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His stomach was as flat as the blacktop they drove over, and probably as hard. Not that she’d looked. Much. She lifted her gaze to his face.
“Hot down here,” she said, then winced at how inane she sounded.
She had tagged along to catch up, maybe even apologize for her past sins, but suddenly she couldn’t remember a thing she’d meant to say. Shep still had a knack for overwhelming her.
He kept his attention on the road. “How long have you been with the FBI?” he asked in that rich, masculine voice of his that had been the center of her teenage obsession with the man.
“Five years. Police force before that.”
He turned to her at last, his eyebrows sliding up his forehead. “You were a cop?”
“For a while. After I got my act together. My juvenile record was expunged.”
He grunted, sounding a lot less impressed than she’d hoped he would be. As she tried to think of what to say next, he turned off the county road and down a winding lane, which led to a trailer park.
A hundred or so trailers of various sizes sat in disorderly rows, all in faded pastel colors. No people. Nobody would want to sit outside in this heat. Broken-down cars and rusty grills clogged the narrow spaces between trailers, garbage and tumbleweeds blowing in the breeze.
He drove to the back row, checked the address, then backed his SUV into the gravel driveway next to a derelict shed that sat between two homes.
“This one.” He nodded toward a pale blue single-wide directly across from them that had its siding peeling in places. A tan recliner with the stuffing hanging out sat by the front steps.
When Shep got out, so did she. She caught movement at last—nothing sinister. Behind the shed, in a half-broken blue kiddie pool, a little boy was giving a graying old dog a bath. The dog didn’t look impressed, but still stood obediently and let the kid dump water all over him.
The kid paid them no attention. He should be safe where he was. They weren’t expecting trouble, but even if they found some, the little boy was out of sight and out of the way.
Shep looked at her. “What do you think?”
She scanned the blue trailer, mapped all the possible venues of approach in her head. “Anybody going up the steps could be easily picked off by someone in one of the windows.” That would be the most vulnerable part of the exercise. “Do you need backup?”
“I can handle it.” He checked his weapon with practiced movements, as if he’d done this a million times before. He probably had. “You keep an eye on the kid. Make sure he stays where he is.”
She watched the trailer’s windows. If anyone moved behind the closed blinds, she couldn’t see them. “Any guess who the big boss is? Any clues to the real identity of the Coyote?”
Shep shrugged. “Our best leads have an unfortunate tendency to die before they can be questioned.”
Which was one of the reasons why she had come.
While the six-man team was made up of the best commando soldiers the country had to offer, they’d been trained to fight, and fight they did. The body count was going up. She’d been sent to tone that down a little.
They weren’t in the mountains of Afghanistan. Running an op inside the U.S. was a more delicate business. Border security was a touchy issue. International relations were at stake. They needed to catch the terrorists without starting a war.
Well, they weren’t going to lose any leads on her watch. She glanced at the boy still busy splashing in the water, then something else drew her attention. A souped-up Mustang roared down the street.
The dog barked, then jumped out of the pool to chase the car. And the little boy chased after. “Jack! Come back!”
Something about the car set off Lilly’s instincts, but there was no time to react, no time to stop what was happening.
Brakes squealing, the car slowed in front of Jimmy’s trailer, and the next second the trailer’s windows exploded in a hail of bullets.
“Get down!” Shep shouted over the gunfire and dived after the kid.
She’d never seen a superspy lunge like that, straight through the air, covering an unlikely distance in a split second as she took cover behind the SUV. She was on the wrong side to help, but at the right angle to get a look at the license plate, at least.
Shep went down, protecting the boy, rolling back into the cover of the shed with him as the dog ran off. The Mustang was pulling away already.
Her heart raced as she jumped up. “Shep!”
Was he hit?
Chapter Two
She couldn’t see him. “Shep!”
Then he popped back into sight and shot at the Mustang, blew out a window as the car picked up speed, roaring away.
Lilly rushed forward and aimed at one of the back tires, barely seeing anything from the dust cloud the car was kicking up. She missed.
