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Izzy followed Caleb silently into the cabin. The opening of both doors at the same time hadn’t alerted anyone to their presence. As she fully entered the building and stepped around Caleb, she saw Hawk and Tex slowly moving in directly across from her. The kitchen was to their left and they skirted along the wall to reach the entrance without being seen.

Izzy spied Jace Paul stretched out across the couch, asleep. She and Caleb swept the room with their eyes just before Izzy moved around him and toward the sleeping man. She maneuvered her way between the couch and coffee table, training her shotgun on him. From her position, she couldn’t be seen by Jeter in the kitchen. She brought the gun down slowly, much more slowly than she would have liked, honestly, until it came to rest on Jace’s cheek.

The man’s eyes fluttered open and widened at her. When he opened his mouth to shout, she quickly moved the barrel of the Mossberg directly into his mouth. “Morning, sunshine,” she whispered. “Stay quiet for me or you’ll never make another noise again. You feel me?”

Jace swallowed hard. Izzy could see the pulse in his neck throbbing. He nodded as best he could under the circumstances. Izzy kept her eyes on Jace and hoped things went as well with Jeter.

She heard the click of a hammer in her earpiece.

“What the fuck?” said the other man.

“Drop it,” said Hawk.

“What the fuck?” the man repeated. “Jace?!”

Hawk sighed. “Think this through,” he said. He sounded irritated, like he was scolding a child having a tantrum. “You’ve brought a knife to a gunfight.”

A long silence ensued before Izzy heard a sharp clatter. She assumed Jeter had made the right choice and dropped the knife. There was a scuffling of shoes behind her. Caleb approached the couch and grabbed Jace by the arm. He hauled him up off the couch and cuffed him. Izzy stepped back and turned around. Tex was slapping a second pair of cuffs on the other man.

Izzy frowned at him. At both of them
, really. The man looked up and spat onto the floor. “Fucking Christ,” he growled.

Izzy crossed the room and stood a few feet away, directly in front of him. “Who the fuck are you?” she demanded.

“Oh, shit,” Tex muttered.

A loud, keening cry came from the back room. It sounded a bit like a raging or wounded animal. As the door flung open, Tex grabbed the cuffed man around the torso and hauled him to one side, out of the way. A scrawny asshole that Izzy finally recognized as Jeter Paul emerged from the room just off the kitchen. He was spoiling for a fight and he hadn’t made the same mistake as his nameless friend. He lifted a nine millimeter, eyes on Hawk who was closest to him. Izzy stepped deftly to the side and forward, clearing the Sioux from her spread. She caressed the trigger of the Mossberg and fired. Thunder blasted, making her ears ring.

Jeter Paul dropped to the floor, his gun skittering into a corner, far out of his reach. Izzy was reasonably confident he couldn’t even crawl to it. He screamed loudly but the sound was somewhat muted by her recovering eardrums. Hawk leapt over him; agile, Izzy thought, for such a large man. He kept his gun drawn as he looked into the back bedroom.

“We’re approaching!” Shooter said loudly through her earpiece. He might have been running.

“Jeter!” the two cuffed men shouted. Tex wrestled the unknown man back away from the kitchen and manhandled him toward the open front door. Caleb pushed Jace out ahead of him. Shooter’s large, hulking frame filled the doorway and he stepped inside. His sniper rifle was shouldered and he had his own Desert Eagle drawn and pointed at the floor. His shrewd eyes assessed the room.

“Damn!” said Easy as he fell in behind his former
lieutenant. “She shot him? What the fuck? I thought we weren’t supposed to shoot them! If I’d known we could shoot them, I wouldn’t have agreed to be a fucking spotter,” he grumbled.

“He ain’t dead,” Hawk replied stepping back over the man calmly. He holstered his weapon. “Izzy,” he said, jerking his chin at the back room. Izzy skirted around the two of them as Hawk grabbed the man whose feet had seen better days. Hawk lifted Jeter onto his shoulders as though he weighed little more than a sack of potatoes. Izzy barely spared them a glance as she peeked into the room at the end of the kitchen.

