Deep Recon

Best of all, no ex-wife and a lot more pretty women. It definitely had been the right move.

It had been months on this particular undercover case. Last May, he’d become Donald Kincaid, a Key West–based gunrunner. It was miserable, cozying up to the scum of the Earth, having to pretend to be their pals. However, the months of work had gained him valuable information.

He hoped it would all be worth it.

McAvoy sat at his steering wheel, a burning cigarette dangling from between his lips, reading the file on a former Marine lieutenant turned gunrunner named Kevin Lee. The BATF agent had read it all before, of course—Lee was one of the major players in South Florida—but McAvoy couldn’t get over Lee’s impeccable service record with the Corps, ending with a tour in Afghanistan. He had no reprimands, no bad behavior, no warning signs at all—it was spotless. Sometimes, he thought, people just flipped a switch.

It had taken him months to get the lead on this warehouse. McAvoy was sure that he was close to the jackpot, finally—the light at the end of the tunnel that would get him back behind his desk at the BATF field office in Miami.

He could see men were wandering aimlessly in and out of this warehouse on Stock Island, the penultimate of the islands that made up the Florida Keys, the last being Key West, the southernmost point in the continental United States.

McAvoy had parked his Crown Vic in the lot of a scuba diving place next door. The dive shop had several cars and SUVs present, as it was running a night dive, so McAvoy’s car didn’t stand out.

The warehouse was supposed to be shut down, but Kevin Lee had taken over the property through a shell company. That was the thing about illegal operations—nothing was legit or permanent.

Peering through his Bushnell 8x30 Imageview Instant Replay Binoculars, McAvoy saw that the guards were fairly lax. There were only two of them, and they patrolled the perimeter once every hour or so—if they even remembered. One was wearing an MP3 player, while the other had been paging through a skin magazine, occasionally holding it up for his music-listening partner to share in the joy of the airbrushed, Photoshopped, silicone-laden female form.

Their rifles were slung unceremoniously across their shoulders. McAvoy was seriously tempted to take the warehouse now, but he didn’t have any backup. Using the Bushnell’s five-megapixel camera, he took several more pictures, then checked the memory.

The only thing he still needed was Lee himself. If he’d enter the building, and McAvoy got a picture of him doing so, that, along with all the other intel he’d gathered, would be enough probable cause for a warrant to hit the warehouse.

McAvoy’s plan was to wait until the night dive ended, and leave along with the other cars in the lot. If Lee hadn’t shown up by then, he’d try again tomorrow night. He’d been at this for months, and while he was eager to close the case, he was equally eager to do it right. It wouldn’t do after all this to get tripped up on some picayune piece of procedure just because he was in a rush to stop being Kincaid.

Moments later, as he was ashing his cigarette out the rolled-down window, he saw movement near his Crown Vic, and his plan suddenly changed.

McAvoy knew that whoever was out there would be easier dealt with in the open space of the parking lot. He put out his cigarette in the car’s ashtray and just as he was about to reach into the well between the seats where he kept his Walther PPK .380 a voice sounded from the passenger side.

“I wouldn’t move, if I were you Mr. Kincaid.”

The voice belonged to Kevin Lee.

“Or, rather,” Lee continued, “should I say Agent McAvoy?”

The BATF agent’s blood froze. He’d been so careful, worked so hard for months. How the hell had his cover been blown?

Still, he had to keep it up for as long as he could, especially since the other person he’d seen moving was now fully visible outside the driver’s door. It was one of Lee’s goons—a bulky Cuban named Jiminez—pointing a police-issue Glock 17 right at McAvoy’s head.

“Kevin? The hell’re you doin’ here? I’m just waitin’ on Lola, she’s supposed to be back from her freakin’ night-dive by now.” His partner in this undercover was a former Monroe County Sheriff’s Office deputy turned freelance operative named Lola Maxwell, and her cover was as a woman who, among other things, loved to scuba dive.

“For an undercover BATF agent, you don’t play dumb very well, Agent McAvoy. I was hoping that it wouldn’t come to this. But I suppose that’s how it has to be.” Lee nodded to Jiminez.

At the same time as the nod, McAvoy threw his shoulder to his left, the metal of the suddenly open door slamming into Jiminez’s midsection, denying him the opportunity to pull the trigger.

McAvoy rolled out of the car on his left shoulder, coming up on one knee. He hadn’t had the chance to grab his Walther out of the car, and Jiminez was still holding his Glock.

McAvoy wasn’t worried about Lee. Despite having led a rifle company in Afghanistan—or perhaps because he had—Lee never carried. That was what he had goons like Jiminez for.

