by Dana Marton
She stood to walk around the desk. “Would you mind rolling up your pants?” she asked in her friendliest tone. “In light of the weapons we found in your car, I’d feel more comfortable if I made a full search. Just to set my mind at ease.”
If he’d been cold before, he went subzero now, his gaze turning to black ice. Every muscle in his body tensed. She’d definitely hit a nerve.
Would he hit back? She was ready to defend herself, not that she was looking forward to tackling him. He looked strong, quick and capable.
She should have asked Delancy to stay as backup, she thought too late. Jamie was already on his feet.
* * *
ANGER AND HUMILIATION washed over Jamie as he stood. He’d played along long enough. He didn’t have time for this. “You need to let me make that call.”
The next thing he knew, he was shoved face-first into the wall, his right hand twisted up behind his back, his cheek rubbing into the brick. Air whooshed out of his lungs, more from surprise than anything else.
Her transformation from sweet to tough cop was pretty spectacular and stunned him more than a little. For a second her body pressed against his full-length from the back, her soft breasts flattened against his ribs. Another place, another time... Heat and awareness shot through him, pure lust drowning out the aggravation that she would try to manhandle him.
He could have put her down. He could have put her down hard.
But she was an officer of the law, and they were on the same side. And frankly, he was beginning to respect her skills.
“Take it easy,” he said. “I’m cooperating.”
He let her pull down his other hand and put plastic restraints on him, even if the thought of being tied up made him uneasy. Any undercover commando who couldn’t get out of plastic restraints in under a minute needed to quit. He said nothing when she edged his boots apart with her foot.
Then she bent and grabbed on to the hem of his jeans, and that set his teeth on edge. “That’s not necessary. I’m not the enemy.”
She rolled the denim up briskly. “Just a quick check. Then you give me that number you want to call and I’ll call for you. How about that?”
Over his dead body. She called Ryder and Jamie would never live it down that he’d gotten nabbed and interrogated by Deputy Sheriff Hot Chick.
He held still as she moved his pant leg up. He knew what she would see: cold steel alloy, nothing human, a well-engineered machine. He’d received his prosthetics as a major favor from a friend of the colonel his team reported to. It was the best technology Olympic athletes used, taken up another notch. A prototype, the first and only set to receive the designation combat ready.
“Fancy hardware,” she commented as she covered up his left leg and moved on to the right. “How did this happen?”
None of her business. “Car accident.” He said the first thing that came to mind.
“I would have thought war injury.” She finished and straightened, expertly sliding her hand into his pocket and retrieving his wallet. “You move like a soldier.”
And suddenly he had enough of her prying into his business. He twisted his wrist to expose the link on his metal watchband that he kept sharp. Another twist, applying pressure to the right places, and he was free.
He reached for her as he turned, caught her by surprise and had her trapped against the wall in a split second, holding her hands at either side of her head, preventing her from going for her weapon.
Their faces were inches from each other, their bodies nearly touching. She stared at him with wide-eyed surprise that quickly turned to anger, then back to calm strength again, the transition fascinating to observe.
God, she was even more beautiful up close—those sparkling blue eyes and all that flawless skin.
“Not a smart move,” she said calmly, the words drawing his gaze to the crease in her bottom lip that begged to be kissed. “I call out and there’ll be half a dozen officers in here in a second.”
“Why don’t you?” He knew the answer, the exact same reason why he hadn’t given her the number to call Ryder at the office. She didn’t want to embarrass herself.
Her cell phone rang in her pocket.
He thought about kissing her, which was really stupid. He held her for another long second before he stepped back and let her go as a gesture of good faith, but took his wallet back.
She pulled her phone out with one hand, her gun with the other, pointing it at the middle of his chest.
She glared at him as she took the call. “Yes. Yes, sir,” she said, the look on her face stunned at first, then quickly turning speculative. She lowered her gun. Her sparkling blue eyes narrowed when the call ended, and she turned her full attention back to him.
She stepped around to put the desk between them once again. “Want to guess who that was?”
He raised an eyebrow.
“Homeland Security. I’ve been ordered to release you immediately, without any further questions. Want to tell me what that’s about?”
He winced. He would rather have that nobody know about his brief time in Brianna Tridle’s custody, but, hell, he’d take whatever break he could get at this stage.
He sauntered by her on his way to the door. “Looks like you won’t get to keep me. Life is full of disappointments, Deputy Sheriff.”
* * *
HE ALMOST DIDN’T even mind having to see her again, Jamie thought as he ran a quick background search on her once he was back at his office that night, after having caught a brief nap at his apartment.
She hadn’t returned his weapons, probably just to spite him. The orders on the phone had been only about releasing him, she’d said. He could claim his property after a twenty-four-hour waiting period, some rule she’d made up on the fly, he was sure.
“So she hauled you in?” Shep, one of his teammates, was asking with a little too much glee.
They worked out of a bulletproof office trailer in the middle of nowhere, close enough to the border to be able to reach it within minutes, far enough from prying eyes in town.
They had a pretty simple setup: one office for Ryder McKay, the team leader, an interrogation room, a bathroom and a small break room in the back, the rest of the space taken up by desks for the six-man team.
