Chapter 1
Shots rang out. At first, Jayden Powell had thought a car had backfired. Ducking behind a tree by instinct, he identified the source as gunfire seconds before the sound came again and he fell backward with the force to his chest. Upper left. The only part not shielded by the trunk he’d been using for cover.
Lying still, in agony, his head turned to the side on the unevenly cut lawn, Jayden played dead, figuring that’s what the perp wanted: him dead. Praying that it was enough. That the guy wouldn’t shoot again, just for spite. Or kicks.
A long blade of grass stuck up his nose. Tickling. Irritating. Damn. If he sneezed, he’d be dead. Killed again—by a sneeze. Did his breathing show? Should he try to hold his breath?
Why wasn’t he hearing sirens?
They were in Santa Raquel, California. It was an oceanside town with full police protection—not some burg where they had to wait on County, like some of the other places he served.
His nose twitched. Had to be two blades of grass. One up inside trying to crawl back into his throat. One poking at the edge of his nostril. Maybe if his chest burned a little more, he wouldn’t notice. Maybe if someone mowed once in a while, a guy could play dead in the front yard without fear of exposure.
Where in the hell was Jasper? His sometime partner and fellow probation officer, Leon Jasper, had waited in the car on this one, just as Jayden, the senior of the two, had insisted. Harold Wallace was Jayden’s offender. His newest client. He preferred first meets to be one-on-one.
Good thing, too, or Leon would be lying right next to him—and the guy had a wife with a kid on the way. A boy. No...maybe a girl. Had he actually heard yet?
Jayden was going to sneeze. If he took another breath, he’d be dead for sure. Maybe just a small inhalation through the mouth. Slow and long and easy, just like he’d been doing. Right?
Shouldn’t have let his mouth fall open. Now he had grass there, too. It tasted like sour bugs and...
Sirens blared in the distance. An unmistakable sound.
Thank God.
* * *
Prosecutor Emma Martin was having a chicken salad sandwich in her office when a paralegal stopped to tell her that there’d been a shooting and an officer was down. Immediately concerned, she could hardly get the bite in her mouth past her dry throat.
“Is he alive?” she asked Kenny, the best paralegal she’d ever worked with. Married with three kids, Kenny was an integral part of the mechanism that kept the district attorney’s office running smoothly. At the moment, Emma wanted to run out and help gather every detail that would put a cop-shooting perpetrator behind bars for good.
“Yeah, he was
wearing his vest, thank God,” Kenny told her, his balding head bobbing up and down a couple of times to punctuate his words. Something so intrinsically him, the bob had become a “Kenny” trademark. “He’s at the hospital but insisted on going in his own car.”
“He drove himself?”
“I heard his partner took him.”
Ready to leave her lunch behind and get on the case, to be ready to help obtain warrants and find the culprit as soon as possible, if she was assigned the case, she asked, “Who was it?”
“Powell.”
Her jaw dropped. The man she’d been thinking about while eating lunch?
“Jayden Powell?” she asked, heart thudding for no valid reason. She already knew the probation officer was okay.