Shadow Girl (An Afton Tangler Thriller) - Softcover

Mom Chao Cherry hunched forward in a broken wicker chair and stared anxiously across the Mississippi River toward the University of Minnesota campus. Almost unrecognizable as a wealthy khunying from Bangkok, she wore a polyester blouse and baggy pants, cheap rubber flip-flops, and carried an eight ball of cocaine in her handbag. Only her red lacquered nails, edged in twenty-four karat gold, hinted at her ridiculous wealth.

“Time?” Mom Chao Cherry asked in an accent that probably sounded Thai or Chinese to a Westerner, but to a linguist’s ear, clearly betrayed her American heritage.

“Paed nalika,” Narong replied. Eight o’clock.

The corners of Mom Chao Cherry’s mouth crinkled faintly, giving her aging face the appearance of a patient but ravenous crocodile. “Di yeiym,” she said. Most excellent.

She hadn’t been back to America in more than sixty years, ever since her missionary parents had dragged her off to Asia to bring the word of Jesus to the impoverished, war-ravaged people of China. But this homecoming felt incredibly sweet. Like sweet revenge. Now, relaxing slightly, she reached into her bag and pulled out a cigarette. Lit it with a hissing lighter and inhaled deeply. She would have preferred to imbibe her drug of choice, cocaine, but that would have to wait. Right now there was wild work to be done.

Narong, who was old beyond his years at twenty-four, lifted the PF-89 rocket launcher onto his right shoulder and braced himself. Two years of compulsory service in the Royal Thai Armed Forces and another two years in the private employ of Mom Chao Cherry had taught him to truly love all forms of weaponry. He was in awe of their cold precision and the impersonal way in which they delivered death. Narong, whose name literally meant “to make war,” hungered for the moment when he could sight a potential target in his crosshairs, gently squeeze the trigger, and feel the pulse-pounding rush of total destruction. For close-up work, he was an expert in awud mied, or Thai knife fighting.

They’d come to this third-floor room above the Huang Sheng Noodle Factory some two hours earlier, right after they’d received the call from their hospital contact. Entering through the back door, eyes downcast, they’d pushed past the cooks and dishwashers that toiled in the hot, humid, clattering kitchen where bean sprouts littered the floors and orders were barked out in greengrocer Cantonese.

Up to the top floor they’d been led by the nervous owner, and then down a long hallway lit with bare bulbs. They’d ghosted past small cramped dormitory rooms that held two and three sets of narrow bunk beds, finally emerging in this end room with a lumpy bed and the smell of rancid cooking oil and mouse droppings. A room with a single window that afforded the perfect prospect of the slow rolling Mississippi River and, beyond it, the University of Minnesota Medical Center complex.

The helicopter swept in from the north, decelerating to approximately five knots. Two pilots in a Bell 407 who’d made this run a hundred times before. They’d just dropped out of an indigo blue sky scattered with bright stars like jacks strewn haphazardly across a lush cashmere blanket. A mile to their right, Minneapolis skyscrapers twinkled in the night—the IDS tower, Capella Tower, and the Wells Fargo Center, as well as a dozen high-rise luxury condominiums. Closer still was the newly constructed football stadium, raking the skyline with its harsh, unforgiving wall of reflective glass.

The chief pilot, Captain Sam Buell, had his hands on the cyclic stick, his feet working the rudder pedals. He was carrying no emergency patients tonight, just medical cargo he’d picked up in Madison, Wisconsin. So, an easy run for Buell, who was looking forward to spending the night with his girlfriend, who lived in a nearby North Loop condo. She was an assistant producer at a TV station, a hot chick with a killer body and a healthy appetite for experimental sex. She had no clue that Buell had a pregnant wife waiting for him back home. Or if she’d figured it out, she didn’t much care.

Buell’s feet worked the pedals as he swung the helo around in a wide arc over the turgid Mississippi. He was preparing for their final approach. All he had to do now was coast in slowly and drop the skids. The landing zone, with its sixteen green perimeter lights, shone like a Christmas tree. No problem there.

“Looking good,” his copilot, Josh Ansel, said. “Ten-degree angle, LZ dead ahead. Almost there.” Ansel was young and unmarried, so he might be hitting the clubs tonight. First Avenue, where Soul Asylum and Prince had gotten their starts. Like that.

Buell hovered the Bell 407 over the dark ribbon of river as easily as if it were a giant bubble floating on a summer breeze. He was just about to throttle back and adjust his airspeed and pitch when a tiny flash, no bigger than a lightning bug, caught his eye.

