Dark Angel

Also by John Sandford Rules of Prey Shadow Prey Eyes of Prey Silent Prey Winter Prey Night Prey Mind Prey Sudden Prey Secret Prey Certain Prey Easy Prey Chosen Prey Mortal Prey Naked Prey Hidden Prey Broken Prey Invisible Prey Phantom Prey Wicked Prey Storm Prey Buried Prey Stolen Prey Silken Prey Field of Prey Gathering Prey Extreme Prey Golden Prey Twisted Prey Neon Prey Masked Prey Ocean Prey Righteous Prey Kidd Novels The Fool’s Run The Empress File The Devil’s Code The Hanged Man’s Song Virgil Flowers Novels Dark of the Moon Heat Lightning Rough Country Bad Blood Shock Wave Mad River Storm Front Deadline Escape Clause Deep Freeze Holy Ghost Bloody Genius Letty Davenport Novels The Investigator Stand-Alone Novels The Night Crew Dead Watch Saturn Run (with Ctein) By John Sandford and Michele Cook Uncaged Outrage Rampage G. P. Putnam’s Sons Publishers Since 1838 An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC penguinrandomhouse.com Copyright © 2023 by John Sandford Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Sandford, John, 1944 February 23– author. Title: Dark angel / John Sandford. Description: New York : G. P. Putnam’s Sons, [2023] | Series: Letty Davenport ; volume 2 | Identifiers: LCCN 2022059972 (print) | LCCN 2022059973 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593422410 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593422427 (ebook) Subjects: LCGFT: Thrillers (Fiction) | Novels. Classification: LCC PS3569.A516 D366 2023 (print) | LCC PS3569.A516 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54—dc23/eng/20221213 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022059972 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022059973 Cover design: Tal Goretsky Cover images: (wing) Andrew Howe / Getty Images; (feather) Eskay Lim / EyeEm / Getty Images Adapted for ebook by Maggie Hunt This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. pid_prh_6.0_143038228_c0_r0 Contents Cover Also by John Sandford Title Page Copyright Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Chapter Sixteen Chapter Seventeen Chapter Eighteen Chapter Nineteen Chapter Twenty Chapter Twenty-One Chapter Twenty-Two Chapter Twenty-Three Chapter Twenty-Four Chapter Twenty-Five Chapter Twenty-Six Chapter Twenty-Seven Chapter Twenty-Eight About the Author _143038228_ One In the summer of 2021, the woman flew into Miami International with nothing to declare but the clothes she stood in, a phony passport, an iPhone with a broken screen, and a ballpoint pen. The pen didn’t work, but did conceal a two-inch-long razor-sharp blade that could be used to slice open a carotid artery (for example). She looked more than tired. Exhausted, but fighting it. She had dishwater blond hair that hadn’t been washed recently, a mottled tan, turquoise eyes, and a thin white scar that extended from one nostril down across her lips to her chin. The clothes she stood in were speckled with mud and what the young Customs and Border Patrol officer thought might be dried blood; the clothes reeked of old sweat and something else, like swamp water. Her ragged tee-shirt—the only clothing above her waist, worn paper thin, he could see her nipples pushing out against it—featured a drawing of a llama with a legend that said “Como Se Llama?” which the young officer understood as a Spanish pun. She had flown in on United, from the Aeropuerto Internacional Jorge Chávez in Lima, Peru. How she’d gotten on the plane, he couldn’t even guess. The CBP officer was giving her his best no-admittance stink-eye as he thumbed through her passport. He asked, “Your name is Angeles Chavez?” The woman shook her head: “No.” “What?” Hadn’t heard that before; he checked her turquoise-green eyes. “Then what is it?” “I’m not allowed to tell you that.” He was about to call for help when the head of the CBP unit stepped up behind his booth, took the passport from his hand, and said, “Let her in.” Hadn’t heard that before, either. He let her in. A man in a plutonium suit and tie was standing a few feet behind his boss, rolling a wooden matchstick between his lips. When the woman whose name wasn’t Angeles Chavez stepped past the CPB booth, the man took the matchstick out of his mouth, grinned, and asked, “How you doin’, honey-bun?” “I think I got a leech up my ass,” the woman said. So then Letty Davenport was sitting on a battered swivel chair in a near-empty room on the second floor of a warehouse off Statesville Road in Charlotte, North Carolina, watching a door on another warehouse across the street. August was slipping away, but the heat was holding on with both hands, and the warehouse was only somewhat air-conditioned. When she lifted her arms to look through her binoculars, she could smell her armpits, if only faintly, and her face was . . . moist. Letty was twenty-five, of average height, dancer-slender and dancer-muscled, with dark hair that fell to the nape of her neck. Crystalline blue eyes. A whiff of Tom Ford’s Fucking Fabulous perfume mixed with the perspiration. She was an investigator for the inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security, although her real boss was a U.S. senator. She’d suffered a spasm of fame, or notoriety, after a shoot-out in the Rio Grande town of Pershing, Texas, the year before, in which she’d killed two men. She’d shot to death a third man earlier in the same trip. All for God and Country; Country, anyway. Behind her, in the long, wide, near-empty room was a ping-pong table. Three youngish