Hellbent

77. Original S.W.A.T.

78. Worth the Trying

Acknowledgments

Also by Gregg Hurwitz

About the Author

Copyright

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

HELLBENT. Copyright © 2018 by Gregg Hurwitz. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.minotaurbooks.com

Cover design by Ervin Serrano

Cover art: man © Mark Owen / Trevillion Images; bullet hole © Malgorzata Smigielska / Shutterstock.com

The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

ISBN 978-1-250-11917-9 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-250-18500-6 (international, sold outside the U.S., subject to rights availability)

ISBN 978-1-250-19098-7 (signed edition)

ISBN 978-1-250-11918-6 (e-book)

e-ISBN 9781250119186

Our e-books may be purchased in bulk for promotional, educational, or business use. Please contact the Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at 1-800-221-7945, extension 5442, or by e-mail at [email protected].

First Edition: January 2018

3 Everything He Held Dear

Venice was a beautiful city. But like many beauties, she was temperamental.

Furious weather kept the tourists inside. Rain hammered the canals, wore at the ancient stone, bit the cheeks of the few brave enough to venture out. The storm washed the color from everything, turning the Floating City into a medley of dull grays.

Nearing the Ponte di Rialto, Jim Harville spotted the man tailing him. A black man in a raincoat, bent into the punishing wind a ways back. He was skilled — were it not for the weather-thinned foot traffic, Harville never would have picked him up. It had been several years since he’d operated, and his skills were rusty. But habits like these were never entirely forgotten.

Harville hiked up the broad stone steps of the bridge, the Grand Canal surging furiously below. He reached the portico at the top and cast a glance back.

Across the distance the men locked eyes.

A gust of wind howled through the ancient mazework of alleys, ruffling the shop canopies, making Harville stagger.

When he regained his footing and looked back up, the man was sprinting at him.

It was a strange thing so many years later to witness aggression this naked.

Instinct put a charge into Harville, and he ran. Vanishing up a tight street, he took a hairpin left between two abandoned palazzos and shot across a cobblestone square. He had no weapon. The man pursuing him was younger and fitter. Harville’s only advantage was that he knew the city’s complex topography as well as he knew the contours of his wife’s back, the olive skin he traced lovingly each night as she drifted off to sleep.

He shouldered through a boutique door, overturned a display table of carnival masks, barged through a rear door into an alley. Already he felt a burning in his legs. Giovanna liked to joke that she kept him young for fifty, but even so, retirement had left him soft.

He careened out onto a calle at the water’s edge. Across the canal a good distance north, his pursuer appeared, skidding out from between two buildings.

The man saw him. He flung his arms back, and his jacket slid off gracefully, as if tugged by invisible strings. Rain matted his white T-shirt to his torso, his dark skin showing through, the grooved muscles visible even at this distance.

The man’s eyes dropped to the choppy water. And then he bounded across, Froggering from pier to trash barge and onward, leaving two moored gondolas rocking in his wake.

Dread struck Harville’s stomach like a swallowed stone. He registered a single thought.

Orphan.

The man was on Harville’s side of the canal now, but propitiously, a wide intersecting waterway provided a barrier between them. As Harville began his retreat, the man vaulted over an embankment, rolled across a boat prow, and sprang up the side of a building, finding hand-and footholds on downspouts and window shutters. Even as he went vertical, his momentum barely slowed.

That particular brand of obstacle-course discipline — parkouring — had come into popularity after Harville’s training, and he couldn’t help but watch with a touch of awe now.

The man hauled himself through a third-story window, scaring a chinless woman smoking a cigarette back onto her heels. An instant later the man flew out of a neighboring window on Harville’s side of the waterway.

Harville had lost precious seconds.

He reversed, splashing through a puddle, and bolted. The narrow passages and alleys unfolded endlessly, a match for the thoughts racing in his head — Giovanna’s openmouthed laugh, their freestanding bathtub on the cracked marble floor, bedside candles mapping yellow light onto the walls of their humble apartment. Without a conscious thought, he was running away from home, leading his pursuer farther from everything he held dear.