But this? The burn of betrayal was returning, lighting a fire deep in his belly. The sheriff was right about one thing: he wanted to know who’d put him in this position and who was after him. He wanted those answers more than he wanted to preserve his own messed-up life.
He sighed. “I took my pain meds this morning. I’m not at my best. I need more coffee.”
“Three didn’t do it?” Ryker asked.
“This is strong stuff. That’s why I hate to take it.”
Dalton surprised him by rising and limping over to the door. He opened it and leaned out. “Hal!”
“Yo?”
“Get me six tall and strongs, black, from Maude’s. Double time.”
Then he limped back to his seat, and with every one of his careful movements, Trace felt a twinge of sympathy for the sheriff. Evidently he hadn’t escaped all the effects of the bomb that had killed his family.
“That’ll tick Velma off good,” the sheriff remarked when he’d settled again.
“Velma?” Trace asked.
“The smoking volcano at the front desk. She makes us coffee every morning. We all pretend to drink it so as not to offend her. Might as well swallow thickened battery acid.” Gage waved a hand. “Her coffee is infamous. Enough about that. We’ll pump some more caffeine into you, and when you feel ready, we’ll get into some detail about what, if anything, Conard County can do for you, if you’ll let us.”
Trace shook his head, trying to absorb this. “Why should you help me? You don’t know me from Adam.”
“I have some inkling about the service you’ve been providing to this country,” Gage said quietly. “I get freaking frosted when people like you get cut loose. I don’t like the stench, and I want to clean it up. Besides, you’re Ryker’s friend, and his wife means a whole lot to folks around here.”
That was when Trace realized he’d walked onto a different planet.
* * *
The coffee arrived within ten minutes. Trace drank the first as fast as he could without burning his mouth and throat, then started on another. The two other men took their time chatting about how another storm was about to blow in and how everyone hoped it would be the last of the winter.
Trace listened with only half an ear. Ryker had given him enough information to fly with this morning, and as the coffee drove away the fuzziness the meds caused in his mind, it slipped into high gear. He’d hated the last weeks of running from an invisible threat that might not even exist. Well, now he was pretty certain it was real. Not knowing who or what made it pretty hard to take evasive action, but at least there was a reason for what he needed to do.
As a field operative, he’d seen enough of the underside to know that sometimes assets were more important than operatives, that his employer would protect some of them at any cost. He’d never known personally of a case where an operative had been hung out to dry, but it didn’t exceed his ability to imagine. It became even easier to imagine when the operative, namely him, had become useless. Yeah, they’d do it all right. If an important asset demanded Trace’s blood, nobody would intervene.
He looked up, interrupting the conversation without apology. “My phone’s on the road. The car needs to be, too.”
Ryker checked his watch. “Very soon. The driver of the truck I put your phone on was just walking inside to order breakfast when I spoke to him. He’s probably just finishing up. Or maybe just pulled out of the lot. But you’re right.”
“I’d better get to it, then.”
“Hold it,” said Dalton. “Give it five.”
“Why?”
“Because Ryker told me earlier we might need to get rid of your car. I’ve got a couple of guys who should be here any minute. So you think they’ve got a tracking device on your auto?”
“I don’t know. It’s unlikely, but I never looked for one. Besides, phones are easy to track. But if they’re tracking both, then we don’t want them to get too far apart.”
“Why in the devil would they want to track you when they’ve cut you loose?” Gage nearly growled.
“Because,” Trace said, “I might be a peace offering.” Dead silence answered him.
The burn was growing. He’d spent a long time preoccupied by his recovery and rehab, and hadn’t been paying much attention to a lot of things. When they suggested it might be best for him to hit the road until they figured out if he was at risk, it had made perfect sense in the morphine-induced haze.
He’d gotten off the morphine to milder stuff, meds he could mostly control with coffee, but he hadn’t really thought about the entire setup. He was a field operative, for heaven’s sake. Living at risk didn’t seem strange or unusual to him. Being on the run had sometimes been part of his job. It had never occurred to him that the agency might just want him to be far away when fate overtook him. Plausible deniability was stamped all over this.
He looked up again as a tall man entered the office without knocking. His bearing, his gaze... Trace would have bet the guy had a special ops background. To the casual eye, it wouldn’t show. To the experienced eye, it was unmistakable.
“Hi, Seth,” Gage said. “I’m not going to introduce you.”
Seth half smiled. “I wouldn’t expect it. What do you need?”
“I need you and Wade to wreck a vehicle for me. Make it bad but nonfatal.”
“Easy enough.”
“Well, I’m not done yet,” Gage said. “We need to do this fast. There’s a cell phone on a commercial truck headed for Denver. I need the crash to occur about one hundred and fifty miles from here, close to that phone. Maybe twenty or so miles ahead of the truck.” He looked at Ryker. “Whose truck?”
Ryker rattled off a license number and a description.
Seth nodded. “Got it.”
“Leave the vehicle, leave the plates on it. One of you can drive an official car so neither of you get stopped for speeding on your way out, okay?” He pointed to the wall. “Grab the keys for number sixteen. She’s gassed and ready to go.” Then he turned his attention toward Trace. “Your keys?”
Trace stood, shoving his good hand into his jacket pocket and pulling them out, handing them over. “Might be smart to lose these in the snow, too.”
Seth smiled faintly. “Will do. Which car?”
“Virginia plates, dark blue.”
“See you in a few hours,” Seth said and departed.
Trace began to see a little humor in all this, out of place though it was. “Who was that masked man?”
Gage chuckled. “Hang around here for a while and you’ll find out.” Then he leaned forward, reaching for his coffee. “We’ve got one more immediate problem. Julie Ardlow.”
Julie Ardlow. Trace thought about her, of course, but what really chapped him was that he’d lost control of everything. Oh, he knew he wasn’t at his best with pain pills in his system, and he seriously considered throwing them away. But each time he started to, he was forced to admit that he couldn’t yet. The pain could keep him from thinking clearly even more than the meds. At least those he could fight with coffee.
But he was usually the manager of operations like this. The one who laid out the plan and directed it. Instead, he was along for the ride, and he didn’t like it. He approved of the sheriff’s actions. They were the same thing he would have ordered himself in a similar circumstance. But