Chapter Seven
The beat-up sedans were tinted and framed with extra bumpers to keep those inside the cars as safe as they could be while on the 1.1-mile track housed by the TEVOC training center. Jo’s excitement over the Tactical and Emergency Vehicle Operation Center driving course fueled the smile on her face as she sat in the passenger space of the car. Lenny buckled in as the driver, and she was supposed to keep him informed of what was happening around him when things got dicey.
And things were about to get dicey!
“Don’t kill me,” she told Lenny as she fastened her seat belt.
“Ha!”
The radio in the car paired them with an instructor, while the other cars on the track also housed students with a set instructor talking to them.
“Have you done this before?” she asked.
“Not here. Have you?”
“Academy. Pit maneuvers, high-speed basics. Nothing I’ve had to use that often.”
Lenny turned over the engine. “You’re in luck, I’ve had my share of chases and haven’t killed my partners yet.”
“Let’s keep it that way, Deputy.”
“Car five . . . are you ready?”
They were car five out of six on the track.
“Standing by,” Jo said into the radio.
“Okay, kids . . . ease onto the track and take the third position. Don’t let anyone pass you.”
Jo glanced at Lenny . . . “Something tells me there will be more than one person vying for third.”
Sure enough, car six was side by side within seconds of making the first turn. When the pace car sped up, so did everyone else.
Car six pulled back.
“Where’d he go?”
Jo swiveled around to notice the other cars on the track spread out. Car six sped up.
“Coming around your blind side.”
Lenny positioned the car to keep six behind him and not on the side.
They slowed on the turn, and six spent a few seconds in the dirt before moving behind them again.
“Looks like they’re positioning for a pit maneuver.” All the other cars had eased back, and the two in front kept the pace.
Sure enough, car six kissed the corner of a back bumper as Lenny sped up. They swiveled a few times, but Lenny managed to keep the car on the track.
“Car five . . . work your way into the lead.”
Jo kept her eyes darting from car to car. “Guess we passed.”
Lenny hit the gas and wove in and out until he set the pace.
Several laps later, four of the cars peeled away from the track, leaving them and car two.
They were instructed to hold their speed and stay alive. That was all the warning they received before out of the passenger window of car two, the long barrel of a paint gun slid toward them.
“Brake!” Jo yelled.
Lenny listened, and the red paint ball whizzed past the front of the car.
“There are civilians in the street, car five,” the instructor over the radio said.
“Pit him,” Jo suggested.
Lenny sped up, dodged another paint ball as he attempted to get into position.
Each time they came close, the armed car outmaneuvered them.
Paint balls started hitting the car.
Jo swiveled around. “Shit, another car behind us.”
“Well son of a—” Lenny hit the brakes and swung the car around, skidding tires as he went.
Jo held on to the door and the dash to keep from being flung around. By the time she knew what Lenny had done, he’d managed a 180-degree turn and positioned himself behind both cars.
“Well played car five . . . now what?” the instructor taunted.
Jo picked up the radio. “Is backup available?”
Jo glanced at Lenny. “Worth a try.”
Lenny swerved away from flying paint.
For a brief minute, Jo thought the third car pulling up behind them was backup.
That was until a splash of green paint hit the side of her window.
They managed another lap before they were forced off the road and ended up boxed in.
When the instructors called time, both Lenny and Jo sighed in relief.
Lenny lifted a fist in the air. “Nice dying with ya, Jo.”
She managed a fist bump before they stepped out of the car.
Jo wasn’t at all surprised to see that the shooter from the first car was a familiar face.
Gill walked up, set his paint gun on the front of their car. “Sheriff . . . Deputy . . . not bad.”
“Not all that good either, we’d be dead if this were real life,” Lenny conceded.
“We normally tap newbies out with two cars.”
Jo swatted Lenny upside his left arm. “Way to drive, Ohio.”
The course filled up with new drivers while Gill and another instructor went over the things they did right, the things they could improve. By the afternoon Jo was in the driver’s seat, a little better prepared for what to expect.
Only when it was her turn, only two cars were needed to stop her and put her in the kill zone.
While the frustration was there, so was the sheer adrenaline rush from the exercise.
The clocked rolled around to the end of their day. Jo stood beside Lenny, Bess, and a few of the other trainees before they changed out of the FBI standards and into their civilian clothes.
Out of the corner of her eye, Jo saw Shauna walking toward her.
“Hey, stranger,” Jo said. “I haven’t seen you all day.”
