Cutting Loose Read Online Free PDF Page A

orange juice with a thin slice of lime, maybe some papaya.
    Maybe not.
    His gaze locked on a low-slung sports car slowly turning the corner onto Somerset Street. Sitting up a little straighter, he took a last drag off his cigarette before stubbing it out in the car’s ashtray.
    Lily lived in a nice neighborhood, but not Aston Martin nice. She had a ten-year-old Ford short-bed pickup parked in her driveway, and her next-door neighbor’s truck looked older than that. The expensive import was out of place and showing up at an odd time of day. In the morning, people were usually leaving their homes and neighborhoods, not arriving.
    When the Aston Martin stopped in front of Lily’s house, Zach reached into the gun bag he’d put on the passenger seat and withdrew a suppressor for the Para .45 semiautomatic pistol he carried in a shoulder holster. Somerset was a quiet street, and Zach planned on keeping it that way, no matter who parked in front of her house, and no matter what they had in mind. He could imagine a few things, any number of which could end quite poorly for someone, probably not him, and to the best of his ability, not Lily Robbins.
    Van Zandt and Kesselring had played coy with the contents of the flash drive Devlin had been transporting, but during their briefing, Alex had laid enough information on the line to keep Zach’s stomach in knots until the Fourth of July. “Russian Nobel Laureate Gone Bad in Iran” was a crappy headline in any language. When the laureate was an eminent nuclear scientist, and the bad part was her collusion with the Iranian government to expedite their enrichment of significant amounts of uranium, and the whole mess was documented on a flash drive whose encryption key had quite possibly ended up on a New Mexico schoolteacher’s wrist—well, that’s where Zach’s stomach had started to knot up. Foreign policy issues aside, the loss of that kind of data was enough to get a senior station chief killed, let alone an expendable civilian like Lily Robbins. The problem being that she didn’t feel at all expendable to him.
    Reaching back in his gun bag, he pulled out a cool little tracking device he’d found attached to Charlotte’s ammeter gauge when he’d stopped for his coffee. He dropped the tracker in his pocket, and threaded the suppressor onto the Para, and kept his eye on the Aston Martin, hoping for the best, but preparing for the worst.
    He got the worst.
    Both doors on the sports car opened at once, and two guys got out,
dos pendejos,
one with a thick gray ponytail, the other with buzz-cut white-blond hair. They didn’t look like carpool buddies, or a couple of cousins dropping by for an early morning visit, and they sure as hell didn’t look like they’d stopped for directions. No, the men looked like they knew exactly where they were and exactly what they wanted. They didn’t hesitate when they got out of the car; they fanned, as in “fanned out,” each one taking a different side of Lily’s house and heading toward the back.
    Fuck them.
    Zach didn’t hesitate either. He rolled down the passenger-side window on the Shelby, moved the gun bag, and silently slid out of the car, no lights, no opening and shutting doors, no nothing, only him on the street and heading toward Lily’s house with a suppressed .45.
    Three weeks—that’s how long it had taken the CIA to come back around to Lily Robbins, obviously long enough for other interested parties to draw the same damn conclusions about the American woman’s involvement in the Salvadoran incident. He knew exactly what kind of people would have been sent after the literal key, and he knew who would have sent them: half a dozen governments, another half a dozen big-name dealers on the international black market, and a handful of shadow organizations that made their way in the world by straddling the line between legitimate and rogue. They