Crack! Thunk! Another bullet shattered the tense silence, piercing the fender of the second Tahoe. Special Agent Palmer gave a roar of outrage, audible even from a distance.
Toby tackled Dylan to the ground a second time. Adrenaline juggernauted through him, making his head pound with frustration. Jesus Christ! Who was firing on the freaking FBI? He craned his neck trying to pinpoint the culprit. Whoever it was, his behavior was influencing the soldiers to do likewise. Two at a time, they came to a consensus, picking up their rifles and shouldering them in an effort to chase off the interlopers.
Ugly isn’t the right word for this.
Lt. Ashby’s booming voice reached Toby’s ears. “If I were you, I’d leave right now,” he cautioned the agents.
Toby agreed. Good idea. Get the hell out, now.
A brief discussion between the FBI special agents ended with the slamming of car doors and the revving of engines. Then the Tahoes took off, spinning up clods of dirt in their haste to hightail it off Dylan’s property. Toby breathed a sigh of relief and rolled off Dylan to cast a grateful gaze at the robin’s egg sky.
Her pale face reclaimed his attention as she kneeled next to him. “Talk about poor timing,” she exclaimed in a shaken voice.
“Idiots,” he agreed, drawing his knuckles down one side of her ashen face.
“You lying son of a bitch!” A rusty, furious voice intruded on their momentary interlude as Cal Fallon pushed through the line of soldiers to confront Toby.
Aw, hell, Toby thought. Here it comes. And he could only blame himself for putting off the truth when he should have come clean. He rolled to his feet, snatching up his rifle out of pure reflex.
“You liar,” Cal roared. His face ruddy with fury, the Sheriff of Harpers Ferry barreled into Toby, shoving him hard. “You said you’d protect her, you son-of-a-bitch!”
Toby staggered back a step. “Easy, Cal. Don’t do this, now.” The odor of smokeless gunpowder clung heavily to the man’s cammies, leading Toby to assume that he’d been the one firing on the FBI, but then, they’d all just come from the firing range. Fallon had tossed his rifle aside to free his hands, but he still had his side arm, a 9 mm pistol, in the holster under his arm pit.
Dylan scrambled to her feet and leapt between them. Toby swept her behind him, out of harm’s way. He clutched his rifle indecisively. Between Fallon’s pistol and the roughly sixty or so armed soldiers standing behind him, he didn’t stand a chance to defend himself with it.
“I’ve kept quiet long enough,” Fallon snarled. “You want to know who he is?” he asked Dylan while pointing an accusing finger at Toby’s chest.
“I was going to tell her myself, right after the CPX,” Toby grated. “Don’t make things worse.”
“He’s a god-damn Fed!” Fallon spat, ignoring Toby’s words entirely and gesturing in the direction of the fleeing agents. “Just like them.”
“What?”
The anguished question wrested Toby’s attention from his accuser. He turned his head to plead for her understanding. “I work for the federal government, Dylan. But I know you’re innocent, and I’m working with Fallon and Hooper to prove it.”
The indignant mutterings of the soldiers gathering around them raised the hairs on the back of Toby’s neck.
He held his hand out, palm up, entreating her forgiveness. “I would never hurt you, Dylan. You have to know that’s true.”
She staggered backward, her shock and horror utterly apparent. “You kept this a secret from me?” she demanded of Cal, all the while eying Toby like she’d never seen him before.
The click of a 9 mm pistol froze Toby’s blood. He looked over to see Fallon staring down his sights at him, pistol aimed at Toby’s chest. “He promised he would defend you,” the sheriff explained through his teeth, “but that was obviously a lie. Drop it,” he warned.
Reluctantly, seeing no way out of his predicament, Toby set the rifle at his feet.
Fallon approached him and kicked it out of the way. With identical looks of incredulity and betrayal, Morrison, Ackerman, and Lee closed a noose around Toby as Fallon circled him. “Down on your stomach. Now,” the sheriff commanded, his aim steady.
Following her initial outburst, Dylan fell mute.
