Hell for Leather

by Julie Ann Walker

  Christ…that sound just…well, it just got to him. He was tempted once more to place a comforting arm around her shoulders. After all, she was so incredibly soft. So amazingly warm. So…so much woman—and, yeah, sick, twisted, shitheel that he was, he was referring to her boobs. Her lush, delicious, overly abundant boobs. And having her in his arms just now, and earlier, out in the courtyard, had felt…something. Something a far cry closer to right than he in any way, shape, or form wanted to admit.

  Are you really stupid enough to let history repeat itself?

  The question was either posed by the universe or his own subconscious. Of course, where the query originated didn’t amount to a hill of beans, because either way, the answer was the same.

  No. No, he was not stupid enough to let history repeat itself. Because the truth was, no matter how good or how right she felt in his arms, That Woman was nothing but walking trouble and heartache.

  He’d learned that the hard way…

  Boy, howdy, had he ever. Barely a week went by when he wasn’t reminded of the pain Jolene’s leaving had caused. Barely a month passed when he wasn’t wrenched from his sleep by the nightmare of her betrayal and what it had cost him. And sometimes, when he was all alone, he could still hear the sound of a strangled voice calling her name in the darkness.

  “We haven’t been able to access your uncle’s text messages,” Becky said. “But we have been able to access his call log and Sander’s number is the only one with a southern Illinois prefix. Plus Charlie is a nickname for Charles, and—”

  “Well, that’s—” Delilah shook her head a little frantically. Her slim, pale throat—a throat Mac didn’t want to touch and kiss and lick; liar, liar, pants all the freakin’ way on fire!—worked over a hard swallow. “That’s got to be him, right?”

  Her excited tone hit Mac in his soft, gooey center. And, yes, he had a soft, gooey center. Because even though he may be determined not to let history repeat itself, not to let himself get caught up in her sticky web of seduction, that didn’t mean he wanted to see her enthusiasm ground to dust either. Fortunately—thank you sweet baby Jesus—Zoelner saved him from the unenviable task of having to be the one to douse that spark in her eye. “Don’t get too excited,” the ex-spook said. “This could be the guy we’re searching for, or it could just be coincidence. We still need to run his name through military records to see if he was a Marine.”

  “Yeah.” Delilah nodded again. “Okay.” Mac could tell she was trying hard, and failing miserably, to temper her enthusiasm.

  “Then, if he was a Marine, we can start looking for his last known address,” Zoelner added.

  “Sounds good.” Delilah licked her lips. The dart of her pink tongue made Mac’s—

  “Ow! Goddamnit!” he hissed. “Lord have mercy, Steady,” he groused, frowning up at the man. “Are you usin’ a seven-gauge needle to stitch me up, or what?”

  “Oh, pipe down, you big baby,” Steady replied. “I gave you a local. And besides, this is just a little stab wound. People get stab wounds all the time.”

  Mac turned to Delilah, one corner of his mouth quirked, his expression all about the I told you so. But he was thwarted from speaking the words aloud when Zoelner yelled, “Bingo!”

  “What’ve you got?” Boss strolled into the conference area from his office, then immediately ordered, “Good God, Ozzie! Turn that shit off!”

  “What?” Ozzie lifted his hands, blinking innocently. “I’m kicking mad flava in your ears. I’d think you would all thank me for it.”

  “I’ll thank you by way of a boot up your ass,” Boss growled, throwing an arm around Becky’s shoulders when she came to stand beside him, bending to smack a quick kiss beside the lollipop stick protruding from her lips.

  “What is with everybody wanting to put their boots up my ass?” Ozzie asked the room. “I know it’s a particularly cute ass, but—”

  “Ozzie!” a chorus of voices, including Mac’s, yelled at once.

  “Sheesh!” The guy held up his hands and Mac noticed his T-shirt was printed with the Starfleet logo and the words: Are you out of your Vulcan mind? “Tough crowd tonight,” he grumbled, twisting to switch off the music. Boss shook his head before pinning Zoelner with a no-nonsense stare. “What’ve you got, Z?”

