Conard County Spy

She pulled out of the parking space and waited for him. Soon he was behind her, and she led him down the main street to the edge of town, where a truck stop brightened one side of the road and the La-Z-Rest Motel sagged on the other side. She tapped her brake lights a couple of times and saw him flash his headlights once in response before he turned into the motel.

She continued her way along an unnecessarily circuitous route to her apartment. It had been out of her way to lead him to the motel, but she was glad to do it. He struck her as an interesting man.

Too bad he wasn’t staying. She could use a little adventure.

* * *

At the motel, Trace checked in under the ID of Tom LaCrosse and soon had a room, paid for in cash. Once he’d dragged his duffel inside, he popped two of the pain pills the doctor had prescribed. He took them only when he didn’t need to drive and felt it was safe to doze a bit. Tonight was safe. Tomorrow, who knew?

Regardless, the three coffees he’d just bought would keep him from getting too drowsy to wake up.

He ditched the winter jacket, thinking that he had to find a coat easier for a man with only one working hand. He was adept enough at buttons now and could zip up his pants, but that damn jacket was a pain. Getting the zipper to work with only one hand after he’d opened it all the way defied him, but pulling it off over his head didn’t work, either. That procedure left him sweating and too close to passing out.

The pain of the gunshot wound would ease with time, he’d been told, although he’d never get the function back in his hand. Not all of it. He’d reached the point where he didn’t care if it ever worked right again if it would just shower him with the mercy of not hurting as if it were caught in a meat grinder.

Shed of his clothes, he climbed into the sweat suit he preferred for sleeping and turned on the TV at low volume. He guzzled coffee and waited for the meds to start their work. A few hours of milder pain would be welcome, but nothing completely erased it.

Ryker hadn’t exactly surprised him, now that he thought about it. The man was out of the business, he had a wife and child to worry about, and he could hardly want someone like Trace showing up.

But the thing was—and this bugged the devil out of Trace—nobody at the agency was sure that he might be in trouble. All the intelligence networks, all the people gathering every little tidbit, could come up with only one thing: someone had tried to find him under his real name. Something only a few people should know. The secrecy around him had somehow been pierced.

So who and why? It might be nothing. But it left him, as Ryker had so succinctly put it, blowing in the wind. The agency wanted him to keep moving until they learned more, so he’d been doing exactly that, until he was utterly tired of it.

He shouldn’t have come here. Ryker was right about that. Whether someone was after him didn’t matter. If there was even the slightest chance, he should never have risked exposing Ryker’s family. Maybe the pain was affecting his decision-making, because this was a dumb one.

But as the buzz from the meds began to hit him and he stretched out on the bed, another part of him was glad he’d come. He’d enjoyed his eyeful of Teacher Julie. He wondered if she had any idea how that claret sweater brought out the red in her hair and the green in her eyes. Or if she even guessed how it had revealed her breasts as she’d leaned forward against the table.

Maybe not, but he’d appreciated every single minute of the view. Still, she was not for him. How much sweeter could you get than a kindergarten teacher who lived in a world of smiley faces and foil stars? She deserved the kind of man who would stay for the long haul, and he was no stayer.

Even if they found out no one was after him, he still wouldn’t be right for that woman. He didn’t want to cast his shadows over her bright little faces and shiny stars. Everywhere he went, he cast shadows. He knew that.

He just hoped he hadn’t cast one over Ryker.

As the pills set him free enough to doze, they also set his imagination free. Images of Julie Ardlow swam in his mind’s eye, images of undressing her, sensations of touching her, exploring her. The unparalleled moments of entering her hot, wet depths and claiming her.

Just dreams. Sometimes dreams were all a man had left. Sometimes they were the last safe place he could go.

Chapter 2

Ryker yanked him out of sleep in the morning with a phone call. Groaning as he awoke to searing pain yet again, Trace reached for the phone beside the bed and answered it.

“Yeah.”

“It’s me,” Ryker said. “Meet me in thirty at the sheriff’s office. It’s just up the street from the diner.”

“I need coffee.” He needed more than coffee, but these days caffeine was the only thing that kicked his brain into something resembling a normal gear.

