Hell for Leather

by Julie Ann Walker

  “Or there could be a handful of people still livin’ there who know everything about everything that happens in their town,” Mac quickly countered.

  “Not to get off track,” Ali said, her bare feet up in her husband’s lap as BKI’s ugly, mangy, obese mascot of a tomcat attempted to balance himself on her knees while rubbing his furry face over her bulging belly. The feline was purring so loudly it sounded like a small plane about to take off. “But are you guys just going to forget about the man in Timberlands? The break-in and attack on Delilah seem awfully coincidental so close on the heels of her uncle’s disappearance.” She absently scratched the cat’s notched ears, causing him to ratchet up his purring to a rhythmic roar. “Or are those just my paranoid pregnancy hormones talking?” she asked, wrinkling her nose.

  “No, those aren’t just your paranoid pregnancy hormones talkin’,” Mac assured her. “And I’d just as soon bite a stink bug as quit lookin’ for Mr. Timberlands, but findin’ Delilah’s uncle has to be the top priority right now.”

  “The top priority,” Boss interjected, “but not the only priority.”

  “You have something in mind?” Mac asked, eyes narrowed in interest.

  “I’m going to report the break-in to Chief Washington. Maybe his boys in the CPD can find Mr. Timberlands for us. If that’s all right with you, Delilah.” Boss turned to lift a scarred eyebrow at her.

  “Hey,” she shrugged, “I’m taking all the help I can get. Obviously.” She gestured to the men and women gathered around the table.

  “Good.” Boss jerked his chin. “That’ll let us focus all our efforts on the hunt for your uncle without completely allowing the guy in work boots to get off scot-free.”

  And for the second time, gratitude surged so strongly inside Delilah that she felt overwhelmed. “I don’t know how—” She had to stop and clear her throat. “I don’t know how to thank you all for doing this. It’s just so—”

  “Darlin’,” Mac’s deep drawl, not to mention that knee-loosening endearment, had the words screeching to a stop on the tip of her tongue as if they’d come equipped with a set of airbrakes. “I told you, that’s what friends are for.”

  Friends…yeah… Except when it came to him, she wanted—she’d always wanted—something more. Ack! And we’re back to that, Delilah?

  Okay, it was official. She needed a lobotomy, if only to silence that annoying voice.

  “So who’s goin’ on this little fishin’ expedition?” Ghost asked, absently rubbing his hand over his wife’s pregnant belly.

  “Well,” Boss said, “since Ali has been… What did you call it the other day, Mac?”

  “Storked,” Mac replied helpfully. “Down in Texas, we say she’s been storked.”

  Oh, and why did she have to go and find stuff like that so freakin’ adorable? What was it about the slow-talking, overgrown, Southern boy sitting next to her that she found so fascinating?

  Uh, everything, she admitted woefully. It was absolutely everything about him. Damn it all to hell!

  “Yeah,” Boss chuckled, slapping a huge, baseball-mitt-of-a-hand on the table. “You Lone-Star staters do have a way with words. Anyway, since Ali has been storked,” he snorted, “it’s a foregone conclusion Ghost will stay behind and—” Boss stopped in mid-sentence, scowling at Ali. “What the hell is the matter with that cat?”

  The tom was now rubbing his entire length over Ali’s belly.

  “He’s a frickin’ traitor, that’s what’s the matter with him.” Becky crunched down on her sucker, chewing angrily. “I’m the one who feeds him. I’m the one who bathes him. I’m the one who buys him catnip toys and cleans out his litter box. But do you see him over here rubbing all over me? No. No, you do not.”

  “It’s not me he’s rubbing on,” Ali insisted, shooting Becky a placating look. “It’s the baby.”

  “People,” Mac interrupted, “let’s get back to the point, shall we? Who besides me is goin’ down to Cairo?”

  And either Delilah was exhausted or crazy or both, but the way he said that, like it was a foregone conclusion he’d be going with her, gave her a little thrill. Before that idiotic voice could pipe up with something scathing, she preempted it. Put a cork it, you aggravating little prick! I’ve had it with you!