  Leaning forward, studying his computer screen intently and still typing, Zoelner said, “Charles Sander was in Delilah’s uncle’s Marine Corps unit. And I’m using his cell phone number to locate a phone bill, which should give us his last known address. Uh…give me a second here.” More rattling as the former–CIA agent attacked the keyboard. “Well, shit,” he said after a few seconds, sitting back and raking a hand through his hair. “I have no idea how to find his last known address. All I’m getting for him is a post office box.”

  “He has a house,” Delilah insisted. “My uncle always talked about what a shithole it was.”

  “Yeah.” Ozzie shrugged. “But how do you suggest we find it?”

  For a couple of intense, breathless moments, no one moved. Mac racked his brain, trying to figure out their next move. There has to be something. There has to be a way to—And then Delilah came up with the answer for him.

  “The IRS,” she said. “I know a back door into their database. We can cross reference Charles’s name with his PO box and check to see if he’s getting a yearly property tax bill.”

  “No way.” Ozzie shook his head vehemently. “There’s absolutely no way I’m hacking into the Internal Revenue Service.”

  “Why the hell not?” Mac frowned, wincing when Steady hit another particularly sore spot. He was beginning to think there’d been nothing but sugar water in that syringe of so-called numbing agent. “You hack into the NSA’s and CIA’s databases all the time.”

  “Uh, yeah.” Ozzie pulled a face. “But the IRS is scary.”

  Delilah snorted and pushed up from her seat, strolling over to Ozzie and his bank of computers. Mac didn’t let his eyes ping down to watch the sway of her ass. Or if he did, it was only for a nanosecond…er…okay, so maybe it was two nanoseconds. “I do it all the time for the law firm,” she said, claiming the seat Becky had vacated. Raising her arms to twist her hair quickly into some kind of sloppy updo thingy, she began lightly, but efficiently typing on the keyboard.

  Yessir. It was his naughty librarian fantasy come to life. Little Mac, the goddamned idiot, sure took notice. Which was good and bad. Good because it distracted Mac until he could no longer feel the tug and pull of Steady’s needle. Bad because his jeans had suddenly shrunk six sizes. He reached down to adjust himself, ignoring the knowing smirk on Steady’s face when the guy caught his move.

  “And here we go,” Delilah said, pointing at her screen.

  “Good God, that was fast!” Ozzie enthused.

  “The IRS. They see all. They know all.”

  “See”—Ozzie shuddered dramatically—“and that’s why they’re scary.”

  “Where does he live?” Mac asked.

  Ozzie leaned forward to squint at the computer screen in front of Delilah. “Some place called Cairo, Illinois. Let me see if it’s…” He tapped a few keys on his own keyboard. “Yeah. It’s about forty-five minutes south of Marion.”

  “Mac?” Delilah turned to him then, a wide smile splitting her face and making her eyes sparkle like a field of green wheat after a big thunderstorm. “This is it! We’re going to find him!”

  She jumped up from the desk and raced toward him, grabbing his hand and squeezing it tight. “We’re really going to find him!”

  Every cell inside him thrilled to the touch of her fingers. Holy shit fire, was all he could think. Just like a shot of pure crack cocaine…

  Chapter Five

  Georgetown, Washington, DC

  Music…

  The sweet, dulcet tones of Dolly Parton singing about working nine to five filtered into Intelligence Agent Chelsea Duvall’s dreams, making her smile. Until her unconscious mind recognized the sound of her ringtone and thrust her i
nto wakefulness.

  “Son of a hoochie mama,” she growled, fumbling on the nightstand for her glasses. “Ow!” she squawked when, in her mad scramble to get the suckers on her face, she stabbed herself in the eyeball with an earpiece. Squinting her abused eye closed, she glanced at the glowing red numbers on her alarm clock with her one remaining functional peeper.

  Eleven p.m. This can’t be good.

  “Agent Duvall here,” she answered, not bothering to read the caller ID. There were only a handful of people who’d be phoning her at this hour, and they all belonged to The Company.

  “We’ve got a red flag,” came the immediate reply from Joe Morales, her supervisor.

