“ ’Ello? ’Ello?” the receiver squawked. And Bud replaced it carefully in its cradle before slipping out the back door.

54

LUCKY THING Melanie was so enamored of Dan O’Reilly’s voice. It had this killer rough-sweet quality, gravelly and totally sexy, with a noticeable New York accent. It was so distinctive to her ear that she even recognized its fingerprint in a brief grunt that emanated from a nearby níspero tree when the shooting started.

Melanie instantly plunged into the underbrush, heading for that tree. The air was thick with flapping bats and bright flashes of gunfire. Sharp branches tore at her clothes, but damn it, she was zeroing in on Dan.

“Shit, behind you!” she heard Bridget Mulqueen exclaim.

The next second something whizzed by Melanie’s ear, and it wasn’t a mosquito. The bullet knocked a branch off a tree behind her head. It fell with a crash, and she dropped to her knees into a tangle of thorny brush, her heart in her throat, the hair on the back of her neck standing up, every nerve quivering.

“Stop, stop! It’s me, Melanie! Don’t shoot!”

She knew she was yelling louder than safety counseled, but Dan was an excellent shot. If she didn’t stop him, he’d kill her, and what kind of ending would that be to their love story?

Dan stopped firing. “Melanie?” he called, pitching his voice low.

“Yes. I’m getting up. Don’t shoot.”

She stood up slowly, shaking all over, her arms and legs stinging where thorns had pierced her skin. She made her way the remaining ten feet to where Dan and Bridget crouched behind the tree.

“How’d you get here?” Dan asked, rubbing his eyes like he thought he was hallucinating.

“I took a cab.”

Bridget looked at her as if she were crazy, but Dan laughed. “That’s you, all right,” he said.

“I’m sorry, but I had to come,” Melanie whispered urgently. “Trevor’s missing. Esposito is still in New York. He never got on a plane to come here. I was thinking this deal was either a diversion or an ambush, and that I needed to warn you. But then I saw Lamar and Pavel coming here, so now I’m completely confused.”

“Uh,” Bridget said, mouth still hanging open in astonishment at Melanie’s presence.

“The hand-to-hand’s definitely going,” Dan said under his breath. “Two guys came in from the right less than five minutes ago, prob’ly the Colombians, because they were carrying a duffel bag, which we gotta assume has the product. Armed with assault rifles. One of ’em has a pit bull. Right before the shooting starts, Pavel and Lamar show up from the direction you just came from. They’re about to do the hand-to-hand when all hell breaks loose.”

“We think the local cops jumped the gun, started shooting for no reason,” Bridget explained.

“We can’t be sure. I don’t want to prejudge guys. You can barely see your hand in front of your face out here. But I gotta tell you, nobody was supposed to move until I gave the signal, and I did not give the fucking signal. It’s quiet now, but we don’t know if anybody’s hit,” Dan said.

“If we don’t know that, chances are the bad guys don’t know either, right?” Melanie said.

“What’s your point?” Dan asked.

“If you could call the locals off, maybe after a while the bad guys would assume whoever was shooting at them took a hit?”

“It’s possible.”

“Then maybe they’d make their exchange and try to leave. If we could pick off Expo’s guys and arrest them with the drugs, we’d have a prosecutable case. I know where they parked. We could set up on their car.”

“Huh,” Dan said, thinking.

“Well?” Bridget asked.

“Maybe. Not bad, actually. Our only other choice is to shoot it out, and obviously we’re not gonna fire first,” he said.

Somebody else made the decision for them. The moment the words left Dan’s mouth, bullets began to fly again up ahead. Bursts of gunfire mixed with shouting and cursing in Spanish. Dan and Bridget raised their weapons, ready to advance.

Dan threw a final glance over his shoulder at Melanie.

“You move from this spot, I’ll shoot you myself,” he said. But he gave her his gorgeous smile, backlit by gunfire, before he turned and strode off toward the battle.

55

MELANIE SLURPED hot café con leche from a bowl, struggling to keep her eyes open under the buzzing fluorescent lights of the Luquillo police station at three o’clock in the morning. Just as she was about to lose the fight and nod off, Lieutenant Albano walked in and marched up to her borrowed desk.

“What the hell happened out there?” he asked. Gotta love New Yorkers. Not one second wasted on preliminaries.

“I came in late, but from what I understand, the hand-to-hand was about to go down and the locals just…opened fire.” She held up her hands in dismay.

“Ah, crap.”

“The guy who shot first claims one of the Colombians was reaching for a weapon.”

“Was he?”

“Well, the Colombians definitely had assault rifles, so maybe. But now we have to deal with an IAB investigation in the middle of our case. It screws everything up.”

“Shit.”

“I’m just amazed nobody was killed. One of the Colombians is in the hospital with a bullet in his leg. I arranged with the local U.S. Attorney’s Office for a bedside arraignment later this morning. And we locked up Pavel Stepanov, Esposito’s bodyguard.”

“That’s good.”

“Yeah, except our case on him sucks. Once the shooting started, the hand-to-hand never happened, and the second Colombian ran off with the drugs. So we have no product to put on the table. It’s just a circumstantial conspiracy case. I mean, we could charge an attempt, but…”

“Son of a gun. It just gets worse,” Albano muttered.

Melanie paused, looking for a diplomatic way to bring up the subject that was foremost on her mind. But there was none. “So listen, Lieutenant.”

“Yeah?”

“What went wrong with Trevor? I mean, how could you lose him like that?”

Albano looked at her like he was seeing her for the first time. “Yeah, sorry about that one, kid. What can I say? The good guys don’t win every inning.”

“That’s it? I mean, Trevor’s a solid human being. What are we doing to find him?”

“We were following up a tip that I thought came from you about the hand-to-hand tonight, thinking maybe the Leonard kid got by us somehow and that he’d show up here. But obviously things didn’t play out that way.”

“No, obviously they didn’t.”

“Well, I don’t know what you want from me,” Albano said irritably. “We got Dan and Bridget still out with the Puerto Ricans searching that area again, on the off chance anybody’s around. But it’s a long shot. Who knows, maybe this joker Pavel’ll start talking and tell us where the kid is.”

“He won’t. He invoked. So he can’t be questioned without a lawyer present.”

“Jesus H. Christ.”

“Yeah, and when counsel’s appointed in the morning, it’ll be for ex-tradition purposes only. That lawyer’ll just tell him not to talk until he gets transported to New York and gets his real lawyer, which could be weeks from now given how slow the Marshals’ airlifts are.”

“This is when I hate the fucking system. A kid’s life is at stake. You’d think we’d be allowed to go in there and beat the crap out of that Russian prick till he gives it up.”

“That’s what separates us from the barbarians, I guess,” Melanie said.

“Look around. Nothing separates us from the barbarians these days, so why stand on ceremony?” Albano popped one of his ever-present Rolaids. “Stay put for a few minutes, wouldja? I’m gonna see if I can raise the supervisor here and get an update.”

“Okay.” Melanie drew a shaggy breath.

Albano patted her arm. “Buck up, kid. The game ain’t perfect, but we gotta keep playing it.”