by Jenna Ryan
Her gaze flicked through the crowded room to the jukebox in the corner. One of her customers was a diehard Tanya Tucker fan. The playlist really, really, really needed to be updated.
“Answer,” she ordered as her sister’s cell phone continued to ring. Instead, Rachel’s voicemail kicked in. Rocking her head from side to side, Amber waited it out. “Yes, I know, you’re unavailable, blah, blah, blah…” When the message ended, she said simply, “Call me. Now.”
Setting her phone down, she glanced at Paulie, who was jabbing a pool cue into the stomach of a man twice his size. A few minutes later, she heard a ring and saw her sister’s name on the screen.
“It’s about time, Rachel.” She turned away. “Where the hell are you? Paulie’s on the verge of skewering his neighbor.”
“Sounds like my kind of guy,” a man’s voice drawled back. “Listen, sugar. I got your sister all snug and cozy here with me. Sorry she can’t talk right now, but I can and I want you to listen. We’re coming for you. In fact, sugar pie, a couple of us are already there.”
Chapter Two
Gage Morgan loved the King. Not weirdly loved him, but his early music had an edge no other musician could match.
He sat in his open-top ’59 Caddy outside the gates of Graceland, slouched down in the driver’s seat, savoring his second bottle of Michelob. “Blue Moon of Kentucky” played quietly, traffic was light, and he had a sweet buzz going on—one he hoped to make a whole lot sweeter after this meeting he’d been talked into showing up for ended.
McCabe, the man who’d talked him into it might be a US Marshal, but he wasn’t his boss in the true sense of the word. As a US Marshal himself, Gage didn’t mind hearing him out. What could it hurt? He wouldn’t give a rat’s ass no matter what McCabe said. You cared, life got messy, and he’d been there, done that too damn many times already.
Gage heard the footsteps McCabe didn’t bother to disguise and smiled as he took another pull on his beer. “Your boots need new soles, my friend. Left one more than the right.”
“Your senses are still good, Gage. Means you can only be on your second or third beer, and that makes me uncommonly lucky at quarter to midnight on a Saturday.”
“You’re luckier than you think. This is only my first beer.”
“You could use a shave and a haircut.” McCabe vaulted over the door, accepted the bottle Gage handed him. “Yeah, I know, same goes for me.” He drank deeply. “It’s been a long day.”
“I’m not available.”
“Tell me something I haven’t heard before.”
“Just trying to save time. I’m in a funk.”
“Who isn’t? Bad weather’s blown in.”
“Does this particular weather involve a woman?”
McCabe chuckled. “Two of them, actually.”
“Smart?”
“One’s smart, the other’s resentful. You take this assignment, you’ll figure out which is which soon enough.”
“Major funk here, McCabe.” Reaching for another beer, Gage twisted off the cap, but he swirled rather than drank. “What’s the story?”
“They’re in the Witness Protection Program—have been for the past month. One of them’s missing, presumed taken. The other’s gone to ground, no idea where. She’s not trained, not really, but she has a surprising amount of common sense. It might keep her alive long enough for you to find her.”
“Making her the smart one.”
“There you go. You’ve got it figured out already. As a bonus, she’s a looker. Tall, black hair, gold eyes. No idea what her ancestry is, but you won’t be disappointed.”
“Can’t be disappointed by what you never see.” Gage kept swirling his beer. “How she looks doesn’t matter to me. What’s the bottom line?”
“She was asked to gather information for the FBI about one Owen Fixx.”
Shit. Gage let a humorless smile cross his lips. “Owen Fixx? The weapons and drug dealer who works for a sadist known as James Mockerie? That Owen Fixx?”
McCabe slanted him a shrewd look. “Intrigued?”
“No. And I’m sure as hell not suicidal.”
“You were once.”
“Yeah, well, I have more to live for these days. I’m thinking about getting a dog.”
“Dogs are a commitment, Gage. You go wherever, whenever, and suicide missions were your style long before you left the LAPD.”
