“How big can Bowman be?”
“Not sure,” I answered, searching it on my phone at the same time I talked to him once I put him on speaker. “But it’s along US 58 right after Ewing.”
“How far is that from where you are?”
“Almost two hours.”
“What time is it there now, like four something?”
“Four thirty, yeah.”
“All right, so get to Bowman, make contact and get a room for the night. I need status twice more today.”
“Yessir.”
“How’s Doyle?”
“Sir?”
“He just got back, and I understand this last op went bad.”
It had? That was news. I didn’t usually ask how Ian’s missions went, because he wasn’t supposed to talk about them. But I was surprised that he hadn’t said a word to me about it in this case. “Oh, I dunno.”
“But he’s good?”
“He is.”
“All right. Give me status when you reach Bowman.”
“Yessir.”
Kage ended the call, and I looked up in time to see Walker pick up a phone. “You’re out of line, Marshal, and I’m gonna have your badge!”
Of course. During my minute-and-a-half conversation with Kage, Ian managed to piss off everyone in the room.
“You’ll be lucky to make it out of this with yours,” Ian snapped.
“Your ass is mine!”
Technically, his ass was spoken for.
Ian tipped his head and gave him a smirk. “Give it your best shot.”
Everyone was tense, no one moved, and I stood and waited as Walker called the sheriff.
“Sir, I have Deputy Marshal Doyle in front of—” Walker stopped and listened. “Supervisory Deputy?”
Uh-oh.
“I don’t know what he—” Again Walker was interrupted. “He wasn’t listed as a federal—”
I moved up beside Ian. “It’s two hours.”
“Yeah,” he grumbled, not taking his eyes off the deputy on the phone in front of him. “Which is nothing, but still, this is stupid.”
I coughed. “So our boss says that you had a rough op this last time out.”
“They’re all the same.”
“What did you do?” I asked softly.
“Extraction.”
“Did everybody come home?”
He coughed. “No.”
“I’m sorry.”
“We saved our target; we accomplished our objective,” he said automatically, but the muscles in his right cheek were doing the ticking thing they did when he was tense, and his brows furrowed.
“What happened?” I gently pried.
“The intel was bad, and we got dropped into something bigger than we expected.”
I put a hand on his back. “Will the guy who delivered bad intel get in trouble?”
“That guy’s dead.”
Jesus.
“Ian?”
He shook his head slightly to shut me up as he took a step forward. Walker had hung up the phone.
“The sheriff says that we can put both you and your partner up here, on the department, while we retrieve Mr. Ford from the Bowman Police Department.”
“No thanks,” Ian said snidely. “We’ll retrieve him ourselves. God knows how long it would take if we wait on you.”
Walker’s jaw muscles clenched, as did those in his neck. He so wanted to run Ian over with his car. The animosity was transparent.
“We’ll be going,” I said gently.
“We’re at your disposal, should you need us,” Walker said, obviously having been charged with repeating the statement.
Ian scoffed, turning to leave. “Yeah, like that’ll happen. I’d be better off with mall cops and security guards.”
When I closed the door, I heard something shatter against the wall. “Your interpersonal skills are fantastic,” I mentioned for perhaps the hundredth time in our partnership. He could have turned Gandhi into an ax-wielding psychopath.
He grunted, and when we were in the car, he looked at me.
“What?”
“It was a bad op, but I’ve been on even more fucked-up ones that have ended way worse.”
“Okay.”
“But what I hate now is, at the end, when it’s done, I can’t immediately come home.”
“You have to be debriefed, right?”
“I mean after that.”
“You don’t just get on a plane?”
“No, we have to wait for orders to come through.”
“And you don’t like that, the waiting.”
“No. I don’t.”
“How come?”
“That should be obvious,” he said gruffly, starting the car.
“Tell me.”
“Why you think?”
“I’d rather not guess.”
“My home,” he said curtly, “the job, stuff like that.”
“Chickie,” I offered playfully.
“And others.”
“Others?”
“Yeah,” he said sarcastically, “other annoying people who know better than to fish but do it anyway.”
I was very pleased with him and chuckled while I checked my phone.
WE DROVE in silence except for the music on my phone. He never cared what I played which was lucky since my taste could nicely be called eclectic.
“US 23 North to Virginia,” I said, getting drowsy. It was warm in the car, the heat on since it was only 28 degrees outside. “We should stop and get some Mountain Dew or something.”
“Take off your coat.”
It was a good idea. After mine was off, I helped him with his.
“So tell me why Drake Ford is going into WITSEC,” Ian said abruptly.
“Because he saw Christopher Fisher try and burn up Safiro Olivera in an abandoned building in Gatlinburg six months ago.”
“Okay.”
“Apparently Ford and his boyfriend, Cabot Jenner, were running away from home at the time of the incident, and when Ford went out to get something for them to eat, he saw a man carrying what he thought was another man over his shoulder, into a building.”