“Is there any possibility it’s a practical joke?” Jericho Crewe asked. “Or just a rumor, maybe?”
Unfortunately, Sheriff Kayla Morgan shook her head. “I was the one who called them,” she said, leaning back in her battered leather desk chair.
“You called the feds.” Jericho waited a few seconds for the words to make sense, then gave up. “We have feds in town worrying about the border, feds in town still cleaning up the biker mess, feds in town investigating your dad, feds in town trying to catch Wade—and you woke up one morning, looked around, asked yourself, ‘What does this town need more of?’ and the answer you came up with was ‘feds.’ Honestly?”
Kayla’s scowl suggested that Jericho wasn’t the first person to express a similar opinion. “I’m not going to let my pride get in the way of doing my job, Jay. The FBI already knew about the basic situation—they’re tracking about a dozen little militia groups in this part of the country—but they needed to know Tennant and his boys are flaring up. Receiving a big shipment of illegal weapons is definitely a break in their typical pattern of behavior.”
“And you know that because you got an anonymous tip?” Jericho hated to do it. He didn’t want to think it, much less say it. But . . . “Have you considered the possibility that this is more of Wade’s bullshit? I mean, he—” Jericho’s throat tightened as if the words shouldn’t be spoken, but he was fairly used to his body betraying him when Wade was involved “—he was with me all weekend.” Maybe Kay hadn’t formally known that, but she wasn’t clueless, and Jericho would be damned if he’d hide it. “So maybe this was just another case of him using me as an alibi, setting up something to distract everyone else, and then having one of his minions run a shipment across the border.”
“I never thought I’d say this, Jay, but not every criminal activity in Mosely is connected to Wade Granger. Ninety-five percent of it, yeah. But I think this may have been something from that other five percent.”
Jericho wanted to believe it. The weekend had been—well, not perfect, not considering the long car ride with two highly unpleasant children and then a lot more snakes than Jericho had ever wanted to see in one place—but it had been memorable, all the same. Jericho and Wade, outside of Mosely, weren’t cop and criminal. They weren’t their parents’ sons, weren’t men with painful histories, weren’t running, and weren’t refusing to run. They were just Jericho and Wade, and that was all they ever needed to be, as long as the world left them alone.
There had been nothing romantic about taking Jericho’s half siblings on a road trip to the Billings zoo in order to fulfill Jericho’s promise to get Elijah more access to snakes. Nothing romantic at all. And the two nights together had been fairly tame since Elijah and Nicolette had been sleeping in the adjoining motel room, but that hadn’t mattered. It had still been Jericho and Wade in bed together, warm bodies and hot kisses, and Jericho was pretty sure he’d remember it all for the rest of his life.
They’d driven back the night before, dropped off the kids, and gone to Jericho’s place as if it was the most natural thing in the world for them to stay together, and with no kids to worry about the night had been considerably hotter than the previous two. Then a late breakfast before Wade had left to do whatever Wade did all day and Jericho went for a run. Jericho hoped to be able to remember it as something pure, rather than as the latest episode of Wade’s endless series of manipulations and games.
But Jericho was at work now, wearing the brown and beige polyester even if it was for one of the last times, and he needed to think like an under-sheriff, not a hormone-raddled teenager. “So if it wasn’t Wade, who was it? Who do you think the tip was from?”
“Someone with knowledge of a single shipment of illegal weapons and ammo. So that means probably someone on the arms-dealer side, because it was only one shipment, no mention of the overall arsenal the militia has stockpiled.”
“Or a disgruntled ex, or a neighbor who doesn’t like the guys and wants to stir shit up. Might not be anything at all. The department’s had an eye on these guys since well before I got here, and we’ve never seen anything to worry about before.”
“Are you negging me, Jay? Is that what you’re doing?” Kay frowned for a moment before her brows lifted in understanding. “Oh. You’re worrying about how this is going to affect you. A bit harder to bail on me, guilt-free, if I’m in the middle of a big situation. Is that what you’re thinking?”
Damn. Maybe it was. For too long Jericho had felt as if his life was out of his control, and he’d only recently started clawing it back. The weekend had been his announcement, to himself if no one else was listening, that the situation was going to change. But now? “Is it harder for me to bail out now? I mean, my reasons for quitting are the same as they were—I don’t think I can be a good cop, the kind of cop I want to be, when I’m not sure I believe following the law is always the best idea, and—”
A shout from the main room interrupted his declaration. “We have agents down! Agents under fire, agents down!”
For a frozen half second, Jericho stared at Kayla, who stared back at him. Then they were both in motion, sprinting out to the central room.
The scene there was close to chaos. Federal agents and sheriff’s deputies, all electrified and ready for action, desperately waiting for someone to tell them what to do.
The man on the phone, one finger plugging the ear he wasn’t using to listen, was unfamiliar to Jericho, but his suit, haircut, and general attitude announced him as a fed. Almost certainly one of the new crop of FBI agents Kayla had invited into town. “Coldcreek Road,” he told the crowd, but he spoke as if the words were in a foreign language. “Just past the canyon turnoff?”
And with that, half the room was in motion. The locals—and the feds who’d been around for a while—knew where they were going. The other half were pulling out their phones, tapping at them to call up the GPS.
Jericho let himself be washed along in the flow down the stairs. In LA, this all would have been different. There would have been a call to the SWAT team, a central command to coordinate squad cars and helicopters and snipers. But in Mosely, there was one M4 per squad car, and there were sidearms. That was all.
The feds wouldn’t even have the M4s. Feds were good at stirring shit up, but they generally left the cleanup to special teams or locals. And the locals, officially, weren’t too well armed, though if there’d been time, practically every deputy in the department could have run home to pick up a few hunting rifles or bigger stuff. But there was no time.
“Is this the militia?” Jericho demanded as he followed Kay to her squad car. “Coldcreek by the canyon turnoff—that’s on the way to Tennant’s place. Were there feds heading out there this afternoon?”
Her grim expression answered his question. A bunch of fanatics who’d just received a shipment of arms, and the sheriff’s department was going after them with little more than cap guns and courage. “This is a federal operation,” Jericho tried as Kayla wheeled the car out onto the street. “We don’t actually have to get involved.”
She kept her eyes on the road. “I can’t hear you over the siren.”
He leaned back in his seat. Shit. He was still wearing the brown and beige, and even if he hadn’t been, he’d have followed Kayla wherever she led. So this was going to happen.
“Talk to dispatch, get things coordinated,” Kayla ordered.
It would have made better sense for Jericho to have been driving so Kayla could do all that, but he did his best. As they raced through town and out into the mountains, he listened to the dispatchers sending back reports as they came in. Three feds injured, two others still active on-site. The feds were pinned down behind their vehicles, returning fire against an unknown number of perps who’d taken cover behind three cube vans. There was a more specific location, a helicopter was on the way, and someone was back at the dispatch center taking charge and directing units.
“Mosely County Five,” the dispatcher called, and Jericho reached for the radio.
“County Five, go ahead,” he said. Kayla kept her eyes on the road, but he could practically see her ears straining toward the radio.
“You’re two klicks from a secondary road, no name on the map,” the man at dispatch said. “It should lead around behind the incident. Break.”
