Doranna Durgin - Heavy Metal Honey

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Heavy Metal Honey

Doranna Durgin

Chapter One

Kimmer Reed peered through her night-vision goggles into a green-hued desert.

"Got me some dust," she said into the tiny voice-activated mike at the side of her

face. "Ooh, these next gen goggles are sweet."

In her ear, ex-CIA operative Rio Carlsen responded, "Got dust here, too."

Rio…she'd met him on an assignment, cemented their relationship on an unofficial

op, and only a few weeks earlier he'd accepted the Hunter Agency's offer of

part-time work. And here they were on their first assignment together, scanning the

Arizona borderlands for one very specific smuggler.

Also sweeet.

"Move in?" Rio suggested.

"Move in," she confirmed. They wouldn't spook anyone with their motorbikes,

sleek little hydrogen-fueled machines not quite meant for the rugged terrain of the

Coronado National Forest. Even here at four thousand feet of elevation, the desert

foliage lent itself more to spines and prickles and low-lying brittle brush than actual

trees, and the footpaths spit out a powdery dust at the passage of anything on four

feet or two wheels.

She and Rio flanked the trail they'd hoped the smuggler would use, with nine

hundred meters of combined night vision range between them. More Hunter agents

flanked similar trails all along this section of the border — the trails that led to

Bisbee, the unofficial drug corridor of the border. And now they had dust.

Kimmer said, "Could be the jackpot." And she grinned — fiercely — because

they were headed for action, and because there was nothing better than nabbing a

bad guy. Kimmer and her SIG, Rio and the Colt on which he'd recently settled.

Or to be more precise, Kimmer and her SIG and every other little weapon she had

stashed in her clothing. She also wore a light pack with camelback water supply,

restraints and the heavy lined pouch for the smuggler's contaminated dope — their

ultimate goal.

"Might not be our jackpot," Rio said. More laid back than she by far, he was

astonishing once he went into action. Which, since the blown operation that had

been the end of his CIA field career, wasn't as often as it had once been. Even now,

he still favored his bad side.

"Might be just your average illegal immigrant," Kimmer agreed. But she didn't

think so. The average illegal immigrant didn't have the means to buy a dirt bike, and

the dust they saw came from wheels, not feet — this particular runner had been, at

least to some extent, financed. Kimmer eased her own bike forward through the

brush, glad for her knee and shin guards — she brushed by a prickly pear without

taking damage, and then a cholla.

"What I don't get," she murmured to Rio, "is what's so important about this

particular smuggler. Let's get serious — pretty much the whole agency is in on this

one, not to mention the border patrol and friends."

"Contaminated drugs," Rio said. "Meaner than your average bear if they get out

into distribution. They pulled us in because we could mobilize faster."

"We're not immobilized by red tape, you mean." Kimmer looked to the side,

discovered him within visual range. "I just wish I'd had a chance to talk to the suits.

There are things going unsaid. Important things." Not that it mattered. They'd come

to get a drug-dealing smuggler, and they would. When it came to the bad guys,

Kimmer gave no quarter.

Kimmer gleefully gave no quarter.

And Rio laughed, angling along the other side of the trail from her, his

wheat-blond hair hidden by his helmet but his large, lanky frame making his sleek

motorbike look not quite up to the job. "Why do you think they stayed out of your

sights?"

Kimmer grumbled, but she knew he was right. Agency directors tended to avoid

her, simply because she had a knack for reading the truth behind a situation. Any

situation. Anyone.

Almost anyone except Rio. She'd had to figure him out from the ground up. At

first it had scared her…and now she had learned to revel in it. Just as they were

learning to reconcile Kimmer's alienation from all things family to his tight-knit,

compassionate relatives.

Rio's voice changed, became all business, "Here we go —"

For the dust had drifted away into the dark night, and the trail widened into a flat

area littered with the refuse of previous runners — water bottles and suitcases and

belongings that these travelers had once thought they couldn't do without. And here,

a figure stood by a dirt bike, shapeless under layers of ill-fitting clothing, long stringy

hair hanging limp, shoulders slumped with fatigue.

Good. The better to snatch you up.

Kimmer gunned the eerily silent engine and shot forward, balancing as though she

rode a living thing, aware of Rio a beat behind her. They circled the figure in an

unmistakable message — we found you! — kicking up dust in a ghostly silent

display and all the while expecting the smuggler to go for a gun, to jump for the bike.

But none of those things happened, and when Kimmer stopped her bike, she was

greeted with exhausted relief. "Finally!" the smuggler said in Spanish, and using a

woman's voice to do it. She reached inside her baggy long-sleeved shirt to tug at the

hem of the oversized T-shirt beneath. "Take this, and give me my papers!"

Rio sent Kimmer a quick look, as startled as she at what they'd cornered; she

lifted one shoulder in a shrug of reply.

"Well?" The woman tucked lank hair behind her ear and mustered up a glare from

a young face already careworn. "That's what you said. I bring this over the border. I

don't get caught. You give me my papers. So take your drugs! I don't want anything

more to do with them!"

Not exactly the gutter-crawling nastiness Kimmer had expected — just a mule,

trading honor for the American Dream. She took a second look, a closer look — she

saw the fear and exhaustion and the edges of hope. Kimmer almost felt sorry for her.

Almost.

"The problem is," Kimmer said, also in Spanish, "you got caught."

"I —" The young woman looked at Kimmer, looked at Rio. Her hands went to

her waist and the fanny bag now visible beneath her clothes. "Madre de Dios!"

"You must be kidding," Kimmer told her. "She was a mom. Probably a charter

member of Mothers Against Drugs."

"But they'll kill me!"

