Here’s a new episode in the blog series, FIRST CHAPTERS. It’s the first exciting chapters in each book in the Micah Reed series! Expect a new one each week.
To get this book, click here. To see all posts in the First Chapter series, click here.
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A GLOVED FIST whiffed through the air, and Micah Reed managed to lean his head far enough to the left that he didn’t lose any teeth when the punch connected with his jaw. His boxing partner Layne Parrish was a beast of a man. Tall, muscular, covered in faded and fleshy tattoos. Micah wasn’t tall, or buff, or decorated with ink. He used to fancy himself an above-average boxer, but Layne’s ass-whooping was teaching him otherwise.
The most recent blow nearly sent Micah to the mat, but he was able to save a little bit of dignity by skidding into the ropes instead. The ropes wanted to catapult him back to the middle of the ring, but he wrapped a glove around the top rope to stay in place.
He held up his free hand and spit out the mouth guard. “Uncle. I’m waving the white flag. I think you’ve kicked my ass enough for today.”
Layne cackled and shadow-boxed the air between them. “Sure, man, if you say so.”
Micah caught his breath as Layne lifted the ropes for him to exit the ring, and both of them thudded onto stools to remove their gloves. Micah’s heart raced so fast he had to pause for a minute first. Around them, Glazer’s Gym rumbled with movement, sound, and the stink of sweat. Micah loved this place. It was close to his home in downtown Denver, was funky, run-down, and anonymous.
Micah appreciated anonymity. Not only because Micah wasn’t actually his name, but also because sometimes, you want to be one among many. To blend into a place where nobody knows your name, and nobody would care to know it.
“Got plans tonight?” Micah said.
Layne sipped from his water bottle and splashed some on his head before answering. “Not really. Going to see my daughter tomorrow, then I’m out of town for work for a couple weeks. You’re not interested in dogsitting my Bullmastiff while I’m gone, are you?”
“Nope. Not even a little bit. Sorry, Layne.”
“No big deal. You got plans?”
“Frank’s got me doing some research at the office. Stuff I should have done already. But what can I say? I slacked off, and now I’m paying the price.”
They stood and then navigated the dirty floor to return to the locker room. After hitting the showers, they walked out together, chatting about travel plans for Christmas and New Year’s Eve. Micah had none, of course. No family trips on the horizon since most of his immediate family thought he was dead. And, being fourteen months sober in AA, he didn’t see the point in going out for a big New Year’s bash.
Outside, Micah cinched his coat close as snow trickled from the sky like white confetti in a parade. Layne, wearing only a long sleeve t-shirt, grinned at Micah’s heavy coat.
“I seriously don’t get how you can’t feel cold,” Micah said.
“Oh, I can feel it, man, I just don’t care.”
Micah was about to reply when Layne held up a hand, pointing at a man standing next to Micah’s car, across the lot.
“You know that guy?”
Micah focused his eyes, then identified a white man with dark hair standing next to Micah’s beat-up Honda Accord. Blue suit, wool coat and scarf around his neck. Arms crossed, a leather messenger bag hanging across his body.
Gavin Belmont, US Marshal.
“Yeah,” Micah said, grimacing, “I know the guy.”
Layne cracked his knuckles and stepped closer to Micah, while eyeing Gavin. “You don’t seem happy to see him. Everything okay?”
“It’s fine. I think I should probably talk to him, so maybe I’ll catch up with you later?”
“Sure, man. Hit me up if you need anything.”
Micah endured Layne’s punishing grip to shake his hand, and then waited until he’d left the area before approaching Gavin. Without speaking, Gavin tilted his head at the car and walked around to the passenger side.
Micah slid in and unlocked the door for the Marshal.
“Hi, Gavin,” he said as his former handler had a seat and unraveled his scarf. “We’ve got to stop meeting like this.”
Gavin approximated a smile. “Feels like yesterday, doesn’t it?”
“What do you want, Gavin?”
“There you are again, with that attitude. I thought after everything that happened last time, we’d gotten past all this. I thought we’d come to an understanding.”
