This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Legacy Books

Cover art: Cory Clubb

Library of Congress Case # 1-273031561

HARD FALL

A Lucy Guardino FBI Thriller

CJ Lyons

DEDICATION:

To Peggy,

Who is always willing to join in on the

fun with an adventure in research.

Dear Reader,

Thanks so much for joining in on Lucy’s fifth adventure! If you haven’t read her first stories, they are:
SNAKE SKIN
,
BLOOD STAINED,
KILL ZONE,
and
AFTER SHOCK
.

The Lucy Guardino Thrillers are the only series I know of that come with a warning—and there’s good reason for it. Most of the crimes and bad guys depicted in these stories come from real life and HARD FALL is no exception.

The criminal Lucy is chasing in HARD FALL is the most vile and twisted individual I’ve ever written about. Yet, I didn’t invent him. I read about similar criminals in a
USA Today
news story (you can read it yourself
HERE
if you have the stomach for it) and it made me sick to think of people like them walking among us.

Instead of depicting his crimes (far too horrid for me to ever actually portray on the page) I wanted to shed some light on this dark stain of humanity and wrote of the girl who survived. She is a product of my imagination but, as you’ll see, also inspired by true events.

I hope you find her story and Lucy’s journey in HARD FALL empowering and inspiring.

As always, thanks for reading!

PS: want advance notice of my next book? Sign up for my Thrillers with Heart newsletter
HERE

PROLOGUE

UNTIL FIFTY-EIGHT DAYS
ago, Lucy Guardino never dreamed you could have a panic attack in your sleep.

It was the dog. Always the damn dog.

Haunting her, day and night.

Lucy jerked upright, fingers clutching her throat, fighting to loosen a rope that was no longer there. She couldn’t breathe, was suffocating, terror throttling her as effectively as the real noose had.

Her heart beat so loud and hard it ricocheted through her body. Her gasps filled the darkness surrounding her, red streaks blazing through her vision, the pressure on her chest, pressure around her throat so tight…she was dying.

The damn dog would finally get what it’d wanted all along.

Lucy reached for her weapon. Her gun, where was her gun? Her hand flailed, hit the back of a couch. Awareness crept into the darkness.
Her
couch. The movement shook the blanket from her body and her left foot thudded to the ground.

Pain shrieked through her, slapping her fully awake.

She wasn’t choking to death, the pain reminded her. Wasn’t dying.

That’d been fifty-eight days ago. This was now. Her new reality.

Thanks to the damn dog.

She blinked, the room slowly coming into focus. The old steamer trunk they used for a coffee table. A fireplace, its mantel filled with family photos. The overstuffed chair from her mom’s house, now angled beside the bay window—her daughter Megan’s new favorite place to sit and pretend that Lucy didn’t exist.

The way the shadows fell across the wing-backed chair, for a second she thought she saw her mother sitting there, watching over her as she slept. Like she had when Lucy was a kid, after her father died.

I’m so sorry, Mom.
Guilt settled like a rock in her stomach. She wished for tears to blink back, but she had none left. What good were tears, anyway? They couldn’t bring her mom back.

Her living room. In her house. The room where her mother had been killed by the man sent to kill Lucy. No wonder Lucy felt compelled to haunt it night after night.

Couldn’t change the past, just as she couldn’t save her mother. But she had been able to save her husband and daughter. She tugged the blanket closer to her body, her heart thudding against the T-shirt she’d worn to bed. Nick? Safe and sound asleep upstairs in their bed. Wasn’t that why she’d crept down here to the couch, so her night terrors wouldn’t disturb him? One of them deserved a good night’s sleep.

She leaned forward, bent over her ankle and massaged the nooks and crannies of scar tissue and missing muscle. Felt the alien bumps and knobs left behind by the surgeons with their plates and screws. Her ankle and foot now had more hardware than an erector set. The dog’s handiwork.

The dog was dead. Not by Lucy’s hand. It had been trained to kill—had done its best on her. Animal control had no choice. It had died peacefully, in its sleep.

The man who’d turned a beautiful animal into a raging killing machine, he’d died as well. By Lucy’s hand. Not so peacefully and wide awake.
His
screams never haunted Lucy.

She shook away memories from fifty-eight days ago. Focused on the simple, undeniable fact her life centered on: her family was safe.

The pain in her leg subsided to its usual dull roar. Unlike the blinding blaze when the dog first mauled her ankle, the pain now danced across a spectrum. From the spiking intensity of infrared blasts to tooth-rattling ultraviolet electrical shockwaves, less intense but more unnerving. A rainbow of agony.

Although her bones had mended nicely, apparently nerves heal more slowly. The doctors said it might take years—or never. And while they were healing—or not—the electricity racing along their synapses jumped erratically, causing random impulses the brain interpreted as pain.

Leaving Lucy with a choice: a life of painkillers, popping pills to numb her body and mind, or a life of pain.

She couldn’t live without her job and when your job is an FBI Supervisory Special Agent leading a team of armed men and women, you can’t do that job while taking narcotics, so Lucy chose the pain. Treated it as she would any other suspect—observing, analyzing, predicting what it would do next, and preparing against it.

So far the pain was winning, able to sneak past her defenses, blindside her. Not for long. Because tomorrow—she glanced at the railroad clock on the wall, her eyes now adjusted to the dim light, 3:14 am—no, today, today was the day she returned to work.

Fifty-nine days ago she’d almost lost everything. Now she was taking it all back.

She pushed herself upright, reached for the cane propped against the couch, and grit her teeth against the purple haze of pins and needles as her foot brushed against the oak floorboards. Took one step, then another toward the bedroom upstairs where her husband slept.

Pain or no pain, panic or no panic, no way in hell was Lucy letting anything keep her from doing her job. From healing her family. From getting her life back.

Starting today.

Chapter 1

FRIDAY, 9:46 AM

LUCY’S FIRST INDICATION
that this day wouldn’t be going as planned came when she entered Pittsburgh’s Federal Building and was stopped by security.

The Federal Protective Service
guard, one she didn’t recognize, snapped to attention when Lucy swiped her employee ID at the turnstile and an alarm sounded. “Ma’am, step back, please.”

“I think it’s expired.” She hobbled to one side so she didn’t block anyone else and cursed herself for forgetting to check the date on her ID. Thankfully she’d left plenty of time before she was due to meet with Isaac Walden, second-in-command of her Sexual Assault Felony Enforcement squad. She gestured to the cane. “I’ve been on medical leave.”

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