Mace slipped the helmet on.

“Wait a sec.”

She looked over in time to see Beth toss her a black leather jacket she’d bought for her when she’d gotten the bike. Mace slipped it on. Her shoulders had widened enough to where it was a tight fit, but it still felt wonderful, because those shoulders and the rest of the body attached to it were now free.

Mace engaged the engine.

From behind the door to the kitchen there came the sounds of claws scratching and then Blind Man started to howl.

“He’s always hated you on that thing,” Beth yelled over the roar of the bike’s engine.

“But God, it sounds so good,” Mace shouted back.

Beth had already hit the control for the garage door. Good thing, because a few seconds later the Ducati roared out of the bay and into the crisp morning air, leaving its signature mark in burned-off tread on the cement.

Before the security detail could even react and move the barriers, Mace had already whipped around the staggered portable walls, angling the Ducati almost parallel to the ground. The machine responded flawlessly, like she and it had already fused into one organism. Then she was gone in a long exhale of Italian-engineered exhaust.

The security detail scratched its collective heads and turned to look back at the chief. She raised her cup of coffee in mock salute to their dedicated vigilance and returned to the house. She kept the garage door open, however. Four years ago she’d lost one garage door to her little sister’s overeager entry. She did not plan on repeating that mistake.

MACE KNEW that D.C. was the sort of town where on one block you were as safe as you would be in the middle of a small town in southern Kansas on Sunday afternoon in front of the local Methodist church. Yet one block over, you better have Kevlar covering every square inch of your body because chances were very good that someone was going to get shot. That was where Mace wanted to be. Her brain was wired to run toward the gunfire instead of away from it. Just like her sister.

She’d been working another assignment when a slot had opened with the Narcotics and Special Investigations Division. She’d applied. Her arrest record was stellar, her late-to-work and tardies nonexistent. She’d impressed the brass board and gotten the position. She’d worked 4D Mobile Force Vice, though it was now called Focused Mission Unit, which to her didn’t sound nearly as cool.

She’d started doing jump-outs as a plainclothes, which basically meant you cruised looking for dealers and when you saw them you jumped out and arrested as many as you could. In certain areas of D.C. you couldn’t miss them. She could hang as many as she wanted. The only thing holding her back was how much paperwork she wanted to do and how much court OT she could stomach.

She’d cut her teeth on street-level dealers hand-selling rocks and making two grand a day. They were small fish to be sure, but they also shot people. Then there were the scratch-offs. They were either checking a rock of crack in their palm or doing a lottery card, it was virtually the same hand motion. And lots of lottery tickets were sold where Mace worked. Yet she’d gotten so good that she could tell by the motion of the index finger at twenty feet whether it was a rock or merely Lotto. Later, she’d gone undercover in the drug and homicidal hell of the Sixth and Seventh districts. That’s when all the trouble really began. That’s why two years of her life had vanished.

Mace flew through block after block enjoying her first free day in nearly twenty-four months. Her dark hair whipped out from under the racing helmet as she quickly moved from the fortress of solitude around her sister’s house, to fairly decent and safe D.C., then to a neighborhood whose turf battle had not yet been fully decided between cops and bandits, and finally onto ground where the thin blue line had failed to establish even a beachhead.

This was the Sixth District, or Six D in the MPD’s carved-up fiefdom. If Mace had a hundred bucks for every time she’d seen a PCP zombie running naked screaming through the streets here at midnight, she wouldn’t have been so ticked about losing her police pension. In certain sections of Six D there were shuttered houses, trashed buildings, and cannibalized cars on blocks. At night on virtually every corner here something bad was going down and gunfire was as ubiquitous as mosquitoes. All of the honest hardworking citizens-and that constituted most of the folks who lived here-just stayed inside and kept their heads down.

Even in daylight people moved around on the streets with furtive looks. It was as though they just knew stingers launched from nickel-plated Glocks with drilled-off serial numbers or else hollow-points exploding out of virgin pistols looking for first kills could be heading their way. Even the air here seemed to stink, and the sunlight felt degraded by a cover of hopelessness as thick as the carbon emissions eroding what was left of the ozone.

She slowed the Ducati and watched several of the people walking by on the street. The homicide rate in D.C. was nowhere near what it used to be in the late 1980s and early 1990s when young drug kingpins wearing brutish crowns formed from the tendrils of the crack cocaine era enjoyed their reign of terror. Back then a body violently dropped on average over once a day, every single day of the year, including the Sabbath. Yet currently nearly two hundred mostly young African American males every year required a medical examiner’s certification as to their cause of death, so it wasn’t exactly violence-free either. The men around here craved respect, and they seemed to believe they only would get it in increments of nine-millimeter ordnance. And maybe they were right.

She stopped the bike, lifted off her helmet, and shook free the static from her hair. Normally coming here on a fat-cat motorcycle at any time of the day or night was not smart, particularly if you were white and weaponless, as Mace was. Yet no one bothered her, no one even approached her. Maybe they figured a woman not of color coming here alone on a Ducati was obviously psychotic and thus apt to blow up herself like some suicide bomber.

“Hey, Mace! That you?”

She twisted around on her seat to look behind her.

The gent coming toward her was short and stick-thin with a shaved head. He had a pair of two-hundred-dollar LeBron James sneakers on his feet minus the shoelaces.

“Eddie?”

He approached and looked over the bike.

“Nice, nice shit. Heard you were in.”

“I got out.”

“When?”

“About five seconds ago.”

“Just a deuce, right, so you just be an inmate.” He grinned at this insult.

“Just two years, that’s right. Not a con. Just a lowly inmate.”

“My little brother’s already done ten, and he’s only twenty-five. No family court crap for little bro. Hard time,” he added proudly.

“How many people did he kill?”

“Two. But them assholes both had it coming.”

“I bet. Well, two years was plenty long enough for me.”

He patted the Ducati’s gas tank and grinned, showing teeth so white and perfect that she assumed he’d gotten a nice deal on some veneers, probably bartering some prescription pills for them. Being seen talking to even a former police officer was not smart around here. However, Eddie was just a bottom-level huckabuck, a street thug. Not too bright and not connected at all, and the most illegal thing he’d ever done was to retail bags of processed weed, a few Crocks, and handfuls of stolen OxyContin pills on the street. The real players here knew that, and they also knew that Eddie had no information about their operations that he could possibly sell to the cops. Still, Mace was surprised he was alive. The dumb and the weak around here were usually eradicated extremely efficiently. So maybe he was wound tighter than she thought. Which could make him useful to her.