Slowly, with a sardonic twist of his lips, Toby complied. Lying face-down on the cold earth, he wished he’d just bitten the bullet and told Dylan the truth the night before, back when he’d had the chance. If only she hadn’t had so damn much to deal with already. If only he hadn’t wanted to bask in her devotion a little longer.
Fallon’s knee gouged his spine, sending shards of pain to his extremities. Sparing himself the indignity of being outnumbered, Toby let the sheriff cuff him roughly. Steel circlets bit into his wrists before he was yanked upright, back on his feet.
A disturbance on the fringes of the group announced Lt. Ashby’s arrival. He had made his way off the porch and down the slope to join them. With a cry of consternation, Dylan rushed over to bolster up her friend, putting her shoulder under his free arm.
Lt. Ashby’s dark, pain-glazed eyes alighted on Toby as he weaved on his crutch. “Is this true?” he demanded, laboring to catch his breath. “You work for the FBI?” he huffed with incredulity.
“Not exactly,” Toby muttered, ashamed to cause the sick man any anguish. “I’m with a counterterrorist taskforce group that operates in support of Homeland Security.”
“He’s an informant,” Fallon interjected giving the cuffs a yank.
“You think we’re terrorists?” Ashby demanded with a visible shudder.
Toby let his gaze convey his deep regret. “No, of course not,” he said gently.
“What do we do with him?” Ackerman asked, eyeing Tobias with malicious anticipation.
Lt. Ashby looked at Dylan, who stared down at the grass with a frozen expression. “What do you think?” the XO asked her.
She shook her head, unable to speak, unable to bring herself to even look at Toby. He knew he’d get no reprieve from her—not today, maybe never.
“I say we hold him hostage,” Fallon suggested. “And we refuse to release him unless the Feds drop their charges against our leader.”
A rousing huzzah followed Fallon’s suggestion.
Toby looked back at Terrence Ashby, hoping to appeal to his common sense. “You’ll have a war on your hands if you do that,” he predicted. “A massacre along the lines of Waco. Just let me go. I can be a liaison between the local authorities and the FBI. I can help prove Dylan’s innocence.”
“We’ve trained for this,” Cal Fallon continued as if Toby hadn’t spoken at all. He spoke to the militia at large. “Are we going to let the Feds trespass on our leader’s property?”
“No!”
“Strip her of her inalienable rights and arrest her for crimes she didn’t commit?”
“No!”
“You know what I think?” Ackerman piped up, pinning Toby with a tightlipped glare. “I think the Feds faked General Treyburn’s death just so they could frame Captain Connelly and shut us down. We’re a threat to their tyranny!”
“Yeah!” Several in the crowd cheered Ackerman’s paranoid conclusions while others like Dylan and Lt. Ashby just looked at him with their eyebrows raised.
At last, Dylan’s brittle, disillusioned voice cut through the rabble rousing. “We’re not taking anyone hostage,” she declared, and Toby released the breath he hadn’t realized he was holding.
“Ivan, collect Burke’s possessions from the attic and his dog from the house,” she said, removing the hair-trigger Ackerman from the scene. “Sheriff Fallon, kindly escort Burke off my property.” Her voice wobbled slightly. She cut a concerned glance at the man leaning heavily on her shoulders before addressing her soldiers as a body. “If you all wish to keep the FBI from coming back, I give you permission to defend my property,” she added. “But no one, and I mean no one, shoots to kill. Do I make myself clear?”
“Yes, ma’am!”
Look
at me, beautiful, Toby willed, attempting to catch Dylan’s eye. I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean for you to find out this way.
But she studiously avoided his gaze.
As Ackerman stormed off to the house to collect Toby’s things, Fallon swung Toby around and shoved him to get him moving. “Walk,” he growled when Toby resisted.
He was hoping Dylan would look at him, just one more time, so he could convey his remorse with his eyes. But she turned her back deliberately to assist Lt. Ashby in making the long trek back to the house. Just like that, she had dismissed him from her thoughts, her life, her future.
With what felt like a gaping wound in his heart, Toby let himself be prodded toward the yard. A contingent of soldiers followed them. As they passed the front of the house, Milly burst through the screen door and streaked across the yard to join him, tail wagging, oblivious to his plight. Toby, with his hands cuffed behind his back, signaled awkwardly for her to heel. She flanked him as he and Fallon started down the long driveway.