There was a bed by the window, covered with crumpled dirty sheets. No closet, so there was no surprise fourth man. In the corner, facing the wall, was a small, thin, blonde girl. She was covering her head with her arm and crying. Izzy sighed and took her finger off the trigger of her shotgun. The girl was alive, that was all that mattered. Anything else could be dealt with, healed, with time and care. Izzy looked over her shoulder and listened to the sound of the men being dragged outside. It was probably better if the girl didn’t have to see them. They could stay here, in this room, until the proper authorities came.

“Shooter,” Izzy said.

“Izzy?”

“Can you call RCPD and get an ambulance, too?”

“Will do, Iz.”

Izzy stepped into the room and got a better view. It was littered with fast food bags, empty soda and beer cans, and the
trashcan by her right foot was loaded with condoms. She bit her lower lip. Thanks to her absent mother, Izzy didn’t have much in the way of maternal instinct, but she was still a better bet than any of the six-foot Army Rangers outside. She set the safety on her Mossberg and leaned it against the wall. She didn’t know how much it mattered, but she tried to appear as non-threatening as possible.

“Hey,” she said quietly. “I’m Izzy.”

The girl didn’t reply. Izzy moved to the foot of the bed and debated whether or not to just sit with her until real help came.

“I’m from Denver. I’ve been looking for you. So many people want you home, Darla.”

It’s funny the way that the perception of time is always colored by the circumstances of the moment. Happy moments, like the ones when she was in bed with Caleb, feeling him moving inside her and always wanting more, never seemed to last as long as she wanted them to. Moments of doubt or fear, though, seemed to stretch out endlessly before her. If Izzy could have seen the girl’s face, she would have known which moment they were living in. Her ability to read people would have ensured a different outcome. But Izzy hadn’t seen her face. Not when she first looked in the room and not even after she entered it. Not until it was too late.

Sixteen-year-
old Darla Hale wiped her tears with the sleeve of her shirt, then she turned and raised a nine millimeter. The inner brass ring of the muzzle glinted at Izzy. H and K, if she wasn’t mistaken, because black moments really did seem to go on forever.

“Get down,” Caleb told Jace.

The younger man glared at him. “Fuck you.”

Caleb kicked him behind the knees and he dropped to the grass alongside his two friends.

“You’re gonna die for this,” Jeter shouted. He was sprawled on the front lawn, bleeding from his feet. Caleb hadn’t seen the actual shot but given the condition of the kitchen floor, it appeared as though Izzy had aimed for the yellowed linoleum right in front of the man’s toes. The floor had taken
the worst of the impact while the scatter had hit Jeter’s feet and ankles like shrapnel. It still hurt like a bitch, Caleb was certain, but Jeter still had all his little piggies, and they were all headed to jail instead of the morgue.

“It was a good shot,” Hawk replied, watching Caleb assessing the injured man. “Kept her head, played it smart.”

“Probably saved your ass from getting shot,” Tex teased.

Hawk frowned. “Let’s not go
that
far. I
had
him,” he insisted. “But Izzy beat me to him. There’s no—”

“Hey!” Jeter shouted. “Do you hear me? Are you listening? You ain’t cops! You ain’t shit. And you have no idea who you’re
—”

Shooter stepped over Jeter, stopped in front of Jace and the man with no name
—or wallet, Caleb had discovered. Shooter leaned down toward them. “You know me?” he asked.

Jace gave him a dirty look before turning his head away.

“I said,” Shooter repeated, “do you know me?”

After a second of silence
, Jace replied, “Yeah. I know you. Don’t matter,” he said haughtily. “When Preacher finds out—”

“Who do you think told me where to find you?”

Jace looked shocked.

“Bullshit” the nameless man snapped.

Easy cuffed him in the back of the head. “Hey, who is this guy, anyway?” he asked the others. “Does Izzy get paid extra for a bonus bad guy?”

“Depends,” Caleb replied
, “on whether or not he has warrants on him.”

The man’s face darkened. Easy grinned. “Oh yeah,” he said. “Look at his face. This here’s a wanted man.”

“Well, he can add kidnapping and accessory to whatever else he’s got,” Caleb said. “Plus, whatever he did to that little girl.”

