frowned. “Why not?”
“Seeing your teammates lying dead on the ground isn’t answer enough?”
He barely refrained from rolling his eyes. “You obviously staged that for effect.”
“You’re right. We did catch the third suspect. But it was a close thing. None of us knew there was a third one out here. The chief surprised us with that element, which just proves how important it is to always be alert and operate as a team, watching each other’s backs.” He poked Blake in the chest as if for emphasis. “You were supposed to watch your partner’s back. But Donna said you took off without her halfway through the scenario. What was that about?”
Blake felt his face flush with heat. He glanced toward the trucks. Donna had already changed into fresh camo and was retying her blond hair into a ponytail. She was also the only member of the team not paying attention to him and Dillon. Had he upset her? Did she feel that he’d let her down?
She’d been training him for several months, teaching him the Destiny Police Department’s way of doing things, which wasn’t the way he’d been trained in Knoxville. He was supposed to stick with her today. But when he’d seen the suspect racing through the woods, he’d taken off in pursuit, without waiting for his partner.
“I screwed up,” he admitted. “I didn’t want the suspect to get away, so I chased him to the barn. I assumed Donna would follow. But I lost her.”
“No kidding. She was scanning the woods, searching for the suspects, and when she turned around, you were gone. Not exactly a team move.”
Blake clenched his hands into fists at his sides. Not that he’d use them. He and Dillon were both a couple of inches over six feet and equally brawny. No doubt a fight between them would be long, bloody and painful. But that wasn’t why Blake wouldn’t hit him. Blake respected Dillon, even if the sentiment wasn’t returned. He’d never raise his fists against him.
Too bad Dillon didn’t share the same compulsion.
Blake waggled his jaw to ease the ache. “I had no reason to believe that Donna was in jeopardy. I would have come back to look for her, but the suspect holed up in the barn, giving me the perfect opportunity to pursue him. Once I took him out, the other suspect appeared. What was I supposed to do? Ignore him? Let him go?”
“What you’re supposed to do, always, is follow orders. Your primary objective today was to stick with your partner. I made that crystal clear this morning. Failing that, when I signaled for you to report to me, you ignored my signal.”
“I couldn’t turn around. I would have missed my shot.”
“You could have responded to me over the radio if you were worried about losing your sight line of the suspect. But you didn’t.”
“Not at first, no. I couldn’t risk the noise alerting him. I did call later, after—”
“After the rest of the team was ambushed? And killed?”
Blake clamped his jaw shut. Why was he even trying to explain? As usual, Dillon refused to listen. He was a great leader and friend—to the rest of the team. But he’d disliked Blake from day one and made no secret about it. The only thing Blake could figure was that Dillon resented him because the chief had hired him without asking for his input.
If Chief Thornton hadn’t offered him a job when he’d run into Blake at the Knoxville Police Station and gotten a taste of the drama going on there, Blake would be unemployed by now, with no prospects for another law-enforcement job. He owed a lot to the chief, including his silence about Blake’s past. Blake hadn’t wanted to share the details of what had happened, because he didn’t want to prejudice his new team against him in case they didn’t agree with his side of the story. But on days like today, he wondered if they’d both made a mistake. Their pact of silence meant that both of them had to lie to the team in answer to their questions about Blake’s past. And lies were the worst sort of foundation on which to build trust. Which was why he always felt as though he were running in quicksand around here, never gaining traction no matter how hard he tried to fit in.
Except with Donna.
Beautiful and smart, she was the one bright spot in his life in Destiny, the one person who treated him as if he mattered. And he’d gone and screwed up with her, too. He’d run off after a suspect when he should have stuck by her side, training exercise or not. She probably despised him just as much as Dillon now.
He raised his hands in surrender, trying to defuse the situation. “Look, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have gone after the suspect on my own. I see that now.”
“Gone off on your own? It’s not that simple. You risked your partner’s life. And don’t you dare tell me it was just a paint-ball fight. This weekend’s exercises are designed to test our instincts and improve our reactions, just as if this was the real thing. If this was the real thing, you just proved you can’t be trusted to watch over your partner or follow instructions.”
“You’re overreacting. If this had been a true SWAT situation, I would have stayed with Donna.”
Dillon shook his head. “You still don’t get it. You can’t act one way in training and plan on acting another way on an actual call. Training is supposed to make things second nature, so you’ll react on muscle memory, without having to think about it. You have to treat every exercise like the real thing. Didn’t they teach you that in the military?”
Blake stiffened and glanced at Thornton. But there was no help from that quarter. Thornton wouldn’t even look him in the eye.
“Are we done here?” Blake demanded, his patience gone. There was only so much lecturing a grown man could take with his entire team a stone’s throw away, witnessing his humiliation.
“Yeah. We’re definitely done. Because you’re toxic—always have been. You’re a lone wolf, a rogue who has to do things his own way. People like you get people like me killed. The chief saw something in you when he hired you. I’ll admit that I never did. But I worked with you, gave you every opportunity to prove my doubts wrong, to figure out how to be a member of this team. But all you’ve managed to do is prove me right. And I’m not willing to risk the lives of everyone here for your ego.” He motioned toward Chief Thornton. “And neither is he. We both agree on this. It’s over. Go home, Blake. You can turn in your equipment Monday morning. You won’t need it anymore. You’re fired.”
Donna entered the sleazy establishment that passed as a bar in this corner of Sevier County. Back in Destiny, this place would have been condemned and torn down, deemed unfit for even pigs to slop around in.
There was a plus side, though. It was quiet, too early in the evening to have more than a handful of patrons. And none of them had felt inclined to feed any money into the old-fashioned jukebox in the corner of the room.
Wrinkling her nose at the smell of urine and stale beer, she forced herself to step all the way inside, even though she was tempted to make an emergency run for a can of Lysol first.
A familiar figure sat on a bar stool at the far end, accepting what she hoped was his first drink of the night from the bartender. If Blake Sullivan was plastered, that was going to make
