Dana Marton - Spy in the Saddle

Shep entered it into his cell phone GPS before turning back to the others.

Jamie and Mo were already gone. Ryder was heading into his office with Lilly. He glanced back from the doorway. “Anything important?”

“We got an ID on the fingerprints.”

They’d been supposed to catch the Coyote when he came up to the U.S. for a medical procedure two days earlier. Instead, they’d chased and shot a stand-in. The driver had escaped, but they’d gotten his car and prints.

They’d never even laid eyes on the Coyote. The crime boss was pretty good at the game he played. Too bad. Because if they had him, he could give them the exact location for the terrorists’ trip across the river. He’d know. He’d set up the transfer.

“You need someone to go with you?” Ryder asked.

Shep shook his head. He wanted to be alone to regain his composure a little, and so he could swear loudly and at length on the way. “According to the lab, he’s a small-time crook. I can handle it.”

But Lilly flashed him a dazzling smile. “I can meet with Ryder later. I’ll go with you. We can catch up on the way.”

Just what he’d been hoping for. Not really.

If he’d learned one thing in the past couple of years, it was that you always played to your strengths. You figured out what your strengths were, built on them, made them even better and used them. You didn’t go into your weak territory. Your weak territory was where bad things happened.

Women were his weak territory. Especially Lilly.

He opened his mouth to protest, then caught another look of warning from Jamie. She was his sister-in-law. Okay, that added another layer of trickiness to all this.

It wasn’t as if he couldn’t handle her. He could.

So he forced his lips into something he hoped might resemble a cool, unaffected smile. “Can’t wait.”

* * *

LILLY SAT IN the passenger seat of Shep’s super-rigged SUV and tried to suck in her stomach while doing her best not to stare at him. Not that the arid Texas countryside provided much distraction. Low brush and yellow grass covered the land they drove over, a handful of farmhouses dotting the landscape here and there.

The cool, confident FBI agent thing back in the office had been a complete sham. Truth was, he made her nervous. Very. Not that he needed to know that.

“This Jimmy is our strongest lead?” She glanced at Shep from the corner of her eye.

Life was so incredibly unfair.

He hadn’t changed any in the past decade. Okay, maybe a little. His shoulders seemed even wider, his gaze more somber. He had a new edge to him, as if he’d been to hell and back. But he could still make her heart skip a beat just by breathing.

No, she caught herself. There’d be none of that this time around. She was a grown-up, a self-possessed, independent woman. Or she would act like one, at the very least.

“Yes.” He responded to her question. “If it pans out, Jimmy could be a direct lead to the Coyote.”

She tugged on her suit top, wishing she knew how to hide the pounds she’d put on since their last meeting—thank you, office work. Being a cop had been bad like that, but working for the FBI was worse. A week’s worth of fieldwork could easily be followed by a month of debriefings, reports and other documentation, with her going cross-eyed in front of a computer.

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.