Excerpt from Blind Spots by Thomas Mullen, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"Damn, you looked scared!" Slade's laugh reaches a new pitch. Owens never liked guys with that high of a laugh. Too performative. Like they're laughing at themselves laughing at you. "You're no cop."

Owens exhales in relief but tries not to look like it. "Hilarious."

Shaking his head, he turns and scans the wall behind him. And that's when he sees it, that a man in that other room is picking up a large gun.

Coincidence or danger?

Tries to think.

While Owens is facing that way, he hears Slade un-holster a gun and say, "Keep your hands where I can see them."

Not coincidence. Shit.

Owens half turns, so he's profile to Slade, who's only three feet away and training a gun on him. He keeps his hands in front of him.

"There are a dozen cops entering this building right now," Owens says. Calm voice, just the facts. "Don't make this worse on yourself."

Also a fact: Slade could shoot him now and then try to escape.

Behind Owens, a door opens and in comes Nayles, Slade's deputy. Long dreads and braids, muscles that have muscles. He's brandishing an automatic rifle that would look massive in a mere mortal's hands.

"Cops at the front door," Nayles says.

Slade says, "Son of a bitch."

The good news is they don't shoot Owens. The bad news is Slade swings his gun into Owens's temple, square into his vidder. Hurts like hell.

Owens hits the floor. He sees a flash of black, then gray-screen pixelations. They seem to vibrate and thrum (or maybe that's just the pain?) but don't go away. As he begins to pull himself up he thinks, Fuck fuck fuck. His vidder's been damaged. He can't see.

He hears Slade say, "Upstairs."

Footsteps. Owens turns toward the sound and launches himself. Maybe lucky, maybe not, but he feels impact, wraps his arms around someone, tackles him to the ground.

Something heavy and metal lands on the ground too. The rifle. Which means he's tackled big Nayles. Footsteps recede, Slade escaping up the stairs.

Owens wrestles atop Nayles. He uses one hand to make sure he knows where Nayles's face is, then punches him with the other. Twice. The back of Nayles's head hits the floor both times, and he's out.

Lucky, hell yes.

Owens fiddles with his vidder, but he feels broken pieces and still can't see. Waste of time. He crawls on the ground, finds the rifle. One he isn't terribly familiar with. Has a thought, puts the rifle down. Crawls back to Nayles and searches him. Voila—a semiautomatic pistol.

Has to hope it's loaded. Flicks off the safety. Cocks it.

Assuming his mike wasn't damaged during the wrestling match, he says, "Jimmy, my vidder's out. I think Slade ran up to the top floor."

He stands unsteadily, reaching forward until he finds the wall. His hands trace it to the doorway.

The feeling vertiginous, familiar in all the worst ways. Wills himself forward: Move now, experience awful flashbacks later.

Hand on the railing, he climbs the first step.

* * *

Giving chase to an armed suspect while blind would rank high on anyone's list of Things Not to Do. Surely they covered this in officer training. But Owens was a rookie way back before The Blinding, when such concerns were unthinkable.

At the top of the stairs, he steps into an unfamiliar room, blind, with a gun in his hands. He focuses on his other senses.

Smell tells him damp, mortar dust, metal pipes. If the second floor was a warehouse space retrofitted as a trendy urban loft, the third floor seems to be the same, minus the retrofitting.

Sound. The music from the ground floor is slightly less loud up here. Sound waves and echoes tell him the walls are widely spaced and bare.

Touch. He reaches forward and finds a metal pipe. Heat. Pain. He pulls his scalded hand away and shakes it.

Taste. Acid in the back of his throat. Fear and energy and a metallic tang, along with a hunger for more.

Excerpted from Blind Spots by Thomas Mullen. Copyright © 2023 by Thomas Mullen. Excerpted by permission of Minotaur Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.