Which he’d done for reasons that’d had him shying away from relationships ever since. “Talk to me about Mockerie.” Gage let his gaze roam past the gates of Graceland, heard “That’s All Right ” in the background, and forced himself to stay in the moment. “What’s he up to these days?”
“Same as always. Anarchy. Word is, he’s found a lucrative overseas market for his weapons. Anywhere wars break out, his people are there, guns, bombs, and drugs at the ready.”
“You create hell around you, those who have to live in it need to escape any way they can. What happened to the information your looker dug up?”
“It disappeared.”
Figured. Gage laid his head on the headrest. “How is it Mockerie’s minions got a line on her? Did the resentful woman talk?”
“She ran. Maybe she talked. Details are sketchy. All we know is that she’s missing.” His lips curved. “And here’s the kicker: she’s the clever one’s sister.”
Great, just fucking great. “So we’re talking blood and affection and the potential for panic at some point because, hello, not a trained agent. Jesus, McCabe, this isn’t just suicide, it’s sloppy suicide. What’s clever sister’s name?”
McCabe polished off his beer. “Her real name was Alexa Chase. You want the current one, you’ll have to come in and get it, along with the rest of the details. This is a one-man job as far as I’m concerned. I don’t want send in a team of people. I just want to send in the best.”
Gage seriously wished he’d been born with Elvis’s mojo, but no such luck. On the other hand, Elvis had been dead and buried for forty years. There was no dog in the offing for the King. No looker with black hair, gold eyes, and curious ancestry, either. He turned his head on the rest. “I’ll mull it over, get back to you.”
Ditching his bottle, McCabe vaulted from the Caddy. “Time’s a factor. Don’t mull for more than an hour. You’ve got contacts in the area, Gage—more than a few, if memory serves. That makes you the right man for the job in my mind. You know where to find me.”
Unfortunately.
Using his knee to bump the retrofitted CD player to another disk, Gage switched to gospel. And took a painful journey back through hell.
…
James Allan Mockerie had two stunning women on retainer. They’d been his mistresses back before he’d murdered his wife, but these days, they were simply a pair of exquisite call girls who came to him as required.
He missed his wife in a strange and unhealthy way. Unhealthy to his vast business empire, certainly. From the moment he’d met her, she’d dazzled him. And as he’d discovered, to be dazzled was to be distracted.
His anger started mounting, and he couldn’t seem to control it. So he blocked the memory and shuffled his thoughts accordingly.
There were problems that required his attention. The one that weighed heaviest on his mind involved his associate, Owen Fixx.
Secreted in Fixx’s plush Las Vegas hotel office, Mockerie watched the action in the casino below through a wall of elegant smoked glass. The gaming floor was packed, as usual, with everything from cowboys in distressed denim to Texas millionaires in diamond-studded belts. The money they dropped helped fuel his empire. That and booming overseas sales.
He recognized his associate’s sharp double rap on the door.
“Come,” he said when the knock repeated. Propping a booted foot on the desk, he swiveled Fixx’s office chair just enough to let his approaching associate know he was considering something weighty. Then he stopped the motion and showed his teeth. “You look unhappy tonight. More problems on the wife and si
ster-in-law front?”
Lines of strain showed around Fixx’s annoyingly handsome eyes. “The problems are being handled. The information that was stolen is back in my hands, and our FBI insider is going about his business. I put a fifty thousand dollar reward out on the pair of them. I got word two nights ago that my ex has been located. She was living in a small town in Tennessee.”
Mockerie kept his teeth fully visible and his own eyes shielded behind a pair of round sunglasses. His hair was long and flyaway under a hat that had belonged to his father. His white T-shirt, leather vest, and jeans had all seen better days. He wore a ring, the only piece of jewelry he owned, on what remained of his left middle finger.
He toyed with that ring while Fixx took a subservient seat across from him.
“Your casino’s doing well.” Mockerie studied his missing half finger. “Ka-ching, ka-ching.” His gaze rose. His teeth vanished. “Where is she now?”
“My tracker caught up with her in Mississippi.”
