“That should leave him with three,” Scott said quietly.

“Jack, I’m going to shoot up the hall… high… ceiling. One of you can come over here. Then I’ll need cover to break for the bedroom door ten feet up the hall,” Warren whispered.

“Roger that,” Scott replied.

Warren stuck his head out and pumped eight shots from his sidearm into the top of the bedroom doorway at the end of the hall. At the same time, Scott burst across the hallway into the bathroom almost bowling Warren over. One shot rang out in response.

“Two left,” Scott said flatly.

“Ok, Warren… go for your door on three,” Jack said.

A few seconds later, the hallway once again lit up with the sound of gunfire as Warren raced up the hall toward the bedroom, diving to the side when he got to the first doorway.

“I’m in,” he said on the radio a moment later.

“What’s the play, Warren?” Jack said.

They could hear a thudding from the bedroom as they waited for a response from Warren.

“I’m going to go through the wall behind him. I need him distracted… only for a moment. I think I can get the rest of the way through in one hit.”

“Roger that,” Jack replied. Then he yelled out, “Ron March, this is Jack Dixon. What’s your plan? We can still fix this.”

“Go away, man.”

“I can’t do that, Ron. Why don’t you let Vivian go, then we can square everything away. Nobody else has to get hurt today.”

Jack snuck a look around the corner just before another round from the pistol struck the wall just below where his head had been. At the sound of the gunshot, Warren slammed into the spot he’d selected on the wall. As promised, he broke all the way though and emerged in the bedroom.

Ron swung around at the explosion of sound off to his side, seeing the man emerge from the wall, stumbling a couple of steps into the room, then charging him. He shot his last round at the man, point blank. The gun clicked just before Ron was lifted from the floor, losing his grip on Vivian. The man carried him across the room and slammed him into the wall hard enough to break out the sheetrock around two studs.

Jack rushed down the hall, pulling Vivian away and shielding her from the other men with his body.

“Warren, I have her. I have Vivian.”

Scott rushed into the room behind Jack and rolled to the right toward where Warren was pushing Ronald March into the wall, his forearm across March’s throat. He pulled Warren off the other man and dropped March to the floor, cuffing him.

“Warren, I got this. Jack is taking your wife downstairs,” he said.

Warren started running back up the hallway, but stumbled at the top of the stairs, collapsing and then rolling down the hardwood steps.

“Jack, I think Warren is hit,” Scott said into the radio.

At the bottom of the stairs, Jack turned back, releasing Vivian. Warren rolled into a heap at his feet.

“I need medical, right now. Chestik is hit,” Jack yelled for the benefit of the communications person outside. “Warren, I have you, relax, ok?”

He rolled Warren onto his back on the flat part of the floor and started stripping away the gear that prevented him from seeing the extent of the other man’s injuries.

“GSW in the leg, another in the shoulder.” Jack said into his comm. “Vivian, I need you to help me,” he said over his shoulder.

He grabbed her hand and pulled her down to kneel next to him. She looked down at her husband but there was no recognition in her eyes… she didn’t seem to understand what was going on.

“Hold this on his shoulder,” he instructed her. “There is something wrong with Vivian,” he said quietly in his comm. “I think she is drugged… she seems out of it.”

A moment later two more men rushed through the remains of the front door to work on Warren. A few minutes after that, he was loaded into an ambulance.

As Scott hauled Ron down the steps, Jack walked up and got in his face. “What did you give her?” he said, his eyes flashing with intensity.

“Nothin’… just a little something to take the edge off… help her to not fight it.”

“What is it?” Jack asked again, each word exploding from him.

“Just a little special K, man.”

Jack turned away. “Female may have Ketamine in her system. She was non-consensually drugged,” he said into the radio.

“Your problems are a lot bigger than they were before, March,” Jack said, turning back. “You should really start thinking about who you can sell out to save your miserable ass.”

A moment after he cleared the threshold, two of his security men followed and flanked the door. They peered in through the window to watch the gathered crowd in the room; neither of the burly mercenaries keeping watch on the property outside off the balcony. Perez didn’t want to be disturbed by any of his guests, but there was little to fear from his own domain.

Titus backed the young woman to the rail at the edge of the balcony as he pressed the length of his body against hers. She smiled confidently, occasionally sipping her own brandy as his hand slid down her lithe body. Her own free hand snaked around his shoulder as she pulled him closer to her and whispered something in his ear.