“You stay right here,” she heard Shep call out, probably to the kid, then he was next to her.
“Call in the plate. Call the office.” He rushed forward, up the shot-up trailer’s steps. “Law enforcement,” he called out when he reached the top. “Don’t shoot. Are you okay in there, Jimmy?” He kicked in the already damaged door and disappeared inside.
She moved after him, glancing back as the dog returned and ran into the gap between the shed and the trailer next to it, back to the boy. One step forward and she could see the kid, his arms tight around the dog’s neck as the animal licked his dirty face. Didn’t look as if either of them had gotten hurt.
She pointed at him. “You stay there. Don’t move. Okay?”
Neighbors peeped from their homes.
She scanned them and evaluated them for possible trouble even as she held up her badge. “FBI. Please go back inside.”
She clipped the badge onto her jacket so she could dial, gun in one hand, the phone in the other, her blood racing.
The line was picked up and she summarized in a sentence what had happened, reported the license plate, listed the make and model of the car, and asked for assistance. Then she went up the stairs after Shep to help him.
She found him in the back of the trailer, standing in a small bedroom that smelled heavily like pot. Clothes and garbage were thrown everywhere. Their brand-new lead, a scrawny twentysomething she assumed to be Jimmy, lay in the middle of the floor. Frustration tightened her muscles as she took in the bullet holes riddling his body.
Shep crouched next to him, feeling for a pulse with one hand, still holding his gun with the other. He straightened suddenly, swearing under his breath, then speaking out loud what she pretty much knew already. “Dead.”
He pushed by her, out of the trailer, and she ran behind him, noting the young mother who now had the little boy wrapped tightly in her arms.
“You,” Shep called to a man in his late forties who’d also appeared, probably from a neighboring trailer, while they’d been inside. He wore denim overalls over bare skin and held a hunting rifle.
“This is FBI Agent Lilly Tanner,” Shep told him as he hurried to his SUV. “She’s deputizing you.” He turned when he reached the car. “You sit in this chair—” he pointed to the recliner by the steps “—and don’t let anyone go inside until the authorities get here. Do you understand?”
The man looked doubtful for a second, but then he nodded. “Yes, sir.”
Shep jumped into his car, and she had to follow if she didn’t want to be left behind.
She snapped on her seat belt, keeping the gun out. “What happened to standing still long enough to think and come up with a plan?”
“No time.” He turned the key in the ignition.
“I’m not a sheriff. I can’t deputize people,” she said through her teeth as he gunned the engine. “You just left a crime scene to a civilian. Is this the kind of Wild West law enforcement your team is running here?”
“It’s called doing what it takes.” He stepped even harder on the gas pedal and shot down the lane at twice the speed she would have recommended, people scampering out of his way.
A grim, focused expression sat on his face, his weapon ready on his lap, rules and regulations the farthest thing from his mind, obviously.
He was a different man from what she remembered. He belonged on the battlefield, not among civilians. She pushed the thought back. She’d barely been here; the determination was too early to make. She’d give him a fair shake. He deserved that much from her.
But she would have to make that determination at some point. Her mission here had an extra component his team wasn’t aware of. She was to make recommendations whether to keep the SDDU’s Texas headquarters in operation or have one of the domestic agencies take over their duties.
The law forbade U.S. military from being deployed inside the borders of the United States. The Special Designation Defense Unit didn’t technically belong to the military—their top secret team reported straight to the Secretary of Homeland Defense—but they were a commando team, no matter how they sliced and diced it.
The few FBI and CIA bigwigs who did have knowledge of the SDDU were more than uncomfortable with them being here. And then there was, of course, the rivalry. The very existence of the SDDU seemed to imply that the bureau and the agency weren’t enough to handle the job.
She was supposed to write up an evaluation and recommendation based on her experience here. But her judgment of the small Texas headquarters would have implications for the entire SDDU team. There was some pressure on her to come up with recommendations that would restrict their operations to outside the borders, like the military.