“Is your tracker reliable?”
He watched Fixx deliberately blank his features. “I sent the best I’ve got. He’s taking his directions from our inside man. I don’t think it’ll be long before he’ll have her sister, as well.”
“You hope. The information Alexa Chase stole might be back in our hands, but that doesn’t mean the threat’s been eliminated. She could have all kinds of shit tucked away in that cunning brain of hers.”
“If she did, she’d have given it to the authorities when they brought her in.”
“Assuming she trusts the authorities. I wouldn’t tell all to anyone in the government. You’re smart, you withhold, just in case the so-called good guys decide your usefulness has ended and the wolves can have you. Get them, Fixx. Both of them. I want to see their squirming, terrified bodies stretched out on long tables.” Mockerie’s smile returned. “If I don’t see theirs, you can count on the fact that I’ll be seeing yours.”
…
Months of spying, of subterfuge and over-the-shoulder glances, had taught Amber that panic was her worst enemy. It was right there, always, waiting to wrap its bony fingers around her throat. But instead of letting it intimidate her, she’d learned to use it. To take advantage of her heightened senses and focus on what mattered. What would keep her alive.
She didn’t have time to think, not really. Even as Rachel’s kidnapper spoke to her, she looked up and saw two large men staring at her from the back of the room. They grinned and started to move forward through the crowded tables.
Amber’s first instinct: survive. She grabbed what came to hand—two full bottles of whiskey. Breaking them both, she sent the contents flying. Then she lit a match.
Chaos erupted instantly. She threw three more bottles of whiskey into the mix. Flames shot upward in huge spikes and spread.
She could no longer see the men, but she knew they were there, hopefully trapped in the pandemonium. She ducked out through the exit next to the bar, stopping only long enough to swing the emergency backpack she’d had ready and waiting for a month up over her shoulder.
There was a tunnel. The former owner of the bar had told her about it when she’d arrived. Something to do with Prohibition and smuggling booze down from the hills. Whatever its original use, Amber was grateful for its presence that night.
When she emerged in a back alley, she climbed out, tried to settle her nerves, and took a look around. She didn’t hesitate. She stole the first truck she saw that had keys in it.
Thoughts she couldn’t control spiraled through her head. Rachel had been taken by someone connected to Owen Fixx. That was a given. Obviously, Fixx wanted both of them. Maybe they’d snatched Rachel partly as a backup in case they missed her. Whatever the plan, Amber had no intention of going along with it.
She headed northwest. The Dakotas meant nothing to her or her family. No safe harbors to be had in those states. But there were mountains where she could lose herself while she considered her limited options.
She drove through the night, slept some, and when she felt it was safe, used a payphone to call the message center for her WPP emergency contact. She relayed the available facts in code and slept a little more.
When she woke, she bought sandwiches and Coke from a crappy highway rest stop and told herself to keep going. What was the cliché? A moving target was harder to hit?
She only stopped long enough to take a fast shower at a campsite where a group of Boy Scouts were toasting marshmallows and scaring one another with ghost stories. If scary was what they wanted, Amber could have given it to them in spades.
She drove in circles at times. It was mostly a deliberate act, though, once or twice, when fear snuck in and clouded her mind, she wound up on a dead-end road in a dead-end town that came straight out of Edgar Allan Poe.
By late Saturday night, she decided to risk another call to her contact. Because the truck was low on gas, she found a station off the highway and pulled up to a row of poorly lit pumps. She paid with cash taken from the bar and really, really hoped she’d get lucky in the all-night café next door.
She did. A cell phone left unattended on a table presented itself while she headed for a back booth. Instead of sitting, she bought a local newspaper and returned to the truck. Ten minutes later, on a side road that read like a cow path, she had her contact, Tom Vigor, on the phone.
“Got it, Snowbird.” Tom sounded like a half-drunk hillbilly, but Amber knew he could outthink the US Marshals’ top people and play a game of chess at the same time. The old man grunted, then said, “Someone stole your mama’s jewel box, and you don’t know where to look for it. We’ll hope the rings inside are brass and not real gold. I’m looking at my call display. Who’s Myra Pinkerton?”
