She headed south on I-95 and took an exit ramp six miles later. There was a hitchhiker heading to Key West, a homeless guy waving a cardboard sign and a broken-down Beemer with the hood up and someone bent over the engine.
Brook drove by. The man slammed the hood, jumped in the Beemer and hit the gas.
She found her way through a modest middle-class neighborhood outside Miramar. Brook cut the headlights and drove the last hundred yards in the dark before easing up to the curb. She unzipped a leather tactical bag in her lap and removed the sawed-off, pistol-grip shotgun. Then she grabbed the door handle. Headlights hit her car from behind. She took her hand off the handle and watched in the mirror.
At the end of the block, a Beemer rolled to a stop five homes back and cut its lights. The driver didn’t get out of the car. Maybe he was waiting for someone to emerge from the house. Maybe he was getting a hummer. Who cared? The important thing was his lights were off her. She grabbed the door handle again.
Lights hit her again. This time a Camaro. Then a Datsun. “How busy is this street?”
Brook suddenly jumped as she heard gunfire. But it was just a loud TV across the street where the windows were open to save on A/C. The street may have been dark, but it was a noise fest on a Friday night. Multiple stereos, people laughing and yelling at a backyard pool party; other televisions were tuned to more networks that decided they needed even more weapon fire.
Every sound made Brook flinch. She reached in the glove compartment for an airline miniature of banana-flavored rum, her first drink of the day. She made a wicked face and began coughing as it went down like any non–call brand of well liquor.
She waited for the effect. Headlights appeared again at the end of the block, this time facing Brook and making her lie flat across the front seat. The lights passed, and she straightened up to reach for the door handle. And withdrew her hand again. She grabbed another miniature from the glove compartment and made another face.
Brook lowered her head with self-anger. “I just can’t do it.”
The car remained still while she flipped through photos in her wallet. Mostly of her parents. Emotion spiked in two directions, sorrow and rage. She nodded at a new idea. “But I can at least scare the shit out of him, just like he did to my father.” She ejected the twelve-gauge’s shells and opened the driver’s door. “If he has a heart attack, it’s fucking karma.”
She reached the front steps with the shotgun slung under a light jacket. But now what? Did she ring the doorbell? Or find a darkened side door and bust out some jalousie glass. This clearly wasn’t thought through.
For reasons known only to the rum company, something told Brook to try the knob. Unlocked. She gave the door a gentle push and poked her head inside. Lights blazed throughout the residence. Somewhere inside, a TV’s volume was way up. That’s where he must be. Brook silently slipped the door closed behind her, raised the shotgun from under her coat and followed the sound of a cop show where someone was being interrogated. She found herself in a hallway and concluded that the TV and fake Rick Maddox must be in the den.
Brook crept forward, chest pounding, sweat starting to trickle into her eyes, every inch forward an undertaking. She reached the edge of the den’s door, and her legs began to buckle. She got mad at herself again, thought of her father and forced her muscles to steel themselves.
Brook told herself she was thinking too much:
Sure enough, there he was, stretched out in a La-Z-Boy, watching TV with his back toward her. Just the top of his head showing. For some reason, she had pictured him with hair.
She took a forceful step forward. “Get up, motherfucker!”
The plan was for him to spring up from the chair in a freak-out. But he just continued lounging there smugly watching his cop show. What an asshole.
Brook began circling him in a wide arc, the aim of the twelve-gauge never leaving its target. She got halfway around to his profile and realized he wasn’t ignoring her; he was asleep.
She picked up an ashtray—“Wake up!”—and hit him in the chest.
That’s when . . .
Blood trickled out of the far side of his mouth. More blood in a circle on his shirt, just above the lung.
“He’s . . . dead? . . . Oh God! Oh, Jesus!”
Thoughts pinwheeled, eyes shooting everywhere. She noticed something on the floor. Whoever killed him had been going through his stuff, scattering manila folders, computer disks and a disgorged wallet.
Brook slowly retreated in terror. “No! No! No! No! No! . . .”
Back down on the floor, the wallet had fallen open to display a silver badge.
“Dammit, they got the addresses mixed up!” Brook gulped air. “It’s the real DEA agent! I couldn’t be any more fucked!”
Not yet.