Pivoting on the leg whose foot was flat on the ground, McAvoy rose and thrust his other foot out toward Jiminez, catching the large Cuban in the solar plexus.

Jiminez doubled over, trying to catch his breath. With someone as big and well-muscled as the Cuban, you had to go for something that would hurt no matter who you were. One place was the solar plexus, where a good hit would knock the wind out of you.

Of course, McAvoy had actually been aiming for his balls. That always worked, too. But he kicked too high.

Unlike slamming the door into the Cuban’s body, kicking him in the stomach got him to drop the Glock. McAvoy snatched at it, even as a bullet whistled loudly by his head from behind.

Whirling, he saw another one of Lee’s guys—the Samoan guy, whose name McAvoy didn’t know, but everyone called him “Pooky” for some reason. The man was holding a Desert Eagle .50 Action Express, pointed right at where McAvoy’s head had been before he dived for the Glock.

The Desert Eagle had serious recoil, so it was hard to squeeze off multiple rapid-fire rounds. Gripping the Glock with both hands and turning so he was sitting on the ground and leaning against his Crown Vic to prevent his own recoil issues, the agent fired off six rounds.

Or, rather, tried to. The weapon jammed after the third shot. McAvoy aimed unpleasant thoughts at people who didn’t maintain their weapons.

One of the Glock’s bullets had sliced through Pooky’s left arm, shredding bone and muscle and cartilage. Blood had exploded from the wound, dripping onto the asphalt of the parking lot.

Unfortunately, Pooky was right handed, so he still held the Desert Eagle. And he didn’t even flinch from the bullet wound. McAvoy wasn’t sure if that was because Pooky was tough or because Pooky had more heroin than blood flowing through his veins.

The Samoan squeezed off another shot from the Desert Eagle one-handed, and stumbled backward from the recoil.

McAvoy only barely registered Pooky’s issues, though, as the .50-caliber round tore into his left thigh, pulverizing arteries and veins, destroying flesh and shattering bone. Blood gushed from the wound, and McAvoy realized with certainty that his femoral artery had been hit.

Blinking away the tears of pain that welled up in his eyes, he managed to clear the misfire and squeeze off another shot with the Glock, one that went right between the Samoan’s eyes.

That, though, was his swan song. He could feel the life draining out of him, his limbs growing weaker and weaker, his thoughts getting fuzzier, his vision getting cloudier. The only thing that remained vivid and constant was the agonizing pain emanating from his destroyed left leg.

The last thing Agent John McAvoy of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives would ever hear was Kevin Lee saying the words, “Goodbye, John.”

LOLA MAXWELL wasn’t on the dive boat, of course. She was in a bar on Duval Street, clutching the same pint of beer she’d been nursing for over an hour, wondering where the hell McAvoy was.

He had said he would call her when he was back home, which would be after the night dive at the shop next to Lee’s warehouse. But that dive had started at eight o’clock and was scheduled to end at nine-thirty. True, the water was choppy, so the dive might have run late, but surely not more than forty-five minutes or so. It was only a five- or ten-minute drive back from Stock Island to Johnny’s bungalow on Eaton Street.

Which meant that Lola should have heard from him no later than a quarter to eleven or so. It was now creeping toward eleven-thirty.

There was a band playing cover tunes at the front of the bar, and they started playing “Brown-Eyed Girl” for the third time that night. That, combined with worry over John and lack of desire to continue being hit on by drunks, caused her to gulp down the remainder of her beer and depart.

She had a bad feeling about all of this.

When she came out onto Duval Street, the autumn breeze cutting through her shoulder-length red hair, she pulled out her cell phone, hoping that maybe she hadn’t heard the chirp of the ringer over the din of the cover band.

But there were no messages, no missed calls, no sign of Johnny.

As she ambled quickly down the sidewalk, expertly weaving her way around drunken college students and the like, she called Jean-Louis, her “associate”—a euphemistic term for extra muscle, in both the physical and firepower departments—in the hopes that Johnny might have contacted him.

“No can do, Lo,” he said. There was a lot of noise in the background, so Jean-Louis was probably at the Cutter’s Wharf, his preferred watering hole.

“I’m going to the warehouse.”

Jean-Louis hesitated. “You sure that’s such a good idea, boss?”

Lola snorted. Jean-Louis only called her “boss” when he was trying to talk her out of something. “I know it’s a bad idea, Jean-Louis, but in six months, he’s never missed a scheduled call-in. He’d only miss one if something awful had happened—I have to know.”