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crew with her in minutes. She wouldn’t be alone and exposed then.
    In minutes...
    A lot could happen within that time frame.
    Venn shut out the thought, ignored the image his wild, fanciful brain was trying to send him - the five men from the pier closing in around Beth, their guns drawn - and doubled his pace, feeling the adrenaline kick in and spur him on as he dodged a dumpster halfway down the alley and leaped over a pile of empty cardboard boxes and saw the other end of the alley ahead, with the brightly lit street beyond.
    The man he was chasing had turned right.
    Venn was ten paces from the end and preparing himself to emerge from the alley, with a leap to take him a few yards beyond and a pivot to the right, in case the guy was waiting there round the corner, when a voice rang out from close behind him:
    “Hey. Stop. ”
    Instinct drove Venn to turn through one hundred and eighty degrees to confront the voice.
    Reason stopped him.
    Because as the voice uttered the second syllable, the unmistakable ratcheting click echoing off the narrow walls of the alley told him that a gun had been cocked.
    Venn slowed to a walk.
    He stopped.
    From behind him, the voice said, softly: “That’s right.”
    Venn heard footsteps, faintly squeaking and almost as quiet as the voice. Sneakers, he guessed.
    “I’m aiming at the back of your neck.”
    The voice was closer now. Maybe ten feet behind him.
    Venn figured the guy had been crouching behind the dumpster he’d passed.
    The man continued: “You’re a big guy. But if I pull the trigger, your size won’t matter. A nine-millimeter slug will tear through the base of your skull, and your brain will be veggie burger. It’ll shut down. You won’t even know what hit you.”
    Venn focused on the voice. It was lightly accented. Latino. But with perfectly emphasized, idiomatically correct English. The voice of a man in his thirties, although at which end of the range Venn couldn’t tell.
    The man said: “Hold your arms out to the sides where I can see your hands.”
    Every fiber of Venn’s being resisted what he was doing. But once again, his rational faculty held sway.
    He spread his arms wide, the Beretta in his right hand.
    Behind him, the voice said, “Good. Now drop the gun.”
    It was wrong.
    It was all wrong.
    Venn told people to drop their guns. He was a cop.
    Punks didn’t get to tell him to lose his firearm.
    He’d been in a similar situation once, long ago, before he was a cop. It was in the late 1990s, and he’d been serving in the Corps in Kosovo, cleaning up after the NATO bombings had cleared the way. His outfit had been ambushed while out on patrol in a stretch of woodland, a series of decoy bombs going off ahead of them amongst the trees. They’d headed in the direction of the explosions, expecting a firefight. Instead, the enemy forces, the footsoldiers of the Serbian dictator Milosevic, had stepped out from their hiding places behind them and gotten the drop on them.
    That time, too, Venn had been forced to cast his gun aside, and he’d experienced the same sense of intense, almost paralyzing outrage that he felt now.
    The difference then was that the Corps itself had operated a backup system, so that a group of Marines had been following the vanguard at a distance of half a click. The backup guys had taken out the Serbs in short order.
    This time, here in this Miami alleyway, there was nobody watching Venn’s back.
    The man behind him said, closer still: “Don’t be an asshole. Drop it. Or I’ll blow your fuckin’ head off your neck.”
    With the feeling of a novice parachutist jumping from the door of a plane for the first time, Venn opened his right hand and let the Beretta fall.
    The gun hit the ground hard, the metallic echo bouncing off the walls.
    Swift footsteps behind him and Venn tensed, ready to pivot on the balls of his feet and strike  with a swordhand, aiming for where he estimated the man’s throat would be. It would be a desperate