Page 91 of Enemy of My Enemy

“Hey, asshole, come on. Wake up!”Doc banged on Fitz’s door, rattling the cheap wood on its hinges. He and Fitz were both on Cooper’s team, and they’d become friends through bullshit and bonding and shared cigarettes smoked on Prince Faisal’s sun-drenched pool deck.

“Come on! You said we were going to go the bars. Pick up some chicks.” Doc banged on the door again. They’d gotten back to Tampa late the night before and crashed, but now they were free, at least for the night. “Asshole!” He rattled the doorknob.

It turned beneath his hand.

“I’m coming in! Put your dick away!” Doc pushed open the unlocked door and headed in.

The doorknob crashed to the tile floor of Fitz’s cheap apartment with a loud bang. It rolled away.

Doc frowned. Nothing moved in the silent apartment. “Fitz?”

Nothing.

Creeping forward, Doc peered into the dimly lit hall leading past Fitz’s bachelor-messy living room, toward the apartment’s single bedroom. On his right, a tiny kitchen.

The refrigerator was open. A milk carton lay on the floor, on its side.

“Fitz!” Doc jogged down the hallway, pushing open Fitz’s ajar bedroom door. “Where the fuck are you?” He turned and shoved open the bathroom door.

The shower curtain was pulled down, the bar angled sideways and sticking up from the bathtub. Blood pooled on the tiled floor and had splattered on the walls and the mirror. A broken chunk of Fitz’s porcelain sink lay shattered on the floor. And, wrapped in the shower curtain in the bathtub, Fitz’s broken body lay. His neck jutted at a crazed angle, and his eyes were bulging, shock and terror frozen in his last gaze. Blood covered his naked body, from gashes across his arms, his chest, and one giant head wound above his eye.

Doc backed up, hitting the towel bar as he cursed. His hands shook, shock and rage racing through him. Eyes darted around the bathroom, searching for something, anything, any sign or clue or hint as to what had happened.

He froze, his breath choking off as he found the M circled in Fitz’s blood on the cracked white tiles over Fitz’s broken body.

He tore out of the apartment, bouncing off walls as he ran for the open door. He fumbled in his shorts, trying to pull out his cell and his keys at the same time. “Fuck!” he shouted, dropping his keys as he tried and failed to unlock his car door. Shaking fingers managed to swipe through his cell and pull up Cooper’s number. He threw himself into his car, finally, as Cooper’s phone rang in his ear.

“What?” Cooper answered, snappish and grumpy.

“Fitz is dead!” Doc roared. “There’s a fucking M in his apartment!”

“What?”

“Fitz is fucking dead! He was fucking murdered!” Doc swerved across four lanes of traffic, speeding around a minivan and a sedan. He floored the accelerator, gunning his car up to sixty on the residential drag outside Fitz’s neighborhood. “It was Madigan! His Goddamn sign was there!”

“Where are you?” Cooper was back to professional, his ice-cold mask falling into place as his voice chewed glass over the phone line. “Get back to base, now.”

“I just left his place. We were— Fuck!” Doc punched his steering wheel, his fist flying into the worn leather, over and over. “I’m on the way,” he growled.

“I’m calling the rest of the team.” Cooper cut the line, and Doc threw his cell phone into the passenger seat. His hands gripped the steering wheel, hard enough that the whole column shook. He bellowed, screaming at the windshield.

Behind him, a pair of headlights merged into his lane.

A red light ahead forced him to stop. He slammed on the brakes, a squeal of tires and burning rubber barely helping him to stop in time. He cursed through the light, fury and frustration coursing through his body, making him shake, making him want to rip his car apart with his bare hands. How? Why? Fitz was one of the best on their team, quiet and professional. And young. One of the youngest. Just twenty-two.

How had Madigan found them? Why kill Fitz?

He froze, his breath still heaving as ice flooded through him. Just whohadfound Fitz? Madigan was somewhere in the Indian Ocean, floating on a stolen tanker, or so their best guesses said. Who was here in Tampa doing his dirty work?

The light changed, red to green, and Doc floored it, his tires wailing again.

The headlights behind him matched his speed, hanging on to his bumper.

His stomach clenched. Fingers slid down the steering wheel, knuckles going white. Ahead, a flyover bridge approached, rising over one of Tampa Bay’s watery offshoots. The other cars had disappeared, and it was just him and the headlights behind, approaching the bridge.

The car behind him swerved, veering to the right and accelerating fast, drawing up alongside him.

The other car’s window was down, and a black balaclava blocked out the lone driver’s face.