Jane Hawk Thriller. Dean Koontz

compared to the great warm welling of happiness that he felt just being in her company. When Nick had been alive, no man on Earth could have stolen Jane’s heart, for she had loved him—and he’d loved her—with an intensity that nineteenth-century novelists had described convincingly, but that was seldom found in contemporary arts because such love alluded to a higher love that inspired only contempt in the artists of this era—well, contempt and fear. In death, Nick haunted his lovely widow, not by his spirit’s choice but by her insistent invitation; even if Jane thoroughly avenged her husband’s murder, Vikram suspected that Nick might always be in the doorway of her heart, barring entrance to all other men.

      Unrequited love was reward enough for him, which had better be the case, considering that, by coming to this woman’s aid, he put his life at risk and might not survive long enough to earn even a kiss on the cheek.

      “How did you find me?” she repeated as she piloted the Explorer Sport through a Pamplona of wheeled bulls all charging southward on Interstate 405 into a sudden inexplicable absence of congestion, the light of the setting sun flickering off brightwork and window glass.

      “It’s known that you’ve been driving off-market vehicles with forged plates,” Vikram said. “You had to abandon a black Ford Escape in Texas when the highway patrol pulled you over for some reason, not realizing who you were. You left the trooper handcuffed to your Ford and split in his cruiser. The FBI took your car apart, trying to track its history, but they got epsilon out of it, nothing, nada. I remembered something you told me after you closed the Marcus Paul Headsman case, about this cash-only car dealer in Nogales, Arizona.”

      Marcus Paul Headsman had been a serial killer who tried to live up to his surname by collecting the heads of his victims and storing them in a freezer. He said he would have liked to keep their bodies as well, but he would have had to buy several new freezers, for which he lacked the funds.

      Headsman had stolen a vehicle from Enrique de Soto, who ran a black-market operation out of a series of barns on a property outside of Nogales. Enrique paid boosters for hijacked cars and trucks. He ferried the hot merchandise directly across the border to Nogales, Mexico, where his people stripped out the GPS and all identifiers. They rebuilt the engine of each vehicle to ensure it would be faster than anything a cop would be driving and returned it to Arizona. Enrique provided forged registration papers and license plates for every customer, which in spite of being bogus had been inserted in Department of Motor Vehicles digital records and would allay the suspicions of any officer of the law. When Headsman was caught, he gave up Enrique, hoping to buy a little leniency.

      “I remembered,” said Vikram. “I remember so much of what you told me over the years. Probably all of it. So I backdoored Bureau case files to see what had happened to Enrique de Soto.”

      “Nothing happened to him,” Jane said. “We were after Marcus Paul Headsman, and we got him. No time for small fish like Enrique.”

      Even when the Bureau was well managed, when it wasn’t being weaponized and used against domestic political enemies, it was nonetheless overwhelmed with cases and needed to practice triage, focusing its manpower on the most egregious crimes that were urgently in need of being addressed. When lesser scofflaws were found wriggling under the rocks that had been overturned in the pursuit of more dangerous and consequential felons, they were either referred to local authorities or added to a collateral-crimes file for later investigation, which is what happened to Enrique de Soto’s case. Later investigation usually translated as the day after never, because there was always bigger game to hunt.

      Vikram said, “I remember you wanted to go after de Soto, but if you pushed the issue, your superiors would see you as a quarterback for lost causes. You had to conform to the Bureau Way if you were to have a future in it.”

      “And look how well that turned out.”

      “So I figured maybe you were getting vehicles from de Soto. I deleted him from the collateral-crimes file, so that no one else in the Bureau would make a connection between him and the Headsman case, and I went down to Nogales to talk with him.”

      They were coming toward an exit to a place they didn’t want to go. Jane changed lanes, took the ramp, descended the banked curve at what felt like two Gs, and shot into a neighborhood of industrial buildings that loomed in dark and threatening configurations against the crimson western sky.

      She pulled to the curb, put the Explorer in park, switched off the headlights, and turned to Vikram. “Are you freakin’ crazy?”

      “What? What’d I do?”

      “Ricky de Soto isn’t just some half-assed chop-shop dirtbag. He deals weapons, he’s in human trafficking, he’s a stone-cold killer when he has to be.”

      “Well, you deal with him.”

      “I don’t have any choice but to deal with him, I know how to deal with him, I can hand him his balls on a plate if I have to, but I still watch my back every damn second I’m near him. But you! You weren’t trained at Quantico. If you carried a gun you’d be no danger to anyone but yourself. When you walk into Ricky’s operation, you’re a bunny rabbit stepping into a wolf’s den.”

      “I’m no bunny rabbit,” Vikram protested.

      She punched his arm.

      “Ow!”

      “You’re a sweet, naïve damn bunny rabbit,” she insisted, and she punched him again to emphasize her assertion.

       7

      On the freeway high above, headlights drilled the descendent night as traffic rocketed toward Long Beach and points south. Of the surrounding factories and warehouses and storage yards, some were eerily lighted and engaged in seemingly infernal industry, others perhaps abandoned, dark walls bearing spray-painted Day-Glo gang symbols like the runes of an off-planet civilization. The streets were vaguely lighted by lampposts, some having been shot out for sport. As the last sunlight bled from the sky, the only vehicles on the move nearby were large trucks that resembled military transports embarked on a clandestine mission in a world at perpetual war.

      Jane’s heart pounded as though she’d just boarded the Explorer after a hundred-yard dash. She had lost people who were dear to her, who were dead because they tried to help her, and their deaths weighed on her more painfully every day. Others were even now at risk, not least of all the people who had taken her son, Travis, into their home in Scottsdale, to hide him there for the duration. She could kill any bloody-minded Arcadian who came at her with murderous intent and suffer no enduring anguish, but the guiltless who died because of her were a stain on her soul. She hoped, perhaps irrationally, that she’d be able to conclude this crusade without inducing other innocents to join the resistance only then to forfeit their lives.

      And now here was Vikram.

      “What’d you hit me for?”

      “I don’t want you dead.”

      “Don’t worry about me. I’ve got winnitude.”

      “‘Winnitude’?”

      “Winnitude. I land on my feet like a cat.”

      “Like a kitten. Ricky de Soto is a viper. You’re not in his league.”

      “Obviously he didn’t kill me.”

      “Which is astounding. You just walk in on him, wanting to know did he sell me some off-market wheels—me, the most-wanted fugitive in the country.”

      “I knew it was tricky—”

      “‘Tricky’?”

      “So I didn’t go alone.”

      She closed her eyes. “Whatever you’re about to say isn’t going to make it better.”

      “There were five of us. My brother. An uncle. Two cousins, including Judy, the one who was driving the Escalade at