Standoff: A Vin Cooper Novel by David Rollins Read Free Book Online Page B

opening in the fence, going to investigate nothing. The desert was as empty as my bank account.
    I moved toward the edge of the ramp, away from the tents and the bodies, my hand shielding my eyes from the glare of the sun. Sand, rock and low scrub – nothing else out there. The end of the runway shimmered in quicksilver. A couple of birds circled the desert a hundred or so yards away. Nope, nothing. I turned away just as a mound of sand appeared to move beneath those birds. I looked back, but I couldn’t place the movement.
    “You saw something,” said Gomez coming up behind me, squinting into the distance, also shading his eyes. “Me, too.”
    Whatever it was, it moved again.
    “There!” he said, pointing.
    We both started to run toward it. At first I wasn’t sure what it was, but then it flopped over onto its back. Jesus, it was human.

Four
    It was also a woman. Gomez and I were first to reach her. She was filthy, dehydrated, exposed skin burned red by the desert sun. She was barely alive. From the angle of one of her legs I could see that it was badly broken. Gomez began cutting away the pant leg with a small buck knife. A stick of bone appeared. It was covered in coagulated blood. Shredded muscle, dirt and ants erupted from a weeping red crater midway between her knee and ankle. I had no idea where she’d crawled on her hands and knees from, but it had to be a reasonable distance given her state. She was clearly in a lot of pain, drifting in and out of consciousness.
    “The buzzards … the buzzards,” she said, head rolling from side to side like she was having a nightmare, her tongue thick in her mouth. “Black buzzards …”
    “Did she just say black buzzards?” Gomez asked.
    “Yeah.” I had a small bottle of water in my pocket. Taking off my shirt, I poured water on it and wiped the dirt off her face before drizzling some more water on her tongue and cracked lips.
    Lieutenant Cruz arrived, panting, and pulled Gomez and me away from her. “Give us some room.”
    The room we gave up allowed a couple of crime scene investigators to swoop down on her. They undid her shirt, examined her quickly for other damage while she looked at them wild-eyed. Behind us, an ambulance came bumping across the desert, taking the shortest route, red lights flashing.
    “Black buzzards!” she cried out. “No!”
    The ambulance pulled up, the medics jumped out and raced to her side. The CSI backed off and let them through.
    “Looks like her lucky day,” I said.
    Gomez nodded. “Had a few of those yourself I see.”
    He was frowning at my bare skin, my back puckered where bullets had entered, the scar tissue ragged where they’d exited. A swirl of burned skin here, a knife cut there, mementos from various cases gone by. I put my shirt back on, feeling self-conscious.
    “So what happened to you?” he asked.
    “Life.”
    “What about your partners?”
    The question made me think of Anna Masters and mostly, unless reminded, I was successful at locking any thoughts of her away in a private vault. And I wanted the door to remain firmly bolted shut. She’d been my former partner in all the roles that counted, killed not so long ago. And no matter what the forensics report said, it was my stupidity that had pulled the trigger and blown a hole in her chest. So much for not thinking about her … History showed that most of the people around me seemed to come off second best, which was why I preferred to work solo, though that wasn’t always possible. Like now. “Do you really want to know?” I asked him.
    Gomez thought about it. “You just answered the question.”
    The medics lifted the woman onto the gurney and then hoisted it into the back of the ambulance. One of them climbed in with her. The doors closed and the remaining guy ran around to the front and jumped in behind the wheel.
    “Who is she?” Gomez wondered as the ambulance moved off.
    “The missing piece, maybe,” I said.
    Cruz came over with a wallet