“I’ve got it from here, fellas,” Fallon told the stunned soldiers that still followed them. “Return to your NCOs to receive your orders. It’s going to take all of us to hold off the OpFor.”
In the distance, Toby could hear Morrison and Lee barking out orders to secure the perimeter, which would be all four corners of Dylan’s vast property. For as long as the militia had been in existence, it had trained to deflect an invasion by oppositional forces. Today, in their minds, training had transitioned into reality.
Each man in the militia carried a three-day supply of rations; after that, they would have to rely on whatever Dylan’s pantry had in store to keep them fed. Within a week, they’d all be hungry and tired and ready to go back to their real lives.
“Keep walking,” Cal growled, shoving Toby to get him moving.
Every muscle in Toby’s body balked at leaving. If only he could turn back the hands of time, he would tell Dylan about the amazing woman he had met on his undercover assignment. She wasn’t the lunatic the government had made her out to be. She had done her best to turn her emotional anguish into something positive for others. She’d led the militia to uphold tradition and to combat her PTSD. She’d given both herself and others a sense of purpose. Dylan had integrity and compassion, and he admired the hell out of her.
He would tell her that, whether she forgave him or not, he would do whatever it took to keep her out of jail. Whoever the cold-hearted bastard was that was trying to frame her, that asshole was going to account for what he’d done.
Speaking of assholes, he could hear Ackerman running down the driveway to catch up to them, wheezing under the weight of Toby’s duffle bag.
“Wait,” Ivan called, and Cal Fallon jerked Toby to a stop.
“I ain’t gonna carry his bag any further,” Ivan declared, slowing his step. He threw the duffle bag at Toby, just like Toby knew he would. Of course, with his hands cuffed behind his back, it bounced off his chest and hit the ground. Startled, Milly scuttled out of the way.
“Love you, too, man,” Toby said, just like he had the day Ackerman had lobbed his bedroll at him.
“Man, fuck you,” Ivan countered, predictably.
Toby just rolled his eyes and then he started to grin as Cal Fallon shifted his aim so that he was pointing his gun at Sergeant Ackerman instead of at him.
“Pick it up and carry it to the head of the driveway,” the sheriff ordered.
“What?”
“You heard me. If you don’t want me telling the others that you lied about your past, then you’ll do as I say.”
When Ackerman blanched, Toby swung his gaze back and forth between them. “What do you mean, he lied about his past?”
Fallon curled his lip and mocked, “Figure it out yourself, wise guy.”
With darting eyes, Ivan Ackerman snatched up Toby’s duffle bag. Clutching it to his chest, he ran ahead of them with his awkward, loping gait. As Cal prodded Toby into motion again, he watched Ackerman drop his bag by the mailbox, send one last fearful glance in their direction, then hightail it through the orchard.
Well, I’ll be damned, Toby thought, wondering what fact Fallon had unearthed and why he hadn’t shared his information with Toby earlier.
Once Ackerman was out of sight, Cal Fallon shoved his pistol in his holster and started to take off Toby’s handcuffs.
“Sorry about the rough treatment,” he apologized, “but I did tell you I’d make your life a living hell if you let Dylan take the rap for Nolan’s murder. And now there’s this new case in which she’s the suspect.”
“You did warn me,” Toby conceded, shaking out his arms. “And I intend to keep my promise. But you damn well didn’t need to pull the rug out from under her feet that way,” he railed, his resentment bubbling anew.
Cal’s facial muscles flexed with sudden self-doubt. “Well, don’t just stand there, bitching me out. Call your buddies in the FBI and tell them to pick you up. I know you’ve got some way to reach them.”
The impulse to tackle Fallon to the ground and punish him for destroying whatever slim chance he and Dylan might have had tempted Toby briefly.
But in Cal’s defense, he’d been protecting Dylan in the same way that Toby had been trying to protect her. Ultimately they were on the same team, only the sheriff didn’t believe it yet.
“She’s more vulnerable than ever without me. Just so you know, we love each other—or at least she did love me until you screwed that up. If she hurts herself now, then that’s on you,” Toby declared.