“
Do
to her? I didn’t do shit to her!”

“Fuck you,” Jeter spat. “You think you know me? You don’t know shit about shit! You think
—”

The sound of a single gunshot came from inside the cabin. It sounded like a mid-caliber handgun, not Izzy’s shotgun. Caleb broke out into a run. “I thought you cleared the place!” he shouted at Tex who was right behind him.

“I did!”

If Tex was certain
, then it was true—he had cleared the cabin. Caleb struggled to put the pieces together as he pounded up the stairs of the front porch. Every muscle in his body was tingling. He was on full alert. He grabbed the doorknob and barreled through the entrance.

“Told you motherfuckers!” Jeter screamed after them. “She’s dead! She’s fucking dead!” Then he laughed.

Caleb had never had much concern for even the
idea
of a god, not with all he’d seen in his life. His mother had constantly prayed to a god who had never intervened for them. Caleb had eventually written it off as the last act of the desperate and powerless. But as he tore through the living room and turned into the kitchen headed toward the back bedroom, he realized he was both desperate and powerless.

“Don’t take her,” he whispered. “Don’t take her from me.” His thumb pulled back the hammer of his .45, in case he was just talking to himself.

He burst through the half-open door and lifted his weapon. Izzy was slumped with her back against the wall. In her hand was a nine millimeter. On the floor next to her, sobbing and blubbering through a face full of blood, the girl was pressing her hands to her face. It didn’t take much detective work to suss out that the girl had fired on Izzy and Izzy had pistol-whipped her with her own gun. Caleb wasn’t relieved, though. Izzy had her arm pressed across her midsection. She was struggling to breathe.

Tex moved past Caleb and yanked the girl up off the floor by one arm. As she was being secured, Caleb holstered his gun and rushed across the room just as Izzy was sliding down toward the floor. He put one arm around her waist to steady her. “Baby?” he whispered. “Oh, God, baby. No.”

“I didn’t see her face,” Izzy replied with her eyes closed.

“What?” he asked, but he didn’t really care. With his free hand he yanked the
Velcro over each of her shoulders and peeled off the bulletproof vest.

Bulletproof is a common but inaccurate term for body armor. Though vests are manufactured at different tensile strengths, even the highest rated armor is merely bullet
resistant
, not bullet
proof.
And they have a failure rate upwards of 20% even if they haven’t been weakened by the temperature changes of various seasons.

This…was not one of those times.

Caleb gently lifted her
T-shirt over her belly. There was a large impact injury, already purple and spreading. It was low, though, just above the waistband of her jeans. Her ribs might have been spared. “Baby, can you breathe?”

Izzy squeezed her eyes shut through the pain and nodded. “Yeah,” she told him. “Yes. Did it fail?”

Caleb shook his head, even though she wasn’t actually looking at him. “No,” he said in relief and drew her close. He wrapped his other arm around her and held her to him tightly. “No. You’re alright. You made it.”

He helped her outside where she leaned against the railing of the cabin’s front porch. “Fucking bitch got the drop on me,” she growled with one hand pressed to her belly. “That never happens. Motherfucker.”

Easy frowned at her. “You’re lucky she didn’t clip you in the head,” he told Izzy.

Izzy flipped him the bird.

Hawk laughed and Easy broke into a grin.

Caleb watched as Tex’s Hummer pulled up to the driveway. He parked it, hopped out, and opened the rear cargo door.

“Okay, boys” Shooter said loudly. “Load it or lose it,” he ordered.

The men of Burnout stripped off their gear, stowing their vests, weapons, and earpieces into the back of the vehicle. Caleb set Izzy’s shotgun aside as well as the handgun she’d been shot with. He was having a hard time staying focused. His hands were shaking so he kept them busy unloading both weapons and laying them on the porch. The task kept him well occupied, but he kept looking over his shoulder to reassure himself that Izzy was okay.

With everything stowed, Tex gave the group a playful salute and opened the driver’s side door. He took off down the unpaved road, kicking up dust behind him. Shortly after he left, the faint sound of sirens could be heard in the distance.