Page 1 of Deep Cover

Prequel

Addicted to the Dark

1

The first indication that the buy had gone bad was when the shooting started.

"Shit! Shit! Shit! Down!" Jesse yelled, and threw me to the concrete, following me down. We were surrounded by a ring of Asian dealers, all tattooed and over the top slick and mean. They made the motorcycle gang I'd infiltrated, the ones I was at the buy with, look like pussycats and scared the crap out of me.

Jesse throwing himself on me was just weird. He was the leader of the gang, tattooed and bearded and angry pretty much 24/7. He scared me, too. That wasn't a bad thing.

Because if you're not scared when you're working undercover, you're asking to die undercover and sometimes when that happens, nobody ever finds you.

Sometimes when that happens, it’s just assumed you went rogue. Police officer drawn into the other side. Was it the drugs? The money? The machismo (or the female equivalent)?

They were using automatic weapons, AR-15s or something. The noise was tremendous. There was the roar of the Asians’ Mitsubishis starting up to get the fuck out of the warehouse. There was the noise of the bikes as the couriers saddled up to ride and the bodyguards started firing back.

There was the sound of a helicopter overhead, which had to mean the police were here, but whoever was firing into the warehouse, they weren't cops.

There were going to be blue deaths and that made me sick. Colleagues, gunned down, maybe Feds, people I didn't know, but we were on the same side.

They wouldn't know that if I got taken down. I didn't look like a cop. I looked like Jesse's girlfriend.

I put my head down and stayed still. I wasn't armed because Jesse's girl didn't ride armed. There were eleven men that had come to the meet, and six of them were soldiers. Four of them were couriers who would get the China white out to wherever it was meant to go. Their system worked better than most retail operations.

Then there was Jesse.

And me.

"Lily. Move behind those plates." Jesse wrenched my head up and pointed it to the far corner of the mostly empty warehouse where steel plates stood waiting for god knew what purpose. I nodded, best I could with him holding my head, and the instant he released me, I ran, crouched and low, the way any sane person would when there's gunfire.

The way a cop is trained to move.

There was too much going down for him to wonder how I knew to move like that. Anyway, my cover story wasn't that I was some sweet choir girl.

Where I ended up I had zero view of anything. All I could do was hear the clusterfuck going on beyond the plates. Law enforcement, Jesse's riders, the Asians we were trading with, and whoever had come in on their heels – or with them, no honor among bad guys – and everyone shooting and the helicopter coming down, guns firing. I wasn't sure anymore if the helicopter was law enforcement or one of the other parties. Or another interested party.

Damn, damn, damn! I'd been with Jesse every step of the way, sitting behind him, hands on his shoulders, watching, listening. The few times anyone asked my opinion, I gave it, always with reluctance. Yeah, I know the right way to do a buy of China white. I've studied past busts. But I didn't offer much in the way of info.

Didn't want to stick out that much.

What Jesse and the boys put together should have worked. The info I'd gotten out should have resulted in a clean bust by Seattle PD narcotics unit.

This cluster going on was a slip of somebody's tongue, maybe not even on Jesse's men. The Asians might have been compromised. The Asians might be the ones doing the compromising.

There were going to be blue deaths.

Fuck, this wasn't supposed to happen.

I started making my way toward the one exit I could see, protected by cement and steel stairs on the edge of the warehouse. If I got caught in the crossfire, the first thing my fiancé Ben would know about my deep cover assignment was that it had gone tits up.

Only Jesse was there. His bike was inside. He found me, didn't bother with anything like Told you to stay put over here or Keep down or any other stupidity. Jesse's a man of very few words.

He grabbed my wrist, pulled me. I stumbled after him. In the racket of shooting and screaming, engines and rotors, no one was going to hear us.

He pulled me after him, turned his bike, and I got on behind him. Everything and everyone was up at the front of the warehouse, far as we could tell. He made a two-pronged finger jabbing motion at his eyes and mine – What do you see?

I made a fist, then pointed west. I thought everybody was there, too.

On the bike behind him, I put on my helmet. Meant to keep roads from breaking heads and cops from stopping bikers. I didn't know what it would do for automatic weapon fire. We were wearing vests. We were all wearing vests. That at least was a comfort.

Jesse put his fingers between his teeth and gave a shrill whistle, enough to cut through the noise. His men instantly started backing up, still firing. I saw we'd lost Carl and maybe someone else, and that the Asians, confused, or pretending to be, were mostly firing at the groups outside the structure.

They watched us and then those who weren't already in cars ran for their Eclipses. Still firing. The longer we all kept firing, the less anybody would expect us to head out of the warehouse.

He waited until the very last soldier threw his leg over his bike and then Jesse gunned the motor. The tires squealed on the concrete. With the rest of the still-living men behind us, we roared out of the warehouse.

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