South Dakota Showdown (Badlands Cops Series Book 1)

by Nicole Helm

“Camper shell is set up on the bed. We’ll be fine.”

  “Tight quarters.”

  “Safer that way. We’ll eat a little something now. Then figure out our best bet for hideaways around Flynn.”

  “It’s been three days since I’ve seen her. They could have taken her anywhere.”

  “Could have, but we know how they operate. Somewhere close.”

  “Jamison...” She didn’t want to tell him. Didn’t want to shift the focus away from finding Gigi, but if the whispers she heard were true, Gigi could be far, far away. “There’s something more.”

  “Isn’t there always,” he muttered, pushing out of the truck.

  Liza didn’t know if his disgust was aimed at her or at the Sons in general, but she got out of the truck herself and crossed over to his side of the vehicle, where he was pulling out the food provisions.

  “There’ve been rumors. Whispers. Nothing concrete and I haven’t seen evidence, but if it’s true...” Liza could hardly speak it. She so desperately didn’t want it to be true.

  Jamison put the cooler on the ground and stared expectantly at her, folding his arms over his chest when she still didn’t talk. He gave her what she was sure was a very effective cop look. But she was too heartsick over Gigi to be intimidated by it.

  “Trafficking,” she managed to say through a too-tight throat.

  “Drugs are hardly new to the Sons’ operations.”

  “Human, Jamison. Human trafficking. Sex trafficking.” She desperately tried to keep the tremor out of her voice and failed. “Gigi’s such an innocent.”

  The impenetrable cop mask gave way to full-on horror. “She’s four, you said.”

  “I don’t know much about it, but I assume it doesn’t matter how old you are. Long as a person is female and vulnerable. Hell, maybe only vulnerable. You’re a cop. Surely you’ve seen the worst humans can do to children.”

  He turned away from her at that, focusing on the food.

  “The point of me telling you that is if she got pulled into something...different, they’re not going to follow the old rules.”

  He put together a sandwich and handed it to her. It took her a minute to get ahold of herself enough to take it. Despite it being her favorite—ham and Swiss, heavy on the cheese, light on the meat—she didn’t have an appetite for it.

  If nothing else, she could find some tiny satisfaction over the fact that he remembered what she liked to eat. That he didn’t only remember the ways she’d betrayed him.

  “The Sons do things a certain way,” he said, making his own sandwich. “Even if it’s new, the ways will be old. They evolve, but they don’t change. We just have to figure out where they’d be able to hide human cargo instead of drugs. I think we can.”

  “You’re awfully confident.”

  “You came to me for a reason, Liza. I have to believe it’s because you thought I could do this.”

  Since she didn’t trust her voice, she nodded.

  “Then I’ll do it.”

  Chapter Six

  Jamison was pretty sure they hadn’t been tailed, and they had a few hours before anyone in the Sons figured out their location. The tails would have tried to follow or figure out where he’d gone before contacting their superiors—probably not his father or Liza’s. These geniuses were too low in the pecking order. So, the chain of communication would take time.

  Once they sent more men—better trackers—it’d still take a good hour. Too many places to look—and he was still a distance from Flynn, which was naturally where the men would start their search.

  But even knowing he had a few hours of safety, he wasn’t about to sleep on the same little air mattress in the camper shell of Grandma’s truck with his ex.

  He had supreme willpower, but he also knew better than to test it with Liza.

  Instead, he took the first shift, sleeping when he knew there would be the least chance of being caught. Though he told her to wake him up in two hours, he also set the timer on his phone because he didn’t quite trust her.

  He shouldn’t trust her at all—with anything. This human trafficking thing could be a crock for all he knew.

  But why would it be? Jamison certainly couldn’t put it past the old man. Even though Liza might have lied to him once upon a time, he had a hard time believing even now that she was the kind of woman who could lie about her sister being in trouble like that.

  Which probably made him an excellent mark.

  He sighed. He could sleep with the best of them in the worst situations, but not with all this doubt and uncertainty.

  Still, he wanted Liza to think he’d slept. That way she’d be more likely to sleep herself.

  If this wasn’t a giant con.

  He pulled his phone out of his pocket. No service here, which he’d known going in. Still, he typed in a text to Cody and Brady about the potential of the Sons being involved in human trafficking. If he got into a place with service, the text would go through. Hopefully.

  He put the phone back in his pocket and then pulled out the map of South Dakota. It was worn in the creases, and no doubt there were more high-tech ways to keep his records, but Jamison preferred what he could see spread out before him.

  This wasn’t the same map he’d shown Liza last night, which was up in the front of the truck. This was his personal map, and how he’d been keeping tabs on the Sons for most of his life. Even before he’d escaped and become an officer of the law.

  He’d marked everything he’d known while he’d been in. Anyplace they hid people or drugs. Their entire array of camps over the years. Crimes. Disappearances. Deaths.

  A story of all the things he hadn’t been able to prevent. After Dev’s near-death run-in with the Sons, Ace in particular, Jamison had given up on taking them down and had instead focused on keeping what he could and whom he could safe.

