So I scooped to pick up Ghost, and it was a measure of his pain that he snapped at me. But I got him in and pushed him over and down into the passenger footwell. I started the car, keeping low, released the brake, and stamped on the gas. The Edge lurched forward, and I drove it right at the shooter, ducking low as he blew out the windshield. But then the left front fender smashed into the door behind which he was standing. I heard an awful shriek and the tire thumped over something, and immediately, the scream stopped.

I muscled between that car and another and then cut left across the parking lot to the first exit. The passenger-side window burst inward, and I heard more shots, but I couldn’t see the shooter. I was too busy driving.

We got the hell out of the parking lot and drove one block and pulled into an underground garage beneath an office building. It took me only seconds to break into another car and ten more seconds to disable the alarm. Easy when you know how. I transferred Ghost, who was whimpering piteously, into the back seat. Then I exited the lot and got the hell out of the area.

Ghost needed a doctor, and we both needed a place to lie low. And I knew exactly where to go.

CHAPTER 146

OAKWOOD PLAZA

HOLLYWOOD, FLORIDA

Stafford disconnected the call and sat behind the wheel of his rental Jeep Gladiator.

Four dead.

Four.

“Jesus Christ,” he said aloud. And then repeated it over and over while banging his fist on the steering wheel.

He’d sent a six-man team, all experienced militiamen from the New Founding Fathers, one of the most radicalized of the teams on Mr. Sunday’s list. Men who’d been involved in serious operations—the shooting of an anti-fracking senator, the kidnap and execution of a CEO who was moving his plant overseas and taking seven hundred American jobs with it, and counterprotesting at voting sites from Miami to the Rust Belt. Men who should have been able to handle one man and a goddamned dog.

He debated calling Kuga, which he was supposed to do, but the boss had seemed a little twitchy lately. No, better wait until there was good news to report.

Stafford took his tablet from the open briefcase on the passenger seat and called up the profile on Joe Ledger. Looking for where he might be going here in Lauderdale. Stafford did not think Ledger knew where he should have been going. If that were the case, if Ledger knew where the Fixers were getting their gear ready, that cocksucker would be leading the entire National Guard right there. Since that wasn’t happening, then the likelier scenario was that Ledger had gotten the name of the city from the Cat—which was all that idiot knew—and was going to hole up while trying to plan his next move.

Fine.