“Okay, then, I’ll bring it to you. How much and how do you like it?”

“Three or four, black, strong.”

“In ten, then. What’s your room?”

Trace struggled for a moment to recall. “Four.”

“Ten minutes.”

Then Ryker was gone. Slowly Trace pushed himself upright, biting back groans and facing the nearly impossible task of getting dressed. Well, Ryker was bringing more coffee. So he popped another pill and started the laborious job. Shorts. Jeans. Shirt. He simply stared at the god-awful jacket. Not even enough time to shower. That was Ryker. That was the job.

Socks. Boots with Velcro closures. Damn, sometimes he felt old.

Ten minutes later he heard the knock. Rising, he opened the door, wide-awake and hating it. Ryker stepped in, carrying a cardboard tray with four tall coffees.

“Trying to hurry me out of town?” Trace asked bluntly as he plopped on the bed and reached for one of the cups.

Ryker spoke very quietly. “Cell phone?”

Without question, Trace rose and got the phone from the pocket of his jacket. He didn’t say a word as Ryker pulled the back off of it and removed the battery and SIM card.

“Later,” Ryker said, “get a new phone. A burner. That one is about to head out of town on the next truck that leaves the lot across the street.”

Trace understood, and he didn’t like what he understood. If the right person had that number, they could have been listening to what was going on in this room at that very moment, at least until Ryker pulled the phone apart. “I’ve been getting fresh burners all along.” Because he wasn’t a total idiot, although he had to admit every time he’d gotten one, he’d had to use his debit card, even if only at an ATM. Hell, if the worst case proved true, he might as well have kept his original phone. “What about yours?”

“My cell is still at home. We’re going to send this one out of town this morning. Just in case. Anyway, everybody else may be kicking you to the curb, but I’m not.”

That jolted Trace, and he looked over as Ryker took the only chair and reached for a coffee. “Why not?”

“I talked to Bill. Are you on meds?”

“I’m still waiting for it to hit.”

“Okay. Does it help?”

He met Ryker’s dark gaze and saw something very like the sympathy that had been missing last night. “Yeah, when I take enough of it.”

“Probably not often, knowing you.”

“Not when I can avoid it. What’s going on?”

Trace could feel the buzz coming, so he finished his coffee and reached for another before sitting on the edge of the bed again.

Ryker sighed and sipped more coffee, then leaned back and crossed his legs at the ankle. “I told you I talked with Bill. I was going to rake him over the coals for giving you my address, but it turns out he gave it to you for a reason.”

Trace sat up a little straighter, suppressing a wince. “What reason?”

“Apparently he thinks there’s more going on than you’ve been told and that you desperately need an ally.”

Trace felt his heart accelerate. “That’s news to me.” Important news. Something to give his full attention to. “Did he say what’s happening?”

“No. He doesn’t know.” Ryker blew a long breath and glanced at his watch. “A few more and then we go. No, he doesn’t know, but he was unhappy about it. He thinks they’ve cut you loose and don’t give a damn.”

“I was right. I’m a liability.” Instead of just wondering, now he knew, but he was damned if he knew why. So much was becoming clear, and he didn’t like it.

“My guess is you’ve passed your expiration date because of your injury, and they’re more interested in catching the tiger that’s on your tail than whether you survive it.”

“Or alternatively, they have a reason not to stop the tiger. I’ve heard of it.”

“So have I, but I’ve never known it to happen.”

“Me, neither, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. You know how much butt-covering goes on.” And secrets. Secrets that only a handful might ever know. Those secrets could be good for the country, essential even, but they could also cover up more nefarious activities.

A sense of betrayal began burning in him, but this wasn’t the time to let it take over. Trace forced it down, trying to clear his head, suddenly wishing he hadn’t taken the pain pill. It wouldn’t help at all, not right now. What good would it do him to ease his hand when his brain would be in low gear?

“We’ve got some time. Bill never told anyone he directed you to me, and I talked to him on a scrambled line this morning.”

“You have one?” Trace hadn’t expected that, given that Ryker had hung up his spurs. That technology was doled out very carefully.

