Spy in the Saddle

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?”