Micah bit his lip. “You show up unannounced, inserting yourself into my life whenever you see fit. I told you before, this is one of the reasons why I dropped out of the program. I don’t want to live like this anymore. I want my autonomy back.”
Gavin sighed, and Micah felt a pang of guilt. He didn’t know why he persisted in being so resentful toward this man who was only a few years his senior. Objectively, the Marshal wasn’t a bad guy. But Micah still felt an irresistible urge to punch this man in his stupid face.
“Odd choice for a gym,” Gavin said.
“How so?”
Gavin pointed behind him. “It’s right down the street from the Pink Door. You know who owns the Pink Door, right?”
“I do know, and I don’t care. Tyson Darby hasn’t hassled me in a long time, so I don’t consider it to be a problem. What do you want, Gavin?”
“Okay, I’ll get to the point, if you’re not in the mood for small talk.” He opened the messenger bag and removed a folder. From inside that, he handed Micah a black and white photograph of some guy with brown skin, messy black hair, and a tattoo of a skull on his neck. Looked about Micah’s same age, late twenties or early thirties.
“Should I know who this is?” Micah said.
“I doubt it. His name is Santiago Jiménez, but he goes by Snoop. Former cartel.”
“Sinaloa?”
“No,” Gavin said, “not one of your old crew. He was with an outfit named Dos Cruces, out of Baja and Southern California. Ever heard of them?”
“Yeah, I know Dos Cruces. They stayed far enough away from us that they weren’t a problem. The Sinaloa never had any beef with them, as far as I know.”
“Good. That’s helpful.”
“Why are you showing me a picture of this Snoop guy?”
Gavin went back to the folder and withdrew a few more pictures. He plopped them into Micah’s hands. When Micah looked down, the pic on top nearly turned his stomach. A row of corpses, partially-covered with stained sheets. Many of the corpses’ limbs were exposed. Bubbling skin, bulging eyes, tongues lolling out.
After only a second or two, Micah had to look away. His stomach scrambled like two alley cats fighting.
“What the hell, Gavin? What is this?”
“The literal name is N5A9, but few people know it by that name. It’s sort of like a strain of smallpox, but it’s much more sinister, as you can see.”
There were three more pictures underneath the one on top, but Micah didn’t page through them. He dropped the stack on top of the Honda’s center console and folded his hands. “Please don’t surprise me like that again.”
“Sorry.”
“You said you were going to get to the point.”
Gavin cleared his throat. “Santiago Jiménez, during his time in the cartel, stole some of this smallpox strain from a group of particularly nasty Serbians to give to Dos Cruces. It’s never been recovered.”
“And?”
“And we need to recover it.”
“So, why don’t you pick him up, sweat him, throw him in jail? Isn’t that what you people do best?”
Gavin shook his head. “FBI and others have tried that several times. Claims he doesn’t have it, and he’s been on-message about it since we first questioned him. If he does know where it is, he’s not telling. Believe me, we’ve used every method of interrogation, turned over every rock.” Gavin reached back into the bag for a different folder and pulled out a printout.
Micah glanced at it, hesitantly, not wanting to witness any more real life gore. But the image seemed tame. A building for sale, some old abandoned mall. “And this is?”
“That’s a piece of property for sale in Las Vegas. Actually, not for sale anymore. It’s sold now. There’s a Nevada billionaire—I’m not going to tell you his name, but he’s previously been under investigation by the FBI—who’s selling it.”
Micah felt a little itch under his skin. He had a connection to Las Vegas, but he didn’t know if Gavin knew that. “And?”
Gavin set another picture on top of the printout. Two men in suits, shaking hands. The one on the left looked familiar, and when Micah saw it, he gritted his teeth. Kellen McBriar, Micah’s older brother. Micah hadn’t seen him in five years, maybe six. Not since before everything happened and Micah had disappeared. Before anonymity.
“That’s my brother Kellen.”
“Is it coming together yet?”
“What does my brother have to do with this crooked rich guy?”
“That’s a photo of your brother shaking hands with the billionaire I mentioned. They’re newly-minted partners. Kellen just entered into a deal to buy that piece of land, and he’s going to lose everything. It’s a rotten deal.”
