Besides, Donovan and Jule were friends.
Jule stretched her knees straight, one at a time, then folded herself back up in the space behind the seats.
She thought about what she was wearing, then took off her earrings and her jade ring, shoving them into her jeans pocket. She forced herself to calm her breathing.
Finally, there was the sound of a suitcase on rollers. The slam of the trunk. Donovan slipped behind the wheel, started the car, and pulled out of the lot. Jule stayed on the floor as he drove. The road had few streetlights. There was Mexican pop on the radio.
“Where d’you want to go?” Donovan asked eventually.
“Anywhere in town.”
“I’m going home, then.” His voice sounded predatory all of a sudden.
Damn. Was she wrong to have gotten in his car? Was Donovan one of those guys who thinks a girl who wants a favor has to mess around with him?
“Drop me a ways from where you live,” she told him sharply. “I’ll take care of myself.”
“You don’t have to say it like that,” he said. “I’m putting myself out for you right now.”
Imagine this: a sweet house sits on the outskirts of a town in Alabama. One night, eight-year-old Jule wakes up in the dark. Did she hear a noise?
She isn’t sure. The house is quiet.
She goes downstairs in a thin pink nightgown.
On the ground floor, a spike of cold fear goes through her. The living room is trashed, books and papers everywhere. The office is even worse. File cabinets have been tipped over. The computers are gone.
“Mama? Papa?” Little Jule runs back upstairs to look in her parents’ room.
Their beds are empty.
Now she is truly frightened. She slams open the bathroom. They aren’t there. She sprints outside.
The yard is ringed with looming trees. Little Jule is halfway down the walkway when she realizes what she’s seeing there, in the circle of light created by a streetlamp.
Mama and Papa lie in the grass, facedown. Their bodies are crumpled and limp. The blood pools black underneath them. Mama has been shot through the brain. She must have died instantly. Papa is clearly dead, but the only injuries Jule can see are on his arms. He must have bled out from his wounds. He is curled around Mama, as if he thought of only her in his last moments.
Jule runs back into the house to call the police. The phone line is disconnected.
She returns to the yard, wanting to say a prayer, thinking to say goodbye, at least—but her parents’ bodies have disappeared. Their killer has taken them away.
She does not let herself cry. She sits for the rest of the night in that circle of light from the streetlamp, soaking her nightgown in thickening blood.
For the next two weeks, Little Jule is alone in that ransacked house. She stays strong. She cooks for herself and sorts through the papers left behind, looking for clues. As she reads the documents, she pieces together lives of heroism, power, and secret identities.
One afternoon she is in the attic, looking at old photographs, when a woman in black appears in the room.
The woman steps forward, but Little Jule is quick. She throws a letter opener, hard and fast, but the woman catches it left-handed. Little Jule climbs a pile of boxes, grabs an overhead attic beam, and pulls herself onto it. She runs across the beam and squeezes through a high window onto the roof. Panic thuds in her chest.
The woman takes after her. Jule leaps from the roof to the branches of a neighboring tree and breaks off a sharp stick to use as a weapon. She holds it in her mouth as she climbs down. She is sprinting into the underbrush when the woman shoots her in the ankle.
The pain is intense. Little Jule is sure that her parents’ killer has come to finish her off—but the woman in black helps her up and tends the wound. She removes the bullet and treats the injury with antiseptic.
As she bandages, the woman explains that she is a recruiter. She has been watching these past two weeks. Not only is Jule the child of two exceptionally skilled people, she is a remarkable intellect with a fierce survival instinct. The woman wants to train Jule and help her seek revenge. Since she is something of a long-lost aunt. She knows the secrets those parents kept from their beloved only daughter.
Here begins a highly unusual education. Jule goes to a specialized academy housed in a renovated mansion on an ordinary street in New York City. She learns surveillance techniques, performs backflips, and masters the removal of handcuffs and straitjackets. She wears leather pants and loads her pockets with gadgets. There are lessons in foreign languages, social customs, literature, martial arts, the use of firearms, disguises, various accents, methods of forgery, and fine points of the law. The education lasts ten years. By the time it is complete, Jule has become the kind of woman it would be a great mistake to underestimate.
That was the origin story of Jule West Williams. By the time she was living at the Playa Grande, Jule preferred it to any other story she might tell about herself.
Donovan stopped and opened the driver’s-side door. The light came on inside the car.
“Where are we?” Jule asked. It was dark outside.
“San José del Cabo.”
“This where you live?”
“Not too close.”
Jule was relieved, but it seemed very black out. Shouldn’t there be streetlights and businesses, lit up for the tourist crowd? “Anyone nearby?” she asked.
“I parked in an alley so you wouldn’t be seen getting out of my car.”
Jule crawled out. Her muscles were stiff and her face felt coated in grease. The alley was lined with garbage bins. There was light only from a couple of second-story windows. “Thanks for the ride. Pop the trunk, will you?”
“You said a hundred dollars American when I got you to town.”
“Of course.” Jule took her wallet from her back pocket and paid.
“But now it’s more,” Donovan added.
“What?”
“Three hundred more.”
“I thought we were friends.”
He took a step toward her. “I make you drinks because it’s my job. I pretend to like talking to you, because that’s my job, too. You think I don’t see how you look down at me? Second-best Hulk. What kind of scotch. We’re not friends, Ms. Williams. You’re lying to me half the time, and I’m lying to you all the time.” She could smell liquor spilled on his shirt. His breath was hot in her face.
Jule had honestly believed he liked her. They had shared jokes and he’d given her free potato chips. “Wow,” she said quietly.
“Another three hundred,” he said.
Was he a small-time hustler jacking a girl who was carrying a lot of American dollars? Or was he a sleazeball who thought she’d rub up against him rather than give him the extra three hundred? Could Noa have paid him off?
Jule tucked her wallet back in her pocket. She shifted the strap so her bag went across her chest. “Donovan?” She stepped forward, close. She looked up at him with big eyes.
Then she brought her right forearm up hard, snapped his head back, and punched him in the groin. He doubled over. Jule grabbed his slick hair and yanked his head back. She twisted him around, forcing him off balance.
He jabbed with one elbow, slamming Jule in the chest. It hurt, but the second thrust of the elbow missed as she sidestepped, grabbed that elbow, and twisted it behind Donovan’s back. His arm was soft, repulsive. She held on tight and with her free hand snatched her money out of his greedy fingers.