Page 7 of Direct Action

I made a mental note to ask Poppy if the servers’ cars were valeted or if there was an employee parking lot. The outside wasn’t pitch black around the outside of the club, but the lighting was soft, offering an intimate feel. The parking lot was the same.

I had the tip ready by the time my Mustang was delivered. A pre-health-crisis purchase that I was equal parts grateful and guilty I’d dropped a wad of cash on. It was flashy, loud, and unnecessary. It was also the culmination of hard work and saving. The day I bought my baby, I’d been damn proud to write the check. It was my one and only big-ticket purchase, one that had made me feel like I was an actual adult. It wasn’t lost on me I’d been thirty, and now five years later I no longer felt like an adult—more like a beaten-down woman careening toward middle age with nothing to show for it.

No house.

No husband.

No kids.

And an apartment I could barely afford and a father who I loved more than life but who only recognized me one out of every ten visits, if I was lucky, and a mother who was heartsore and working herself to the bone to take care of the man she loved.

This adulting shit sucked.

I wanted to rewind time back to when I was six and my dad had me out on my first surfboard. I wanted to go back to the quiet times sitting in the ocean with my dad in the early-morning hours, waiting for the waves to wake up. Before I was a teenager and got wrapped up with friends and boys and choosing to hang out with them instead of my dad.

More than anything, I wanted that time back. No, that wasn’t right. More than anything I wanted him well. I wanted to see the spark of happiness in his eyes when I came into the room. I wanted to hear him pepper me with questions about my life. I wanted to hear him tell my mom she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever laid eyes on.

“Sweet ride,” the valet said, pulling me from my depressing thoughts.

I handed him the folded bills and muttered my thanks.

It wasn’t until I was waiting for traffic to clear to make my right onto Wildcat Canyon that I scrolled through my playlists, found my favorite country tracks, and queued them up.

Dasha’s pop-country woman-scorned anthem started. I turned it up, until the bass was punching through my speakers and I could lose myself in a really great song and the throaty growl of four hundred and eighty horses under my baby’s hood.

Fifteen minutes later, with Carly Pearce crooning about a red can and gasoline, I merged onto the 67. By the time Carly was giving her last warning to her cheating ex, I shifted into sixth, completely ignoring the speed limit, making an otherwise forty-five-minute drive home into thirty.

Though, in hindsight, I should’ve driven slower.

After all, there was nothing waiting for me in my apartment but loneliness and a boatload of stress.

Chapter Four

Pete drove past the exclusive Bowen Golf and Country Club to where the Vault was situated, a mile behind and to the west of the fairway.

“I have to say, this Shep guy is impressive,” Calista said from behind me. “A penthouse in Dubai and the use of a luxury SUV. Rescue missions. Helicopters on standby. A Grand Wagoneer delivered this afternoon. Is there anything he can’t pull off?”

In the years we’d worked with Shepherd Drexel, I’d yet to find something he couldn’t get or find. And I didn’t know for certain, but I was confident he did and found and delivered everything from behind a keyboard.

I’d never met the man in person. Neither had any of my teammates, and we’d worked with him for years. Hell, I didn’t even know where he lived or if he was in the US. For all I knew, he had a fortified lair deep in some jungle. Further, I knew all his save-the-world missions were funded by money collected from accounts Shep had seized. Yes, Downrange missions were paid for with stolen money. I gave zero fucks we saved victims of sex trafficking, domestic violence, femicide, and a multitude of other atrocities with the money Shep stole from assholes who made their fortunes from trafficking and other felonious activities. It came to us dirty and we cleaned it—literally—by rescuing women, men, and children. Setting up safe houses, and donating large sums to victim-assistance organizations.

“I asked him to send me Hershey bars while we were on an extended-stay mission in Peru. He failed,” Mason pointed out.

“It was February in Peru,” Pete reminded him. “It was over a hundred degrees and humid as fuck. What did you expect?”

“Ice packs,” Mase returned dryly.

I thought back to the box of melted chocolate and my teammate’s absurd love affair with chocolate. “Dude, you still ate the mushy chocolate with a plastic spork.”

“And?”

“You’re ridiculous.” I chuckled, taking in my surroundings.

The full moon cast just enough light to make out the golf course to my right and the untouched, unmanicured natural shrubbery of the woodland to my left. No streetlights to guide the way. An ornamental sign back at the entrance declaring this a private road. You had to know the Vault was tucked back behind the country club, making it feel more exclusive. The nonmember nights were by invitation of a member or management. An invite Shep had managed to secure through an active member who had concerns.

Last week’s briefing had been, well . . . brief. Shep’s file didn’t offer much, just a friend of a friend of Shep’s expressing concern about something he’d overheard, which prompted this member, Dorian Whitmore, to reach out to his buddy who was in law enforcement. Unfortunately, the Bureau couldn’t open an investigation with nothing to go on but a conversation. The FBI agent reached out to Shep, asking him to look into it. How Shep knew this field agent, he didn’t say. But Shep followed up, didn’t like the players involved, the money, the opportunity, and the reach, and decided to send us in.

To the average person, the conversation was benign. To someone who did the kind of work we did, it absolutely was not. And to a man whose friend worked in the FBI and had heard enough stories to know words like product, secured, buyer, and ready to move were at best case about drugs. Worst case, the product in question was women. And with Sterling Blackwell’s fleet of jets, moving product—be it women or drugs—would be easy.