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  Last Child

  Edita A. Petrick

  Published by Edita A. Petrick, 2019.

  This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.

  LAST CHILD

  First edition. April 22, 2019.

  Copyright © 2019 Edita A. Petrick.

  ISBN: 978-1386617631

  Written by Edita A. Petrick.

  Last Child

  Edita A. Petrick

  Copyright 2019 Edita A. Petrick

  www.editaapetrick.com

  https://twitter.com/EditaBoni

  https://www.facebook.com/edita.petrick

  COPYRIGHT NOTICE—ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  The content of this book is protected under Federal and International Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part of this book may be electronically or mechanically reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or retention in any information storage and retrieval system without express written permission from Edita A. Petrick.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, locations, events, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual events or actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Book Cover Art by thebookcoverdesigner

  http://www.thebookcoverdesigner.com

  Formatting by Maureen Cutajar, Go Published

  http://www.gopublished.com

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  Prologue

  He heard the door buzzer and glanced at the oval mirror mounted on a steel arm inset into the ceiling. It was meant to be a deterrent to customers with sticky fingers. Except Chris at the front counter rarely looked up to see who was browsing in the snack food aisles. If he did, his smartphone might get offended and shut off. He turned, intending to continue re-stocking the shelves, when something made him look again. The customer stopped in profile. He saw an oddly-shaped bulge under the back of the guy’s t-shirt and instantly knew what it was. He’d spent centuries learning to recognize the shape of concealed weapons. By now, he could not only tell whether a renegade Buddhist monk was hiding a dao under his maroon robes but also whether the single-edged, hand-forged Chinese sword’s dragon motif was made of jade or bronze.

  “Can I help you, sir?” He raised his voice, turning and walking slowly down the aisle, toward the customer. Chris stood at the counter, peering at the pump-control register. He would assume the customer was coming in to pay for gas—not to rob the gas station. The jerk spun around and yanked out his gun. He made it into one smoothly blended motion. He pointed it at Chris. “Give me all your money,” he said as evenly as if he was asking for his change.

  Reading the man’s state of mind from the tone of his voice was another skill he’d acquired in the course of the centuries. The steady tone of voice, coupled with steady hands, told him the jerk was not an acolyte and this was not his first hold-up. He was barely out of his teens, but he’d traveled the road of crime for some time now. Could he afford to stall with even something as innocuous as a remark that he was going to comply? He glanced at Chris behind the counter and knew the situation could get pretty ugly. Christian was scowling. It wasn’t a good sign since it was a product of his tough-hombre daddy who ran him through an exercise of “defending your fort” at least once a week when he dropped by to check how his business-graduate son was running the franchise. Roderick Guerrero lived in a large Spanish-style villa in Bakersfield. He was a third-generation Puerto Rican and lived up to his “warrior” name in business and everything else.

  There was a safe under the counter—and a red button he didn’t want Chris to push because he wanted him to live.

  “I’m taking out my wallet,” he said loudly to draw attention to himself. He made a motion of reaching into the back pocket of his jeans. At the same time, he glanced at Chris. “It’ll be all right,” he said, voice hardening with a warning, hoping that Chris would know it was meant for him.

  “I don’t want your spare change.” The thug spit then spun sideways and jabbed the gun into his chest. “Get back there and crack open the safe, and move it. I ain’t got all day.”

  “We don’t have a safe here,” Christian said.

  “Like hell you don’t, college boy. I’ve done my recon. You’ve got a safe, all right. What you ain’t got is a working security camera ’cause the kitkat who’s coming to fix it is outside, sleeping in his van,” the thug sneered and once again pointed the gun at Chris. He parted his feet in such a way that he’d be able to quickly squeeze off a shot in any direction. The fact that someone barely out of their teens was already well-versed in military strategy momentarily unsettled him. Had the 21st century moved ahead of him faster than he thought or…? Then again, the jerk’s recon was only half accurate. The gas station’s main security camera was out of commission, but the back-up was in place and would record most of what was going on in here. He wouldn’t have time to get the tape. Was that something to worry about? And did he even have time to worry?

  He took two steps back and one sideways to come between the gun and stubborn Chris behind the counter. “Look, no one has to get hurt here today,” he said. Just then, the sound of a siren rose in the distance. Chris must have pushed the red panic button. Wheeler Ridge was just a hamlet of half a dozen streets east of the bypass on Interstate 5, south of Bakersfield, but cops were known to stop for lunch at Markle’s Diner, a mile down the road.

  “Lousy college punk….” the young thug ground out and jabbed the gun in Chris’s direction.

