She swiped the yearbooks from the table and sprinted through the mudroom. She grabbed Jake’s hat and truck keys from the hook then tore out to the garage. She was approaching the gate and Deputy Carson in less than five minutes.
She rolled down the window as the deputy sauntered toward her. “Going somewhere, ma’am?”
Olivia tamped an automatic sarcastic response. “To see the sheriff.”
Carson nodded. “Yep, he said you’d be doing that.”
“Okay, great.” She started to roll the window up, but the deputy slapped her hand over it. “Is there something else, Deputy?”
The frank hazel eyes studied her for a long, hard moment. “You’re not thinking of running, are you?”
Olivia’s chest expanded a little bit. “No, I’m not. I’m in this for the long haul.”
Carson’s eyes drifted up the dirt road leading to the ranch. “Those boys deserve someone good.” She locked eyes with Olivia again. “You hurt them and they’ll never find your body.”
Well, that was to the point.
“I have no intention of hurting them, Deputy.” She wanted to say more. I love them trembled on the tip of her tongue, but Olivia squashed the urge and the sentiment. It was much too soon.
Wasn’t it?
Something must have shown in her eyes because a small smile lifted the other woman’s lips. “Good. On your way. I assume I need to stall them if they come down?”
Olivia returned the grin. “Yes, please. They’re going to be a mite upset when they realize I’m gone, but I plan on being back within a couple of hours. Tell them.” She bit her lip and looked in the rearview mirror. A wide expanse of lush green, milling cattle, and wire fence met her gaze. “Tell them it was absolutely necessary.”
The deputy nodded. “Will do. Go on. Git.”
Olivia trundled over the cattle guard, which made her teeth rattle, then turned toward town and gunned it. Somehow, she didn’t think she had to worry about any speeding tickets today.
Less than twenty minutes later she’d pulled into an empty space down the street from the sheriff’s office. She scanned the entire area including rooftops from around the Hex before she dared to open the truck door. She pulled Jake’s hat down low over her brow and hopped out.
Tension kept her shoulders bowed back in a tight arch the entire thirty yards to the sheriff’s office. She wanted to run the last ten but forced herself to remain steady and resolute. If he was out there and hadn’t recognized her yet, running would be a damn good tip off.
The door opened as she approached, and Boone crowded the entrance. Sweat beaded at the base of her neck and slid down her spine in a creepy “someone just walked over your grave” kind of way. She looked up at him. “We should move inside.”
His eyes darted behind her in all the areas she’d checked, too. It didn’t make her feel any better or less vulnerable. Right now there was a huge target on her back and she was a freaking sitting duck.
Olivia huffed and shoved at him. Boone stumbled back a little bit and rubbed his stomach.
“Ow, what was that for?”
“Jeez, I don’t know,” she snapped. She marched into the quiet, four-desk office. For some odd reason it reminded her of the office back at JAG. No patches in the walls. That was good. “Some ass munch is gunning for me, and you’ve got me set up like a clay pigeon ready to pull.”
He spread his hands. “I’m sorry, I didn’t think of that. I was checking to make sure it was safe.”
She snorted again and headed for the door marked Sheriff. The frosted glass pane bore the official gold seal of Edwards County and Tag’s name carefully etched in black beneath it. She rapped on the glass.
“Yeah,” he said gruffly.
She walked inside. His desk was cluttered with paperwork, folders, pens, and an assortment of gum wrappers. Olivia lifted the books. “Where do you want them?”
Tag rose and took them from her. “Sit down,” he said.
As she sat, he rounded the desk again and splayed them out on top of his mess. Olivia’s good eye twitched. She could not stand clutter in her workspace.
“Just had a call from Jake.”
She winced. “How bad?”
“My ears are still ringing, and I’m pretty sure his mama is buying out the soap aisles in every store within a fifty-mile radius.”
“Oh, my.”
“That doesn’t begin to cover it.”
She looked over her shoulder. “Are they on their way?”
“No. I told him to sit tight and that you’d be back within an hour or so. He wasn’t happy about it.”
“I can’t believe he agreed.”
Tag sighed. “I think he’s more concerned about the damage that could be done if he shows up hollering.”
“Yeah, we don’t want to draw any unnecessary attention.” She thought about yesterday and their large crowd. “Again.”
He grinned at her. “Honey, I’m talking about the damage that man wants to do to your ass.”
Her mouth dropped open, and for the first time in a long while she was completely speechless.
Tag’s booming laugh had her clipping her jaws shut. “I didn’t even know he still had these,” Tag said. He flipped through the books. “I have no idea where mine are.”
“Me, either,” she replied. “Do you think they’ll be of any help?”
“Don’t know. Miss Sadie is a bit blind.”
“I noticed,” Olivia said with a smile. The little bird of a woman had her nose plastered to the computer screen when they’d walked into her shop. “But she’s sharp, too. Her description of the man asking the questions was pretty good.”
Tag sighed. “If he’s in there, I hope she can point him out.”
Boone cleared his throat. He was lounging in the doorway looking as if he didn’t have a hurry or care in the world. “The question isn’t if she can ID him but why.”