“I’ve been helping with hand-to-hand. How did it go out here?”
Jo leaned against a beat-up car, arms crossed over her chest. “Makes me wanna build a track like this close to home to practice.”
“That good, huh?”
“You’d have to come up with old cars,” Lenny said.
Jo thought of the many cars that broke down and had to be towed out of River Bend or risk cluttering up the back lots of forgotten farms. “Finding the cars won’t be hard . . . making sure they run would be the challenge.”
“Or we can meet here every other year or so.”
Jo liked Bess’s suggestion.
“I don’t think my department would go for that. Hard enough to get the okay to be here this time.” Sal dusted his hand on his pants. “Well, kids, I’ve had it.”
A chorus of see ya tomorrows went up as Sal made his way into the locker room.
“Wanna grab a bite to eat?” Shauna asked Jo. She looked to the others in the group. “There’s a local dive, great burgers, some decent beer on tap.”
Lenny’s eyes lit up. “You had me at burgers. Beer sealed the deal.”
A couple of others decided to join, while two peeled off to rest for the next day.
The way Jo saw it, she could rest when she flew back home.
Shauna drove Jo to what she labeled a dive.
Bar stools and oak filled an entire wall in what appeared to be a bar dating back over a hundred years. Two side walls were floor-to-ceiling brick, with the only windows framing the front of the building. Class in this place was defined by age. From the smells coming from the kitchen, the burgers would be memorable.
Like many bars, this one sported a couple of dartboards and a pool table that had a dozen or so players milling around it.
Lenny pushed through, did a quick head count. “I’ll get us a table for eight.”
“Make it nine,” Shauna said over the noise of the crowd.
Lenny scurried off in search of open space.
Wearing jeans and a slightly less revealing shirt than she had on when she’d met Gill in DC, Jo felt a little more at home. She left her hair loose, something she found herself doing less and less in River Bend. Only when she was with her friends did she try to relax. For some reason, her hair in a tie changed her attitude from play to business.
“Place is busy for a Tuesday night.” Jo studied the crowd.
“This place is always crazy.”
“Lots of military boys?”
“Yeah.” Shauna’s gaze swept down the torso of a man a good ten years younger than she was. “Fresh.”
Jo laughed. “You haven’t told me much about your divorce. How is it going?”
“Not fast enough.” She leaned in. “We can talk about that when we’re alone.”
Jo took the hint and dropped the subject.
Lenny waved them across the room and their group followed.
Music flowed from a stereo in the walls, but a small stage was available for live entertainment in the back of the room. The waitress took their drink order and left after dropping off menus.
“How often do you get out here, Agent Burton?” Lenny had a knack for keeping the conversation going and including everyone within earshot.
“I’m in DC a few times a year, try to get here at least once.”
“Don’t you have to retest annually?” the woman next to Lenny asked. Jo tried to place her name. Nina . . . or was it Mina? Jo had forgotten but knew she was from Kansas City. Why that fact stuck out, Jo couldn’t say.
“Quarterly quals are four times a year . . . fitness, annually. Clausen and I hold a firearms cert, so that’s something we need to prove every year.”
“Sounds like a lot of testing,” Bess added.
Jo leaned in. “Yeah, well . . . when you call in the Feds, it’s nice to know they aren’t sending some overweight, underskilled fat cat counting his time toward retirement.”
Shauna nodded. “What she said.”
“We have a few of them in my department.”
“There’s a few of those in every department,” Lenny said.
“I haven’t seen one overweight, underskilled anyone here,” Jo said.
“They are . . . they’re just hidden.”
“Who’s hidden?” Jo swiveled around to see Gill standing over her chair, asking. He’d changed into a T-shirt that stretched over his chest like a glove. It wasn’t all that different from the shirt he’d worn the night they’d met.
Jo’s mouth watered.
“Not you, that’s for sure,” Bess said from the other side of the table. She pulled out a chair to her right and patted it. “Saved you a seat, Agent.”
Gill glanced at Jo, smirked, and moved to the other side of the table.
Good, he wasn’t close enough to smell. And he was far enough away to look at without being obvious.
“I was explaining how often we have to prove ourselves to our boss.”
Gill shrugged like it wasn’t a big deal. It helped that he looked like he lived in the gym.
“Jo?” Lenny moved the conversation around the table. “How many deputies do you have working with you?”
“It’s a small town.” Here with so many law enforcement officers, surrounded by the FBI and marines on leave from the base, Jo couldn’t help but feel like a little fish in a great big pond.