Buell frowned, concerned that someone might be aiming a laser pointer directly at his windshield. There were dormitories close by, jammed right up to the edge of the towering riverbank, so there was always the chance some dumb-ass kid would pick him out as a target.

But dumb-ass kids were the least of Captain Buell’s problems at this moment. The rocket slammed into his helicopter with an angry hiss, piercing the metal skin, pulverizing the gearbox, sending the bird into a perilous and lethal spin. In the darkened cockpit, with the hydraulics gone, sensor gauges, warning lights, and control switches all went crazy. Ansel screamed in fear, or maybe it was pain from the raging inferno that suddenly engulfed them.

And when the big explosion came, a riotous event of incandescent shrapnel, Ansel was already gone, bones and flesh sizzled into an unrecognizable carcass. Buell had maybe a split-second longer, time for a fleeting regret about a baby he’d never see.

Two students walking back from Stoll’s Bar in Stadium Village witnessed the eruption overhead. A raging, pulsing beacon that looked as if a big-ass rocket had just blown up in space.

“Holy shit!” one of the men cried as the remains of the flaming bubble jerked and throbbed in the air and then, like an angry demon cast out of the bowels of hell, hurtled downward in a furious arc, screaming directly toward them. The two men had just enough presence of mind to dive beneath a bus shelter before sheets of fire and twisted hunks of metal rained down upon them.

Nearby, on Washington Avenue, a bus was hit by an enormous fireball of white-hot metal that shattered the windshield and sent the vehicle crashing into a light standard. A rotor spun free of the plummeting debris and carved its way into the side of the chemistry building. More debris rained down as students returning from Walter Library, a Chekhov play at Northrop Auditorium, and a French film festival at the Bell Museum, all began to shriek in terror. A minute later, a dozen sirens cranked up to join the unholy cacophony.

2

It was the springtime of unrest. Of students protesting loans they claimed rendered them indentured servants for the better part of a decade. Of real estate developers paying rock-bottom prices for rat-hole boarding houses, booting out tenants, and then throwing up overpriced, high-rise dorms. Of angry people hanging around the dismal cluster of bars, retail, and restaurants directly adjacent to the University of Minnesota that was known as Dinkytown. A place that, in its heyday, had been a hub of fine bookstores, interesting head shops, and coffeehouses haunted by university intelligentsia and the ghost of Bob Dylan.

It was all different now. Nobody wore tie-dye and worried about banning the bomb or building a better world. Now students huddled over mobile devices, muttering and malcontent, never rallying together over one particular cause, but still very freaking pissed off.

Family Liaison Officer Afton Tangler and Detective Max Montgomery, both of the Minneapolis Police Department, had just endured a particularly harrowing university neighborhood meeting a few blocks away at Windmere Elementary School. Afton was supposed to have delivered a quasi pep talk on victims’ advocacy rights, but the meeting had quickly devolved into Max being harassed and shouted down by a gang of wild-eyed students who were across-the-board angry at what they termed “police brutality.” Which basically meant they’d probably been ticketed or arrested for drunkenly racing their cars up and down University Avenue. Or smoking pot beneath the Fourteenth Avenue Bridge. Or turning a deaf ear when their girlfriends pleaded “no” during a drunken party.

“Wait until their precious BMWs get jacked,” Max said, practically grinding his teeth. “Then who are they gonna call? Ghostbusters?”

They were cruising down University Avenue in Max’s Hyundai Sonata, slipping past fraternity houses, copy shops, student centers, and imposing buildings with Ionic columns and donor names carved high on marble cornices. Buildings named after academic superstars in chemistry, geology, and mathematics whose names and accomplishments had long since been forgotten.

“Nobody wanted to talk victim advocacy,” Max grumped. “We were sent in as sacrificial lambs.”

“Of course we were,” Afton said. “That was the edict that came down from on high.”

Afton was the more politically savvy of the two, a sociology major and family liaison officer who was used to dealing with victims and family members caught in the messy aftermath of murder and trauma. Max, on the other hand, was a hot reactor. A veteran police detective who didn’t worry about decorum and political correctness. Of course, when you found yourself in a life-threatening situation—say, some asshole hopped up on bath salts was charging directly at you down a dark alley—you pretty much wanted a hot reactor on your side. A hot reactor whose Glock was loaded with hollow points.