"You don't look so hot now." And it was true. The woman didn't stand quite

straight, didn't show any real energy.

Contaminated drugs.

She made her choice.

And then Rio lifted his head in alarm and said, "Kimmer —" and the world

exploded into light and gunfire. Kimmer ripped off her goggles and abandoned the

bike to hit the dirt. Cholla spines drove through her leather gloves and she blistered

the air.

"Rio!"

"I'm good!" he shouted back over the high-pitched engine of the dirt bike kicking

in, and the sudden din of several others joining it. Kimmer blinked furiously, pulling

her SIG from its low thigh holster but still unable to see. Sporadic shots kicked up

dirt in her general direction, and she hugged the ground, exposing herself just enough

to see two new bikes crash into the drug mule's bike.

Kimmer realized then that the woman would be killed — she was a liability

now — and she took a shot at the dark round blur of a bike tire, wasted another into

the dirt just to make sure she had their attention. Return fire kept her low as Rio

followed her example — another moment of sound and blurry darkness and vague

movement, and the motorbikes raced away, two in tandem and a belated third

gunning off in the opposite direction with Kimmer sprinting up to take a chance at it.

She stumbled over something soft but solid and went down, brushing up against

another cholla. "Sonuva —!"

"She got away with it," said Rio — he whom she had tripped over. "I saw that

much. Sort of."

Kimmer squinted into the night with futility and little result. "And we got nothing."

And now the contaminated drugs were on their way to the dealer pipeline — and

Kimmer had the strong feeling they were about to discover what the stakes had really

been.

Chapter Two

The bad-guy drug smugglers got away in the dark desert. The drug mule had also

escaped, still carrying her payload.

And here Kimmer sat in a meeting.

She plucked at the prickly pear spines in the tender skin of her inner wrist. Not the

big obvious ones, but the almost invisible ones, fine barbed hairs that made their

presence more known with each passing moment. Beside her, Rio casually crossed

his ankle over his knee, managing to nudge her in the process. A pay attention

signal.

Fine. This sleek conference room was supposed to impress her. The fact that

they'd been helicoptered to Tucson was supposed to impress her.

Thing was, she'd seen what she needed to see. Stripped of her weapons — they

thought — and escorted into this government building where a handful of men took

their time arriving and then only glanced at Kimmer and Rio, murmuring among

themselves until the final participant arrived — Owen Hunter.

And meanwhile she'd already looked the men over — already knew what they had

in mind. "We're going to get scolded," she said under her breath to Rio, seeing he'd

heard by the tilt of his head and the amusement in his dark, angled eyes. Everything

about Rio came angled, a courtesy of his heritage — strong Danish bones beneath

sculpted Japanese-stamped features.

He was no more impressed by this gathering of authority figures than she. They'd

both rather be out in the field, coordinating with other Hunter agents to track down

the missing drugs. They had suspect names; they had favorite distribution channels.

They had places to start.

Though the point had been to get the stuff before it hit distribution at all.

"What about that?" Kimmer asked abruptly, as the suits shuffled their chairs up to

the table in the wake of Owen's arrival. "How the heck did that stuff get so

contaminated that it brought you all together?"

Owen, who had greeted her with a nod, now cleared his throat — she knew it for

the request that it was. Don't cause trouble.

Too late. This little gathering was all about chastising them, about imprinting them

with the importance of what they had failed to do and shaming them into bursting out

upon the world to finish the job.

Kimmer wasn't too keen on being shamed.

She was, however, pretty much into bursting out upon the world and taking down

the bad guys.

One of them cleared his throat. A white middle-aged man with a hairstyle that

didn't quite acknowledge his advancing baldness. "About that," he said, and then

stopped, starting again on a different tack. "I'm Thomas Keen, assistant director of

the Homeland Security Terrorist Threat Integration Center. This is Gregor Spellman,

deputy commissioner of the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol." This, a stern

tea-colored man with silvered hair and a perceptible facelift. The final nod went to a

black man who looked annoyed at the whole idea of being here. "And Jaden DuBois,

FBI counterterrorism."

Owen Hunter, indisputable authority of the elite family-owned Hunter Agency,

didn't offer any title at all. But he did nod at her, and she nodded back. "Kimmer

Reed," she said, and glanced down at her leather biking duds. "All-round kick-ass

chick. And Rio Carlsen —"

"Her sidekick," Rio said dryly.

Keen's lips thinned briefly. Then he leaned forward to tap the closed file folder on

the table in front of him. "I'll get right to the point. We were very disappointed in the

results of last night's stakeout."

Tell me about it. Kimmer scratched at the prickly pear spines in her wrist, and

said nothing.

"Frankly," Spellman said, tapping the table with some authority, "I need to be

convinced that we have the best possible team before we go further." He looked at

Kimmer; she smiled back in the most predatory way. So she wasn't all that big; so

she had her totally curly dark chestnut hair cut cap-short in a gamin style and

guileless eyes he would never be able to read. She was also honed by the best

training Hunter could provide after they found her — a runaway caught in the middle

of an undercover op — and a dossier of successful assignments. Not to mention

that brutal childhood.

Owen cleared his throat. "Don't waste our time by going there, gentlemen. You

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HeavyMetalHoneyByDorannaDurgin ChapterOne KimmerReedpeeredthroughhernight-visiongogglesintoagreen-hueddesert."Gotmesomedust,"shesaidintothetinyvoice-activatedmikeatthesideofherface."Ooh,thesenextgengogglesaresweet."Inherear,ex-CIAoperativeRioCarlsenresponded,"Gotdusthere,too."Rio…she'dmethimonanassi...

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Doranna Durgin - Heavy Metal Honey

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