Olivia and Tag shared a puzzled glance.
Boone sighed. “Say this guy really is involved in some sort of antiquities looting and reselling. He has been for a while. That’s kind of a grand-scale operation.”
“Which we established,” Olivia said tightly.
“Yeah, we did. Say he’s the same guy responsible for blowing up the motel and nearly shooting you guys with a rifle.”
“He is.”
Boone rolled his eyes at her flat insistence. “Then why in the hell would he be stupid enough to show his face in a town where suspicion is running high and ask a bunch of questions about you? I don’t buy the looter as this guy.”
Olivia studied him for a long time. He’d kept to himself for the most part when they’d been deployed. He interacted sometimes, but more often than not he’d been content to remain aloof. Being a Fed seemed to smooth him out some, but could he be hiding something?
Was it possible that Boone was a part of the whole looting circle? She tapped her nail on the desk and looked at Tag. They needed some time alone. She wanted to know what he’d dug up on their old squad mate.
As much as it chilled her to think one of her marine members could be so heinous as to send them into an ambush, it had happened.
Now she just had to ensure that Boone didn’t have a damn thing to do with it. Problem was she was running out of time.
“Could you give us a minute?” Tag said to him.
He lifted a raven brow and his gaze swung from one to the other. His mouth tightened, and his hands curled into fists. She didn’t think he would move, but finally he gave a curt nod and shut the door behind him. The glass was still rattling when she looked back at Tag.
“What do you think?”
The other man had a dark, contemplative scowl on his face. “My gut says to throw the son of a bitch out of this investigation.”
Her insides clenched. “Why?”
“Because he’s an ass. Always has been.”
Olivia huffed out an exasperated breath. “Come on, Tag, this is serious. Forget the old animosities. I need t
o know what you found out about him.”
The tips of his ears reddened. “Who said I did any digging?”
She shook her head. “You haven’t changed that much in three years. What did your ranger find out?”
“Shit, Olivia, do you have a camera in here or something?”
She smiled. “Nope. What do you know?”
“He’s clean.”
The words were so grudgingly given that she couldn’t hold back a chuckle. “Why do I get the feeling that irks the hell out of you?”
“Because it does. He’s an ass.”
“I so don’t have time to go into this now, but maybe later when this is all settled we can sit down over a beer and discuss what it is about Boone that gets under your skin so easily.”
Tag’s scowl turned into an arc of surprise. “You planning on staying?”
Olivia thought she should probably tell Jake and Hudson first, but she’d already tipped her hand with the deputy. “Yeah, I am.”
“Good thing. I think those two would probably trail after you if you left town, and God knows we need them in Freedom.”
“Why?”
He lifted his shoulders. “Freedom is a small town. We’re all family. When we came to Freedom after the war it was like coming home. They might be occasional pains in my ass, but they’re good men. The best of men. And we need that kind of stock round here.”
Tears clogged her eyes, and she looked down at her hands. “I think they’re good men, too.”
The silence thickened, and she could feel his unease rising. “Don’t worry,” she said and dashed away her tears. “I’m not turning into some namby-pamby crybaby. Should we let Boone back in?”
Tag groaned. “If we must.”
She opened the door and found Boone leaning against the farthest desk glaring out the sheriff’s front window.
“Boone?”
He turned his head in a slow motion and lifted a brow. “Condemned or condoned?”
She shrugged. “We trust you.”
Surprise coated his face, and he looked past her into the other office. “Even him?”
“Yep.”
“Well, miracle of miracles.” He shoved off the desk, and his long stride ate up the distance between them in three steps. “Lead on.”
They settled into the chairs in front of Tag’s desk, and the men stared at each other for a moment.
Olivia cleared her throat. “So, earlier you asked how he could go from being smartly secluded to dumbly obvious. That’s an excellent question,” she said. “I think he’s bold because he doesn’t think we have any idea what’s going on. He probably thinks we haven’t connected any of the dots. Why would he? The only common link is me and the possibility of the package.”
“And Jake,” Boone said. “If this guy knows you’re in the area and Jake was at the hotel when it blew up, he’s probably putting it together.”
“How could he know?”
“Jake’s truck was in the lot that night,” Tag said. “He probably has the equipment to run the tag number and find out who it was registered to.”
Olivia nodded. “Yeah, that makes sense.”
“We’re checking with the hotel staff for leads. Whitcombe is having a hard time since his night clerk was killed.”
“Of course he is.” She turned back to Tag. “What new information did you have?”
Tag tilted his head toward Boone. “Ask him. I’m gonna take these over to Sadie. I’ll be back shortly.”
He bundled them up then strode from the office. The outer door shut behind him, the snap loud in the silence.
Boone rose. “I’ll be right back.”
He loped into the outer office and returned to the desk he’d been leaning on. He grabbed his briefcase and headed her direction. A shadow crossed the window behind him, and Olivia tensed, but the figure continued moving on.
Damn how she hated always being on her guard. In the three years since she’d left Afghanistan, it had taken her time to shake that level of alertness, but she’d done it.
Until this whole mess exploded around them.