“No idea.” Amber let her gaze roam through the shadowy night. “I grabbed her phone from a café.”
“Then we can talk.”
“If you say so. I don’t know where the guy who threatened me was calling from. I think Rachel might have been running off with a local farmer named Jess Murkle. Knowing her, Miami or New Orleans would have been the destination.”
“What’s Jess Murkle like?”
Amber studied an odd-shaped shadow. “He hangs his head when he talks to his father, but on his own, he’s cocky and snide. Develops a swagger that gets bigger the more he drinks. And he drinks quite a lot.”
“So does Rachel, as I understand.”
“No question she loves her whiskey and tequila. It’s our mother’s legacy. Our father’s was cocaine.”
“And yet you remain clean and sober.”
“I’m a throwback to my Puritan ancestors.” She wished she’d bought an energy bar when she’d stopped for gas. “Can you do anything for me? For either of us?”
“Been working on it since I got your message. Given Fixx’s connection to James Mockerie, I’m being extra cautious. We know there’s at least one person on the take somewhere in the ranks of the FBI. We also know or can figure that Mockerie’ll want you taken out as badly as Fixx does.”
Closing her eyes, Amber allowed ripples of guilt to wash through her. “Fixx’s people might have missed me, Tom, but they have my sister. I’m afraid they’ll hurt her, or worse.”
“They won’t harm a hair on her head until they get their hands on you.”
“Bullshit.” She opened and narrowed her eyes. “They could do all kinds of horrible things to her after what happened in Black Creek, and I’m not there. For whatever reason, they haven’t used her phone to contact me again since I left town, but I’m sure they will eventually.”
“Now, Snowbird…”
“Don’t patronize me,” she warned him. “I’ll agree they probably won’t kill Rachel right off, but one thing I know about Fixx is that he’s a coldblooded, spiteful bastard with as much mercy in him as a scorpion. Rachel’s my sister, and I gathered more than enough evidence to destroy him. He’ll see her as expendable. Maybe you’re right and nothing will happen until they have me, but they’ll sure
as hell try and use her to draw me out. Using can mean a lot of things, from the threat of pain to actual torture. I can’t let that happen.”
“Now, you listen to me, missy.” Tom firmed up his tone. He still sounded like a hillbilly, but a determined one. “I’ve been in this game for a long, long time. I’m telling you, Fixx—and Mockerie, for that matter—will want the both of you brought in alive and unharmed. Mockerie in particular likes to inflict the first cuts. It gives him pleasure to see that initial spurt of pain. Once it’s over, he’ll leave the rest to Fixx. He won’t want to see either of you again until you’re dead. Our sources suggest he’ll spend up to six hours staring at a corpse.”
Amber frowned at her phone. “Who the hell are your unfortunate sources?”
“Stories for another time. I keep the identities of any and all operatives to myself.”
“So, you’re what? A super spy ,and being a US Marshal is your cover?”
She noticed he didn’t answer her directly. He simply reverted to his backwoods banter, yucked out a laugh, and said again, “Help’s a’comin’, Snowbird. You hold on to that thought. Now, if you’re sure Myra Pinkerton’s phone isn’t bugged, let’s you and me get our facts straight concerning the contents of that jewelry box we mentioned earlier.”
Amber’s head began to throb. “Right, my mama’s jewels. I know the drill.”
“Good girl. You go back for that box then and keep telling yourself, Rachel will be fine. Dig deep, Snowbird.”
“Yeah, to the belly of hell,” she muttered.
“You need to start smoking.”
“I hate cigarettes.”
“Try a little weed. Or do you call it pot?”
“A rose by any other name. I’ll dig, but I won’t smoke. I don’t like weeds, plant or human.” She took a bracing breath. “I’ll be in touch, old man. I hope.”
Lowering the phone, Amber ended the call. Then she tossed Myra Pinkerton’s cell into the woods, started the truck, and headed back to the Smoky Mountains.
