Deserves to Be Dead (Alvarez & Pescoli)

Except it annoyed her.

She and the SWAT team would have pulled off the raid in broad daylight, if they’d left without waiting for Burch.

Her cell phone rang.

“Got a break,” Flowers said as she answered and negotiated a curve as they headed west. “Drake just got back. He’s around behind the house where we can’t see him, but I got a good look at him when he came in. He’s there. Where the hell are you guys?”

“We’re still about an hour out,” she said.

“We could take him right now,” Flowers said. “You could get the sheriff to deputize me.”

“Let me check on that,” she said, though it galled her to think Blackwater would be in on the takedown.

She passed Flowers’s suggestion on to Burch, who shook his head. “No way. I spent some more time reading Flowers’s file on the way here, and he has a way of making simple things complicated. Let me talk to him.”

She handed the phone to Burch. “We appreciate what you’re doing, but we mostly need intel. Eyes on the place. You were an army guy, right? So you know what we need.”

She thought she heard a protest from Flowers, but Burch clicked off and she kept driving, her jaw set, her fingers tight on the wheel, the Montana countryside flying past, the sun sinking lower in the sky.

Flowers called back forty minutes later and said, “Drake just went up to Weeks’s place in the Jeep. We could see him turn in, but we can’t see what’s going on.”

“Call us back if anything changes,” she said and Burch nodded.

As the miles had passed he’d grown more silent, his eyes steady on the road, he, like she, getting ready.

Twenty minutes later, another call. “Drake’s gone back to his place. I don’t know, Johnson and I are talking it over, I think he might be packing up or something. We can see him moving around inside the house, but we can’t tell what he’s doing.”

“We’re coming,” she said. “We’re five minutes out. Hold on.” She glanced at Burch, then hit the gas.

“Stay on the line,” she said to Flowers and punched the phone to speaker, so both she and Burch could hear.

Then she drove like hell.

Nothing changed during the last few minutes of the drive. According to Flowers, Drake was still at his house when she, leading the caravan, drove past the dude ranch. The sun was now down below the mountains, but the sky was still bright.

She pulled over when she was certain the vehicles could no longer be seen from the ranch, and the SWAT team armored up and went through a preraid routine, checking weapons, communications, and armor.

Burch, now out of his sport coat and slacks and into jeans, boots, and armor, told her to stay back. “I know you want to go in, but we don’t know you. I don’t mean to be offensive, but we’ve all trained for this and we’ve got communications and lights and there’s lots of firepower out there. We don’t want an accident.”

She was pissed. “No way. That bastard is mine. I’ve been right on top of this.”

Burch put a finger to his lips. “We really need you to wait here. Believe me, you’re going to get a lot of credit in our reports. You wait here, talk to Flowers on your cell phone. If anything critical comes up, we’ll leave a radio. You call me.”

“I don’t give a flying fuck about credit,” she said, her lips barely moving, rage burning through her. In her mind’s eye, she saw the porn films again, the scared children, the predatory adults. “I want in.”

But Burch wasn’t having any of it. “We’re doing this military style. You know the area, so you call me. Any communication you get from your office, even from Flowers goes through you. I’m not taking any other calls. Only from you. You got that? Pass it on to Flowers. We have to run this tight. He calls you. You pass on the important information. Same with any calls from your sheriff. We do this my way.”

Five minutes after they pulled over, and five hundred yards down the road from Drake’s house, the SWAT team, with Burch at the point, slouched up the shoulder of the road, looking more like a squad of SEALs in Afghanistan than a bunch of cops in Montana.

And she was stuck back here.

Her teeth ground together and she had trouble reminding herself that being a cop was being a part of a team. Maybe Santana was right, maybe she should quit. She didn’t need this shit.

But she loved it.

Flowers called again. “Where in the fuck are you guys? Something’s going on. You gotta get up here. Drake is ready to move.”

She reined in her frustration and tried to be rational. The important thing was to take down Drake.