“Out of the way,” Hockings said, her thigh brushing his shoulder.
The electricity now scrambled his brain as the current shot up and then down to finally settle, like a buzzing transformer, in his groin. High school all over again.
Vasta squatted at the window and peeked out. The only thing he held was the venetian blinds. His gun remained on his hip. He glanced back at Axel and cocked his head.
Axel realized his own mouth was hanging open as if Agent Hockings had slapped him, which she would have, if she knew what he had been thinking.
“They shot her car. Peppered the side,” said Vasta.
Her head popped up like a carnival target from behind the desk.
“Who did?” Her perfect blond hair was now mussed. Axel resisted the urge to lay the strands back in order. Was her hair silky or soft like angora?
“I dunno, but they are long gone,” said Vasta. “Even took the shell.”
“How do you know that?” She reached his side.
“Shells are green and red, mostly. Easy to spot on the snow.”
Agent Hockings moved to the opposite side of the window. “There is a whole group of people out there. Witnesses.”
Axel’s laugh gleaned another scowl from Hockings. Vasta’s mouth quirked but then fell back to reveal no hint of humor when Hockings turned from Axel to him.
Now Axel was scowling. Vasta was making him look bad, or perhaps he was doing that all on his own.
Axel reached the pair who now stood flanking the window like bookends. He pressed his arm to hers, muscling her out of the way in order to get a glimpse outside. Her athletic frame brought her head to his shoulder, and he was only five foot ten. She was what Mrs. Shubert, the librarian of the Kinsley Public Library, would have called petite. Mrs. Shubert had also been petite and was as mighty as a superhero in Axel’s mind. He knew not to judge ferocity in inches.
“Or,” said Hockings, “you could see if any of the spectators have a shotgun in their hand or shell casing in their pocket.”
“Illegal search,” said Vasta. “And none of them have a shotgun any longer. So, here’s what’s going to happen. Sheriff Trace is going to escort you out in restraints and put you in the back of his unit. Then he’s going to drive you outta here. If you are smart, you will keep your head down and look ashamed, because you should be.”
“I will not.”
“Then they will likely break every window in Axel’s cruiser and possibly turn it over with you both inside.”
Hockings stiffened as her eyes went wide with shock. The brown of her irises, he now saw, were flecked with copper. She looked to him, as if asking if Vasta were pulling her leg.
He hoped his expression said that the acting chief of police was not.
She turned back to Vasta. “You’d have to stop them.”
“Listen, Agent Hockings, it’s just me here. Last week, I was an officer, and now this.” He motioned to his chief’s badge. “Besides, I’m tempted to help them.”
Hockings looked from Vasta to Trace and then back to Vasta.
“Are you pressing charges against Hockings?” Axel asked Vasta.
“Are you serious?” she asked the sheriff.
He gave her a look he hoped said that he was very serious. “They have tribal courts and you do not want to go there.”
“They can’t prosecute a federal agent.”
“But can hold you until your people find out.”
Her fingers went straight, flexing and then lacing together to create a weapon that he believed she was wise enough not to use.
“Fine. So contrite. That will get us out of here?”
The acting chief of police nodded.
“What about my vehicle?”
“I’ll drive it to the border and leave it for you.”
“The border?” To Rylee, the border was Canada. Vasta enlightened her.
“The border of our reservation.”
Her gaze flicked between them and her full mouth went thin and miserly. But she thought about it. Axel just loved the way the tips of her nose and ears went pink as a rabbit’s in her silent fury.
“Fine. Let’s get going, if you have your keys,” she said, pushing past him.
The acting chief of police was faster, beating them to the door to the main squad room. There, two officers sat on a desk and table respectively, both kicking their legs from their perches where they had been watching the drama playing out through the glass door of the chief’s office.
“Josh and Noah, you two have point,” said Vasta, instructing the men to lead the escort.
Both men rose, grinning. Each wore tight-fitting uniforms. Josh’s hair was black and bristly short. Noah wore his brown hair in a knot at his neck.
They headed out behind the officers, with Axel holding Hockings’s taut arm as if she were his prisoner. Behind them came the acting chief of police. Trace tried and failed not to notice that he could nearly encircle Rylee’s bicep with his thumb and index finger and that included her wool coat. She glared up at him and her muscle bunched beneath his grip. Hockings clearly did not like role-play.
The crowd that Hockings had insisted Vasta question were now calling rude suggestions and booing. Vasta waved and spoke to them in Kowa, a form of the Iroquoian language. The officers before them peeled away, giving Axel a view of his cruiser and the rear door. For reasons he did not completely understand, his squad car was untouched. Axel hit the fob, unlocking his unit. Noah swept the rear door open.
Axel made a show of putting his hand on Hockings’s head to see that she was safely ensconced in the rear of his unit. The effect brought a cheer from the peanut gallery and allowed him to get the answer to one of his many questions about Hockings.
Her hair was soft as the ear of an Irish setter and blond right to the roots. Hockings fell to her side across the rear seat and remained on her side. Wise beyond her years, he thought.
The booing resumed as he climbed behind the wheel. It pleased him that Josh and Noah now stood between his unit and the gathering of pissed-off Mohawks.
And off they went. They were outside of Salmon River, the tribe’s main settlement, but still on rez land before Rylee sat up and laced her fingers through the mesh guard that separated his front from the back seat. Her fingernails were shiny with clearish pink polish and neatly filed into appealing ovals. Her wrists were no longer secured.
“How did you get out of that?” he asked.
“My father says you can measure a person’s IQ by whether or not they carry a pocketknife.”
“With the exception being at airports?” he asked.
“You going to keep me back here the entire way?”
“Not if you want to sit beside me.”
She didn’t answer that, just threw herself back into the upholstery and growled. Then she looked out the side window.
“They better not damage my car,” she muttered.
“More,” he said.
“What?”
She wasn’t looking at him. He knew because he was staring at her in the rearview until the grooves in the shoulder’s pavement vibrated his attention back to the road.
“Damage your