My Spy: Last Spy Standing Read Online Free Page B

way to the door. “Looks like you won’t get to keep me. Life is full of disappointments, Deputy Sheriff.”
    * * *
    H E ALMOST DIDN ’ T even mind having to see her again, Jamie thought as he ran a quick background search on her once he was back at his office that night, after having caught a brief nap at his apartment.
    She hadn’t returned his weapons, probably just to spite him. The orders on the phone had been only about releasing him, she’d said. He could claim his property after a twenty-four-hour waiting period, some rule she’d made up on the fly, he was sure.
    “So she hauled you in?” Shep, one of his teammates, was asking with a little too much glee.
    They worked out of a bulletproof office trailer in the middle of nowhere, close enough to the border to be able to reach it within minutes, far enough from prying eyes in town.
    They had a pretty simple setup: one office for Ryder McKay, the team leader, an interrogation room, a bathroom and a small break room in the back, the rest of the space taken up by desks for the six-man team.
    Ryder was locked up in his office, on the phone. The rest of the team was out.
    Jamie shrugged as he scrolled down the screen.
    “She questioned you?”
    “Interrogation room.” He spit out the two words as if they were broken glass in his mouth. He read the search results on his screen, scanning the scores of photos of her. Miss Brianna Tridle accepts her crown. She’d been Miss Texas. No joke.
    She’d been younger—different hair, more makeup, but the smile was the same. He felt a tug in places that hadn’t tugged in a long time, just looking at her on the screen.
    “Handcuffs?” Shep asked.
    He refused to answer, opening the next document that detailed everything from her family circumstances to her education. She was single, the sole guardian of one Katie Tridle, twenty-three years old.
    Sister?
    There was something there, he thought. Normally a person didn’t need a guardian at twenty-three.
    “Seriously, she had you in handcuffs?” Shep gave a belly laugh. “Oh, man, I would have given money to see that. Why didn’t you just call in?”
    Because she wouldn’t let me, was the answer, words he wasn’t about to say. He shut down his computer instead and pushed to his feet. “Patrol time, funny boy. Move it.”
    Shep picked up his handgun and shoved it into his holster, grinning all the way. It burned Jamie’s temper that he had to get his backup weapon out of his drawer because most of his stuff was in the deputy sheriff’s custody.
    “Good thing she ran your prints and the flags went off in the system.” Shep was having way too much fun with the incident to let it go, giving another gloating smirk as he got into his own SUV while Jamie hopped into his.
    Yeah, flags had gone off. Homeland Security had called. They’d called both Brianna Tridle and Ryder at the office, unfortunately.
    Jamie turned on radio contact as they pulled out of the parking lot. “How are you doing following up on the Kenny Davis angle?” he asked, ready to change the topic of conversation.
    “Running into a lot of dead ends.”
    The Pebble Creek sheriff had been killed in a confrontation with Mo, another teammate, when the sheriff had gotten involved in the smuggling and kidnapped a little boy to use as leverage to regain a drug shipment he’d lost.
    Mo did gain some clues out of his investigation: a code name, Coyote, the head of the smuggling operations on the other side of the border, and a date, October 13.
    Something, but not enough. They needed to unravel the Coyote’s identity and take him into custody, and they needed to figure out what the date meant.
    “You think October 13 is the transfer?” He asked the same question they’d asked each other a dozen times since Mo had come up with the date.
    “What else?”
    “Why would the sheriff reveal it?”
    “A sudden pang of patriotism? He knew at the end that he was dying. Money had been his main motivator for going