Agent Hockings, it’s just me here. Last week, I was an officer, and now this.” He motioned to his chief’s badge. “Besides, I’m tempted to help them.”
Hockings looked from Vasta to Trace and then back to Vasta.
“Are you pressing charges against Hockings?” Axel asked Vasta.
“Are you serious?” she asked the sheriff.
He gave her a look he hoped said that he was very serious. “They have tribal courts and you do not want to go there.”
“They can’t prosecute a federal agent.”
“But can hold you until your people find out.”
Her fingers went straight, flexing and then lacing together to create a weapon that he believed she was wise enough not to use.
“Fine. So contrite. That will get us out of here?”
The acting chief of police nodded.
“What about my vehicle?”
“I’ll drive it to the border and leave it for you.”
“The border?” To Rylee, the border was Canada. Vasta enlightened her.
“The border of our reservation.”
Her gaze flicked between them and her full mouth went thin and miserly. But she thought about it. Axel just loved the way the tips of her nose and ears went pink as a rabbit’s in her silent fury.
“Fine. Let’s get going, if you have your keys,” she said, pushing past him.
The acting chief of police was faster, beating them to the door to the main squad room. There, two officers sat on a desk and table respectively, both kicking their legs from their perches where they had been watching the drama playing out through the glass door of the chief’s office.
“Josh and Noah, you two have point,” said Vasta, instructing the men to lead the escort.
Both men rose, grinning. Each wore tight-fitting uniforms. Josh’s hair was black and bristly short. Noah wore his brown hair in a knot at his neck.
They headed out behind the officers, with Axel holding Hockings’s taut arm as if she were his prisoner. Behind them came the acting chief of police. Trace tried and failed not to notice that he could nearly encircle Rylee’s bicep with his thumb and index finger and that included her wool coat. She glared up at him and her muscle bunched beneath his grip. Hockings clearly did not like role-play.
The crowd that Hockings had insisted Vasta question were now calling rude suggestions and booing. Vasta waved and spoke to them in Kowa, a form of the Iroquoian language. The officers before them peeled away, giving Axel a view of his cruiser and the rear door. For reasons he did not completely understand, his squad car was untouched. Axel hit the fob, unlocking his unit. Noah swept the rear door open.
Axel made a show of putting his hand on Hockings’s head to see that she was safely ensconced in the rear of his unit. The effect brought a cheer from the peanut gallery and allowed him to get the answer to one of his many questions about Hockings.
Her hair was soft as the ear of an Irish setter and blond right to the roots. Hockings fell to her side across the rear seat and remained on her side. Wise beyond her years, he thought.
The booing resumed as he climbed behind the wheel. It pleased him that Josh and Noah now stood between his unit and the gathering of pissed-off Mohawks.
And off they went. They were outside of Salmon River, the tribe’s main settlement, but still on rez land before Rylee sat up and laced her fingers through the mesh guard that separated his front from the back seat. Her fingernails were shiny with clearish pink polish and neatly filed into appealing ovals. Her wrists were no longer secured.
“How did you get out of that?” he asked.
“My father says you can measure a person’s IQ by whether or not they carry a pocketknife.”
“With the exception being at airports?” he asked.
“You going to keep me back here the entire way?”
“Not if you want to sit beside me.”
She didn’t answer that, just threw herself back into the upholstery and growled. Then she looked out the side window.
“They better not damage my car,” she muttered.
“More,” he said.
“What?”
She wasn’t looking at him. He knew because he was staring at her in the rearview until the grooves in the shoulder’s pavement vibrated his attention back to the road.
“Damage your car more,” he clarified. “They already shot at it. So, you find who you were looking for?”
She folded her arms over her chest. Just below her lovely small breasts, angry fists balled. She was throwing so much shade the cab went dark.
“How do you know I was looking for someone?”
“What Home Security does, isn’t it, here on the border?”
“In this case, yes. We have an illegal crossing and the suspect fled onto Kowa lands.”
“They have your suspect?”
“Denied any knowledge.”
Homeland Security Agent Rylee Hockings was about as welcome in Salmon River as a spring snowstorm.
“Maybe Border Patrol has your guy.”
“No. They lost ’em. That’s why they called me. They abandoned pursuit when our suspect crossed onto Mohawk land. Both the suspect and the cargo have vanished.” She glanced back the way they had come. “I need my car.”
What she needed were social skills. She didn’t want his help, but she might need it. And he needed to get her out of his county before she got into something way more dangerous than ruffled Mohawk regalia. Up here on the border, waving a badge at the wrong people could get you killed.
The woman might have federal authority and a mission, but she didn’t know his county or the people here. Folks who lived on the border did it for one of three reasons. Either it was as far away from whatever trouble they had left as they could get, or they had business on the other side. He’d survived up here by knowing the difference, doing his job and not poking his nose into the issues that were not under his purview.
There was one other reason to be up here. If you had no other choice. Rylee had a choice. So she needed to go. Sooner was better.
He considered himself to be both brave and smart, but that would be little to no protection from Rylee’s alluring brown eyes and watermelon-pink mouth. Best way he knew to keep clear of her was to get her south as soon as possible.
“The Mohawk are required to report illegal entry onto US soil,” she said. “And detain if possible. They did neither.”
“Maybe