“Better believe it. When I resigned, I still had a lot of useful stuff in my brain. They want to pick it occasionally. Think they’re going to trust the phone company with that? Or that I would? Hell, we don’t even let the NSA eavesdrop on our lines.”

But another thought had occurred to Trace and it made him sick. “I got your address on an unsecure line. I’d better leave now. I don’t want your family at risk.”

“Well...” Ryker’s eyes twinkled unexpectedly. “The conversation I had with Bill this morning wasn’t exactly as straightforward as I reported. We talked sideways on purpose. I gave Bill a helluva lecture about revealing my whereabouts, and I told him I’d sent you on your way this morning. So if anybody was listening, I sounded p.o.’d, Bill sounded apologetic and loosely explanatory, and in theory you’re already on the road. We’re gonna need to get your car out of town along with the phone, though. You okay to drive?”

“Yeah.” Trace started smiling. His head was getting into the game again. He guessed he’d been missing a sense of purpose. And it felt good not to be alone for the first time in a few weeks. “You wouldn’t happen to know of a junkyard a few hundred miles from here?”

“Well, I do happen to know just the right guy to get a car towed a long, long way.”

* * *

An unreasonable curiosity dragged Julie off her usual path to the elementary school and past the motel. Trace’s car was still there, but probably wouldn’t be for long. Then she got a jolt as she saw Ryker exit the room with the guy. What was going on?

Down the street a way, she pulled over to the curb and watched her rearview mirror. For some reason Ryker dashed across the state highway into the truck stop parking lot. A few minutes later he dashed back. She saw him wave toward the center of the town, then jog up the street to where his car was parked.

What the heck? It was like a scene out of some spy movie, she thought, almost laughing at herself. Why in the world would Ryker park up the street instead of in the motel lot? Shaking her head as questions percolated in her mind, she started to put her car in gear. As she looked to the side she found Ryker pulling up beside her. He was lowering his window, so she touched the button to lower hers.

“Julie,” he said.

“Ryker. What...”

He interrupted her. “Whatever you just saw, forget it. Completely. Curiosity and the cat. You read me?”

Astonished, she gaped at him, feeling her head bob agreement. “I never saw a thing,” she said when she could find her voice.

He smiled. “Good. Just keep Marisa in mind.”

Then he pulled away, leaving her with more questions than ever. Eventually she pulled out, remembering that twenty-two children would be piling into her classroom very soon. But she didn’t want to think about those kids.

She wanted to think about what had just happened and what it might mean, and why he was concerned about Marisa.

No matter how many times she told herself to just forget it, as Ryker had warned her, the questions kept percolating in her mind. Somehow she had to find out what was going on.

Determined that she would, she entered her classroom smiling.

* * *

Ryker had told Trace just last night to lie low. Walking into a busy sheriff’s office hardly struck Trace as staying low. It actually seemed quite high-profile. His nerves began to crawl.

No names were exchanged. The wizened woman at the dispatcher’s desk, who squinted at them through a cloud of smoke that issued from the illicit cigarette dangling from one corner of her mouth, merely jerked her head toward the back.

Trace followed Ryker down a hallway to an open door that had the word Sheriff stenciled on the frosted glass top. Inside a man with a burn-scarred face sat behind the desk, his khaki uniform neatly pressed. He spoke without rising.

“Hey, Ryker. Close the door.” Then his gaze settled on Trace, taking him in. “Sit down,” he said to both of them, “and tell me what all the cloak-and-dagger stuff is about.”

Trace tensed. Some things were not to be revealed under any circumstances, and certainly nothing about the situation he was in. Operational security could be compromised inadvertently. “Maybe I should just go,” he said.

Ryker clapped a hand to his shoulder. “Maybe you should, but we’re going to discuss other options here. Sheriff Dalton worked undercover for years with the DEA. I think he might have some understanding of what we could be dealing with here, and I’m sure he doesn’t expect either of us to reveal anything we’re not allowed to.” Then Ryker returned his attention to the sheriff. “Gage, you know I worked for the State Department. So did my friend here.”

Trace watched in amazement as understanding dawned in the sheriff’s gaze. “Yeah, I know all about that,” the man said, and somehow Trace believed he did. Reading between the lines.

