Rapid Fire Read Free

hair pulled into a ponytail beneath a BCCPD ball cap, she had deep
blue eyes that were wide with stress, though she kept her voice professionally
level when she said, “He’s back. We just had a bomb threat phoned in to that bison
park outside the city. Computerized voice and all.”
     
    “The
Mastermind phoned here?” the chief demanded, already shrugging into his jacket.
     
    The woman
shook her head. “Worse. He called Maya’s cell.”
     
    The chief
repeated the name like a curse, but the word froze Thorne to his core.
     
    “Maya?”
he said, and something must have leaked into his voice because the woman and
Chief Parry both turned to him.
     
    “Maya
Cooper,” the chief said. “The psych specialist that you’re re—that you’re
subbing for while she’s on suspension.”
     
    The
sudden darkening of the woman’s eyes told Thorne the chief’s slip hadn’t gone
unnoticed. She glared at Parry, then at Thorne, but said only, “I’m out of
here. We’ve got a bomb to find and a scene to process. Everything else will
have to wait.”
     
    She
slammed the door behind her, making the glass shudder.
     
    The chief
paused with his hand on the knob and turned to Thorne. “That was Alissa, the
friendlier of your two new coworkers. Sounds like you’re going to have
problems.”
     
    “I can
handle it,” Thorne said carefully, but the chief had no idea how right he was
in predicting a problem.
     
    It wasn’t
Alissa he was worried about, though.
     
    It was
Maya.
     
    Chapter
Two
    “Everybody
stay calm. It’s all under control.” Though her heart pounded in her chest, Maya
pitched her voice low as the crowd of tourists she’d collected in the parking
lot outside the ranch edged toward panic. “The police will be here soon to
check on the possibility,” she stressed the last word, though in her mind there
was no doubt the Mastermind had been deadly serious, “that there’s a problem.”
     
    The
tourists and ranch employees milled in a bare area beyond the parking lot,
shifting restlessly as though they had ceased to be single individuals and
become a combined entity, a spooky, nervous mob that could stampede at any
moment.
     
    Maya
strained to hear the sound of approaching sirens even as she raised her hands.
“Please stay calm. It’ll just be a few more minutes.”
     
    A few
minutes until the Bear Claw cops arrived. A few minutes until the bomb detonated,
minutes that ticked down on the digital display of her wristwatch.
     
    The
explosive could be in any one of the buildings. Or it could be in one of the
cars. Even in the big yellow school bus parked in the corner of the lot, Maya
thought with a faint shudder as the numbers clicked down from five minutes to
four.
     
    “Let’s
get in the cars and get out of here,” a man’s voice called, and others shouted
agreement.
     
    “I’m
sorry, that’s not an option.” Maya glanced to her right and left, where two
terrified-looking ranch employees were helping her keep the group in check now
that the initial rush to get people the hell out of the ranch had passed. The
three of them were holding the line, but the crowd could turn at a moment’s
notice.
     
    Maya had
studied mob mentality. She’d been in situations like this before.
     
    But back
then, she’d had a badge and a weapon, and street cops backing her up.
     
    “Why
not?” shouted the same voice, irritated now. “And who put you in charge?”
     
    She
glared in the direction of the heckler. “I’m a member of the Bear Claw Creek
Police Department, which puts me in charge.”
     
    She
didn’t give her name, because it had already been splashed too loudly in the
media, and she didn’t give her rank or show her badge, because she’d been
stripped of both until Internal Affairs finished looking into the Henkes
incident, a process that had been stalled several times by red tape she could
only assume came from Henkes’s supporters within the force.
     
    Three
minutes, thirty