forty-four Magnum through the shoulder was exactly that—through the shoulder. A forty-four Magnum never diddled around in a person’s body. It wasn’t a stoppable bullet. It always went through someone. The only thing that could stop an unstoppable force was an immovable object. And this woman’s shoulder hadn’t been immovable. It was possible that much of it wasn’t there anymore. Widow had no idea, because he hadn’t looked.

  His priority was to get away from the cops because he figured these two killers weren’t after him for something he had done. And if they weren’t after Agent Leon, then they must’ve followed him way back when he had met Claire Hood. Which, he could guess, meant they were after James Hood. And James Hood had possession of his six-year-old daughter, Jemma. And that concerned Widow. Because now her life was in danger.

  Now that two professional killers had revealed themselves to Widow, he could safely assume that Jemma’s and James’s lives were in grave danger, and that was why James ran with her.

  Widow looked back once more at the woman bleeding to death in the back seat, and he recognized her from the family-owned diner. She had been sitting there a few tables away from him. She was good. He hadn’t made her like a tail.