Micah stared for a few seconds, letting the information sink in.
“Now,” Gavin said, “you might be thinking, since your living situation prevents you from contacting your brother yourself, that you’re going to call someone and get a message to him. To tell him not to do the deal. Well, it’s too late for that. Paperwork has been signed. It’s already in the bag.”
Micah’s shoulders tensed. He didn’t like where this was heading because he knew Gavin was gearing up to turn this into a sales pitch. “Okay.”
“But, it’s not too late for us to get him out of it. I have authority from the Justice Department to scrub your brother clean of this business arrangement so he doesn’t lose his life savings. It won’t be easy, but it’s possible.”
Micah stared at the grainy black and white picture of Kellen McBriar. He couldn’t see enough detail in the photo to detect if Kellen had wrinkles around his eyes, but he spotted a healthy amount of gray running through Kellen’s dark brown hair. Kellen was four years older, which would make him thirty-four? Thirty-five? Micah had known his brother was living in Vegas, doing well for himself, but not much else. Whatever he could glean from Kellen’s public social media posts. Wife, two kids, a few business ventures out in the desert.
Seeing this picture of his big brother tugged at Micah’s loneliness. His isolation from his family. And Micah resented that Gavin would have known that. Gavin could help Micah’s brother, but obviously, there had to be a price. Micah dropped all the pictures except for the one of Santiago Jiménez, AKA Snoop.
“And it has something to do with this guy and his smallpox strain. What do I have to do to get you to scratch my back?”
Gavin nodded. “We want you to get close to Snoop. Undercover, in a sense.”
“Undercover. Can I be a British person? I’ve always wanted to try the accent.”
Gavin frowned. “This isn’t anything to joke about.”
“I’ve got to deflate the tension somehow after you blitzed me with those disgusting pictures, don’t I?”
“Again, I’m sorry about that. I thought you needed to see it, to understand how grave this is.”
“Yeah, Gavin, I get it. What is it you want me to do?”
“Find out if he still has the smallpox and where he’s keeping it. We think he’s about to do a deal to offload it.”
“Why do you think that?”
“Because 28 days from now, he’s on a plane out of Tulsa to Vietnam, to move to a halfway house there. Vietnam has no extradition treaty with the US. We will likely never see him again.”
“Halfway house?”
Gavin reached into the messenger bag yet again and produced a pamphlet for Cornerstone, a treatment center in Perkins, Oklahoma. He dropped it in Micah’s lap. Micah paged through the pamphlet, eyeing pictures of some spacious mansion set among rolling hills and a vast expanse of wooded greens.
“Snoop checked into treatment at Cornerstone today. Locals call it The Stone. We think he’s going to make a deal while he’s there. This is a perfect situation, Micah. You have experience with drug and alcohol recovery. You’re from Oklahoma. You have cartel experience. There’s no one in the world more qualified to work this guy.”
“I have things to do here in Denver,” Micah said. “I have a job, you know.”
“It’s all cleared with Frank. He’s going to be working with me for the next 28 days while we explore some alternate angles.”
“And if I don’t do this, you won’t help my brother.”
Gavin frowned. “Don’t treat it like extortion or blackmail. Your brother got himself into this mess. The Marshals and the FBI are willing to take this risk for Kellen because recovering this smallpox strain is so critical.”
Micah rolled the Cornerstone pamphlet into a tube as he gritted his teeth. Felt manipulated. Once again, he was under the thumb of the feds, with no choice but to do their bidding. But, if he refused, Kellen would suffer. Would lose everything. Micah had done enough damage to the McBriar family already, and he couldn’t imagine being responsible for more.
Not to mention this smallpox strain. Those ghastly pictures of the corpses were a strong selling point.
“I’ll get you fully briefed today,” Gavin said, “and then you’ll be on a plane tonight. 28 days, Micah. We’re on the clock here.”
Micah stared at the picture of his brother shaking hands with a man who would steal his life savings. Probably his kids’ college funds. Micah knew he had to do this.
And he also knew the Marshal wasn’t telling him the whole story.
“Fine, Gavin. I’ll do it.”
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