  “Ooh, ooh!” Ozzie raised his hand like an overly exuberant kindergartener. “Me, me! A road trip to southern Illinois sounds like fun.” He winced, peeking at Delilah. “Sorry. I didn’t mean it was fun that your uncle—”

  She waved him off. “No worries. I know what you meant.” Because she was a born-and-bred biker, and she knew the thrill of the open road better than anyone. Cruising down the highway on the back of a half-ton of hand-tooled leather and high-polished steel was the closest a person could come to flying without ever leaving the ground.

  “Yeah,” Ozzie shook his head woefully, “but that doesn’t—”

  He was stopped when Zoelner’s phone suddenly came to life, buzzing angrily and vibrating across the table. The former CIA agent flipped over the device and peered at the screen. A look of confusion and surprise came over his face.

  “I’m in for Cairo, too,” he said. Then, “Excuse me for a second.” Standing, he jogged into one of the darkened offices. A light blazed inside the room before the door slammed shut with a bang that echoed around the large space, causing the tomcat to pause in his adoration of Ali’s belly.

  “Becky and I will stay here to monitor the progress of the guys we’ve still got out in the field,” Boss said. It was then that Delilah did a quick head count and realized seven of the Black Knights were absent from the conference table. Okay, and way to be completely self-absorbed, Delilah. For heaven’s sake.

  “So that leaves Steady,” Mac said, tipping his dimpled chin toward the dark-eyed man, “to join those of us headed south. The more boots on the ground we have down there, the more area we can cover.”

  “Agreed,” Boss concurred. “It’s all settled then. Pack up your saddlebags, boys. You’re going on a road trip.”

  “Wahoo!” Ozzie shot a fist in the air, then kept his hand raised, looking around for someone to slap him a high-five. When no one took him up on his offer, he realized what he’d done and winced at Delilah again. “Jesus. Sorry. Is it too late to take back that wahoo?”

  “It’s okay, Ozzie,” she assured him, eager herself to be back out on the road now that they had a plan. “I know you didn’t—”

  She was cut-off mid-sentence when Zoelner’s office door flew open. The former spy—or current spy? Did the Black Knights qualify as that? In all honesty, she wasn’t sure—stood on the threshold, a strange look wallpapering his face.

  “What’s up?” Boss asked. “Who was on the phone?”

  “Uh.” Zoelner reached up to scratch his ear. “That was Chelsea Duvall.”

  “Should I know who that is?”

  “She’s an old…uh…acquaintance in The Company. She said she’s been promoted to the position of our official liaison to the CIA.”

  “Our official what?” Boss demanded, his tone that of a man who occasionally munched on a baby for breakfast.

  “She also said…” Zoelner stopped, scrunching up his face. “How did she put it? She said that in an effort to assist us in our exemplary work for the president and his Joint Chiefs, they’ve been monitoring the online activities on one of our computers and—”

  “The hell you say!” Ozzie exploded. “Which one? I have anti-spy programs running on all of them!”

  “Well, they’re obviously getting around that somehow, hermano,” Steady observed.

  Now it looked like Ozzie munched on babies for breakfast. He attacked his laptop keyboard as if he had a personal vendetta against the poor thing.

  “Go on,” Boss growled. “They’ve been monitoring the online activities on one of our computers and what?”

  “And they were wondering if there was anything they could do to assist us in our most recent endeavor regarding Theo Fairchild,” Zoelner finishe
d in a rush, still wearing a slightly bewildered expression.

  “Yeah, well, that sounds like a prime example of my cow done up and died so I don’t need your bull,” Mac said. “Why would the CIA give one shit, much less two, about helpin’ us? I don’t trust those people.”

  “Yeah,” Zoelner snorted. “You don’t have to tell me. Remember I used to be one of those people.”

  Mac made a face. “Then what did you tell her?” And Delilah was curious about that as well. Was it possible the CIA could do something more than the Knights in locating Uncle Theo? Were there…she didn’t know…some sort of secret CIA ways and means?

  “I told her we were simply looking for Delilah’s missing uncle,” Zoelner said. “And I told her that unless they had some sort of LoJack on Theodore Fairchild or his old Marine Corps buddy, Charles Sander, there wasn’t much they could do.”