  All along he’d marked this map every time he heard something, hadn’t he? So, it hadn’t been giving up, no matter what he told himself. Maybe he’d just been waiting for the right opportunity.

  He let out a slow breath. If he was only putting himself in danger, it wouldn’t worry him. But it wasn’t just him. Liza was here, too.

  Jamison shoved that thought away. She was in danger because she wanted to be. He couldn’t let that weigh on his conscience. Besides, she’d be in a heck of a lot more hot water if he wasn’t here.

  He studied the map. Flynn was a speck. Mostly a ghost town when Jamison had been growing up, and he imagined it still was. With the addition of the Sons camp.

  They wouldn’t keep Gigi there, and if Liza’s trafficking story was right on, they’d be very careful.

  What little Jamison knew about human trafficking wasn’t pretty. He had a feeling Cody would know more. Maybe he should drive until they got service, get in touch with his brother.

  But that would draw attention and he wanted to lie as low as he could. Whenever Dad’s men arrived, and they would arrive, it would give Jamison an indication of what they were trying to hide.

  There weren’t many of Jamison’s marks around Flynn on the map. Flynn was sacred ground to Dad. Where he’d been born. Where his parents had left him to die. Where he, in his mind, rose from the ashes as a poor castoff to the deadliest man in South Dakota.

  Flynn was Dad’s mecca. If he was having the whole gang camp there in his sacred spot, something was escalating. Was it the human trafficking?

  If so, the hiding area would be somewhere close, but not too close. If Jamison had to guess, it would be somewhere in the buttes and gullies. Caves, maybe. Isolated, surely. Would they bring potential buyers there, or ship the cargo off?

  If they were shipping, they’d go west into Wyoming. Best chance of being undetected while moving groups of people.

  There were too many possibilities after that. Denver...farther west. Jamison folded Wyoming and Color
ado out of view. Focus on one thing at a time. Narrow down the options to locate where they were potentially holding Gigi.

  It would be somewhere west of Flynn, but not into the national park. Too easy and possible to be accidentally stumbled upon.

  Jamison planned on canvassing from the national park line out toward Flynn. He tried not to think of the huge, nearly impossible task of finding people who didn’t want to be found in the great, empty landscape beyond the national park.

  When he got into cell range he’d call Felicity, see if she’d heard of any strange goings-on around the park. One of the Knight girls who was now a park ranger, Felicity was too dang nice to hold a grudge against Liza. She’d probably jump right in to help.

  But that would only be when and if they got into cell service range. For now... Well, he’d stop pretending he was sleeping. Liza could get a few hours and he could make all sorts of contingency plans as he waited and watched for his father’s men to hunt them down.

  And lead them exactly where he wanted to go.

  He opened the camper shell and slid out, already scanning his surroundings.

  Liza nearly jerked where she was standing, something gold and familiar in her hand. She fisted her fingers over it, then stood there, still as a statue.

  “Thought you were going to sleep longer,” she offered when he did nothing more than crouch at the shell’s opening.

  He barely heard her over the awful pounding of his heart.

  “What’s that?” he demanded, even though he knew exactly what it was. Even though the last thing he wanted was confirmation. Not with the past whipping around them in the wind.

  She looked down at her fisted hand, then met his gaze with defiance and sadness in her own. He’d been so convinced that if he got her out of the Sons he could get rid of that misery. But he’d been eighteen and foolish.

  “You know what it is,” she said, and he shouldn’t have been able to hear her with the way the Dakota winds were swirling with their usual violence.

  But he did.

  “Why do you still have it?” Which was another question he didn’t actually want an answer to. But somehow the questions kept falling out of his mouth, like his brain wasn’t in charge—something instinctual was.

  “You told me it was good luck,” she said, opening her fingers and letting the chain dangle from them. The heart locket twirled in the wind. “Figured I’d need some of that in my life—now more than ever.”

  Too many questions piled up in his brain. Most of all: Was the same picture still inside that stupid locket?

  It didn’t matter. None of the questions about the past mattered. So, he’d focus on the surroundings, on the next move. He’d concentrate on anything except the way she looked down at the locket in her fist like it held all the answers to her broken dreams.

  Walking among the ghosts between them was emotional suicide. It complicated everything and, most of all, it did not matter.

  But his heart couldn’t seem to let it go the way his brain urged him to. “Why did you leave?”

  * * *

  LIZA DIDN’T MOVE. She was afraid that if she did, she’d move toward him instead of far, far away.

  “I thought you had it all figured out,” she said, not daring to look at him. He’d see all the pain that was surely radiating from her like the dust the wind picked up and swirled between them.

  He turned away with no small amount of disgust. She still knew him well enough to know the loathing was aimed inward. He didn’t want to ask her questions like that. He wanted to be above the past.

  But he wasn’t. Something stirred inside her that would be close to deadly here in this moment, but she’d never been very adept at knowing what was good for her.

  It was so hard to watch him be the man she’d always known he’d grow into. Hard to feel all those same emotions she thought time had eradicated. Could he love a woman he hadn’t seen for fifteen years? Someone whom he hated, she thought.