  Even as he watched the hands holding the gun move, he knew he had no other choice if Christian was to live through this. He lurched forward and grabbed the hands with the gun, yanking hard to bring the weapon he knew was going to discharge, to point at his c
hest.

  The thug didn’t settle for pulling the trigger once. The echo of the shots sounded as if coming from a distance. He never could figure out why the sound of yet another briefly lasting death was always muffled. The pain flushed through him as sharp and predatory as ever. That factor seemed to defy gods and time alike. But even as he struggled to remain upright, he knew the wounds were closing, healing instantly, because with every breath, his lungs expanded more and more, filling with air, until breathing normally ceased to be an issue. His body would dissolve the absorbed bullets. His blood, wherever it sprayed, would disappear before any law agency had a chance to take samples. Now and then, when he reflected on this particular “miracle,” he sought to explain it through sublimation. Then again, if that were the case, his blood was a rival of dry ice.

  The young thug knew something was wrong. He just didn’t know what, or how poorly he’d chosen his current job. The punk’s eyes were still stuck to what must have looked like shredded balloons filled with red paint splattered all over a man’s chest, and he grabbed the gun. The police sirens were now almost in front of the gas station. He only had time to slash the gun across the punk’s temple, watch his body settle on the floor, and smile into Christian’s shock-stilled eyes.

  “He missed me,” he deadpanned. “And the cops outside should miss me too, if you get my drift. Here, you’re in charge.” He wiped the gun quickly into his jeans and tossed it on the counter. “Tell them everything but spare them the details. You’ll be all right.” He smiled again, turned around, and ran out the back.

  Chapter One

  “Agent Harmon, your last assignment makes the combined debacle of handling Hurricane Katrina seem like a miscommunication or, at most, good intentions gone awry,”

  Division Chief Brian Maxwell said as his opening remark during the review of the Escondido operation. Harmon wasn’t ready to retire, so he agreed—in principle. Besides, Special Agent Maxwell, in charge of the Los Angeles Criminal Division, was ten years younger than him and just as many years ahead of him in the FBI hierarchy. The office rumor had it that if he stayed in L.A., he was a sure bet to make it to the Assistant Director’s chair…soon.

  “I want you to know that if it was up to me, by this time tomorrow, you’d be directing traffic in Anchorage, Alaska,” Maxwell said, folding his arms.

  Harmon knew that such whimsical re-assignation was not completely up to his boss and remained silent, head slightly bowed so Maxwell would not think he was challenging him.

  “One of the first things that an agent is taught is that there is no substitute for good, reliable field intelligence,” Maxwell said. Out of the corner of his eyes, Harmon saw his boss’s chest expand, hold to the count of three, and then deflate a lot quicker than he felt was safe. It was time to speak.

  “Yes, sir,” he said, keeping his voice professionally flat and neutral.

  “Well, if you agree, then what the hell happened out there…?” Maxwell’s last words came out as if squeezed through a volcanic fissure.

  “The informant lied to us and the Escondido police, and since he was the police chief’s wife’s nephew…” his voice trailed off. The police chief, Lopez, contacted the FBI field office in L.A. when his wife’s nephew tipped him off about the Blue Pearl gang’s activity in Escondido. The gang’s main chapter was in San Francisco, where recruitment and intimidation of Asians was a relatively easy job. It didn’t make sense for Blue Pearl to franchise its operations to Escondido. Harmon expressed his doubts about the validity of the information and was overruled by the Special Agent in charge of the operation, his partner, Josephine Boscoe. San Francisco’s Blue Pearl mainstay was drugs, prostitution, and human trafficking—smuggling Asian aliens into the US in dilapidated freighters, then forcing them to work in basements and, in one instance, in a refurbished slaughterhouse, to pay off their passage to America. In Escondido, according to the informant, the gang was into grand theft auto. It had set up chop-shop operations in an abandoned tire warehouse. The FBI and the police were still working on their sting-strategy when the warehouse, located between Interstate 15 and North Central City Parkway, blew up, leaving three blocks of local real estate littered with concrete chips, mortar, and various automotive parts. Of seventeen casualties, twelve were identified as Blue Pearl members. Maxwell’s fury was driven by the other five civilian casualties—all local residents who’d happened to be in the neighborhood or driving by at the time of the explosion. Subsequently, the forensic experts from L.A. and the fire marshal’s people determined the cause of explosion—plastic explosives packed into the trunk of every car that was brought into the warehouse. The Escondido Blue Pearl chapter was into grand theft auto but not to harvest car parts. Its business was making car bombs—a lot more lethal an enterprise than mere car theft.