He stood and took the drink from her hand as she gave him another seductive grin. He turned and handed the two drinks to one of the bodyguards a few feet behind him. As he turned back to her, he watched as she pulled the hem of her dress up her thighs revealing a pair of sexy, thigh-high stockings and nothing else under her slinky red dress. She knew he was married, and that his wife was not only a beautiful woman, but she was standing less than fifty feet away. But she also knew that he would be terribly generous to her in trade for her attentions. Their marital arrangements were not her problem.

***

Half a mile away, just outside the boundaries of Perez’s property, Warren Chestik laid on a ridge. He blended into the surrounding foliage perfectly… so perfectly that twenty-minutes before, one of the regular patrols of the property boundary had passed within a dozen feet of his position. His camouflage had been designed to seamlessly blend into this very spot.

He watched as several people stepped onto the balcony. He slowly reached out to the end of his scope and flipped open the cover. As he sighted in on the balcony, he recognized Perez and his security. The young woman was unknown, but he knew she was likely just his momentary companion.

Chestik watched as the old man pressed himself against the woman, groping her as she willingly played along. He preferred to not injure her, but Perez would not be stepping back inside his home again.

The old man took her glass and gave her a toothy smile. When he turned back around, Chestik took careful aim with the modified Barrett sniper rifle. The flight time of the round would be approximately one second, flying twenty-six-hundred feet from his position to that of his target. He had already calculated in the thirty-plus feet of drop that the projectile would experience during its flight.

Perez froze as he watched the woman. Chestik squeezed his trigger, and then watched his target. He could see from the other man’s face that he had seen, but not recognized, a muzzle flash as Titus’s forehead crinkled and he looked up from the woman. Just as the realization of what it could have been dawned on him, the projectile passed less than a foot over the shoulder of his date, through Perez’s chest, then the back of the knee of one of the security men, and finally embedded itself into the floor of the ballroom, just inside the door.

As both Perez and the security man crumpled to the floor, the report of the rifle could be heard. The scream of the young woman drowned out the echoes as the sound bounced between the buildings of Perez’s compound.

I usually shoot for someone in the 80k to 100k range for a novel. However, I don’t want to pad something just to get it to the minimum length… but I usually find there is something lacking in the story if I’m not close to that range.

That said, At Arm’s Length is the one that is currently furthest along. It is tapping in at around 71k words. It is a story about a writer, Finn Powers, who is in the early throes of divorce when he runs into an old flame. It wasn’t random, either… she needs something from him. Which puts both of them in danger. It isn’t directly part of the Dixon-Prince series, but does have a couple of characters… including Warren Chestik, below.

The next closest one is Sniper. That title also might stick… although I am also kicking around (Guardian) Angel (of Death). Warren Chestik (who appears in Unknown Caller and Second Chance) is a former military sniper. He ends of going undercover in a drug cartel, but then his wife and daughter are kidnapped.

Shining Star, a title that will likely change, is the story about a woman that runs into the man she left at the altar. They met when he saved her life, and she ran back to him again when she needed saving. Both of their lives have changed in the decade since that happened, and they are both different people. It 64k words, the story is well developed, but there is more that needs to go into it.

The one that I have been working on the longest… and which has sat by itself in the corner being ignored the most is Death Star. It is currently around 47k words, and I barely have the meat of the story covered. Jennifer Coolidge works for Dirk Bryce, Jack Dixon’s long-time friend. She calls her computer the Death Star, and she uses it to protect the computer network of Jack’s father-in-law’s old company. But she is targeted for her skills and her assistant is the one that has to save her… after stinging her with a betrayal.

Another that has been kicking around a long time, Invisible Jack. It is only around 28k words right now, and doesn’t even have a skeleton. The premise is that Jack Dixon isn’t as clean as he seems. In the other books, Jonathan “Jack” Dixon is almost too good to be true. He is smart, loyal and a perfect husband. But nobody can be that “good.” Jack isn’t a bad guy, but he faces his own demons and his own temptations.

Finally, one that has been around a little while and hasn’t been developed much, at only 13k words… Railroaded. It is another story that isn’t part of the Dixon-Prince universe, like Shining Star. Every once in a while I just get a bug on this one and write a few thousand words. It won’t be the next book… but it could get written in a month, or it could ripen for a year of more. I just don’t know with this one.