  “Roger that,” she sat up, throwing back the thick purple quilt her mother made her after college graduation and prior to her recruitment by the CIA. Purple had been her favorite color since she was six years old and fell head-over-heels in love with Fred from the Scooby-Doo gang. Her young mind had picked up on the not-so-unspoken attraction between Fred and Daphne, and she’d used her brilliant kindergarten reasoning and deduction skills to conclude that it was Daphne’s snappy purple dress that was the big draw for Fred. In the way of first crushes, Fred had eventually fallen out of favor. Not so the color purple…

  Reaching over, she snapped on the bedside lamp. Diffuse yellow light spilled around her room, highlighting the piles of file folders stacked on her dresser, chair, and bench. Next to her, two laptops occupied the space usually reserved for a lover.

  Such is my life, she thought fleetingly—maybe she needed to revisit the whole Fred thing. Pulling one of the machines onto her lap and flipping up the lid, she blew out a breath. “All right, I’m ready, sir. Where’s the breach coming from?”

  “The Black Knights.”

  For a moment, all she could do was blink in confusion.

  Was she still asleep? Was this all a dream?

  Before she had the chance to pinch herself, her supervisor barked, “Agent Duvall, did you copy that?”

  “Yes, sir.” She shook her head and scrubbed a hand over her face. “I…I think I heard you say the breach was originating with the Black Knights.”

  “Affirmative.”

  Oh-kay. But… “So I don’t understand how that’s a breach then, sir. The Black Knights are—”

  “Are you still friends with Dagan Zoelner?” The abruptness of the question, along with that name, his name, caused a hard lump to take shape at the back of her throat.

  Dragging in a deep breath, the smell of Tide on her freshly laundered sheets grounded her enough to croak, “I wouldn’t say that, sir. No.”

  She hadn’t heard from Dagan in almost two years. Not since the day he called her up, asking her for help, and she went and said something stupid like, what are you involved in this time? It was the this time—basically a blinking neon sign referring to that terrible tragedy in Afghanistan—that’d done it, that’d hammered in the last nail on the coffin of any affection they might have once felt for each other.

  Or…more like it had hammered in the last nail on the coffin of any affection he might have once felt for her.

  Truth was, she’d never stopped thinking about him. Never stopped worrying about him and wondering if he was happy with his new job at Black Knights Inc. Never stopped questioning how things might’ve been different if only—

  “Doesn’t matter,” Morales said. “You were once friends, so that gives us just the in we need.”

  “Sir?”

  “I want you to call them up and ask them why they’re running a search on the phone records of Theodore Fairchild.”

  “Should that name ring a bell?” She glanced around at the myriad files she’d yet to go through since that treasonous agent, Luke Winterfield, had leaked classified information to the press—and then run like a scared rabbit to hide out in a Central American country with whom the U.S. had no extradition agreement. Of course, if the location of the CIA and NSA black sites had been all he leaked, and if the press had been the only people he leaked to, she wouldn’t be getting calls about red flags from her supervisor at eleven o’clock at night.

  “No. It shouldn’t ring any bells. At least not yet,” Morales assured her. “It could be nothing more than coincidence, but I want to make sure of that. And you’re just the agent for the job.”

  Usually when her supervisor stroked her ego, the ambitious, upstart career woman in her was tempted to purr like a cat. Not tonight, though. Because tonight he was asking her to phone Dagan Zoelner.

  “Thank you for the vote of confidence, sir.” She hoped he couldn’t hear the slight tremor in her voice. “Do I tell the Knights why I’m inquiring about their most recent Internet search?”

  “No.”

  Chelsea waited for more. Nothing came.

  Morales could be amazingly eloquent and long-winded, especially when he was ranting about terrorist factions and rogue nations. Or he could be frustratingly succinct. At this moment, unfortunately for her, he’d chosen to be the latter.

  “If you’ll pardon my confusion here, sir,” she finally said, “what do I tell them if not the truth?”

  “Tell them that in our ongoing effort to assist them in their exemplary work for the president and his Joint Chiefs, we’ve been monitoring the online activity on one of their computers and we were simply wondering if there was anything we could do to help in regard to their most recent endeavors.”

  Chelsea lifted her brows. Okay, and now he goes for eloquent? “And what’s the real reason we’ve been monitoring the online activity on one of their computers?”