  Okay. Apparently the CIA didn’t have any sort of secret ways and means. Shit.

  “Good.” Boss nodded. “Sooo,” he drew out the word, “barring any more mysterious telephone calls from the CIA, I think we all have our assignments here. Let’s get to it.”

  “Permission to stay behind and figure out how those goddamned spooks are monitoring our Internet activities?” Ozzie said, typing frantically.

  “Permission denied,” Boss said, causing Ozzie to glance up from his laptop screen. “You’ve got more important things to do besides getting into a dick-measuring contest with the CIA’s tech boys. You go help find Theo. You can whip it out and prove your superiority to the spooks when you get back.”

  “But—”

  “No buts,” Boss announced, pushing up from the table.

  Delilah stood along with the rest of the group, itching to mount up on Big Red, her beloved custom BKI motorcycle, and hit the road. But a loud squawk followed by a quickly indrawn breath drew her attention over to Ali.

  “Uh…folks?” the blonde said, wrinkling her nose and staring down at the floor. “My water just broke.”

  Chapter Six

  Holy shit, I’m such an idiot.

  Chelsea reached up to slide her forefinger and thumb beneath her glasses, pinching the bridge of her nose. What were the odds that her supervisor would ask her to call Dagan on this night? And what were the odds that she’d completely forget just what this night meant?

  “I didn’t expect to hear from you,” had been Dagan’s initial salvo. “Not tonight of all nights.” To which, idiot that she was, she’d responded with, “Tonight? What’s so special about tonight?”

  The words had been out of her mouth a half second before she glanced at the date on the lower right-hand corner of her laptop screen, a half second too late for her to call them back.

  “Oh…” was Dagan’s immediate retort, and there’d been no mistaking the hurt in his voice the moment before all emotion whatsoever disappeared. She could picture him getting completely still in that weird way of his, becoming a living, breathing statue. “So, what do you want then, Agent Duvall?”

  Agent Duvall…

  He never used to call her that. It’d always been Chelsea, or Chels.

  To say it’d all been downhill after that would be the understatement of the century. And, yeah, she’d certainly spend a good deal of time obsessing about how she could have handled it better. But for right now, she had a call to make.

  Rubbing her hand down her face, she dialed her supervisor’s number.

  “What’d you discover?” Morales demanded before the first ring finished sounding.

  “Nothing,” she told him. Nothing other than the fact that I’m an insensitive ass, and Dagan was smart to cut all ties with me. “They’re simply looking for this Theodore Fairchild guy because he’s the uncle of one of their friends. That…uh…that bartender who’s in on their secret?” she explained. “You know the one?”

  A grunt was Morales’s only reply. She took it to be an affirmative. Back to being succinct, are we?

  “Anyway,” she continued, “apparently the bartender’s uncle was supposed to be visiting a former Marine pal named Charles something or other and has since stopped answering his cell phone. The bartender is worried about him—allegedly going MIA isn’t like the man—and she’s enlisted the Knights to help her locate him.” And unless her boss read more into the situation than she figured was warranted, she quickly added, “But it’s been less than twenty-four hours, so I suspect the two old coots just tied one on for old-time’s sake and—”

  “Sonofa-fucking-bitch!” Morales thundered, and Chelsea was so taken aback, the phone slipped from her hand to clatter against the keyboard of her laptop.

  “Sir?” she asked once she retrieved the device, her heart’s tempo having gone from a steady thump-thump to a racing bahdahboom-bahdahboom!

  “Was it Charles Sander?” Morales demanded.

  “Uh…yeah.” She swallowed. “That rings a b—”

  “Does the code name BA Repatriate mean anything to you?” he cut her off.

  “BA…” She hastily pushed her laptop aside and lunged from her bed, running over to her dresser where some of the alphabetized, highly redacted copies of the files the CIA suspected the rogue CIA agent might have had access to sat in a neat pile. Quickly finding the one she sought, she flipped open the cover.

  And although most of the page was blacked out—couldn’t worry that a civilian might stumble into her apartment and see highly classified files—the three words scrawled against the top of the page in big, bold letters said it all.

