Sacha: March, Kansas City, Missouri

 

“Bolic.”

Sacha glanced in the direction Rick was pointing. Their target slipped out from between some loose pieces of plywood covering the doorway, gesturing with his free hand while he talked on a cell phone. The man saw Sacha, and his eyes widened for an instant before he turned and bolted in the opposite direction.

Sacha took off after the government’s prize witness against the US boss of the Molejevic crime family, keeping his prey’s flashy red parka in view. He heard Rick shout something but couldn’t quite make out the words. As he ran, he gave thanks that Jacobsen looked like a Ross Dress for Less clearance rack had thrown up on him. He and Rick had spent two days freezing their asses off waiting for Jacobsen to show. No way was Sacha going to lose him now. His knee twinged, threatening retribution as he pushed himself faster; he ignored it.

Jacobsen was no Usain Bolt, but he knew the neighborhood better than Rick or Sacha, plus the streets were slick from intermittent rain showers and Sacha had to avoid slipping on metal sewer and electric access points as well as litter and unidentifiables. The rain started spattering down again. In moments, Sacha’s hair was plastered to his head and rivulets ran down his face, making it hard to see. Still, he had almost gained enough ground to grab the back of Jacobsen’s jacket when the man took a sharp left into a tiny alley.

The stench of past-due trash rose up around Sacha. He forced down a reflexive gag as he sped down the dark, narrow space between two brick buildings. It was dank and barely wide enough for two men to walk side by side. Sacha was big enough to feel claustrophobic as he pounded after Jacobsen, losing a little ground because a trash container loomed from the shadows, forcing him to slow down. Jacobsen glanced over his shoulder at Sacha and grinned. Putting on a burst of speed, their uncooperative witness leapt to catch the bottom rung of a sketchy-looking fire escape and began to clamber up it with familiarity.

Using the brick wall to push off, Sacha leapt for the fire escape as well, barely grabbing hold of the grimy metal bar. Praying to any possible saints of US Marshals, he hoisted himself upward, hoping the flimsy, weathered metal would support his weight. Sacha’s prayer held for a few seconds into the climb when two things happened. The first was an ominous creaking that echoed up and down the alley, along with the earsplitting shriek of metal on metal. The second was the silhouette of a large-caliber handgun appearing from a window several stories above him. Fingers flexed on the trigger as Sacha lunged to his right, leaping off the fire escape… except that it followed him, peeling away from the brick wall it had formerly been attached to.

This was going to hurt.

His stomach lurched, and for the briefest moment he was weightless before gravity came calling. All the air left his lungs when he hit the top of the old recycling container. He sort of bounced and, unfortunately, rolled off onto the concrete underneath the now-defunct fire escape. Flakes of rust, pelting rain, and litter that until that moment had been lodged for God knew how long in the metal grating of the fire escape showered down around him, on him. In a kind of slow motion he had only read about, the fire escape creaked to the right and smashed into the brick wall opposite. More rusty flakes showered down, along with pieces of the old metal structure itself.

Sacha lay where he’d fallen, trying to suck a few molecules of oxygen into his lungs, thanking fuck for the fire escape collapsing under his weight. If it hadn’t chosen that moment to disintegrate, rather than reconsidering his life and most especially his career choices, Sacha would be a dead man with a hole in his head the size of a fist. The weighty mass of the forty-caliber bullet displacing the atmosphere alongside his ear was as close as Sacha wanted to get to death today.

Groaning, he rolled over and craned his head toward the window Jacobsen had disappeared into. There had only been the single gunshot. Sacha didn’t know if the guy had actually been trying to kill him or was simply trying to get him to stop following. Regardless, whoever it had been was going to be extremely sorry he opened fire on an officer of the law.

His partner, who hadn’t been right behind him, came panting around the corner. Rick’s searching gaze landed on Sacha where he lay in the stinking trash and dog… or possibly human… shit behind the derelict building their perp had disappeared into. Sacha thought even Sig Jacobsen should have had better taste than this place. Fuck, rats had better taste.