Ryder was locked up in his office, on the phone. The rest of the team was out.
Jamie shrugged as he scrolled down the screen.
“She questioned you?”
“Interrogation room.” He spit out the two words as if they were broken glass in his mouth. He read the search results on his screen, scanning the scores of photos of her. Miss Brianna Tridle accepts her crown. She’d been Miss Texas. No joke.
She’d been younger—different hair, more makeup, but the smile was the same. He felt a tug in places that hadn’t tugged in a long time, just looking at her on the screen.
“Handcuffs?” Shep asked.
He refused to answer, opening the next document that detailed everything from her family circumstances to her education. She was single, the sole guardian of one Katie Tridle, twenty-three years old.
Sister?
There was something there, he thought. Normally a person didn’t need a guardian at twenty-three.
“Seriously, she had you in handcuffs?” Shep gave a belly laugh. “Oh, man, I would have given money to see that. Why didn’t you just call in?”
Because she wouldn’t let me, was the answer, words he wasn’t about to say. He shut down his computer instead and pushed to his feet. “Patrol time, funny boy. Move it.”
Shep picked up his handgun and shoved it into his holster, grinning all the way. It burned Jamie’s temper that he had to get his backup weapon out of his drawer because most of his stuff was in the deputy sheriff’s custody.
“Good thing she ran your prints and the flags went off in the system.” Shep was having way too much fun with the incident to let it go, giving another gloating smirk as he got into his own SUV while Jamie hopped into his.
&nbs
p; Yeah, flags had gone off. Homeland Security had called. They’d called both Brianna Tridle and Ryder at the office, unfortunately.
Jamie turned on radio contact as they pulled out of the parking lot. “How are you doing following up on the Kenny Davis angle?” he asked, ready to change the topic of conversation.
“Running into a lot of dead ends.”
The Pebble Creek sheriff had been killed in a confrontation with Mo, another teammate, when the sheriff had gotten involved in the smuggling and kidnapped a little boy to use as leverage to regain a drug shipment he’d lost.
Mo did gain some clues out of his investigation: a code name, Coyote, the head of the smuggling operations on the other side of the border, and a date, October 13.
Something, but not enough. They needed to unravel the Coyote’s identity and take him into custody, and they needed to figure out what the date meant.
“You think October 13 is the transfer?” He asked the same question they’d asked each other a dozen times since Mo had come up with the date.
“What else?”
“Why would the sheriff reveal it?”
“A sudden pang of patriotism? He knew at the end that he was dying. Money had been his main motivator for going bad. At that last moment, he knew money was no longer any good to him. He did this one thing to appease his conscience.”
That made sense. But October 13 was only three weeks away. They had credible intelligence that several terrorists, along with some weapons of mass destruction, were going to cross this section of the border, the few hundred miles they were patrolling and investigating.
Now they had the date. Hopefully.
They needed an exact location.
To get that, they needed to find the Coyote.
“We’ll catch as many smugglers as we can. One of them will lead us to the boss on the other side. He’ll have the details of the transfer. Once we have him, I’m not worried. We’ll get what we need out of him.” Shep was more optimistic than Jamie.
“The smugglers we catch are small potatoes. None of them had a straight line to the Coyote so far.”
“Patience is the name of the game.”
Not one of his strengths, Jamie silently admitted.
They could have called in the National Guard and closed down the border in this area. But the bad guys would see that and simply bring over the terrorists and their weapons someplace else.
Which was why Jamie’s six-man team was handling things quietly. According to their cover, they were here to observe illegal border activity and make budget recommendations to policy makers, while closely working with the CBP. In reality, they were a small, fast-hitting unit of a larger undercover commando team that protected national security all over the globe.
They wanted the terrorists to have no idea that they were expected. They wanted the bastards to come as planned so they could be apprehended and neutralized, taken out of the action for good—the only real solution.
Jamie and Shep talked about that and strategy as they reached the border, then radioed Keith and Mo to return to the office. The night shift was in place.
The full moon had come up, illuminating the landscape: some limited grazing land with large patches of arid ground thrown in that grew nothing but prickly pear and mesquite.
The Rio Grande flowed to the south of them, its dark waters glinting in the moonlight. Cicadas sang in the bushes. Up way ahead, deer were coming in to drink, but hearing the two cars, they darted away.
The place could look so peaceful and serene, belying how much trouble this little strip of land was causing on a regular basis lately.
Jamie pulled into a mesquite grove to observe for a while. Shep drove ahead and disappeared from sight after a few minutes. They were at one of the known crossing spots where the river was wide and the water low, the crossing relatively easy.
He got out his binoculars and used those for the first scan, then switched to his old, cracked night-vision goggles he’d grabbed from the office. He was mostly panning the river’s southern bank, so he almost missed the three men who stole forward from the bushes on his other side, carrying oversize backpacks and an inflatable raft.
“Got three here,” he said into the radio to warn Shep.
“Be right back.”