  Her stomach immediately took a header, falling to the floor at her bare feet. “Sir? Do we have any idea who Winterfield might have sold this information to?”

  “Unfortunately not,” Morales admitted, fury vibrating in every syllable. “But you can be certain, if he sold this piece of Intel, it was to an organization that isn’t on Uncle Sam’s Christmas list.”

  Her mind was racing a million miles a minute. The implication of this could be… But, wait… “This file doesn’t list the locations of the missing BAs. It just gives the names of the five men who worked the mission.”

  “All of whom are dead of natural causes except for Charles and Theodore. And apparently, according to the Knights, both of those men have now gone AWOL.”

  And the hits just keep on coming! But it was part of Chelsea’s job not to get bogged down in the details. She was expected to be the “big picture” girl. She was expected to keep everyone from jumping to conclusions. “It’s still possible this is all a misunderstanding,” she said. “I mean, we’re not positive which files that prick Winterfield,” she winced at the foul language, “accessed and downloaded. This could still be a case of two old Marine Corps buddies getting overly lubricated and—”

  “Which is why I’m sending you in alone, Agent Duvall.”

  Okay, huh? He was…sending her in? As in, out into the field? But she wasn’t a field agent! She was a desk-jockey analyst with lines of code instead of listening devices and reams of Intel instead of incendiary devices. “Uh, sir? I’m…I’m not sure I copied you correctly on that last bit.”

  “If this is just a red herring,” Morales said, “I don’t want to alert the Knights to the true scope of the problem Winterfield has caused for us. So I’m sending you in to—”

  “If you’ll pardon my interrupting, sir. The Knights have proved themselves trustworthy time and again. Heck, they’re the personal goon-squad to the president and the JCs. How much more proof do you need of their reliability?”

  “Loose lips sink ships, Agent Duvall. You know that as well as I do.”

  Loose lips sink ships, she silently mimicked, rolling her eyes. “Spare me the World War II propaganda, sir,” she harrumphed, disliking where this conversation was leading. Disliking the thought of having to lie straight to Dagan’s face. “I know better than most how important it is to keep our cards close to our vest. But the Knights—”

  “You’ll go in,” Morales cut her off, “working under the auspices of your new title and you�
�ll assess the situation.” And she recognized a red line when she was poised to jump right over it. Her supervisor had made up his mind. Any more argument from her would be flying precariously close to insubordination. “If you think there’s more going on in Illinois than a simple misunderstanding, I’ll have a team ready and waiting to swoop in. If not, then BKI, and the world at large, will remain blessedly unaware of just what a clusterfuck Winterfield created for us.”

  “The Knights aren’t the world at large,” she muttered, unable to help herself.

  “What’s that?”

  “Nothing, sir,” she said, biting her tongue so hard she marveled she didn’t taste blood.

  “Good then,” Morales said, finality in his tone. “I’ll arrange transport for you immediately.”

  The line went dead, and Chelsea pulled the phone away from her ear. Her eyes scanned the file in her hand, and she imagined the warm welcome—not—she’d receive when she just showed up on the Knights’ doorstep.

  This is bad, she thought. This is going to be very, very bad…

  ***

  “Blow,” Becky demanded, holding Delilah’s shiny silver Breathalyzer—a handy device used for checking blood/alcohol level—up to Mac’s mouth.

  Delilah had taken to carrying the thing around in her saddlebags because anytime she joined one of the local MCs—motorcycle clubs—on a ride, it was inevitable the group would stop at a bar or roadhouse somewhere. Equally inevitable was the fact that some sorry sucker would have one too many, forcing Delilah and the rest of the gang to wait around while the guy—it was usually a guy, though once, it had been a gal—sobered up enough to blow below .08%.

  “You heard me. Blow,” Becky repeated, wiggling the device.

  Mac’s dark eyebrows winged down in a fierce V, his five-o’clock…no, more like ten-o’clock-shadowed jaw clenching. “I’m not drunk,” he ground out, crossing his arms over his chest, causing his leather biker jacket to pull tight across the wide expanse of his back.