He was doing all that, and still Jericho had to say, “I can’t go.”
Wade stumbled back as if he’d been slapped. “You can,” he said. Another step back. “You can leave anytime you want to. You just don’t want to.” He was almost wild now, like he sometimes had been when they were kids and everything was too damn much for him to understand. Back then, Jericho had been the one to soothe Wade through times like this, or at least to go wild along with him until they were both ready to calm down; now Jericho was the one causing the pain.
“Wade—” Jericho started, but Wade was already moving. Around the hood of the truck into the driver’s seat, and then a bouncing, jolting acceleration over what was left of the lawn. His tires screeched as he turned too sharply on the pavement, and then he was heading down the street, away from the station. Away from Jericho, who stood dumbly and stared after him.
Wade was gone.
Was this how Wade had felt when Jericho left so many years ago? This empty? This betrayed?
This is good, Jericho told himself. Wade was safe, and that was good, and it was nothing but selfishness that made Jericho feel otherwise. Wade had survived this long because he was an expert at self-preservation, so of course he wouldn’t let himself get dragged into a suicide mission.
“No, we don’t have corroborating information,” Kayla was saying into the phone, and he tried to drag himself back to the current situation. “But it makes sense, doesn’t it?” She paused, and then said, “That was a completely different situation. The bikers were— Yes, I called you for help with them as well.” She was breathing hard, clearly trying to keep her cool. “I know it was a false alarm that time, but I’m not sorry I called you—there was enough intel for the risk to be at least possible, and—” She stopped, listening, and shook her head in frustration. “Yes, but—” She closed her eyes, maybe praying for patience.
Hockley and Montgomery had their own calls going on, and Jericho let the conversations wash over him. He didn’t need to pay attention to the details, not when the general responses would be the same. The real battle was going to be in Helena; there’d already been one false alarm this summer, and nobody had time or manpower to deal with another one; Mosely was on its own.
Jericho was on his own. Wade had left. If Jericho didn’t come out of this—and he wasn’t going to come out of it, not when he was one of a handful of barely armed officers facing a heavily armed platoon—then that would be the last conversation he and Wade ever had. The yelling at each other was okay. They’d always spent a fair bit of their time yelling. But Wade had walked away. Had he ever done that before? Had he ever turned his back on Jericho when Jericho hadn’t already done the same?
Jericho forced himself to think about the practical side of the upcoming battle. M4s. The FBI had taken the ones actually involved in the shootings, but the department had a couple of extra; they were in the squad cars. Ammo. They had enough of that.
Strategy? What the fuck was the strategy going to be?
He looked at the building; it was brick, sure, but not the kind of stronghold police stations in bigger cities had been turned into. No barriers to keep vehicles from driving right up the front, no fortified areas inside. The holding cells were reached through the front doors, or through a service entrance around the back. The front doors were metal, but not specially reinforced. They’d be easy to blow through if the invaders were as well equipped as Wade—no, don’t think about him—as intel suggested.
Jericho’s phone rang as the other three were on their second or third round of desperate phone calls, and he saw Meeks’s name on the display. He kept his gaze on Kayla and lifted the phone to his ear. “Crewe.”
“We have activity out here, Jay!” Meeks’s voice was tight and high. “I’m out on Coldcreek, about six miles out of town, and there’s a—a—I don’t know, a damn invasion coming past me!”
Jericho’s gut churned. It was real. It was happening. “Meeks has visual confirmation,” he told Kayla without lowering his own phone. “Meeks, give me numbers, descriptions—what are you seeing?”
“Oh fuck!” Meeks shouted. Jericho’s grip tightened on the phone as unintelligible noises crackled in his ear.
“Meeks!” Jericho yelled. There was crackling, but no words. Jericho told Kayla “Something happened. They’re six miles out of town, on Coldcreek. He said it was an invasion, but I’m not getting anything more out of him.” He tried not to let his imagination fill in the blanks in that summary, and Kayla’s grim expression made it clear he didn’t need to speculate.
“Forty or fifty well-armed men,” Montgomery said, “and we’re already down one deputy.”
“I’ve called everyone in,” Garron rumbled, “but most of the boys live out of town. It’s going to take a while for them to get here. I’ll send a couple of them around to check on Meeks.”
Kayla kept yelling into her phone, and Hockley and Montgomery’s conversations took on new urgency. Jericho looked at Garron. “Yeah. Send two deputies to Meeks. One town ambulance should go out there too, but it needs to take the long way around. Coldcreek. Have the other ambulance stand by here. And give me the keys to the armory.” There were too few weapons in the room for it to really deserve the name; he probably should have called it the closet. But it was what they had.
By the time he’d returned with an M4 for everyone and all the ammo the department had, the others were off their phones.
“We’re getting a chopper,” Kayla said flatly. “ETA half an hour.”
Half an hour was too long, and they all knew it. And a single chopper? It would help, certainly, but it wouldn’t turn the tide.
They were quiet for a moment, staring at each other or down the road in the direction the militia would be coming from, and then Kayla said, “This isn’t a DEA issue. Hockley, Montgomery—you should go, and make calls from somewhere safe. We need contact with the outside, and you two can—”
“No.” Hockley glanced at Montgomery, saw whatever he needed to, and turned back to Kayla. “We’re law enforcement. We stand together.”
Jericho’s mind raced, trying to sort out the tactics. Five of them, lightly armed, against forty or fifty attackers. He asked Garron, “What have we got in the evidence lockup? Is that grenade launcher still here? Anything else that would be useful?”
Garron shook his head slowly. “FBI shipped everything off to their labs.” He gestured to the M4s. “This is the best we’ve got. If we had time, we could—” He broke off, looking over Jericho’s shoulder.
Jericho turned and looked down the street toward town. It was the wrong direction, and it wasn’t a military strike coming toward them, it was a pair of tow trucks, each pulling a trailer full of—
“Those are the junk bins from Scotty Hawk’s place,” Kayla said almost experimentally, as if she were trying the words out to see if they made any more sense when spoken aloud.
The tow trucks were close enough now that Jericho could recognize Scotty’s bulk behind the wheel of one—and something loosened in his chest, then tightened again, when he saw Wade driving the other. Wade didn’t even glance over, and he was yelling something into his phone as they drove by, but . . . he was there. He was doing something weird, but that was okay.
