His dark blue polo shirt had a smear of something brown on the shoulder, his pressed jeans had a few more brown stains, and his boots were caked around the edges with what smelled like cow shit.
The only clean and shiny thing he had on was the dinner plate sized belt-buckle, proclaiming him the calf roping champion of 2016.
Elka lay calmly on the tailgate of Dr. Bly's truck, watching him with a bored expression on her face.
She even huffed in annoyance, like this whole thing was beneath her somehow.
“Vitals all good, mucus membranes nice and pink. I’m confident she'll be alright, but since you don't know what drug she was given, I'd keep an eye on her just the same. Any signs of vomiting or lethargy, get her back in to see a vet immediately.”
The nervous tension twisting Dillon's guts into knots finally eased with a heavy sigh of relief.
“Absolutely. Thank you. Elka, here.”
Elka hopped off tailgate at Dillon's murmured command, plonking her huge butt on Dillon's sneakers while Dr. Bly packed up his stuff,
With a tip of his cowboy hat to Top, Dr. Bly hopped in his truck and took off without asking for any kind of payment.
Confused, Dillon looked to Top with a frown.
“I have cash in my truck to cover whatever this special visit cost.”
Top snorted and brushed her offer aside with a wave of his hand. “We're square, girly. Doc owed me a favor. You ready to come back inside? It's hot as balls out here.”
It was hot as balls, the air thick enough to swim through, but Dillon was most definitely not ready to go back inside.
“No. I want to go home.”
“You in that much of a hurry to die?” Top asked bluntly.
The idea of returning to her house was, in fact, repugnant. She believed Ghost when he told her there was nowhere to hide.
She believed there was no defense system he couldn't penetrate, no security he couldn't bypass.
The emotionless sound of his voice telling her all the ways he could brutally murder her would haunt her for months. Maybe even years.
It made no sense at all that Ghost would go to so much trouble to get to her, to send her down here with the dire message for Nasa, ensuring she was safe from the Leviathans.
Was there truly some kind of bounty on her head?
Or was it just a lie to get her out of Dallas?
If it was true, what had she done to earn it? Try as she might, she couldn't come up with any answer as to how she could have pissed them off.
“I'll take my chances,” Dillon answered as firmly as she could manage. “I told you everything about Ghost that I could, every detail of what he said to me, what he did. I don't have anything else for you, and I want to leave.”
The salt and pepper jut of Top's beard stood out from his jaw at an angle, his eyes narrowed to slits.
“Most people would choose the devil they know.”
“I met you two hours ago,” Dillon pointed out. “You're still a devil I don't know.”
CHAPTER FOUR
For the fiftieth time in the last hour, Nasa found himself glaring at the man he respected most in the entire world.
“I can't believe you just let her go!”
Top shot him a less than enthused look over the top of his cheaters and put down the file he'd been staring at.
“I'm not in the habit of taking innocent women hostage, Nasa. We told her the risks, offered her sanctuary, and she refused.
"Considering you still aren't convinced she ain't workin' for Ghost, I thought you'd be thrilled to see the back of her.”
“I am thrilled!” Nasa bellowed belligerently, and instead of chewing his ass out for being a prick, Top laced his fingers together over his belly and leaned back to watch Nasa pace holes in the floor of his office.
"I don't want one of Ghost's operatives in our house, but even if she is, I don't want her dead or sold down some trafficking pipeline if the Leviathans get hold of her for whatever the fuck it is she did to piss them off.”
“If that girl is one of Ghost's operatives, I will eat an entire block of kale flavored tofu,” Top replied just as harshly, his beard jutting out at a near ninety-degree angle as he pursed his lips and clenched his jaw.
“Ghost always talks in riddles. 'Straying into their territory' might be a literal misstep across Leviathan turf. Or she could have interrupted a sale, a delivery, who the fuck knows?
"We'll get to the bottom of it. Until we do, Veracruz and the commandos are keeping an eye on her. They'll keep us apprised. You get anything off her background check?”
Nasa raked his hands through his hair in frustration, taking a violent swing at the air as he made another circuit around the office.
Veracruz and his guys were good, real good, but Nasa didn't like not having eyes on their little messenger.
She'd dumped her fucking cell phone—which was a burner anyway—so the only GPS he had to rely on came from the tracker he'd put on her car.
It could fall off. Dillon could find it and toss it, and then he wouldn't have anything to keep tabs on her whereabouts.
If he'd thought the monstrous bitch wouldn't rip his throat out, he'd have tried to put a tracker on the dog's collar.
“Not a damn thing. She's clean, and I mean ‘clean’ in the way someone with a government issue backstory is clean. She's a spy.”
“I swear, you're getting even more paranoid as you get older.” Top grunted, waving his hand dismissively when Nasa whirled on him with a scowl. “I ain't callin' you a liar or doubting your skills, boy. I'm sayin' something stinks about this whole damn situation.
“Spies who get caught get burned. They're
