Outcast

She had spiked, light brown hair and long-lashed eyes. Several buttons of her blouse were undone, revealing a hint of enticing cleavage, and her skirt was short and tight, showing off very long legs.

Legs that could likely wrap entirely around him.

Ben tried to smile but couldn’t manage it. He kept his blue eyes on her and willed her to be the kind of woman he needed tonight. Uninvolved. Unexceptional. Uninhibited.

“You don’t have a government job, not with hair down over your collar,” she said.

He shivered as she brushed a hand through the black locks that fell over the collar of his white Oxford-cloth shirt, teasing the skin at his nape. It took all his willpower to remain still as she settled her hand on his shoulder.

She tilted her head like a small bird and slowly surveyed him from head to foot, her dark brown eyes telling him she liked his chiseled features, his broad shoulders, his narrow waist and hips. And the way his jeans cupped his sex. Her gaze was almost a physical caress, and his body reacted predictably.

She made a purring sound in her throat before her eyes met his again. “What kind of job does one do in D.C. if one isn’t in politics?”

“Does it matter?” he asked, avoiding the question.

She laughed nervously and let her hand drop.

I did something to scare her off. But what? He consciously relaxed his body, modulated his voice to make it less sharp and said, “What do you do?”

She smiled, revealing perfectly capped teeth, and said, “Secretary to an assistant undersecretary who’s an assistant secretary to a secretary. If you know what I mean.”

He knew he was supposed to laugh. But he couldn’t manage that, either. “Would you like to come to my place?” Sensing her hesitation, he quickly added, “For a nightcap?”

He watched two narrow lines appear above her upturned nose, between her finely tweezed eyebrows.

“You’re not a serial killer or anything, are you?”

He made a sound that might have been a snort. “Not hardly.”

She surveyed him for another moment, and he did his best to look unthreatening.

“All right,” she said, placing her hands on the edge of the polished wooden bar to push herself off the backless stool. “Just let me tell my girlfriend I’m leaving.”

He watched her walk over to a high-top table and confer with another woman. He nodded as her friend waved at him. Made himself wait for the woman’s return. He felt like bolting, but his need was greater than his fear that if he invited her home, she would discover his secret.

“I live around the corner,” he said when she rejoined him. “Mind if we walk?”

“No problem. I told my friend I’d take a cab home.”

“Fine.” He didn’t allow the women he brought home to spend the night. That was far too dangerous. “You ready?”

“Let’s go.” She slid her arm through his and hugged their bodies close. He could feel the weight of her breast through the arm of his black leather jacket as they left the bar.

He would take the brief escape she offered, the momentary warmth and comfort of another human body. Give pleasure in exchange. And send her back into the night.

1

The shooter aimed carefully and squeezed the trigger. One dead. He squeezed again. A second victim dropped in his tracks. He held his breath and squeezed a third time. As the third victim fell to the ground, he whispered, “Gotcha!”

The teenage boy standing next to him whistled in appreciation. “You’re a crazy man with that gun.”

Ben Benedict, former military sniper, grinned as he blew off imaginary smoke at the end of his plastic M1911 Colt .45 and shoved the gun back into its plastic holster on the arcade video machine. “That’s me. Your average lunatic with a gun. But you notice I won.”

The thirteen-year-old playing “House of the Dead” with Ben laughed. “Really, man, you’re loco. I’ve never seen anybody shoot like you. You never miss.”

Ben accepted the compliment without bothering to deny the charge of insanity. It was entirely possible the kid was right.

Ben had done his best to hide the nightmares, the night sweats, the daytime flashbacks, the trembling that started without warning and ended just as mysteriously, from his family and his new boss at Immigration and Customs Enforcement, called ICE, the largest branch of the Department of Homeland Security.

As far as Ben knew, none of them suspected his struggle to appear normal since he’d resigned his commission in the army six months ago to become an ICE agent.

“One more game,” the kid pleaded.

“It’s Wednesday. I know you have homework.”

“I can do it later.”

Ben shook his head. “I can’t stay. My stepmom’s giving a prewedding party for my sister Julia and Sergeant Collins tonight. My whole family’s supposed to be there. She’ll have my head if I’m late.”

“I can’t believe your sister’s gonna marry a cop on Saturday.”

“Sergeant Collins is not just another cop. He’s my friend,” Ben said. Their families owned neighboring plantation homes south of Richmond, Virginia. They’d been best buds until Ben’s parents had divorced, and Ben had left Richmond to go live with his father in Chevy Chase. After that, Ben had only seen Waverly when he visited his mother on holidays and vacations.

Waverly Fairchild Collins, III, possessed a notable Virginia pedigree, but his family had been forced to sell most of the land around their plantation home after the Crash in 1929. The Benedicts still owned the vast tract of rich farmland surrounding their estate, The Seasons, where their ancestors had grown tobacco, but which now produced pecans and peaches.

The family gathered at the old plantation house, a white, two-story monstrosity right out of Gone With the Wind, on holidays and special occasions.

“That cop might be your friend,” Epifanio said. “But to me, he’ll always be a sonofabitch.”

Ben bit his lip to keep himself from giving the kid a hard time about his language. At least Epifanio had given up using fuck every other word.

Ben had met Epifanio five months ago, when his older brother Ricardo had been caught in a joint ICE-MPD sting aimed at gang kids boosting cars in Washington, D.C. for shipment to South America. Sergeant Waverly Collins, head of the Metropolitan Police Department Gang Unit, was the man who’d arrested Ricardo. Epifanio didn’t know that Ben, representing ICE, had also been involved in the sting.

ICE was working with the MPD Gang Unit because so many members of D.C. gangs—the Vatos Locos, Latin Kings, 18th Street gang, and especially MS-13—had once been members of violent gangs south of the border.

Gangs had been named a danger by Homeland Security because so many of their members were illegal aliens. Ben had seen the results of gang violence—the extortion, the theft, the beatings, the senseless death and destruction. The government feared that foreign terrorists might recruit these kids, many of them gangsters without a moral compass, to commit acts of terrorism. Hence the effort to interfere with the gangs’ financial survival by eliminating all their sources of income.

Illegal aliens caught in the sting, including Ricardo, were deported back to their homes, usually somewhere in Central or South America.

Upon learning that he was being deported, Ricardo had asked if someone would notify his grandmother. His abuela didn’t have a phone, so he couldn’t call her, and she couldn’t read, so a letter wouldn’t work.

Ben seemed to be the only one moved by the eighteen-year-old’s plea. Despite warnings from Waverly not to get involved, Ben had gone to see Ricardo’s grandmother at her run-down apartment in the Columbia Heights neighborhood, a half hour north of his row house in Georgetown.

Mrs. Fuentes was a small, wizened woman with white hair she wore in braids bobby-pinned at the top of her head. She reminded Ben of his maternal grandmother, who’d died in a private plane crash along with his grandfather when he was ten.

Quiet tears had streamed down Mrs. Fuentes’s brown, wrinkled face when Ben told her Ricardo’s fate. Mrs. Fuentes offered Ben a cup of coffee, which he’d felt obliged to take.

When she had him seated in the tiny living room, where the brown couch was covered with vinyl to protect it, she told him how worried she was that Ricardo’s little brother Epifanio—who, thank the Blessed Virgin, had been born to a black father in the United States—would follow in his older brother’s footsteps and end up dead on the streets from drugs or gang violence. The 18th Street gang was already pressuring Epifanio to join.