Page 4 of Never Stay Gone
First, he wasn’t a cowboy. In fact, he’d never worked a day on a ranch as a grown man. Instead of bunkhouses and saddles, he’d lived in barracks with M16s. Instead of Big Bend’s dust coating his face, the grit of a dozen foreign countries clung to him, collected under his nails and in his hair and between his teeth. And after six years in the army, he’d joined the Texas Rangers, working his way up from a field ranger in Company A investigating cold case murders in and around Houston to become a sergeant in charge of the homicide squad.
Maybe most surprising to him, he wasgoodat it. He was damn good at putting together clues, sometimes drawing from disparate pieces of evidence to create a three-dimensional picture of the crime.
That skill got him noticed by the Rangers’ intelligence squad, and he was tapped to join the Ranger recon team. The recon team was the special forces of the Texas Rangers, complete with a black budget and accountable only to Governor Riggs herself. Within six months he was a full-fledged alpha team member, one of the handful of handpicked high-speed Recon Rangers directed to contain the cartel wars across the border in Mexico and keep the violence, bloodshed, and drug trafficking out of the United States. Or at least out of Texas.
The night he was shot, he and his team had tracked a drug plane coming across the border outside of Langtry, too low for radar to pick up. It was one of those tiny little pack-of-bubble-gum planes, a one-and-a-half-seater. Room for a pilot and a load of drugs, and a few skinny kids lying on top of the haul.
Way out in the desert, they’d found the pie plates filled with cheap palm oil and watched as a six-year-old girl ran from one to the next as the sun set, lighting them. It was like fallen stars were writhing in the sand, like genies were rising from the desert. It had been beautiful.
What wasn’t beautiful were the weapons the pilot and the two skinny teenagers were carrying when they landed. The kids were maybe sixteen, one hundred pounds soaking wet, so thin they’d disappear behind an ocotillo’s slender spines. Dirty white T-shirts, jeans that were barely hanging on around slender waists. And AK-47s slung across their chests.
Dakota didn’t remember the whole shootout. There wasn’t supposed tobea shootout, and when the bullets started flying, he’d thought,Fuck, before diving for cover and trying to sight on the tires of the little plane. He didn’t have a good angle, though, and he’d tried to move, shift position. If his team could take out the plane, the drug runners’ only means of escape, they’d surrender. And then—
Then he woke up in the hospital, and Governor Amanda Riggs was smiling down at him.
He’d been shot. Apparently he’d bled all over the desert while his team was pinned back. One of the skinny teens was wounded, too, but as the pilot tried to take off and get the hell out of Dodge, abandoning the cocaine and heroin haul they’d dumped at the side of the makeshift runway, his team leader managed to shoot out the plane’s propeller.
Later, Dakota saw pictures of the plane nose-down in the scrub. Blood trailed from the cargo door. If they’d taken off, the wounded kid would have died, but Dakota’s team managed to save his life.
Dakota had thought he’d head back to the border and rejoin the recon team, but after a month and a half in rehab and weekly dinners with Governor Riggs; her husband, Drew Riggs; and their best friend Wayne Cross, Governor Riggs’s chief of staff, his life seemed to change direction again.
Amanda, Drew, and Wayne had served in the army together, and maybe that’s why they seemed to take such an immediate liking to Dakota. Dakota could reminisce about his own time in the army with them, about the deployments and the sacrifices and the strain. About the government bullshit that ground away at your sanity. And he could do it all with a laugh, a clink of his beer bottle against theirs, and the knowledge that what they bitched about together wouldn’t ever leave the governor’s dinner table.
Dakota was two decades younger than Governor Riggs and her husband. Amanda Riggs had worked her way up through Texas politics after leaving the army with her husband, going from mayor of Houston to governor of Texas in a hurry. Her name was on everyone’s lips, had been for over a decade. Drew seemed content to be the strong, stalwart supporter, always handsome and charming in the background of Amanda’s dinner speeches and political functions.