Boone sat back down and settled the briefcase on his lap. He popped the latches and the leather creaked open. She craned her neck around to see what he was doing. He pulled a sheaf of papers out then shut the case.
He shuffled through them and plucked out two photos. “We’ve been tracking the emergence of antiquities and a few other items from our region for a few years.” He looked at her. “The Feds had this investigation going from before our deployment.”
She frowned and looked at the pictures. They were grainy black-and-white images of men in turbans and robes mingling with other, more casually dressed men. There were five figures in the first picture and six in the second. “Who are they?”
“The three in robes are locals to the Kabul area. A sheik and his men. The others are brokers, we think. The ones moving the merchandise.”
“So the sheiks are the buyers?”
“Just one sheik.” His blunt finger stabbed at the image of a man in the forefront. He was short and stout even under the cover of his traditional robes. “This is Fatih Kohli. He’s obscenely wealthy and powerful. The others are his bodyguards. When your contact mentioned there’d been an influx of antiquities from our deployment area, I decided to do some checking in our files and found this.” He pointed out another man. “We don’t have any firm names on the sellers, but this guy seems to be the main fence. He shows up in a lot of the photos.”
Olivia studied the slight man. He wore dark slacks and a dark shirt. He also sported a baseball cap and a mustache. The quality of the photo was too poor to make out any individual details, but she had a fleeting moment of recognition. It was gone before she could grasp it.
“The hell of it is,” Boone said, “the sheik is buying back his own history. Word on the street is he has a standing offer to repurchase any items that would otherwise be smuggled out to the West.” He lifted serious eyes to her. “He hates Americans with a passion.”
Olivia knew where he was heading. “You think it’s safe to assume the fencers are not American then?”
“It fits. They are westerners, though. Maybe Brits or Germans.”
She looked at the picture again then switched to the other. It was much the same. The men were crowded around a crate looking down so their faces were obscured. The slight man in black had his back to her. The column of his neck was just as small as he was. He looked almost fragile and vulnerable, like a kid way out of his league. A dark smudge blotted the back of his neck and disappeared beneath the collar of his shirt.
“Is that at tattoo?” she asked.
“Yeah. Recognize it?”
“No, too smudged.”
Another niggle of familiarity hit her, and she tilted the picture this way and that but nothing gelled. She sighed with frustration.
“What’s wrong?”
She flapped the images. “There’s something about this guy.”
Boone’s brow flew up. “Yeah,” he said slowly. “I thought the same thing. So did Tag when I showed him the picture, but we couldn’t put it together.”
She looked down again. “Do you have any other images?”
“No,” he said. “This is it. These guys don’t do a lot of deals in camera-friendly atmospheres.”
“How much have they moved?”
He flipped through the file. “In the last five years, about six million worth of goods.”
She whistled. “Not peanuts.”
“That’s just the antiquities side.”
“What else is there?”
His face clammed up even more. “Can’t tell you that, sorry. But Olivia, if what we’re beginning to put together is correct, these guys have been running this operation for a long time.”
She looked up. “Yeah,” she said. “So where’s the money and what are they doing with it?”
Boone frowned. “That’s what we need to find out.” He tapped the pages. “And I get the feeli
ng the sooner, the better.”
“Why?”
“There is something about the little guy. The broker. There’s more to him than meets the eye. He’s dealing with some high-level people who could do him great harm, yet he doesn’t seem to care a damn about that. The latest intel we had is that the broker has a new shipment. Something valuable and possibly religious.”
“Can you just tail the sheik to the meeting place?”
Boone grimaced. “The little shit seems to be engineering a bidding war.”
“Holy crap,” Olivia whispered. “That’s dumb and dangerous.”
“And again, he doesn’t seem to be the least bit intimidated. I can’t imagine Kohli is going to have much more patience with him.”
Olivia studied the image again.
She knew him. She was sure of it.
But who the hell was he?
Chapter Fourteen
Jake’s temper burned hotter than a cattle brand. He wanted to charge into town and haul Olivia’s sweet ass back to the ranch but knew it would only put her in more danger. He should have followed his instincts yesterday and just gone to town himself to grab what she needed and be done with it. Now that excursion had served to make her more visible.
His heart clenched and burst and throbbed with dry fear. God, what if something happened to her?
“What the hell was she thinking?” Hudson snapped for the hundredth time. “Damn, hell, fuck!” he yelled.
The living room looked as though a tornado had hit it. The couch cushions were strewn along the hardwood floor and several chairs were upended and scattered from the dining room to the hallway. Papers, pencils, and assorted office supplies glittered on the floor. Hudson’s temper was a thing of nearly uncontrollable fury when let loose.
And he had let it loose when he’d heard the news of Olivia’s sneaky departure. He’d ranted, raved, and tossed nearly everything that wasn’t nailed down.
Jake eyed him narrowly. “We should go outside, because if you start digging into my grandmother’s china cabinet, I’m going to have to bust your head and your ass.”
Two Cowboys in Her Crosshairs [Hellfire Ranch] (Siren Publishing Ménage Amour) Page 21