“Fucking hell.” Sacha rolled onto his hands and knees, pushing himself to his feet. Every one of his thirty-nine years was making itself known. By some kind of miracle he’d merely had the wind knocked out of him and would have some impressive bruises tomorrow from hitting the trash container, but nothing felt broken. His knee throbbed, threatening imminent collapse, but after a second he was able to ignore it. Rick, the prissy asshole, didn’t bother to offer a hand, and when he got close enough he wrinkled his nose.

“Where the fuck were you?” Sacha brushed at unnamable bits stuck to his jacket and jeans without much result. Giving up, he unzipped his jacket, took it off, and dropped it to the ground beside him. Sacha didn’t care that he was shivering in the forty-degree weather and getting wetter by the minute as the rain increased in intensity.

“I was a little behind you. I tried cutting through to the other side when he turned.” Rick brushed nonexistent grime off his suit jacket. “You know, to head him off. But the other end was blocked. I had to turn around and come back.” Sacha forced aside the urge to grab Rick by the neck and throttle him. They had been after Jacobsen for weeks, and now the guy had vanished into thin air. “Oh, wow, Bolic, you landed in—”

“I know what I fucking landed in,” Sacha ground out. “I could have been fucking killed. Did you see the shooter?”

Rick looked around, like he was going to see the shooter waving for his attention from a nearby window. Sacha had been lying in non-metaphorical shit for several minutes, checking all his parts to make sure they worked properly. The shooter was long gone, and Sacha was going to be hellishly sore for a few days. “You know what? Never fucking mind.”

They walked back to their car in stony silence, abandoning Sacha’s jacket in the alley. Rick knew better than to try and talk to Sacha when he was in a shit mood. Which was most of the time.

When Sacha had returned to regular service after two brutal years undercover, he’d hoped the transition would be easier than going under. Not so far. He took a deep breath, immediately regretting it when his side hitched, and searched for patience he wasn’t known for. It wouldn’t help his case if he ripped Rick a new one… in public, anyway.

Since returning to duty in February, Sacha had been assigned three partners. The first lasted a single retrieval before demanding a change, claiming insurmountable personality differences. What the fuck ever. The second lasted three weeks before digging up a reason not to work with Sacha ever again. The kid had been witless. Sacha tried to get him to understand that there were capital-R rules, and then there were guidelines. Not every fucking guideline had to be followed with unerring rigidity. Sacha hadn’t survived twelve years in the Marshals service because he followed every guideline like it was God’s word.

Unfortunately, their current vehicle had not been stolen, vandalized, or towed away. The early-2000s Subaru Forester was so boring no one, not even taggers, took a second look at it. It sat where they’d left it, three blocks up from the alley.

“I’m driving.” Sacha held his hand out for the keys.

“Sacha…” Rick whined.

“I’ve had enough close calls for one day; I’m driving.”

“Fine.” Rick slammed the keys into Sacha’s palm before opening the passenger door and getting in.

Sacha slid into the driver’s seat. “What’s your problem? I’m the one who was almost killed. Once by you and once by Jacobsen.”

“Whatever.”

Fuck’s sake. Sacha took a deep breath in through his nose. Ignoring Rick’s passive-aggressive bullshit, he started the engine. Talk radio blared out of the car’s speakers, making conversation unnecessary. Neither one of them moved to turn it down.

Partner number three, for the past two months, had been Rick Lancer, prick extraordinaire, who was smarter than he acted. But this was the third time (or fourth if Sacha counted nearly being T-boned the other day when Rick was fucking talking while driving and not watching the road) Sacha had nearly been killed since he’d been back on active duty. Maybe the universe was trying to tell him something. Maybe it was time he listened.

The lure of something different flitted along the edge of his thoughts. Maybe he needed real change, not merely a new partner. A career change. He’d had the thought before, but the onus of duty had always stopped him from leaving the service. When he left the army and joined the Marshals, his drive had been to bring down as much scum as he could. He’d made a promise to his foster sister Mae-Lin, and to himself, that as long as he walked this earth he would work to rid it of human traffickers.

His heart wasn’t in the fight anymore. Not with the same fire that’d led him down this path so many years before. Maybe he needed to find a different way to fight. He didn’t see himself giving up, but he needed something else, something intangible and indefinable. He was tired of trying to explain himself when no one listened. His body wasn’t bouncing back from back-alley tackles—or falls from fire escapes—quite the way it had when he was twenty-five. Change was in the air.