Wayne was the wise old man, they teased. He’d mentored both Drew and Amanda in the army, and some days it felt like he was starting to mentor Dakota too.
Dakota didn’t have much experience making friends—or, more accurately, he didn’t know how tokeepfriends. It was better to never let anyone get close enough to hurt, he’d decided long ago. He kept a barrier inside, keeping close all of his tender, sensitive parts and leaving the world to see the Dakota he’d Frankensteined into existence out of a broken, angry boy. He’d tried to polish off his rough edges, but he felt half-formed, like a critical component to his being was missing.
Truth be told, it was.
Once, Dakota had laid the cornerstone of his life and put all his dreams inside a little ocotillo flower he set on that foundation. Now the stone was cracked and windblown, eroding out of a ground that never wanted his mark anyway.
It did something to a man when his hopes and dreams, and the life he’d carefully planned, collapsed. Were ripped away. It left him raw, and aching, and hollow in a place inside himself he could never reach.
So maybe he had become friendly with Amanda, Drew, and Wayne, but Dakota was still surprised when he received the orders from the Texas Rangers detailing him to the governor’s mansion and an assignment as special assistant to Governor Riggs.
Maybe it was a quiet kind of pity. He still struggled to move as quickly as he used to. Could he hold his own? Could he do what he needed to if the rubber hit the road again? If his teammate’s life was in his hands, could he save it? Or would he be the weak link on the team, the person who held everyone back?
For now, he didn’t have to worry about questions like that. He was one of Amanda’s many advisors, and he filled his days with committees and meetings and special congressional sessions, offering his thoughts and insights on the Rangers and their law enforcement missions and what support they needed most from the capitol.
Late-night phone calls were not unusual, but they usually weren’t so insistent. In the months he’d been assigned to the governor, Dakota couldn’t remember another night like this. And he’d never heard Amanda’s voice sound likethat.
Dakota jogged up the wide steps of the mansion, grabbing his wallet and swiping his card over the RF reader hidden by the front door. The heavy lock clicked, and he pushed inside.
Southern stately charm hit him square in the face. The governor’s mansion was a tourist destination as well as a home, and half of the place was as stiff and stilted as a museum. He used to want to jump on the silk sofas, throw himself on the Queen Anne love seat and kick up his boots on the delicate armrests. Take a nap and drool into the hand-embroidered pillows, antiques from the antebellum era. Drag his heels across the raked carpet.It was his destructive streak, he knew.
He hadn’t always been that way.
Dakota followed the trail of light bleeding from upstairs and the tense, hard voices talking just low enough he couldn’t pick up the words. His footfalls echoed through the mansion, and the voices stopped, a pregnant pause filling the landing until he made his way into the governor’s sitting room.
Amanda was in her robe, her face scrubbed clean of makeup. Even in middle age, she held on to her fresh-faced Texas beauty. She looked ten years younger than she was and made sure to emphasize that by dressing as stylishly as she could get away with. It was an impossible tightrope: care about your appearance, but not too much. Dress for success, but don’t spend more on clothes than a family of four would at Walmart. Project power, and grace, and beauty, and class—but not too much. Can’t be threatening, now.
Luckily, Amanda had her right and left hands: her husband and their best friend. The three of them sat kitty-corner to each other in the sitting room, so close their knees were touching. Wayne stared over the governor’s shoulder at the wall, while Amanda and Drew held hands as they leaned forward, elbows on their knees, braced like mirror images of each other.
Dakota hesitated. The moment seemed heavier, more private, than any he’d seen before. Why was he here? Why had the governor summoned him—called him, personally? “Ma’am?”
Amanda looked up, seemingly startled. Like Dakota had dragged her back to reality. She stared at him with wild eyes and then blinked, long and hard, as she exhaled. “Dakota. Thank God you’re here.” Her accent, smoothed over the years as she’d risen in politics, was deeper, richer than it usually was. Her vowels lingered. Shook.
