“Where the fuck were you yesterday?”
At the sound of the voice, he glanced over his shoulder. And casually put his hand in the pocket he kept his gun hidden in.
“Well, if it isn’t Mr. Personality,” Daniel drawled.
As he turned around, his oldest friend and ally was looking like he had a hair across his ass. Dressed in loose clothing that covered a variety of guns and ammo, those familiar dark eyes were narrowed under the brim of a hey-there’s-nothing-unusual-about-me John Deere hat. Other than the fact that the guy’s shoulders were big and his jaw like an I beam, everything about him was cultivated to blend in. Escape notice. Remain undetected among the people who passed him by.
“So where the fuck were you?” came the demand.
“Busy. I’m taking up a new hobby.”
“Oh, I know. And her name is Lydia Susi.”
Daniel took a step forward. “She’s not a part of this.”
“She’s fucking in the middle of it—”
“She’s doing nothing but tracking and ensuring the health of the population. That’s it. She’s not involved.”
The smile that came back at him was a knife edge. “Did you get this from her before or after you fucked her—”
Daniel lunged and locked a grip on the front of his buddy’s throat. “You want to rephrase that. While you still have a voice box?”
“So. It. Was. During.”
The syllables were choked, but there was no fear reaction. No struggle, either.
There was a reason they got along, damn it.
“She is not who we’re looking for.” Daniel shoved hard, but his buddy’s balance was not lost for long. The recovery was nearly immediate. “It’s against her principles.”
“Oh, then let’s just look elsewhere because your girlfriend has some kind of pabulum tattooed on her forehead.”
As Daniel tightened the grip on his gun, he had to tell himself to calm the fuck down. “The WSP has no resources. You know that—”
“You are out of control.”
“Fuck off—”
A ramrod-straight forefinger came at him like a laser beam. “You have a conflict of interest. You think I don’t know you’re sleeping—”
“On her property, asshole,” Daniel snapped. “I’m not in her house.”
“Then it’s just a matter of time before you’re in her bed. I know how this shit goes.”
“Because you’re such a frickin’ genius. Right. I forgot.”
“It happened to me once. I got over-involved and I fucked everything up.” His buddy’s massive torso tilted forward. “You stay separate or I’m taking over. We don’t have the time to, or the interest in, rescuing you from a mess of your own creation—”
“You’re not in charge.”
“You want her killed?” His buddy shrugged. “You care that little about the woman? What do you think is going to happen to her.”
“She is not who we’re after.”
“Well, the one thing you and I both know for sure? You can’t be two of a kind. She’s either guilty or she’s innocent—but either way, if you keep involving yourself with her, she’ll end up dead.”
Daniel looked off into the distance. He’d hidden those weapons from the day before, and damn if he didn’t wish he had that suppressor.
“So you want to do this?” he said to his buddy in a bored tone. “Or keep talking at me. Because the latter’s making such a difference in my life.”
“You need to recognize your weaknesses, friend.”
“And you need to step the fuck off. You don’t like what I’m doing, get me removed. Or try to.”
On that note, Daniel brought out his cell phone and triggered the flashlight. Ducking down, he entered the shallow cave—
The body was gone.
Like an idiot, he moved the beam around, you know, just in case he had missed the one-hundred-and-eighty-pound sack of no-longer-breathing on the dirt floor.
He leaned back out. “Did you already take him?”
“Take who?” came the response.
“Motherfucker,” Daniel muttered.
Lydia didn’t have to go as far as she thought she would. She’d been prepared to drive an hour or more. Instead, her destination took only ten minutes of traveling along the network of county roads around the mountain.
And that was a good thing. Time felt tight, like there was a deadline looming. The trouble was, she didn’t know what exactly she was supposed to do, where to go, what to hand in to the proverbial professor.
But it wasn’t the first time in her life she’d had to figure stuff out alone.
As she coughed for the hundredth time—and thought of Daniel—she didn’t know how Candy could stand being in the car. There was so much fragrance packed into the interior that it was like breathing in Funfetti cake, each inhale a dense pack of fake fruit.
Talk about your nose blind—
And that was when the stone wall started. From out of a turn in the road, a fifteen-foot-tall barrier appeared out of nowhere. The rocks that were stacked and mortared were gray, cream, and a blush pink, and the cement that held it all together was a weathered fog color. She imagined that it was very thick, and knew it had been built very recently. No moss or lichen growth.