The Killing Kind Read Online Free PDF

anger and adrenaline. The moment was three months in the making. Three months spent canvassing homeless shelters, arresting pimps and street thugs, and chasing wire transfers—all to connect a dead runaway from Duluth to the men who used her until there was nothing left to use.
    Thompson gave the order.
    In moments, the sidewalk was alive with agents, armed for battle and wearing body armor head to toe: FBI SWAT. They moved into position with silent precision. The three men inside had no inkling and no chance.
    When the battering ram connected with the door, Petrela and his men scattered. Purple Tracksuit broke left, diving behind the faux-mahogany bar as if three-quarterinch medium-density fiberboard was going to protect him from a fully automatic Heckler & Koch. If he hadn’t fired on the agents as they fanned out through the dining room, he wouldn’t have needed protecting. But he had, and was quickly silenced.
    Lime-Green Tracksuit had better instincts, if not more smarts. He took off for the back door at a sprint. Why the idiot thought a team of highly trained federal agents would neglect to cover the alleyway behind their intended target, Thompson had no idea. Maybe she’d ask the guy someday, since he was apprehended without a shot.
    Petrela, though, was another matter. He didn’t stick around to shoot it out. He didn’t flee. True to his reputation, when the SWAT unit made its move, he beelined for the girls, determined that if he was going down, he’d take as many of them with him as he could.
    “Ma’am,” the call came over the radio, “Petrela’s retreated into the basement! The door’s reinforced steel; it’ll take a sec to cut through!”
    Thompson swore. “He armed?”
    “Affirmative!”
    But by the time the answer came, Thompson didn’t need it. The distant pop-pop-pop from somewhere below street level was answer enough.
    Thompson dashed from the van, the other agents close behind. She leapt onto the street, the stiffness in her limbs momentarily forgotten, and wheeled around, frantic to find some way to reach the girls while there were still some of them left. Her eyes lighted upon the sidewalk basement door.
    The door comprised two dented, rust-streaked panels of checkered steel, set into the sidewalk a few feet from the front entrance—intended to allow direct basement access for deliveries. There were no handles or other outside access points, but thanks to frost heaves and foot traffic, the seam between the panels was far from flush.
    “Hey!” Thompson shouted to one of the tactical agents nearby. “You carrying a Hallagan?”
    The man removed the tool from his belt and tossed it to Thompson. Hooked at one end like a fireplace poker, with a flat, forked end like that of a pry-bar, a Hallagan is a favored tool of SWAT and firefighters both. Thompson jammed the hooked end into the space between the panel doors and yanked. Rusted hinges shrieked, and one panel moved, but not enough to get a man through. Two SWAT agents joined her, wrapping gloved hands around the ex
    posed edge, but the damn thing wouldn’t budge.
    And that’s when the new guy had a bright idea.
    Hank Garfield had only been with the Organized Crime Section a couple weeks—he’d transferred over from the MS-13 Task Force, where he’d been working undercover. He’d spent the past two years trying to infiltrate the brutal Mara Salvatrucha street gang, followed by six months rehabbing from a shoulder through-and-through after someone loyal to the gang spotted him meeting with his handler at a sidewalk café two hours north of the gang’s turf. It was a wrong-place, wrong-time bit of bad luck that illustrated just how far Mara’s reach extended, and it nearly cost him his life. Garfield’s handler wasn’t so lucky—he wound up in the ground. Word was that the two of them were close.
    It probably would have been better had Garfield asked—or, failing that, warned her at least. But he hadn’t; he just yanked a