Hot Pursuit Read Online Free PDF Page B

heartbreak in just a few short hours.
    As it currently stood, with her hopes already brotherishly dashed, she would feel no more than a pinch of regret when Mick took one look at Maria, fell to his knees, and broke into song.
    It would sting, sure, but the disappointment wouldn’t last long.
    And one of these days, she’d meet a guy who thought
of Maria
as a sister and he’d fall madly in love with Jenn.
    He was out there—she believed it. Although, truth be told, he probably didn’t look
quite
like Detective Mick Callahan.
    Which, frankly, was kind of a shame.

C HAPTER
T WO
T HURSDAY , 29 J ANUARY 2009
    T he man with the neck tattoo was reaching for a handgun.
    It was a marvelous piece of artwork—the tattoo, not the gun—the swastika embellished and intertwined with curlicues and baroque swirls, to the point of being nearly completely disguised.
    Although the handgun
was
beautiful, too. The theater’s lights glinted off of it as the gunman pulled back his shirt to reveal it tucked into the top of his ragged jeans. It was a museum-quality Nambu Taisho—long and skinny, a Japanese relic from WWII—that he’d no doubt lifted from some wealthy collector’s inadequately locked display case.
    Alyssa Locke had already looked into this man’s hazy eyes, back before he’d jumped the flimsy metal fence that still contained most of the tourists, fans, and autograph-seekers. She’d picked him out of the crowd that came to cheer or jeer the stars as they walked the red carpet that led into this Hollywood movie premiere. She knew, just from one look, that he was jacked up on something that impaired his judgment.
    And in those fractions of a second after he jumped the fence and reached for that pistol, as she sifted through her options and settled on the obvious—disarm him by force or someone was going toget shot—she also knew, without a doubt, that using reason to talk him into surrendering that weapon wasn’t going to happen.
    He wasn’t looking to get out alive. He wanted his fifteen minutes of fame, with his picture flashed, postmortem, on AOL and CNN, his name spoken by the news anchors in hushed tones as he gained notoriety as the man who killed movie star Robin Chadwick Cassidy.
    And the killing-Robin part was probably a secondary goal, since he could have taken the shot from the crowd instead of making that theatrical leap over the ineffective waist-high fence.
    No, Alyssa was certain that what this man wanted, most of all, was for his life to be over and done.
    He’d targeted her as the weakest link in the Robin Cassidy security chain. True, she wasn’t built like her husband, former SEAL Sam Starrett, or their current team leader Ric Alvarado, or team member Jones, or even Annie, who was tall and voluptuous.
    Alyssa wasn’t insulted that he’d singled her out—it happened often enough. Plus, it gave her additional insight into his reasoning abilities, or lack thereof. He was not any kind of trained operative, or else he would’ve instantly picked up her years both as a Naval officer and as an agent with the FBI in her movement and stance.
    Instead, he’d chosen to trespass into her quadrant, flinching but not retreating when she’d first hit him with the full power and volume of her “I am in charge here” voice.
    “Stay behind the barricade. Sir! I said
Stay. Behind. The barricade!”
As Alyssa got even louder, she’d felt the swift movement behind her.
    She hadn’t had to look to know what the rest of her team was doing. They’d surrounded Robin, providing a very literal human shield as they hustled him into the safety of the theater.
    Sam, she knew, would dump and run—straight back to her, to provide assistance. But she also knew that this was going to be over before it started.
    Until, of course, the man pulled back his shirt to reveal that weapon.
    Which was when time slowed way down, seconds stretching endlessly out, as she opened her mouth, and, as if possessed, words tumbled