“The police chief specified police presence at key neighborhood meetings,” Afton said. “Not much we could have done except claim we never got the memo.” Afton was a shade past thirty, with shaggy blond hair and the lithe, compact body of a rock climber, which was her current adrenaline-boosting sport of choice. She had the piercing blues eyes of a Siberian husky and the heart to match. Though she enjoyed being a family liaison officer, her sights were set on becoming a detective.

Max hunched over his steering wheel and searched the dark street ahead. “I gotta get this bad taste outta my mouth. Isn’t there a Micky D’s around here somewhere?” Max was silver-haired and in his mid-forties. Like most detectives, he was mistrustful and circumspect, with political leanings that tended to the right. He’d been married and divorced twice but was still clearly on the radar of several women who worked at their downtown headquarters.

“There’s a Burger Basket in Stadium Village.” Afton leaned back in the passenger seat and stared out the window. It was past nine o’clock on this Tuesday night and she was anxious to get home to her kidlins, Poppy and Tess. She was a single mom and hated being away from them on a school night. “Maybe if we . . .” Afton stopped abruptly. She’d just felt a shudder, a grinding vibration of some sort followed by a low-level explosion. It was as if the fabric of the universe had been ripped apart by something deep and threatening. She suddenly sat up straight, senses alert, antenna prickling. “Did you hear that?”

But Max was still grousing noisily. “Chief wants police presence, next time he can go by himself. See how he likes . . .” Angry static burst from Max’s radio. “What the hell?” His cop instincts kicked in immediately as he dropped his diatribe and pawed at the dial. Goosing up the volume, he swerved to avoid hitting two jaywalking coeds who bounced across the street, cool as you please, in maroon hoodies and butt-twitching miniskirts.

“All available personnel . . . Explosion at Washington Avenue and Oak Street,” came the dispatcher’s crackly voice.

“That’s right here at the U,” Afton said, stunned. “Like, ten blocks away.”

“Better haul ass,” Max said, tromping down hard on the accelerator.

3

Owen Hacket, more often known as Hack to his lowlife friends in Duluth, was waiting a block away, exactly as he’d promised. He chomped down hard on his cigar when he saw the old lady and the kid running toward him through the darkness. They were bookin’ it, even the old lady, bodies hunched forward, feet slapping the pavement loudly. Hack had heard the ominous whomp of the explosion—a hell of a thing—and wondered just how much time they really had before the cops and federales showed up. With visions of terrorists dancing in everybody’s heads these days, he was positive the feds would have their shorts in a twist in no time at all.

Hack had timed out his route earlier this afternoon. Turn right on Cedar, go across the bridge, then swing left onto the ramp that circled around to 35W. Then you were pretty much in the clear. After a hard, snowy Minnesota winter that was still coughing up an occasional spit of snow in early April, the pavement had accumulated a few potholes but was now bone dry. Which was a very good thing. Still, a dry run was always your basic piece of cake. It’s when you needed to pull it off for real that all sorts of problems reared up to bite you in the ass.

The Asian kid jerked open the rear door, shoved the old lady in, and sent her sprawling across the backseat. Then he jumped in himself, hauling his heavy weapon in after him. Hack gunned the engine and spun his way toward the green light even as the kid was still pulling the door closed. Then Hack was gripping the wheel like Dale freaking Earnhardt Jr. and making his turns—right, left, then right again.

His pulse pounding like a timpani and every nerve end fizzing, Hack caught a quick glimpse of himself in the rearview mirror and liked what he saw. Cocksure grin across his face, eyes in a half-knowing squint, buzz-cut hair. In just the right light, he thought he kinda looked like Bruce Willis.

4

Afton and Max didn’t have to go far before they came upon a scene of complete chaos. To Afton it looked like news footage that had been shot following a bombing in Lebanon or Syria. All that was missing was a grim-faced reporter in a flak jacket.

“This is bad,” Max said as they coasted toward the scene.

Flames lit the night sky, throwing eerie specters of shadow on the nearby campus buildings. Chunks of unidentifiable metal stuck out like jagged tumors from the side of a concrete wall. Noxious, oily black smoke boiled from a gasoline fire that smoldered in the middle of Washington Avenue. Injured students were everywhere. The walking wounded.

“What happened?” Afton wondered. “Plane crash?”

“Or some kind of explosion.”

Max ran his car up onto the sidewalk, threw a POLICE card on the dashboard, and the two of them jumped out. Dozens of people were injured and dazed, and Afton spotted a nurse, on her hands and knees, frantically applying pressure to the leg of a wounded coed. M...