“Well,” Ryker continued, “Trace was badly hurt, and he’s been cut loose. Our main concern is that he may have a tiger on his tail.”

Gage’s sharp gaze flashed back to Trace. “Well, and here I was starting to get bored with domestic disputes and traffic accidents. Winter’s a bad time for accidents.”

Trace said nothing, but his nerves stopped crawling. The sheriff had figured it out and knew not to say too much. Ryker had been right. And was that a possible solution Gage had just mentioned?

Trace decided to take over. After what Ryker had told him, there was no longer any doubt in his mind. “I need to get out of town. I need to be gone. I don’t want to put Ryker and his family at risk. Then there’s this Julie Ardlow. She asked me to sit with her at the diner last night for coffee, after I met her at Ryker’s house.”

“And she knows something is going on,” Ryker said heavily. “I warned her off.”

“You’re new around here, Ryker,” Dalton said. “Let me assure you that Julie takes no as a challenge. She’s not going to leave it alone.”

“Unless I leave,” said Trace, standing. The buzz of the drugs made him a little light-headed. “My phone’s on its way to...where?” he said to Ryker.

“A semi that was going to Denver.”

“Okay. Then I’ll ditch my car somewhere between here and there, get another and take a different direction.”

“You can’t keep running,” Ryker argued.

Trace simply shook his head. “I’ll get what’s coming to me, whatever it is, but it’s not going to land on someone else’s head. I never should have come here.”

“Sit a moment,” Dalton said mildly. “While I do admire your scruples, fact is, you’re in my town and that makes you my headache, at least briefly. So what do you know about this tiger?”

Trace sat slowly, ignoring the pounding in his arm, taking care not to let the meds make him clumsy. “Until this morning, I wasn’t even sure there was one. Vague...gossip, if you will. Ryker made a call and it appears trouble is stalking me, but that’s all either of us knows. Not who, why or anything. Which makes this a nearly unsolvable problem.”

Gage nodded slowly, rocking back in his desk chair. It squealed a protest. The only sound in the room. “Many years ago,” he said slowly, “I had a problem like that and I didn’t know it. A car bomb intended for me killed my entire family. I survived. Only one itch saved me from cutting my own throat. I wanted to find the SOB who’d ratted me out.”

Trace nodded. Gage’s experience didn’t shock him, because he’d seen it in his own unsavory world. “I get it. But for me it’s not too late to protect everyone else.”

“Maybe not. No way to know, but I was driving at something else. You need to start thinking real hard. You’d be surprised how different some things can look in light of new information.”

Trace knew he was right. It could. It might. Something might reveal itself. But he wasn’t about to sit here while the guy closed in on him and his friend. He needed to clear out. “I can think on the road.”

“Or maybe we can make it seem you’re on the road.”

Trace shook his head. “I appreciate it, but I’ve been taking care of myself for a long time in situations like this. I can take care of myself now, without endangering anyone else.” That was the most important thing. It always had been.

“You can’t possibly know that,” Ryker said. “You’re assuming a sniper’s bullet at fifteen hundred yards. What if it’s a bomb? What if other people get unavoidably involved?”

“Like what happened to my family,” Gage remarked. “Best you stay around people who know what’s going on. Who might be able to help. Like I said, I admire your scruples, but they don’t necessarily protect anyone. And not everyone has them.”

Trace sat in silence, staring down at his still-gloved, destroyed hand. They were right. He didn’t want to admit it—he wished he’d never set foot in this town—but they were right.

He’d been a damned fool to ever come here, but he hadn’t really believed he was in trouble. Not when he arrived here, simply because a colleague he knew lived here. The threat had been so vague that it seemed improbable that anything would happen. Someone looking for him under his real name? Could have been anyone and probably meaningless. He figured the suggestion of a threat had been used to shunt him aside until his medical retirement came through. He’d become useless, mainly because of the pain and the meds, and frankly no one wanted to see him hanging around like a reminder of what could happen to any of them. He’d known he made his coworkers uneasy.

But this? The burn of betrayal was returning, lighting a fire deep in his belly. The sheriff was right about one thing: he wanted to know who’d put him in this position and who was after him. He wanted those answers more than he wanted to preserve his own messed-up life.

