Tied Up in Knots (Marshals 3)

Chapter 1

IF I lived, I was going to make sure by whatever means necessary that I’d never be loaned out to the DEA again.

If this were a normal assignment, I’d have been following my partner, Ian Doyle, as he ran like a madman after our suspect. But this time, I was hotly pursuing a police officer I met a week ago who was a few feet in front of me, careening around corners after a fleeing DEA agent. If we didn’t catch him before he locked himself into a bolt-hole, the cop and I were probably dead men. We didn’t know how far his dirty fingers reached or which member of his team he’d gotten to smear their badge.

I hated those prima donna DEA assholes to begin with, and normally it wouldn’t even be an issue, but my boss, Chief Deputy US Marshal Sam Kage, was on vacation, and the nozzle covering for him disregarded Kage’s golden rule on interdepartmental sharing. Basically, unless we, the marshals, were running the op, his team didn’t come out to play. It first went into effect when I was almost killed on a bust run by the bureau. I had no idea how he got away with it, but his word was law, and he didn’t want any of us put into danger by members of a team we were working with. The “no sharing clause” was ironclad.

The problem was that Phillip “Call me Phil, there, buddy” Tull was all about grandstanding and kudos from the mayor and public relations wet dreams. Since the highest-profile cases involved drugs… he loaned us out almost immediately. I was the only one who ended up having to fly to the West Coast; everyone else got assigned much closer to home.

“I fuckin’ hate Wisconsin,” Becker had griped as he grabbed PowerBars out of his desk before he left with Ching to drive to Green Bay.

“At least you’re not going to Maine!” Ryan yelled, and Dorsey gave me a grimace of agreement as they left together.

I was the only one going alone because Ian, my partner slash lover slash best friend and maybe fiancé—hard to say how he felt about that word—was deployed, along with the rest of his Special Forces team, and not running for his life with me. If I died on this job, Phillip “Call me Phil, there, buddy” Tull, who also made finger guns whenever he said that, would be fed to our dog, balls first. Nobody wanted to mess with Ian Doyle, especially not where I was concerned. He was slightly possessive.

IT WAS funny, really. I’d been loaned out to the DEA to dig up their dirt, but the op had changed when a guy with hard blue eyes and an even harder handsome face walked into Broken Record on Geneva as I was having an after-hours snack of lobster mac ’n’ cheese at the bar. I had a lot of late nights when Ian wasn’t around because when he wasn’t, I didn’t sleep. I could have taken something, but that was a slippery slope I never wanted to start down. So I was there, and the cop came close—he was obviously on the job, no mistaking the strut—and took a seat beside me. I was all set to make some small talk in greeting to a fellow badge when he picked up a fork from the place setting in front of him on the counter and helped himself to a mouthful of my food.

I turned my chin and looked at him, and he said the magic words through a mouthful of cheesy goodness. “Eli Kohn says I can trust you.”

Since the guy he just mentioned was a fellow marshal in Chicago who transferred from the San Francisco office, and since I trusted said man with my life, I waited to see what else the stranger had to say. Using Kohn’s name to parley with was smart. It held a lot of weight with me. I needed to hear him out.

“I’m listening.”

“Senior Inspector Kane Morgan, SFPD.” He showed me a gold badge that’d taken a few hits in its lifetime, but he looked like the kind of guy who’d wear those dings and scratches proudly.

I didn’t have to flash my badge. He’d come looking for me, and oddly enough, in a city of millions, found me easily, but I did him the courtesy of introducing myself. “Deputy US Marshal Miro Jones.”

“Oh, I know. See, I have a problem, boyo, and you’re right in the middle of it.” There was Irish in his words, a roiling reminder of dark beer and black-hearted men.

It was never good to hear you were at the center of someone else’s shitstorm, and what the hell was it with me and Irishmen, anyway? Couldn’t get away from them.

“And what’s your problem?” I asked, because there was no way I couldn’t after we bonded over Kohn and mac ’n’ cheese.