Snatching his duffle bag off the ground, he called Milly after him and turned his back on Dylan’s farm, aware that he was leaving his heart behind him. The phone call could wait. He needed time to collect his mixed emotions—remorse, worry, anger, and loss—before calling anyone to pick him up.
Besides, if the FBI came anywhere close to Dylan’s property right now, another Civil War just might break out.
Chapter Sixteen
By the nightlight plugged into the socket, Dylan kept an eye on the rise and fall of her dear friend’s chest as he slept. Outside his window, she could hear the occasional snippet of conversation as soldiers tramped across the dark yard. They’d been trained to rotate shifts every four hours, thus preventing boredom or risking the chance of anyone falling asleep on watch. Her radio, set to a new frequency every four hours, crackled softly on the bureau, its volume lowered so as not to interfere with Terrence’s rest.
His confrontation with the FBI today had sapped what little remained of his strength. He’d refused to eat, to take his pain pills, to do anything but retreat into silence. Dylan knew he blamed himself for insisting that Burke join the SAM, only to have him turn out to be a traitor.
For the hundredth time that day, she closed her eyes and rubbed her aching temples. Her world—this carefully constructed reality that she had pieced together to give her life direction—was crumbling. It was just a matter of time, a week at most, before her soldiers weakened in the face of hunger, tedium, and the pressures of loved ones. Soon after that, they’d surrender their rifles and go home. And then the FBI would swoop back in to arrest her.
All that she could hope for was to be here at Terrence’s side when his spirit went to rest. The prospect of him dying alone and miserable, while she languished in jail, was simply unacceptable.
The clock next to the bed blinked as the minutes turned to zero and a new day began. Time was running out already.
Get some rest, Dylan. The echo of Toby’s advice sounded in her head, prompting such a sharp pang in the region of her heart that made her gasp out loud. She pressed her knuckles to her lips to stifle the sounds.
How could she have been so blind not to have realized who he was? The truth, in retrospect, was so terribly obvious. Tobias Burke had sought her out shortly after the FBI had questioned her in connection with Secretary Nolan’s murder. Now she knew why she hadn’t been able to get a read on him at their very first meeting: He’d been lying.
Fr
ame by frame, she relived the previous three weeks with him in her home. If you want to lean on me from time to time, that’s okay, too, he’d said the night Hendrix had covered her car in spray paint, and then he’d kissed her. And just a few nights later, he’d slipped into her room and brought her to a shattering climax in what amounted to magic for her, a calculated seduction for him. Her face flamed with furious chagrin.
Then there’d been that interlude on Jefferson’s Rock when he’d sung to her so sweetly and freed the pins from her hair, saying, This is who you really are. He had blinded her with his smile, with the warmth of his gaze and the deep rumbling sound of his laughter. He had pried her broken heart wide open and sucked out her very soul.
Bitterness launched her out of the chair. She snatched up the radio and stalked from Terrence’s room, leaving his door ajar just in case. Moving down the dark hallway toward her bedroom, she remembered how Tobias had sat outside her door the night that Terrence’s condition worsened. Remorse burned like acid in her stomach as she recalled how she’d wept in his arms; how he’d held her so tenderly. Don’t apologize to me, he’d growled when she’d told him she was sorry.
Confused by the memory, Dylan pushed into her room. Keeping her gaze averted from the bed they’d shared, she stormed to the window to search the dark terrain outside for signs of her loyal soldiers. The reflective tape on someone’s uniform glimmered in the orchard. A flashlight winked on the horizon and turned off again. She pictured her followers huddled up for warmth on the cold ground and pitied them for their pointless efforts.
Protect them, Father, she prayed. It would be the saddest of ironies if a skirmish between federal forces and her militia broke out because of her. Her future meant nothing now. Her brief hope, her dream of starting a new life had been snatched away by an FBI informant, who’d resurrected her heart, only to murder it again.
Leaving the window sash raised, she turned blindly toward her bed and sprawled across it with her eyes tightly shut. Tobias’s unique scent still clung to the sheets, bearing with it memories of unsurpassed pleasure, of tenderness, and of intimacy.
The Enforcer Page 23