  “It’s just a leftover from when we were looking for Rock Babineaux,” Morales admitted, referring to the huge blunder involving the framing of one of the Knights by a psychotic former government psychiatrist. And, yes, Chelsea knew just how ironic that sounded. Psychotic psychiatrist. Jesus. “And you know that once we get our sharp, little eavesdropping hooks in someone, we don’t like to let them go.”

  Did she ever. “Dagan…uh…” She cleared her constricted throat. Damned pesky lump. “What I meant to say is that Agent Zoelner—”

  “Former Agent Zoelner,” Morales stressed, obviously still firmly entrenched in the camp of people who placed the blame for that failed Afghani mission squarely on Dagan’s shoulders.

  “Yes, sir,” she capitulated. “Former Agent Zoelner might ask why I’m the one calling. What should I tell him?”

  “Tell him, given the friendly relationship you two once shared, that you’ve been appointed the official liaison between the United States Central Intelligence Agency and the covert group known as Black Knights Incorporated.”

  “Is the official liaison between yada, yada even a real thing, sir?”

  “It is now. Congratulations on the promotion, Agent Duvall,” Morales said. And, yeah, as well as its sharp, little eavesdropping hooks, the agency was also known to come up with nifty titles for people when it behooved them to do so.

  “Thank you, sir. Does this promotion come with a raise?”

  “Of course not.”

  Uh-huh. “I didn’t think so, sir.”

  “Get on it, Agent Duvall. And call me back with whatever information you discover.”

  “Roger that.”

  After punching the “end” button on her iPhone, Chelsea simply sat and stared at the blank screen as the old grandfather clock in the living room ticked away the seconds.

  Oh, quit being such a wuss, her pride finally admonished. And with a shaky finger—really? Were her hands shaking?—she dialed Dagan’s number…

  ***

  “So, what now?”

  All the Knights were seated around the conference table, and Delilah felt buoyed just looking at their capable, determined faces. Now that they’d identified Charlie Sander and pinned down his address, the cold fear that had squeezed her in its merciless grip, the one that had fostered all those nebulous, terrifying feelings that she might never see her uncle again, finally released its icy hold.

  She
was going to see Uncle Theo again. She wasn’t exactly sure how or when. But she was sure of where to start looking. Cairo, Illinois…

  “It’s called a plan, shit for brains,” Steady answered the question Ozzie posed to the group, a grin pulling at his handsome, swarthy face. “You know, as in, we need one?”

  “Well, derrr.” Ozzie rolled his eyes. “Thanks for that brilliant—”

  “We head down to Cairo,” Mac interjected, cutting short what Delilah had come to suspect would be a lengthy back-and-forth. For a group of highly educated, highly trained men, they sure talked a lot of smack. Of course, her years behind the bar had taught her that an overload of testosterone tended to have that effect on guys when they were grouped together. “We check out Charles Sander’s house. And if we don’t find Theo there, we go door-to-door, flashin’ his photo until we locate someone who’s seen him.”

  Yup. And that sounded about right to Delilah. Then again, most things Mac said sounded right to her. It was hard for things not to sound right when they were spoken in that low, sexy, Texas twang of his.

  Oh, pull your head out of your ass, Delilah.

  “Yeah, well, good luck with that.” Ozzie harrumphed, and for a moment, she wasn’t completely sure she hadn’t spoken that last thought aloud. Then she saw Ozzie frowning at the laptop sitting open on the table in front of him. “The place is a ghost town.”

  “All the better,” Mac muttered. He’d donned a fresh shirt, and he was swirling a stir stick in a piping hot cup of sludge…er…coffee. It had to be coffee, right? “Small towns are notoriously nosy. If Theo and his big, loud Harley rolled through, you can bet your bottom dollar he was noticed.”

  “No.” Ozzie reached up to scratch at his mop of blond, fly-away hair. “I wasn’t being oblique. The place is literally a ghost town. Says here,” he pointed a finger at his screen, “that following some pretty severe race riots in the sixties, the town was mostly abandoned. Then, in 2011 when the Ohio River burst its banks, the Corps of Engineers evacuated most of the residents who were left. It’s possible Theo could have come and gone with no one the wiser.”