LITMIR.BIZ

       Chapter Two

      Nash couldn’t remember how long he’d been driving, and he had no clue where the highway was taking him.

      Shaking off the fogginess in his head, he pulled off the next exit ramp and drove through some cookie-cutter neighborhood mecca. The front yards were dotted with wire reindeer and giant inflatable lawn ornaments. The snow and suburbia were as foreign to him as the need to find an ally who could help him.

      He blinked away the frost forming on his eyelashes as his brain skipped from one random thought to the next. It was freaking cold here in Missouri; he had no driver’s-side window to roll up and he’d lost his hat. He loved that hat. It was a sentimental homage to the boys ranch where he’d lived and worked and gone to school after his parents’ deaths at the hands of a pair of drugged-up teenagers who’d invaded their home. Nash had grown up and taken a job with the DEA to combat the flow of drugs into Texas and other parts of the U.S., to stop another tragedy like his parents’ murders, to help troubled kids like he’d been find a healthier way to deal with the crap life threw at them.

      He usually oversaw or handled undercover operations where an agent infiltrated a gang or cartel or independent meth lab to gather information to stop the drugs being made, trafficked or sold. But two of his agents had been exposed as cops and killed. So he’d gone undercover himself to find out how and why and who and had ended up with too many suspects and too little concrete evidence.

      Somehow, Berto Graciela had found out he was a cop, too.

      He was driving in circles.

      Tommy Delvecchio was dead.

      “Ah, hell.” A moment of painful clarity put the brakes on Nash’s rambling thoughts.

      He’d come to Kansas City with one desperate plan in mind. Without knowing who’d betrayed him in Houston, he’d gone elsewhere to find a sanctuary where he could lie low long enough to safely figure out his next move.

      He reconsidered calling Jake Lonergan, who’d left the DEA due to a nearly fatal head injury that had robbed him of his memory. Jake probably didn’t want any part of the violence chasing Nash to enter his happily-ever-after life. But, sitting in a pool of his own blood and panting for nearly every breath, Nash knew his luck was running out. It might cost him a friendship, but Jake was all he had left.

      Taking his hand off the reloaded gun at his side, Nash brushed the snow off his lap at the next stoplight and reached inside the bag Tommy had brought him to pull out the untraceable phone. Even that subtle shift in his seat renewed the pain like a stab in the back. Thug One had winged him in the leg, creating a discomfort he could simply throw a bandage over. But Thug Three had got him good. He still couldn’t tell if the bullet had gone through or if it was lodged inside him somewhere. All he knew was that he was hurt. He was bleeding. And he wasn’t going to get any better on his own.

      The light changed. A horn honked behind him before Nash stepped on the accelerator and moved along with the traffic past a busy shopping mall and a modern hospital. He debated whether or not to turn off into the hospital’s E.R. But if the men after him were smart—and clearly they were or they wouldn’t have tracked him to K.C.—they’d be checking E.R.s across the city looking for him. Besides, a gunshot victim showing up in a hospital was an automatic call to the local police and a subsequent alert to the DEA office in Houston. That was the kind of publicity he didn’t need. Until he knew who had set him up, trusting anyone, even a cop, wasn’t a good idea.

      When he reached the next crossroads, Nash spotted a narrow two-lane road leading away from the suburbs and turned. He needed to get someplace without all these cars and people—someplace where he could put the first-aid kit in his bag to good use without anyone trying to help him or ask any questions. He needed a place where he could pull off and make sense of the dancing letters and numerals on his phone as he tried to recall Jake Lonergan’s number, which had been programmed into the phone he didn’t want to reactivate.

      The truck wheels spun on a patch of snow-packed road and he dropped his phone to grab the wheel and keep the big Ford from skidding across the asphalt. Coming from Houston, he wasn’t used to driving in weather like this. Of course, if the world outside his cracked windshield hadn’t been such a blur, and he hadn’t been shivering from the icy wind blowing in through his busted window, he might have been able to handle the treacherous stretch of winding road he’d pulled off onto.

      But he was hurt. He was bleeding. He was cold.

      When he crested the hill and hit the next patch of black ice, Mother Nature finally did what a half dozen thugs in two different cities hadn’t been able to do.

      She took him out.

      Nash’s truck sailed

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