Free Devils and Dust by J.D. Rhoades Page A

Miron, and what’s on that SIM card. Think about it.” He turned and walked back to the car.
    “I’ll tell her,” Frank called. “But these people you want to talk to…they do more than just move immigrants. You’ve made some very bad enemies.”
    Keller turned as he opened the car door. “Well,” he said, “it won’t be the first time.” He and Angela climbed in and drove off.

“W ELL,” A NGELA said, “that was…interesting.”
    “That’s one word for it,” Keller said. “You do have the card, right?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Okay. We get another phone that uses the same kind of card. See what we can pull off the contact list.”
    “You think that’ll give us anything?”
    Keller glanced in the rearview mirror to confirm they weren’t being followed. “Probably not.”
    “They’re most likely using burners,” Angela said, referring to the prepaid cell phones meant to be used a few times, then discarded so they couldn’t be traced.
    “Most likely,” Keller said.
    “Which is why you were provoking them. You want them to come after you.”
    Keller just nodded. “Yeah.”
    She shook her head. “You’re enjoying this.”
    They were entering a small town. “Yeah,” he said. “I am.” He took a right at the town’s lone stoplight. “You got a problem with that?”
    “Actually, no. You want to know why?”
    “Sure,” he said. “We’ve got a long drive ahead of us. We might as well make conversation.”
    She sighed, “Okay. I know I’ve been fretting over you like a mother hen. But I care about you, Jack. And I know how close to the edge you walk sometimes. It scares me.”
    Keller didn’t answer. He took another left, out of town, headed for the highway that would take them back to Angela’s home in Wilmington. The place where Keller had once lived. The place where he’d found a way out of the desert in his head, before he’d had to do things that sent him right back there.
    “It scares me sometimes, too,” he said quietly.
    She nodded. “But back there, at that fight…you had the chance to kill someone. I could see it. You had that tire iron raised, ready to smash that guy’s skull…and you didn’t do it.”
    He replayed the incident in his mind. Certainly there’d been a savage and primal part of him, in the back of his mind, screaming for him to bring the iron down, to feel the shiver run upon his arm and into that bloodthirsty place in his head, to hear the crunch of metal crushing flesh and bone. But he’d pulled back. “I didn’t need to,” he said.
    She smiled. “Exactly.” She leaned back in the seat and closed her eyes. “I’m going to take a nap. Wake me when you want to change drivers.”
    He drove on in silence, through small towns, then bigger ones, then back out into the country again before reaching the main east-west highway that led to the coast.
    He looked over at Angela. Time and care had etched a couple more lines on her face than he remembered, but there was still the same strength in her face that had brought him out of the numbness he’d been living in since the war, the same beauty that had made him think that living again might be something he’d be interested in doing. She’d given him a job chasing bail skips that gave him the jolt of adrenaline he needed to shock him awake again. That had taken him into even darker places, but he’d felt alive for the first time since that night in the Kuwaiti desert when a stray American missile had killed his entire squad, sparing him only by chance.
    He’d loved her then. She’d turned him down, still suffering the physical and emotional effects of her own near-death at the hands of her abusive husband who’d left her scarred and damaged, but not broken.
    Then had come Marie. He’d fallen in love with her, and that had helped him get past how he felt about Angela. But then, the things he’d done to protect her and her son had exposed his own dark side and the brutality and violence he was capable