  “The informant didn’t lie, Agent Harmon,” Maxwell said, his voice still dangerously loud. “He was set up, misled on purpose by one of the female gang members. You, as the senior partner, should have…”

  Harmon interrupted his boss even though he knew it was not wise to contradict him. “I may be senior in terms of length of service, sir, but I was not in charge of the operation. My partner was.”

  “Semantics,” Maxwell snapped at him. “As the one with years of experience, you should have known better.”

  “Known better what, sir?” Harmon raised his head, staring unflinchingly at the thirty-something hotshot who defined his job only in terms of career and how high it could propel him in the FBI ranks. “Agent Boscoe and I worked from a premise that a San Francisco gang had franchised its operations to Escondido and were hi-jacking trailers delivering new cars to dealerships. There was no evidence to indicate otherwise. The information that we had clearly put the case into the Criminal Division’s jurisdiction. You didn’t see any evidence that would call for split responsibility between Counterterrorism Division’s involvement and ours.”

  “Don’t lecture me on my responsibility,” Maxwell said harshly.

  “Don’t make me a scapegoat for something that was outside of my control—indeed, for something that no one knew about. Once the sting operation was put into motion, we would have discovered soon enough the true nature of the gang’s operations. But we didn’t have time to implement the strategy, which, by the way, you drafted.”

  “Are you implying that the failure in the Escondido case is mine?” Maxwell asked in a dangerously level voice.

  Harmon knew that he should shut up and avert his eyes, but he also knew that if he did the smart, career-saving thing, he would have a hard time looking at himself in the mirror every morning.

  “All I can tell you is that it certainly is not my and Boscoe’s fault, and the Escondido police should not be saddled with it either,” he said, steel-voiced.

  “Well then, I suppose under these circumstances, we can’t continue working together, wouldn’t you agree?”

  “Are you asking me or telling me, sir?”

  “I’ll let you figure it out,” Maxwell said and dismissed him.

  Forty-eight hours later, Harmon parked his Honda Accord in front of a coffee shop on Beaver Street and walked the half a block down to number 365 Pacific Avenue where the FBI San Francisco Division had its Santa Rosa Resident Agency. The three-story red-brick building looked more like an old apartment complex with half a dozen duplex units than an office building. The bottom floor had a laundromat and what looked like a deli, while the access to the second floor was by a staircase that served as a natural divider between the two establishments.

  He climbed to the second floor and looked down the narrow corridor, wondering whether only one of the three doors he saw or all three comprised the Resident Agency “headquarters.” Santa Rosa had a population of an average city suburb—one hundred and fifty-six thousand residents. Did it merit a staff of three or four at its FBI Resident Agency?

  “Six, actually, but five of us are out of the office on any given day,” Special Agent Dahlia Jaworski said, offering a hands
hake when he walked through door number three and found himself in a deserted, open-concept office. She motioned with her head at the row of tall windows behind her. “My desk is right next to the window. I like to watch the street, profiling pedestrians. I saw you walking here, looking around for the numbers, slowing down like a man who’s still trying to decide.”

  “I was just looking at the numbers,” he said, shaking her hand. He reflected that she had a firm grip but not a power grip that sought to compete with a man’s handshake. He seldom liked anyone at first glance, but, for some reason, he liked the woman who was his new boss. He judged her to be about forty, within a year or two on either side, and though she would be in good physical shape, she wasn’t a fanatic about her figure or fashion. She looked pedigreed and comfortable, like a handcrafted couch that had seen better days but which boasted only the best of hardwoods in its construction.

  “True enough,” she agreed, “but once you found the number and saw this building, you realized that you still had a choice—to walk up the staircase or turn around, get back in your car, and head for a new career horizon.”

  “I’m a twenty-year veteran of the Bureau,” he said, hoping she’d not see his smirk, since he hadn’t had much control over what showed on his face ever since he’d walked out of Maxwell’s office.

  “I’m getting there, too. Sit down,” she said, motioning at the chair facing a desk near the window. “You’ve spent five years down in L.A., working the last three under Maxwell. So, what possessed you now?”

  “What do you mean?”

  She laughed. “You lasted three years without pissing off Maxwell. Believe me, that’s a distinction of sorts.”

  “Did he…?” he stopped when he realized that no matter how he phrased it, it would sound bad.

  “Banish me here, too?” She glibly filled in what he’d left unspoken. “Nah. I’m here because my ex is a supercharged lawyer with the Bureau in Washington. This is as far as I could go without getting on board a cargo ship. Besides, my daughter’s a freshman at Berkeley. It’s close enough for me to drop in on her to make sure she’s into books and not into group sex. My sixteen-year-old son lives with me here, in Santa Rosa. I knew Maxwell when he was still interning in Washington. He was barely out of the Academy but already had a reputation as someone who would be going places. So, how did you piss him off?”