Hell for Leather (Black Knights Inc. #6)(22)

Yessir. It was his naughty librarian fantasy come to life. Little Mac, the goddamned idiot, sure took notice. Which was good and bad. Good because it distracted Mac until he could no longer feel the tug and pull of Steady’s needle. Bad because his jeans had suddenly shrunk six sizes. He reached down to adjust himself, ignoring the knowing smirk on Steady’s face when the guy caught his move.

“And here we go,” Delilah said, pointing at her screen.

“Good God, that was fast!” Ozzie enthused.

“The IRS. They see all. They know all.”

“See”—Ozzie shuddered dramatically—“and that’s why they’re scary.”

“Where does he live?” Mac asked.

Ozzie leaned forward to squint at the computer screen in front of Delilah. “Some place called Cairo, Illinois. Let me see if it’s…” He tapped a few keys on his own keyboard. “Yeah. It’s about forty-five minutes south of Marion.”

“Mac?” Delilah turned to him then, a wide smile splitting her face and making her eyes sparkle like a field of green wheat after a big thunderstorm. “This is it! We’re going to find him!”

She jumped up from the desk and raced toward him, grabbing his hand and squeezing it tight. “We’re really going to find him!”

Every cell inside him thrilled to the touch of her fingers. Holy shit fire, was all he could think. Just like a shot of pure crack cocaine…





Chapter Five


Georgetown, Washington, DC

Music…

The sweet, dulcet tones of Dolly Parton singing about working nine to five filtered into Intelligence Agent Chelsea Duvall’s dreams, making her smile. Until her unconscious mind recognized the sound of her ringtone and thrust her into wakefulness.

“Son of a hoochie mama,” she growled, fumbling on the nightstand for her glasses. “Ow!” she squawked when, in her mad scramble to get the suckers on her face, she stabbed herself in the eyeball with an earpiece. Squinting her abused eye closed, she glanced at the glowing red numbers on her alarm clock with her one remaining functional peeper.

Eleven p.m. This can’t be good.

“Agent Duvall here,” she answered, not bothering to read the caller ID. There were only a handful of people who’d be phoning her at this hour, and they all belonged to The Company.

“We’ve got a red flag,” came the immediate reply from Joe Morales, her supervisor.

“Roger that,” she sat up, throwing back the thick purple quilt her mother made her after college graduation and prior to her recruitment by the CIA. Purple had been her favorite color since she was six years old and fell head-over-heels in love with Fred from the Scooby-Doo gang. Her young mind had picked up on the not-so-unspoken attraction between Fred and Daphne, and she’d used her brilliant kindergarten reasoning and deduction skills to conclude that it was Daphne’s snappy purple dress that was the big draw for Fred. In the way of first crushes, Fred had eventually fallen out of favor. Not so the color purple…

Reaching over, she snapped on the bedside lamp. Diffuse yellow light spilled around her room, highlighting the piles of file folders stacked on her dresser, chair, and bench. Next to her, two laptops occupied the space usually reserved for a lover.

Such is my life, she thought fleetingly—maybe she needed to revisit the whole Fred thing. Pulling one of the machines onto her lap and flipping up the lid, she blew out a breath. “All right, I’m ready, sir. Where’s the breach coming from?”

“The Black Knights.”

For a moment, all she could do was blink in confusion.

Was she still asleep? Was this all a dream?

Before she had the chance to pinch herself, her supervisor barked, “Agent Duvall, did you copy that?”

“Yes, sir.” She shook her head and scrubbed a hand over her face. “I…I think I heard you say the breach was originating with the Black Knights.”

“Affirmative.”

Oh-kay. But… “So I don’t understand how that’s a breach then, sir. The Black Knights are—”

“Are you still friends with Dagan Zoelner?” The abruptness of the question, along with that name, his name, caused a hard lump to take shape at the back of her throat.

Dragging in a deep breath, the smell of Tide on her freshly laundered sheets grounded her enough to croak, “I wouldn’t say that, sir. No.”

She hadn’t heard from Dagan in almost two years. Not since the day he called her up, asking her for help, and she went and said something stupid like, what are you involved in this time? It was the this time—basically a blinking neon sign referring to that terrible tragedy in Afghanistan—that’d done it, that’d hammered in the last nail on the coffin of any affection they might have once felt for each other.

Or…more like it had hammered in the last nail on the coffin of any affection he might have once felt for her.

Truth was, she’d never stopped thinking about him. Never stopped worrying about him and wondering if he was happy with his new job at Black Knights Inc. Never stopped questioning how things might’ve been different if only—

“Doesn’t matter,” Morales said. “You were once friends, so that gives us just the in we need.”

“Sir?”

“I want you to call them up and ask them why they’re running a search on the phone records of Theodore Fairchild.”