Henry Rojas was clearly fleeing for his life. That meant that once he finished whatever he was doing in the house, he would most likely kill Lani. What would happen if she could somehow open the door and fall far enough out of the vehicle so that her body was half in and half out? Maybe a passerby would notice and stop to help. The only problem was that there were no ­passersby—no cars driving slowly through the neighborhood and no one out walking a dog. And when she did attempt exiting the vehicle, it didn’t work. Henry had locked the car. She could reach the door handle, but not the button to unlock the door.

Resigned to her fate, Lani settled back against the car seat as best she could. What would happen to Angie and Micah? Dan was a good man and an excellent father. If she was gone and he was left alone with the kids, he’d do a great job of raising them. She also knew that her parents would do everything in their power to help.

But just thinking about Dan made her want to weep. Only yesterday he had tried to warn her about the dangerous smugglers she and Gabe might encounter out near Ioligam, and he had been right. The dangerous smugglers had been there all right, but it turned out that none of them were strangers, not at all. As for Henry Rojas, someone who should have been above reproach? He was likely the most dangerous of them all. Dan hadn’t seen that one coming, and neither had Lani.

She tried to keep an eye on the street. Trusting the drug to keep her sedated, Henry hadn’t bothered to gag her. If someone came by, she intended to scream her head off. Otherwise, she knew that her best chance of living was to continue doing just what she’d been doing all along—­pretending to be asleep. It seemed unlikely that he’d do whatever it was he planned right here in the car. He’d need transportation of some kind that wasn’t filled with either a dead body or blood and gore. She could only hope that at some point he’d have to loosen the tie wraps that bound her. That would be her one opportunity to fight back.

“I’ll head-­butt that son of a bitch all the way into next week,” she swore to herself. “Then I’ll run like hell.”

AVA LOOKED AT HER WATCH again and wondered what was taking so long. At this point Henry was over an hour late in making the delivery, and she was growing impatient. Or maybe Jane Dobson was the one worrying and watching the minutes tick by. At this point, it was hard for Ava herself to remember exactly who she was at the moment or who she would be at any given time. That was something to bear in mind. As of now, Ava Richland was over. Going forward, Ava would always be someone else.

The problem was, she had a long drive ahead of her tonight. It would take at least five hours to reach the Border Patrol checkpoint northwest of Brawley, California. She wanted to pass through that around midnight, a time when the guards would be tired and traffic would be light. Jane Dobson would drive past the officers in her properly licensed vehicle. Then, somewhere north of there but south of Indio, Jane Dobson would disappear for good, shortly after Ava Richland.

At that point the Acura’s Arizona license plate would go in the trunk. Weeks earlier she had commissioned one of her operatives to steal a California plate from a similarly colored Acura. Then, with the stolen plate in place, she would assume the guise of Kate Worthington for the remainder of the trip. And once in L.A., Kate Worthington would also evaporate when Jane Carruthers went into Postal Minders to pick up her preshipped packages of diamonds.

As for Henry Rojas? She hoped it would be days or maybe even weeks before anyone stepped inside Jane Dobson’s abandoned house to find his body. Earlier in the day she had asked one of the neighborhood kids for help loading her luggage into her car in the two-­car garage. In passing, she happened to mention to the kid that she was on her way to visit her dying mother and wasn’t sure when she’d be back.

Waiting for the garage door to open, Ava concentrated on remaining calm. She touched her purse with the toe of her shoe. The extra weight told her that her weapon was where she needed it to be. The Glock semiautomatic was much smaller than the .22 she had used on Amos Warren and Kenneth Mangum. The .22 had originally belonged to her philandering father. Twelve-­year-­old Ava had found it hidden in the bottom drawer of his dresser the day her mother threw the man out of the house. Ava had taken the gun, hidden it in her own dresser, and used it twice before ditching it in a Dumpster at a gas station somewhere in Portland on her way home from Seattle.

As for this one? It was new. She hadn’t spent any time firing it, but at close range, that wouldn’t matter. She worried about the sound of gunfire. Occasional gunshots in this dodgy neighborhood weren’t all that unusual, but unwelcome attention was something she could ill afford. If she could avoid shooting him, she would.

With that in mind, what Ava was really counting on was Henry’s soft spot for tequila. They’d shared a slug or two of that on other occasions when he’d dropped off shipments. This time, she had prepared a special barbiturate-­laced bottle of Jose Cuervo. She’d set it out on the coffee table along with a single shot glass, a plate of lime slices, and a shaker of salt. And if that didn’t quite do the trick? If something more was required, she was pretty sure she’d be able to make it look like suicide.

Ava had watched the local news at six. She had followed the piece on the reservation shooting with avid interest, but there had been few details. Stories about two unidentified males being gunned down out along the border didn’t get much traction these days. Just before the broadcast ended, there had been a brief breaking news alert about a disturbance at the state prison in Florence in which two ­people had died and one was injured. The smiling young blond anchorwoman breathlessly promised more details on the ten o’clock edition.

Ava fervently hoped that the two dead victims were the right dead victims, but she didn’t plan on hanging around long enough to make sure. She’d be well on the road before it was time for the ten o’clock news.

The minutes crept by. She had poured herself a glass of wine that sat untouched on the table next to her chair. There was no point risking having wine before embarking on an all-­night drive, but the wine provided camouflage and gave her a reason for not joining Henry in having some of his tequila.

For hours now, the only sound in the house had been the quiet growling of the fridge as the motor switched on and off and the occasional banging of ice machine cubes rattling as they dropped into the plastic bin. The sound she was waiting for was the slow creak of the garage door opening, but that one didn’t come. Instead she was jarred by the sound of her doorbell.

Doorbell? Are you kidding? What the hell was the man ­thinking?

BOZO LAY ON HIS BED while Brandon paced the patio, waiting and worrying. When Amanda Wasser called to report that John Lassiter was out of surgery and in the recovery room, he was relieved to hear the news, but it was all he could do to keep from snarling at her. He hurried Amanda off the phone because he wanted the line open in case Todd Hatcher called.

He already knew there was no way he’d be able to keep his promise to Diana—­no way he’d be able to stay out of it. After all, Lani was his daughter. He didn’t want to trust her fate to a bunch of inexperienced patrol officers who might shoot first and ask questions later. And Brandon knew in his gut that Dan Pardee would be on the same page.

Henry Rojas was Navajo and Border Patrol. If Brandon and Dan could get to Henry, they might be able to talk him down or take him down. The problem was, they had to find him first.