Pressure or not, however, she was determined to keep an open mind. Even if Shep wasn’t making that easy for her.
He drove like a maniac. The Mustang was nowhere to be seen. It’d gotten too much of an advantage. Not knowing where it was headed, they would have little chance of catching up.
She cleared her throat. “We would have been better off staying and searching the trailer, I think.”
Instead of responding, Shep made a hard left without hesitation when they hit the county road, and without yielding to oncoming traffic.
“How do you know they went this way?” she asked over the blaring horns and squealing tires, her right hand braced on the dashboard, her blood pressure inching up.
“Burned rubber on the road. Wasn’t there when we came. They didn’t slow to take the turn.”
She glanced back but, of course, they’d long passed the spot. Burned rubber... She should have picked up on that. Would have, normally. She needed to snap to instead of allowing him to distract her.
He overtook a large semitrailer and nearly ran a car off the road in the process.
She had to brace herself again. “You can kill someone like this.” She might have raised her voice a little. “What happened to waiting for backup? Also known as standard procedure.”
Back in the day, he’d been a lot more balanced—the sane voice of authority and all that. Rules used to mean a lot to him. He’d had a ton of them. But not anymore, it seemed.
Which he further proved by saying, “We don’t run things by the company manual here.”
“No kidding.”
God help her if the other five were like him. She pushed that depressing possibility aside and put on her business face. The bureau had sent her here to keep this wild-card team in line, and she was the woman to do it.
Shep might have been her parole officer at one point. She might have had a crush on him so bad she hadn’t been able to see straight, but a lot of things had changed since then. She was here to do a job.
She opened her mouth to tell him that, but he pointed straight ahead, cutting her off. “There.”
The red Mustang was a speck in the distance ahead of them.
He floored the gas and did his best to catch up, scaring innocent motorists half to death in the process as he whipped around them like a race-car driver.
But when he finally reached the red Mustang, it picked up speed. So did he. Was he insane? Nobody could fully control a car at speeds like this.
She meant to read him the riot act, but he cut her off, once again, before she could have gotten the first word out.
“Take over the wheel.”
“What? No—” But she had to grab the damn thing when he let go without even looking at her.
Then he took the safety off his gun, rolled down his window, pulled the upper half of his body outside and started shooting at the men in the car in front of them.
Of course, they shot back.
* * *
SHEP TRIED TO HIT the back tire, but the Mustang sat low to the ground and he was high up in the SUV, nearly sitting in the window, so the angle wasn’t much to work with. He couldn’t shoot at the two idiots inside the car, which would have been easier. They needed them alive for interrogation.
“Coming in.” He popped back onto his seat and grabbed the wheel from Lilly, who slid back into her own seat to make room for him, shooting him a murderous look, her full lips pressed into a severe line.
He floored the gas and rammed the car in front of them.
The Mustang nearly swerved into oncoming traffic.
Lilly braced herself on the dashboard. “Slow down! You’re endangering civilians on the road. Shep!”
“Take over the shooting. It’s easier for you to use your right hand.” He needed both hands for the ramming.
“This isn’t how it’s done. Public safety always comes first.”
When the hell did she turn all prim and proper? “The public is safe. Unless you’re a bad shot.”
She said something under her breath he didn’t catch.
“Listen—” He rammed the Mustang again. “I don’t know how you do things at the FBI, but this is not white-glove law enforcement. You’re in the combat-boot section now. If you want to stay here, you’re going to have to step up to the plate.”
She unsnapped her seat belt, muttering something under her breath, then rolled her window down and leaned out.
He did his best to keep the car steady for her.
She shot at the tire, didn’t have any more luck than he’d had, with the Mustang swerving. She leaned out a little farther.
The man in the passenger seat shot back at her.
She didn’t even flinch.
Shep could see from the corner of his eye as she lifted her aim. And shot the bastard straight through the wrist.
“Good shot.” He flashed her a grin as she pulled back into the cab. But then the smile froze on his face.
