No Honor Among Thieves: An Ali Reynolds Novella (Kindle Single) by J.A. Jance

the docks when there wasn’t a shipment scheduled for us, I knew it was time to pull the trigger.”
    “Are you saying you shot him yourself?” Ali asked.
    The guy laughed at that. “I mean I pulled the trigger in a manner of speaking. You meet a lot of useful people in a job like mine—you know, people who can get stuff done or who know people who can get stuff done. Years ago, one of them put me in touch with Julio, who happens to be a very useful guy from Naco, Sonora. He also happens to have all kinds of connections. When I told him what was up, he told me he knew of a place close to Hans’s dad’s place—an empty warehouse—where we could store the stuff temporarily once we laid hands on it. He found the drivers, located the trucks, handled the whole thing.”
    “Including shooting Taquito?”
    “Sure. I put a GPS tracker on the bumper of his truck and knew his every move. By the time he came through Palominas, Julio was ready and waiting.”
    They were nearing town. Ali saw, to her relief, that the roadblock was still in place. With the risky maneuver she had in mind, she needed to have all other vehicles safely off the road. The man in the backseat spotted the roadblock almost as soon as she did. He leaned forward in his seat, peering warily out the windshield. “What the hell? Turn around,” he ordered. “Go the other way.”
    “But they’ll see us,” Ali warned. “They’ll come after us.”
    “I don’t care. Go the other way. Now.”
    Ali slowed and put the car into a careful U-turn. She briefly considered ramming an abutment on a nearby bridge crossing a dry wash, but she chose not to. With Cami in the back and not wearing a seat belt, she was afraid to try it. Moments later, with the Yukon back on the pavement and westbound once more, Ali checked in the rearview mirror, hoping one of the cops at the roadblock had noticed the turning vehicle and come after them, but so far no one had. As her mother, Edie Larson, liked to say, “God helps those who help themselves.” This time around, the only help available was Ali herself.
    Ali’s mother also despised liars in the worst way, but desperate times called for desperate measures, and lie she would—to the very best of her ability.
    Ali felt the Glock pressing painfully against the back of her leg, but she wasn’t ready to bring it out into the open. She had already calculated what her next moves would be, and she couldn’t afford to have her only weapon get away from her and go clattering around on the floorboard of the front seat. No, when the time came, she needed to have that gun in her hand and nowhere else.
    She made a show of peering into the rearview mirror. “Oops,” she said aloud after a long moment. “Here they come.”
    As the man behind her leaned forward again, peering into the rearview mirror to check for himself, Ali slammed on the brakes. The sudden change in momentum threw him forward against the back of the front seat. Cami, too, was propelled forward. Praying that the man’s .38 had been knocked from his grip, Ali used both hands to pull the Yukon out of a 360-degree spin and bring it to an abrupt stop.
    “You bitch!” he screamed behind her. “I’ll kill you both.”
    Feeling a sudden pressure against the back of her seat, Ali knew for sure that her wild zigzagging had done the job. The man had crawled behind her seat and was reaching for his fallen weapon. That meant he was now on Cami’s side of the SUV. Without a moment’s hesitation, Ali pulled the sweat-covered Glock out from under her leg, raised it, and pulled the trigger, sending a bullet cleanly through the safety screen. The shot, fired at very close range, plugged him in the shoulder. Ali knew at once that it wasn’t a fatal wound—she hadn’t intended for it to be fatal—but the shot had succeeded in taking that damned .38 out of play on a permanent basis.
    With the man bleeding, writhing, and howling in pain, Ali opened the back door. The .38 had