  He couldn’t.

  Maybe the locket was good luck, though, even with all these conflicting emotions, because Jamison’s gaze went to the horizon, hard and cold. It was different than even back in Bonesteel before she’d been shot. There had been a heat to his disdain then.

  This was pure, deadly cold.

  Which stirred something inside her, too. That old need to soothe him, to give him the warmth everything about the Sons had dimmed into that coldness.

  “Get in the truck,” he ordered.

  She didn’t argue, didn’t try to see what he saw, because there was no doubt in her mind the Sons had found them.

  She got in the truck.

  Back then, she’d fought Jamison tooth and nail more often than not, but these days she was grateful to have someone take the lead. She was tired of trying to stay one step ahead of the Sons and failing.

  Jamison slid into the driver’s seat, opening a map on his lap. He took a pencil from the middle console and marked a few things.

  “What are you doing?” she asked, hoping the question didn’t sound like an accusation. But men were after them and he was taking notes?

  “We’ve got three cars—I’m guessing two men apiece. They’re all coming from the west. So, we’ll head there. Grab that pack there in the back.”

  He kept looking at the map while she struggled to pull the giant, heavy backpack into the front seat.

  He made a few more notes on his map, and then carefully folded it and shoved it into his pocket. He took the bag from her, nodding into the back again. “Grab the smaller one. We’re going on a hike. Your leg up for it?”

  Even if it wasn’t, she would have nodded. She wasn’t about to be the person holding Jamison back. Not when she was the reason he was here in the first place.

  She snatched the pack and followed his lead getting back out of the truck. She didn’t see anything on the horizon to the west, except maybe some upturned dust. Still, she trusted Jamison’s instincts.

  They shouldered their individual packs. Without any verbal instruction, Liza knew to fall in step behind Jamison. Her leg hurt, but it was a low-level, throbbing ache she’d get used to.

  And if she didn’t, she’d just think of Gigi in danger and suck it up.

  He led her down into a valley, over the crumbling rock that made up the strange formations that drew sightseers every year. They weren’t as big or uninterrupted here as they were in the national park. Here there were still gaps of flat land with early green grass growing.

  She tried not to make a sound when she stumbled and hit her leg the wrong way. Jamison didn’t look back at her, his attention focused on what she assumed was the path in his mind.

  “Why are we leaving the truck behind?” Liza asked as she skidded on a rock and just barely stopped herself from stumbling over a dangerous edge.

  “We’re going to hike around, let them think we abandoned the vehicle. They’ll start looking for us on foot, and they’ll probably start from the truck and move toward the target. If we circle up and around, we can get back to the truck in a few hours. From the direction they came, I’ve got a few ideas about where a trafficking hideout might be.”

  “What if they guard the truck? Or torch it?”

  She could tell he hadn’t thought of that, because his forward motion paused almost imperceptibly. “They won’t torch it. Their prime objective is to find us, and likely bring us in front of our fathers. The truck is inconsequential.”

  Liza didn’t bother to argue as she looked back at the truck, a sitting duck for the destruction the Sons liked to inflict on anything in their path.

  Jamison no doubt had it right that if they were caught they’d be brought in front of their fathers and the “council.” Judgment would be meted out, and Liza shuddered to think what awful things might be waiting for her and Jamison.

  But she didn’t think his assessment of w
hat could happen with the truck was right—at all.

  Chapter Seven

  They hiked for a good hour. He had the route fixed in his mind, but still, he used his compass to make sure they weren’t getting turned around in the rock formations that could start to look all the same if one didn’t know how to navigate them.

  The sun slowly started its descent, and Jamison began to lead them back to the truck. He was pretty sure he’d timed it right, but he still kept the pace slow and steady—Liza behind him rather than next to him—as they got closer and closer to where he’d left the truck.

  He wanted to be back there by the time the sun went down. It would get exponentially colder as the day wore on, and while he’d packed Liza some warmer gear, he doubted she needed a long hike in the cold with her current injuries.

  She’d held up like a champ and he opened his mouth to tell her so but closed it instead. She didn’t need his encouragement. She was trying to save her sister. Not earn brownie points with him.

  He wasn’t her protector anymore, even if she’d come and asked him for a hand. Help wasn’t the same as saving someone. He didn’t need to rescue her. Just like all of these feelings wrapping around him would go away. It was memory, not reality.

  They meant nothing to each other. Nothing at all.

  He’d get it through his thick skull eventually.

  There was a tinge to the air as they approached the truck, and a low-level dread crept across his skin. The acrid smell of fire and chemicals became more and more potent the closer they got to the vehicle.

  Still, he wouldn’t let himself believe the worst. What possible reason would they have had to burn the truck? It would draw notice—and the one thing the Sons had always shied away from was too much attention from the law.

  But as he closed in on the clearing, he could see the dark smoke. They stepped level with the truck and all Jamison could do was stop and stare.

  They’d torched it, just as Liza had worried about. It smoked, the blackened wreckage of his grandmother’s truck a grotesque twisted skeletal remain on the dusty landscape. An incongruous image against the riotous sunset.