Black Rock Guardian. Jenna Kernan

need to run?

      Ty carried both duffels to the GTO. Then he fed Hemi. After they’d both eaten, he took his dog to his mother’s place. His mother, May, lived on the high ground outside Piňon Forks. Redhorse was busy getting his sister, Abbie, and the foster girls ready for church. She tried to feed him, of course, and accepted a kiss on the cheek. He asked Burt Rope, her new husband, to look after Hemi.

      Burt knew exactly what that meant. “You in trouble, son?”

      “Maybe. Tribal police want to talk to me again.”

      “Three times, isn’t it?”

      “Four.” Four times and each time they had more pieces of the puzzle. Maybe they’d just take a blood sample today and let him go.

      “We’ll look after your dog, Ty.” Burt laid a hand on Ty’s shoulder and gave him a little pat.

      Burt was a good man. Not like his rotten of a father. He felt relieved that his mother had found a man who, though not very industrious, was as reliable and kind as any he’d ever met.

      Ty drove to tribal headquarters in his ’67 Pontiac GTO because he didn’t want to leave his bike outside the station. Burt could pick up his car. But no one drove his Harley but him.

      Way he figured, tribal was done asking for his help. So they would either charge him or turn him over to the Feds. The only good thing about the attention of the police was it had kept Faras Pike from pulling him all the way back into the Wolf Posse.

      Ty rolled his shoulder, wondering if Kee would be willing to take the stitches out a few days early. If the Feds took his clothing and saw him without his shirt, they might just wonder how he sliced his shoulder open and then remember the blood they’d found on the shattered picture window at the house on Antelope Lake where two women had been held.

      Neither Kee nor his girlfriend, the tribe’s new dispatcher, had mentioned that Ty had been there. Kee thought Ty should get some credit for helping them get away from the Russian mobsters. Ty knew that the questions as to how he knew where to find them would make him vastly less heroic and possibly culpable for some serious jail time.

      Ty knew about the capture because Faras told him that Ty was on call as a driver. That meant that the Russians had sent someone after Kee’s girl and he was the backup if there was trouble. Ty had been on hand when the Russian, Yury Churkin, captured Ava Hood. The rest of the job was just shadowing them to the location where the women were being held. Faras’s order to Ty to drive the Russian to safety if he ran into trouble would be enough to connect Ty to the criminal organization, and down the toilet he would go with the rest of them.

      He drove to the station in Piňon Forks, which had been relocated now that the dam had been reinforced by the US Army Corps of Engineers. The state of Arizona had already begun repairs to the compromised Skeleton Cliff dam above their rez.

      Ty parked at the health clinic, right next door to tribal headquarters, where the police station was housed. Kee was likely up to his eyeballs in patients, since he was now the only physician on the rez. The other, Hector Hauser, was dead and Ty could not muster a drop of regret over that. Ty wondered if they’d lock him up today or just tell him not to flee. Where would he go?

      Alaska, he thought. He could follow his youngest brother, Colt, up there to a wide-open state where his reputation would not dog him. More likely he’d be relocating to a cell next to his father in the federal prison down in Phoenix.

      Ty made the long walk across the formal courtyard between the buildings into tribal headquarters. Once inside, he turned toward the police station. Jake greeted him in the squad room.

      “I need a lawyer?” Ty asked his little brother.

      Jake did not smile or make a joke. The look he cast back was deadly serious. “Don’t think that will do it.”

      “Am I getting arrested?” he asked, glancing toward the chief’s office and making eye contact with Wallace Tinnin, who rose from behind his old battered desk and collected his aluminum crutches.

      “It’s one of the possibilities. Ty, I think you should cooperate.”

      Jake didn’t understand. How could he? Jake had never been on the wrong side of anything. Yet Ty’s younger brother had understood how things worked well enough to ask Ty to get Faras to report to his associates that the baby Jake wanted to adopt had died. Ty had done it and hoped Jake never learned what the favor had cost him. How would his brother feel if he knew that Ty had been pulled into service driving the Russians off the rez because of that little favor?

      Tinnin clicked his way to them on his crutches. The foot, broken in the blast after the dam collapse, was in a black plastic boot.

      “Thanks for coming in, Ty,” said the chief. “If you’ll follow me, please.”

      Damn, they were taking him to the interrogation room. He wondered if he still had the card with his attorney’s phone number in his wallet.

      They locked Ty in the room for twenty minutes. Enough time for him to consider exactly what evidence they had turned up. He’d heard that the tribe had voted to turn Kacey Doka’s mother over to the Feds after she was connected to the surrogate ring. And they voted to turn over the former tribal health clinic’s administrator, Betty Mills, after she broke the conditions of her agreement for cooperation by failing to tell them that Ava Hood’s cover had been blown. That nearly got Ava killed, which was no skin off his nose except that Kee was in love with her. So he’d followed Churkin and waited for Kee and Hauser. Then when the shooting started he’d busted through that plate glass window and bled all over the place.

      They were probably looking at him through the one-way mirror right now. He forced his bouncing knee to stillness.

      The door latch turned and in stepped Detective Jack Bear Den, one of Ty’s least favorite people. Bear Den held the door for Tinnin, who thumped in on his crutches, and behind him came...

      Ty sat back in his chair. He did not keep his jaw from dropping as his mouth opened like a trapdoor as she strode in—Beth. There she was, the woman on the BMW sled whose kisses rocked his world. But today her eyelids did not shimmer and the liner around her eyes was not black, but was an earth tone. She was more beautiful today, with a burgundy-colored lipstick that added to her aura of authority. She wore blue slacks, practical shoes, a blazer and a white cotton blouse. The outfit made it easy for him to see her pistol, holstered at her hip, and the FBI shield and plastic ID on a lanyard about her neck. Today she radiated a different kind of power, the kind that came with the full weight of the system. Ty had run against that system often enough to know that it didn’t work. At least not for him.

       FB freakin’ I.

      Ty closed his mouth and narrowed his eyes on her.

      Beth’s crazy, curly beautiful wild hair was tugged back in a scalp-hugging bun and gleamed with some kind of hair product. She stood there with a triumphant glint in her lovely pale green eyes and the hint of a wicked smile curling her wide lips. The woman had counted coup on him, defeating him with a touch of the metaphorical crooked coup stick, like the plains Apache of old. And she knew it.

      Ty pressed a hand to his forehead as it sank in. Faras had seen him kissing Beth. So had Chino and Quinton and at least four other members of the Wolf Posse. Everyone in the roadhouse saw him leave with her, this two-faced woman who was on the opposite side of the law. His problems just got bigger than Antelope Lake. If the posse knew who and what she was, he was a dead man.

      “Good morning, Ty,” she said, taking a seat across from him and laying a file folder on the table between them. “How was your weekend?”