Dove Season

Chapter 1

1

“I have a rule,” Gina said as she steered me bodily down the aisles. It was a little past nine in the morning and the bookstore had barely opened.

I had just shot a man six hours earlier. I still felt shaky, even though the killing was necessary.

Analysts don’t usually kill. We sit and read all day and think. But sometimes your theories bear out before you’re ready to be right, and I was too right too fast.

I hiked up the waist on the workout pants Gina had lent me. They’d whisked me out of my apartment so fast I didn’t have time to grab clothes of my own. My pajamas were still splattered with blood. I wore one of Gina’s shirts too, a couple of sizes too big. Built like an sss, she had at least six inches on me. I got my height from my petite Filipino mother instead of my tall German-American father.

I continued to let Gina lead me. I didn’t want to be there. I needed sleep and solitude and time to think, but Gina and her fellow investigators had been at me for hours. “Who did you tell about your research? Who else in the department knew? Walk us through the steps. How did you find out about Danic?”

But the real question was how did Danic find out about me? We had a traitor in our midst and we knew it. We all felt duly unnerved.

“Did you know it was him when you shot him?”

“No, not until I turned on the light.”

His eyes were open, mouth slightly agape, as if he’d died surprised. I kicked away his lethal-looking knife and automatically checked for a pulse. I didn’t want to touch him, but the training kicked in.

I recognized him. The shaggy blond hair thinning on top, the particular slope of his nose. I’d seen him in some of the surveillance photos I’d been studying for the past week. He wasn’t even my primary target. He kept showing up in groups of men I meant to investigate separately as soon as I’d mapped out my broader theory.

If I hadn’t already seen his face so many times I would have thought he was just a random thug breaking in.

He hadn’t expected an alarm to go off. Not in some low-rent studio apartment. Then it was a matter of his reflexes versus mine. If I’d been slower, groggier, I’d be the one dead right now. Stabbed with that sharp ugly blade that clattered from his hand when my bullet met his chest in the dark.

I dialed the Agency’s emergency number and they told me to wait, don’t touch anything. I stood in my small clean kitchen and couldn’t take my eyes off the body.

Danic was solid and beefy. He wore cheap-looking black polyester pants, black sneakers, and a black cotton zip-up jacket. Blood was already spreading out from beneath him onto my fake wood floor. I went back and jerked away the nearby rug before the blood could reach it.

I could still smell his blood, even now, hours later. The stench of it seemed stuck to the inside of my nostrils. Gina was supposed to be taking me to a hotel where I could finally shower and get some sleep. But she’d insisted on this detour first.

“Here,” she said, finally coming to a stop in front of a row of bookshelves.

Comic books.

I’m sure I looked at her with disgust. This wasn’t funny. This wasn’t okay. Maybe she killed people every week, but I wasn’t in the habit.

She was a senior agent, but I didn’t care about rank. I turned and started walking away.

“Alice—” She grabbed my arm and twisted me around.

I saw movement directly behind her.

“React,” my uncles always told me. “Don’t think, react.”

You do drills over and over to get your reflexes tuned so you fight before you know why you’re fighting.

Gina made a sound and I pushed her hard to my left and leapt past her to the man wearing glasses. He hadn’t been there ten seconds before. The knife in his hand was wet and red with blood that I knew must be Gina’s.

He stabbed toward my chest.

I angled my body away from the blade and slammed my palm into his wrist. His meaty fist still held fast to the handle.

“Fight once. Finish the fight. Don’t keep fighting the same person twice.”

He slashed toward my rib and I warded again and this time I stomped hard sideways against his knee. He grunted as his right leg gave way, and he tried to stab me again.

But he was at my own height now, with his throat perfectly poised, and it doesn’t take strength to crush a man’s windpipe. You have to be fast, and I am, my uncles made sure of it, and they always taught me to aim.

Maybe the Agency would want him alive to find out whatever he knew, but he was a man with a knife and he was trying to kill me. I punched my fist hard into his throat. His body fell backward to the ground and I was glad.

Gina gasped. Gasped again. She was struggling to breathe.

I dropped down beside her. Blood leaked from a wound in her back. From the sound of her breathing, the attacker had pierced her lung. I pressed my hand firmly against the wound.

Three bookstore clerks stood nearby, frozen in place and staring.

“Call an ambulance,” I told them. “Right now.” I saw one of the girls pull out her phone. “And bring me some towels,” I told the other two. I needed a better way to staunch the blood.

The man with the knife still hadn’t moved. I wasn’t surprised he was dead. It didn’t bother me the way killing Danic had. Doing it with my hands instead of a gun felt more natural. I had been practicing that since I was six.

Gina gasped again and clutched hard at my arm. Her eyes looked wide and desperate. Her lips were starting to turn blue.

“They’re coming,” I told her, and kept pressing on the wound. There was nothing else I could do.