“Are you deaf? I said, step out of the vehicle.” Haynes leaned back, his hand wrapping fully around the grip of his holstered gun. “Officer,” Sloan said, her voice dropping into the low authoritative tone she usually reserved for interrogation rooms. “I have not committed a moving violation. There is no probable cause to order me out of my vehicle during a routine traffic stop. Write the citation. I will be on my way.”
Haynes’s face flushed a deep, ugly crimson. He wasn’t used to defiance out here, and certainly not from a woman who looked like Sloan. He saw the faded T-shirt. He saw the old car. He saw the color of her skin, and he calculated, in that single reckless glance, that she was powerless. It was a fatal miscalculation.
“Listen to me very carefully.” Haynes ripped his gun from its holster and pointed it squarely through the open window at Sloan’s face. “You are going to open this door, and you are going to get out on the ground, or I am going to rip you through this window. Do you understand me?”
Behind the car, rookie officer Liam Davies gasped, taking a sudden step forward. “Travis, Jesus, man, what are you doing?” “Shut up, Davies. Watch the perimeter.” Haynes screamed over his shoulder, his eyes wide and manic as he pushed the barrel of his pistol closer to Sloan’s temple.
The moment had crossed the point of no return. Time seemed to stretch, slow, and dilate, like the endless highway itself. The heavy metallic click of the safety disengaging echoed through the still desert air. It was a sound Sloan had heard a hundred times on the firing range.
Feeling the hollow black eye of a loaded barrel hovering inches from her skull was an entirely different thing. She didn’t panic. Her heart rate spiked, yes, but her training overrode her fear. The man holding the gun was erratic, sweating heavily despite the dry heat, his finger hovering dangerously close to the trigger.
He was a powder keg, and any sudden movement would hand him the excuse he was desperately searching for. “Okay,” Sloan said, her voice eerily calm, projecting a deadly stillness. “My hands are on the wheel. I am complying.” “Open the damn door!” Haynes roared, spittle flying from his lips and landing against the window frame.
“Officer Haynes,” Sloan said, reading the silver name tag pinned to his chest. “Listen to me very carefully. I am a sworn federal officer. I am a special agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. My credentials are in the same jacket on the passenger seat. I am going to reach for them very, very slowly. If you shoot me, you will be murdering a federal agent, and you will spend the rest of your natural life in a federal supermax prison.”
Haynes blinked. His mind struggled to process the words. For one split second, the barrel of the gun wavered. Then a twisted, incredulous grin spread across his face. “You’re an FBI agent?” He mocked, his tone dripping with contempt. “Yeah. And I’m the King of England. Get out of the car, you lying—” He trailed off, shaking his head. “You people will say anything.”
“Travis, hold on.” Davies called out from the rear of the car, his voice trembling. “Let her show the ID. Just let her show it, man.” “I told you to secure the perimeter, Davies.” Haynes snapped, then looked back at Sloan. “Fine. Show me the fake badge. Do it slow. You flinch, I drop you.”
Sloan kept her eyes locked on Haynes’s twitching trigger finger. Moving with agonizing slowness, she lifted her right hand from the steering wheel, reached across to the passenger seat, and let her fingertips find the cool, heavy leather of her FBI credentials case. She pulled it into her lap, then slowly raised it toward the window, flipping it open.
The gold shield caught the brutal midday sun and glinted brightly. Beneath it sat her official Bureau identification card. Sloan Jenkins, special agent, Federal Bureau of Investigation, complete with the Department of Justice seal, the security watermarks, and the stamped signature of the special agent in charge.
Haynes snatched the leather case out of her hand. He didn’t lower his gun. He held the weapon steady in his right hand while he brought the badge up to his face with his left. He stared at it for three agonizing seconds. Then he burst into laughter.
It was a cold, cruel, barking sound that echoed off the empty desert. “Woo.” Haynes chuckled, tossing the credentials carelessly onto the hood of Sloan’s car. The heavy badge scratched the paint as it slid toward the windshield. “I got to admit, that’s high quality. What did that cost you online? Fifty bucks? A hundred?”
Sloan’s eyes narrowed. The stillness inside her evaporated, replaced by a cold, sharpened fury. “That is federal property, officer, and you have just assaulted a federal agent, detained me without probable cause, and are currently pointing a deadly weapon at a sworn officer of the Department of Justice.”
“I’m pointing a gun at a suspect resisting arrest who just presented forged law enforcement credentials.” Haynes countered smoothly, fully lost in his own fantasy. “That’s a felony, sweetheart. Now, for the last time, get out of the car.”
Sloan understood, in that instant, that she could not reason with him. Haynes was too far gone, too deeply entrenched in his own arrogance to back down. If she stepped out of the car, he would throw her to the dirt, cuff her, and likely invent a charge of resisting arrest. Or worse, his weapon could discharge accidentally in the scuffle.
She needed to tip the scales, and she needed to do it now. “All right,” Sloan said slowly. “I’m stepping out.” With her left hand, she reached for the door handle. But beneath the steering wheel, out of Haynes’s line of sight, her right hand dropped to the center console.
She didn’t reach for her own service weapon, a compact pistol locked away beneath the seat. A shootout was exactly what Haynes wanted, exactly the excuse he was hunting for. Instead, her fingers found the encrypted radio bolted to the console, the one she used to communicate directly with the Phoenix field office and the surrounding federal task forces.
By feel alone, she flipped the small protective toggle on the side of the unit. Then she pressed and held the panic button for three solid seconds. It was a silent alarm. Two hundred miles away, inside the Phoenix field office, an alert was already blaring through the operations center, broadcasting her vehicle’s exact coordinates.
Because she was currently assigned to a joint task force, the distress signal was simultaneously beamed to the dash consoles of every federal marshal, Drug Enforcement agent, and state police supervisor within fifty miles. Federal officer down or in extreme danger. Respond immediately, all available units.