Jamie didn’t wait for him. He started his car and gunned the engine, caught the trio halfway between the bushes and the water, squealed to a stop then jumped out, aiming his weapon as he rushed forward while they scattered.
“Guns on the ground! Hands in the air! Now!”
But the idiots seemed to find courage in the fact that they outnumbered him three to one. The nearest one took a shot at him.
Jamie ducked, ran forward and fired back, aiming for the extremities. They needed information, which dead men couldn’t give.
He hit the guy in the leg and the smuggler went down, then Jamie was on top of him, maybe a little rougher than he had to be. His already damaged night-vision goggles broke and fell into the dirt.
Disarming the idiot took a minute, cuffing him another as the man struggled pretty hard while swearing and complaining about his injury.
“I’ll feel sorry for you later.” Jamie finished securing him. “Now shut up.”
By the time he was done, the one who had the raft was at the edge of the water, the other one running in the opposite direction, back into the bushes where they probably had a vehicle hidden.
“Halt!” he called after him, not that the guy obeyed.
Jamie swore as he pushed to his feet. He’d already taken one down. He could have waited for Shep to go after the others together. But he wasn’t in the habit of holding anything back.
He took after the guy who was going for the getaway car. With his prosthetics, he was no good in water, a weakness he hated.
He caught sight of Shep’s car flying back, kicking up dust, just as the man he was chasing turned for a second and squeezed off another shot at Jamie.
He slowed, steadied his arm and shot back, aiming at the guy’s gun and hitting it, a miracle considering the distance and lack of light. Then he darted forward once again, after the man who had already disappeared in the bushes.
The brush he entered was as tall as he was in places so he slowed, watching for movement up ahead. Nothing. The moon sliding behind a stray cloud didn’t help. He had his high-powered flashlight clipped to his belt. Too bad turning that on would just make him a target.
Waiting for Shep and hunting as a team would have been smarter, but once again something—a need to prove himself, pride—pushed him forward.
He moved slowly, step by step, careful not to trip.
Somewhere behind him, Shep beeped his horn to let him know he got his man. That blare turned out to be Jamie’s undoing.
He didn’t hear the smuggler jump out of the bushes on his right, so he caught the collapsible paddle full in the face.
Pain shot up his nose and into his brain. He sprinted after the bastard anyway, shaking his head to clear it. The uneven ground tried to trip him; he focused on his balance, on closing the distance.
The man dropped his backpack and picked up speed.
Jamie didn’t slow to see what he’d been carrying. That could wait.
Dark shadows surrounded them; there was no other sound but their boots slapping on the ground and their harsh breathing. Thorny bushes tore at him, ripping flesh and fabric. He paid no mind to anything but the man in front of him.
When he came close enough, he dove forward. They went down hard onto gravelly ground, rolled. Jamie was stronger, but the guy could maneuver his legs easier. A few minutes passed before he could subdue the smuggler.
“What’s your name?” He flipped the guy onto his stomach and yanked the plastic cuff around his wrists. “What are you doing here? Who do you work for?”
But the man didn’t respond, just snarled with impotent fury.
Jamie pushed himself up with his hands, then stood, the movement ungainly. Walking and running were his
strengths; other things still didn’t go as smoothly as he would have liked. He pulled the guy to standing and drew his gun at last to speed things up. “Talk and walk.”
The guy did neither, so Jamie shoved him forward.
He picked up the backpack on their way back to the SUV. Judging from the metallic clanking, it held weapons, probably a few dozen small handguns.
Drugs and illegal immigrants were smuggled north; guns and money were smuggled south, in ever increasing quantities, fueling massive empires of crime on both sides and causing untold human misery.
The three they’d caught tonight were a drop in the bucket.
“Got him. Coming out.” He called a warning before stepping out of the cover of the bushes.
Shep had been waiting. He lowered his weapon. Looked like he’d already stashed the other two guys in the back of his SUV. He holstered his gun as Jamie came closer.
“You okay? Your nose doesn’t look too good.”
“Feels like it’s been driven into my brain.” It really did. He was seeing a couple of extra stars than what were in the sky tonight.
“Broken?”
“Nah.” But his cheekbone might have gotten cracked. He flexed his jaw. His face burned like hell.
“Could have waited for me.”
Yeah, they were a team. Whatever. Just because he was no longer whole didn’t mean he couldn’t handle a chase by himself. Although that probably wasn’t what Shep had meant.
He drew a deep breath. After his injury, he’d spent some time in the darkest pit of depression. Then he’d gotten his new legs and...fine, he’d been overcompensating. “We got them. That’s what counts, right?”
Shep was panning the brush with his spotlight. “Did you find their car?”
“Didn’t get that far. Has to be back there somewhere. I don’t think they walked far.” The man he’d chased down had had plenty of energy left in him for a good sprint.
“I’ll go and take a look.” Shep took off running, keeping both his flashlight and his weapon out.
Jamie shoved the smuggler he’d caught up against his SUV, searched the man’s pockets for ID but found nothing but a small bag of weed. He locked the guy in the back of the car then went through the backpack and came up with three dozen brand-new small arms: Ruger .380, the perfect size to be carried concealed.
