Merciless

I knew better than to argue with that tone. I handed him a first-aid kit after he finished washing his hands.

“What will it take to convince you to talk to me about what happened last night?”

The poker face I’d mastered slipped. And for all the people it could’ve happened in front of, just my luck it was Special Agent Shay Turnbull. When I wasn’t wearing pants. “I guess that depends on who I’m talking to right now.”

“Are you asking if I’m wearing my badge?”

“Yes, but I’m not just talking figuratively.”

Shay locked his gaze to mine. “I’m more than the badge, Mercy.”

“Still not hearing the reassurances I need, Agent Turnbull.”

Indecision clouded his eyes. Then he said tightly, “Tit for tat, eh? My dark secret for yours?”

I had so many secrets I wasn’t sure if last night’s events even counted as the dark variety. “Fine. But it’d better be what I want to know, and don’t pretend you aren’t aware of exactly what that is.”

“Then tell me what I want to know. Were you shot last night?

“Yeah. It’s no big deal. I’ve been shot before.”

“I see that.” His fingers traced the ugly ridged scar on my other leg, and the skin tightened with gooseflesh. Then he bent over the wound, seeing blood oozing from beneath the bandage. “You say there’s no bullet in there?”

“I already poked around in it.”

“I’m gonna take a look anyway.” Shay ripped off the covering quickly, but it still hurt like a mother.

Blood gushed out and ran down the inside of my thigh.

He caught it with a piece of gauze. Took him a bit to speak. “You’ve asked why I got reassigned to South Dakota. You assumed I was demoted. In a roundabout way, I was. I was reassigned because my partner in the Minneapolis office allegedly committed a crime, and I refused to be part of the federal hanging party.” He sucked in a swift breath. “This needs stitches.”

“So I should ask Dawson’s doctor if he could patch up a bullet wound while I’m killing time in the waiting room? Wrong.” I pointed at the first-aid kit. “Use the butterfly bandages. I just couldn’t hold the skin together and put the bandage on myself.”

His eyes met mine. Not aloof like I expected but filled with concern. “I’ll help you, but you have to promise if this gets infected you’ll let a medical professional look at it.”

“I promise. Now tell me what happened.”

“This is gonna sting.” He sprayed the entire area with antiseptic. “My former partner joined the FBI after college. Top of his class, he could’ve done anything. Even the CIA was sniffing around. But he was Ojibwa and wanted to stay in Indian Country to help his tribe. Part of the reason for his choosing a branch of law enforcement stemmed from his witnessing his mother and his sister brutally raped and murdered when he was twelve. He knew who’d done it. The cops had known, and nothing was ever done because the man was a DEA confidential informant.”

My stomach twisted. “No one is untouchable.”

“Trust me, this man was. Then we found out, through not entirely legal channels, that this monster had recently raped and killed another ten-year-old girl. But the crime had been covered up because the Indian girl was in foster care. And because the DEA needed this sick fucker’s crucial information for a major drug op, they swept it under the rug.” He pointed at my leg. “Pull the skin as closely together as you can and hold it.”

I gritted my teeth and watched as he attached the butterfly bandages.

“The FBI and the DEA were convinced that my partner was the one who gutted the confidential informant like a trout a day before the man was supposed to deliver key information on a major drug shipment.”

“What was your part in it?”

“Mine?” Shay’s eyebrows rose. “None. The night this DEA snitch was killed, my partner and I were at a strip club sixty miles from the scene of the crime.”

“Alibied?”

He dabbed at the pooled blood. “Ironclad. Corroborated by two men we’d gotten into an altercation with after the… female escorts they provided for us earlier that evening tried to double the agreed-upon price.”

Four solid witnesses to alibi Shay and his partner’s whereabouts. “And the feds?”

“No charges were filed on the criminal side, but my partner lost his job with the FBI for moral implications.”

“That’s fucking ironic.”

“Tell me about it. I agreed to an immediate transfer out of the Minneapolis office, where I was third in line for the top slot. My ADA saw to it I was listed as a training agent for ICSCU. They sent me here. And I’m unofficially the DEA’s bitch. No matter where I’m transferred. For as long as they deem it.”