Chapter 4
“I don’t know why everyone’s so fired up. It was just corn.”
-Cam
“How far were you going to bend the rules, Saber?”
Did you know a Black man can get so red in the face he turns purple? I’m watching it happen in front of my eyes, and I still can’t believe what I see. I didn’t think it was possible.
“Saber!” Roman Fairclough snaps his fingers in front of me. “Are you paying attention? I’m in the middle of chewing you out! You could at least have the decency to look contrite!”
I sit straighter in my chair, causing my shoulder to ache. “Yes, Boss Man.”
Roman has a decade of life on me and about a million more commendations with the ATF. He was a rookie at Waco and knows all too well what happens when you misstep when going after a cult leader or domestic terrorist.
My little escapade at the farmhouse hit too close to home for him. I know he’ll get this out of his system, and we’ll get back to work. But I have to face the consequences first.
“Months of undercover work gone right in the shitter because you decided to cowboy it up and lone wolf the fuck out of this,” Roman pounds on his desk. “You go willy-nilly into a terrorist’s house of death without so much as a heads up…”
I hold up my hand. “To be fair, I did alert Ken Doll.”
“It’s Kendall. Layne KENDALL,” my relatively new blond partner grinds out. “And I told you to stop calling me that.”
I bat my eyelashes at him. “My bad.”
“Your alert wasn’t good enough!” Roman rants.
“What about the beacon? Huh? I activated the emergency distress signal,” I point to my wrist where the bracelet had been.
“You mean the emergency beacon we couldn’t get because you were in a house of horrors where all signals were jammed?”
Ah, shit. So, he knows about that.
“Yes! I know all about that!”
Ah, shit. Am I using my inside voice right now? Can you hear what I’m thinking?
I narrow my eyes at Roman, but he says nothing. I breathe a sigh of relief.
“You blindly went with Dakota Helfinger without any backup and could have been killed instead of stabbed by corn!” Roman screams, pounding his desk in time with his bullet points of rage.
I rub my shoulder that throbs harder the more Roman screams.
Yes. I fell onto a stalk of corn. It wasn’t shrapnel from the explosion that stabbed me. Needed two stitches to close it up.
How’s that for a badass bitch of the ATF? Huh?
Yep. Not getting a medal for that one, not that I was looking for that.
I also wasn’t looking for an ass-chewing today, and I’ve had about enough.
“Listen!” I stand and place both hands on Roman’s desk. “I’ve been undercover for months! You are correct! And you, of all people, know what undercover work is like! Situations come up that you can’t predict. You get an opportunity to travel to the target’s stash house. You take it. I made a fucking judgment call!”
“Well, your judgment sucks!”
I gasp and fall back into my chair, at a loss for words since we started this farce of a meeting thirty minutes ago.
Roman shakes his head, then dismisses the Ken Doll.