He sighed. “I took my pain meds this morning. I’m not at my best. I need more coffee.”

“Three didn’t do it?” Ryker asked.

“This is strong stuff. That’s why I hate to take it.”

Dalton surprised him by rising and limping over to the door. He opened it and leaned out. “Hal!”

“Yo?”

“Get me six tall and strongs, black, from Maude’s. Double time.”

Then he limped back to his seat, and with every one of his careful movements, Trace felt a twinge of sympathy for the sheriff. Evidently he hadn’t escaped all the effects of the bomb that had killed his family.

“That’ll tick Velma off good,” the sheriff remarked when he’d settled again.

“Velma?” Trace asked.

“The smoking volcano at the front desk. She makes us coffee every morning. We all pretend to drink it so as not to offend her. Might as well swallow thickened battery acid.” Gage waved a hand. “Her coffee is infamous. Enough about that. We’ll pump some more caffeine into you, and when you feel ready, we’ll get into some detail about what, if anything, Conard County can do for you, if you’ll let us.”

Trace shook his head, trying to absorb this. “Why should you help me? You don’t know me from Adam.”

“I have some inkling about the service you’ve been providing to this country,” Gage said quietly. “I get freaking frosted when people like you get cut loose. I don’t like the stench, and I want to clean it up. Besides, you’re Ryker’s friend, and his wife means a whole lot to folks around here.”

That was when Trace realized he’d walked onto a different planet.

* * *

The coffee arrived within ten minutes. Trace drank the first as fast as he could without burning his mouth and throat, then started on another. The two other men took their time chatting about how another storm was about to blow in and how everyone hoped it would be the last of the winter.

Trace listened with only half an ear. Ryker had given him enough information to fly with this morning, and as the coffee drove away the fuzziness the meds caused in his mind, it slipped into high gear. He’d hated the last weeks of running from an invisible threat that might not even exist. Well, now he was pretty certain it was real. Not knowing who or what made it pretty hard to take evasive action, but at least there was a reason for what he needed to do.

As a field operative, he’d seen enough of the underside to know that sometimes assets were more important than operatives, that his employer would protect some of them at any cost. He’d never known personally of a case where an operative had been hung out to dry, but it didn’t exceed his ability to imagine. It became even easier to imagine when the operative, namely him, had become useless. Yeah, they’d do it all right. If an important asset demanded Trace’s blood, nobody would intervene.

He looked up, interrupting the conversation without apology. “My phone’s on the road. The car needs to be, too.”

Ryker checked his watch. “Very soon. The driver of the truck I put your phone on was just walking inside to order breakfast when I spoke to him. He’s probably just finishing up. Or maybe just pulled out of the lot. But you’re right.”

“I’d better get to it, then.”

“Hold it,” said Dalton. “Give it five.”

“Why?”

“Because Ryker told me earlier we might need to get rid of your car. I’ve got a couple of guys who should be here any minute. So you think they’ve got a tracking device on your auto?”

“I don’t know. It’s unlikely, but I never looked for one. Besides, phones are easy to track. But if they’re tracking both, then we don’t want them to get too far apart.”

“Why in the devil would they want to track you when they’ve cut you loose?” Gage nearly growled.

“Because,” Trace said, “I might be a peace offering.” Dead silence answered him.

The burn was growing. He’d spent a long time preoccupied by his recovery and rehab, and hadn’t been paying much attention to a lot of things. When they suggested it might be best for him to hit the road until they figured out if he was at risk, it had made perfect sense in the morphine-induced haze.

He’d gotten off the morphine to milder stuff, meds he could mostly control with coffee, but he hadn’t really thought about the entire setup. He was a field operative, for heaven’s sake. Living at risk didn’t seem strange or unusual to him. Being on the run had sometimes been part of his job. It had never occurred to him that the agency might just want him to be far away when fate overtook him. Plausible deniability was stamped all over this.

He looked up again as a tall man entered the office without knocking. His bearing, his gaze... Trace would have bet the guy had a special ops background. To the casual eye, it wouldn’t show. To the experienced eye, it was unmistakable.