“How small?” Bess asked.
“I have one full-time deputy, and two part-timers I pull in from Waterville that help with relief when my second or I are occupied.”
“So there are only two of you?” Mina/Nina asked.
“It’s a really small town,” Shauna explained.
“I’m not sure if that’s good or bad,” Lenny said.
“I’d go apeshit crazy.”
“Oh, I don’t know . . .” Gill said. “There’s been enough trouble in River Bend to keep you busy.”
Jo switched her gaze from Shauna to Gill. The two had obviously talked.
“Trouble in River Bend usually means trouble with people I know, which makes crime personal.”
Lenny tossed a hand in the air. “I’m out. I don’t want to be slapping cuffs on my friends.”
“Forget that, what about family?” Mina/Nina asked.
“Maybe your family,” Bess teased.
The discussion moved to dysfunctional brothers and deadbeat cousins. Jo was happy to switch the spotlight away from herself. Who knew policing such a small town held embarrassment? She hadn’t felt that coming. Since she had taken the position of sheriff, she’d worn her badge with pride and taken everything she did seriously.
Jo always considered herself a strong person, one that didn’t bend to peer pressure or cower in any way. Yet for the next hour, while their group enjoyed a couple of drinks and ate some of the best burgers she’d ever tasted, Jo said as little as she could to keep the conversation off her.
Gill watched her disconnect. Almost like a computer being powered off, the fire in Jo’s eyes twinkled down to a dim spark until she appeared to be nothing other than a shell. He waited until they’d gotten through their meal and she was ordering another drink before he engaged her.
“Hey, Jo.”
She met his eyes from across the table.
“Yeah?”
“You’re a competitive sport.” He nodded at the vacant dartboard on the other side of the room. “Wanna lay a bet on who can toss a better dart?”
Jo swiveled in her seat before narrowing her eyes. “What kind of bet?”
He liked her tiny smile. “Round of drinks, twenty bucks? Whatever you want.”
Shauna nudged Jo’s arm while keeping on with the conversation with Lenny.
“Round of drinks and twenty bucks.” She stood. “You’re on.”
“Give her your money now, Clausen. I saw her on the range,” Lenny said.
The chair scraped against the floor as he left the table and followed Jo to the dartboard. He couldn’t stop his eyes from lingering on her ass any more than he could stop breathing. It helped that he knew what it looked like without the tight jeans she now wore.
Jo Ward was many things, but a sluggish, small town cop working toward retirement, she was not.
She finished her drink and set it on the tabletop closest to where they were going to play.
“I’ll have a Stella,” she told him before moving to the board to retrieve the darts.
“Afraid you’ll lose and downgrading your drink now?” he taunted.
“Slowing down the liquor so I can beat you.” She nodded to the tiny cocktail waitress with blue hair as she walked by. “You order whatever you want. You’ll be buying.”
Some of her earlier spark came back.
“Two Stellas,” he told the girl.
She wrote it down and walked to another table.
Jo erased the scores from the previous players from the chalkboard before adding their names. Only instead of Jo and Gill, she wrote an A and an R.
He chuckled under his breath.
“Are we playing 501?” she asked.
“Sure.”
“Double score to win, or just get to zero?”
“Double score.”
There was a little swing in her hips as she walked back. “You’re entirely too confident,” he told her.
She gathered up one set of darts and pivoted toward the board. “You live in Eugene, right?”
“Yep.”
She didn’t look at him. “Big city.”
“It’s not New York.”
She poised a dart on the tips of her fingers and motioned toward the board a couple of times. “River Bend has one bar and zero nightlife outside of that bar.” She let the dart fly, hitting the twenty-five-point green bull’s-eye. When she turned back toward him, a satisfied grin lifted both sides of her cheeks.
Gill liked her like this, at ease and sassy.
The waitress dropped off their beers and Gill opened a tab.
He took one of his darts and moved close enough to Jo to breathe in her scent. “Where I live now holds little weight on my dart playing ability.”
“Oh?”
It was his turn to twist the dart in his fingers before pulling back and letting it fly. It slid right along hers, but directly in the center, where a proper dart needed to be this early in the game.
He reached around, made sure his arm met with her shoulder as he grabbed his beer. “I grew up outside of Spokane, where my dad still owns a small town bar. My mom helps out with the bookkeeping.”
Jo looked at the board and then him. “I’m guessing you helped your dad. Bouncer?”
Gill answered her with a nod and a grin as he sucked on his beer.
She reached for hers and smiled through her eyes as she drank.
With a sigh, she set the beer back down, reaching across him to do so, and filled her lungs with a fortifying breath. “And here I thought this was going to be easy.”
She did a little rolling of her head on her neck thing, along with the shaking of her right arm, before tossing her next dart. Instead of aiming for the center, where his dart might very well deflect hers, she set her dart in the triple score of the twenty-point zone.
“Oh, game on!”
Pride washed over her face when she turned around.
His hand stopped shy of slapping her butt when she reached for her beer a second time. He glanced over his shoulder at the party going on with their group. Yeah, ass slapping was going to have to wait for another time.
Less than ten minutes later, Jo was handing him twenty bucks and ordering another round. “I want another shot.”
He glanced at their drinks. “You’re not driving, are you?”
“I know about Uber,” she told him.
“Does River Bend have Uber?”
Her eyes were a little glossy, something he didn’t think happened all that often.
“River Bend has me.”
He erased their scores and started over.
“You taxi people around?”
“There have been a few times I’ve been called, mainly by Josie.”
He sat down, waited for their drinks before starting the next game.
“Who is Josie?”
“She owns R&B’s, the bar I told you about.”
“Josie calls the sheriff to drive drunks home?” Gill wasn’t sure his father had ever done that. Then again, the small town he grew up in had an actual police department with more than two men stationed there. And his father wasn’t the only one with a bar.
“Most of them can walk, but yeah . . . sometimes.”
“That’s a hell of a service you have there, Sheriff.”
“It’s a pain in the ass,” she admitted.
The waitress dropped off their round, slapped a bowl of nuts on the table. The increase of salt would increase the drinks. A trick Gill had learned from his father.
“Then why do you do it?” Gill asked her.
“It beats the heartache of having to haul them in for drunk driving, or worse. Besides, it isn’t like everyone calls. Policing the town where you grew up has its upside, and its downside. Downside is, those who know me, call.”
“And the upside?”
Jo blinked at him a few times, narrowed her eyes. “Free meals.”
Gill chuckled. He wasn’t about to tell her that once in a while his meals were comped, too. And most of the law enforcement in the room had plenty of free meals from local businesses without driving anyone’s intoxicated uncle home from a bar.
She stood, grabbed her darts, and nodded toward the board in question. Technically he should take the first turn for the next game, but he agreed, and Jo turned toward the board as she spoke. “The worst part isn’t driving drunks.”
“Oh?”
The dart flew, not that he didn’t bother looking where it landed.
“The hardest part about policing River Bend is trying to erase my youthful transgressions.” She sat back down and twisted her beer in her hand.
“You were a wild child?” he asked.
“Quintessential cop’s daughter. Defiant, skipped school, got caught drinking early on.”
The way she looked beyond him said she was remembering one of those teenage days. “Sounds like a lot of people I knew growing up.”
She sipped her beer, pointed at him when she was finished. “But your dad ran a bar. My dad ran a town.”
“I guess it was expected that I drank, and mandated that you stay sober.”
“I hated it.” The words sounded like a confession.
He leaned forward on his elbows, the dart game forgotten. “Then how did you end up taking over your father’s world?”
If Gill wasn’t watching her so closely, he would have missed the wave of brief pain that washed over her. “He died before I could redeem myself. Before I grew up enough to know I’d acted like an idiot. Going to the academy, talking the right people into putting me on the ballot to become sheriff even though I was too young and too green . . . it’s what my dad would have wanted me to do.”
Probably. But was it what she wanted to do?
He was about to ask when someone tapped his shoulder.
He twisted to see Shauna smiling. “You kids having fun?”
“Relieving Jo’s wallet of her spending money,” he said.
“I’m going to take a few of these monkeys back to their hotel.”
Gill saw Jo glance at her watch, start to stand. “I should probably get going, too.”
He tried to think of an excuse for her to stay. “You wouldn’t earn your money back anyway.”
She sat back down and Gill grinned.
He found himself doing that a lot around this woman.
“I don’t have room in my car anyway,” Shauna informed them. “You can give Jo a ride, right, Clausen?”
The memory of her straddling the back of the bike, the heat of her pressed against his back, moved all the blood in his head south. “Yeah, I have it covered.”
“Good, I’ll see you both tomorrow.”
Gill noticed the women exchange glances. Jo’s held wonder, while Shauna’s was filled with mischief.