Never Surrender (Task Force Eagle) by Vaughan Susan

Author:Vaughan, Susan [Vaughan, Susan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Gullwood Press
Published: 2013-04-06T21:00:00+00:00

*****

During the next few days, Rick worked at a desk in the Portland DEA office. He fought the urge to drive to Portsmouth to see Juliana. To wrap himself in her scent, to feel her soft skin, to drown in her eyes. Damn.

Instead, he harassed the guys assigned to protect her, checked on them every other hour, generally provoking them to the brink of violence.

The next Monday, Juliana had her car back. An agent followed her to and from work at Vinson Seafood. If she was keeping something from him, she’d made no moves to indicate that. No moves one way or another. She was safe. That’s all he should care about. She was a woman he should avoid. And he wasn’t the man she needed.

He buried himself in the El Águila files. His percolating investigative instincts kept brewing up Wesley Vinson as the American connection, but so far he didn’t have enough for a search warrant. No evidence. No witnesses.

The draggers, 120-foot-long boats that netted bottom fish like haddock and flounder, seemed in the clear. They chugged into port after nine or ten days at sea, then steamed out to fish again. With crews of six or more, keeping drug smuggling under wraps would be as hard as maintaining a secret in his gossipy family.

Purse seiners, eighty-foot boats with smaller crews. More possibility. Motoring out every day in search of bait fish like herring, a captain could easily meet another boat at sea and add a package or two to the cargo. The Coast Guard couldn’t be everywhere at once. They would pay no special heed. Even if Rick had the schedules and cargo lists and checked them against the DEA’s list of intercepted shipments, he’d still have no evidence.

The jailbirds sullenly refused to open up. More scared of their Mexican boss than of cops or prison.

He had no leads on the possible leak in the Boston office either. The notion of betrayal roiled in his gut. Same tangled emotions Juliana probably felt about Jordan. Hell.

His only hope was in the Sea Worthy’s return to Portland in another week. Finnegan Farnham would have to answer a lot of questions. A fast run in a Coast Guard cutter might get some quick answers, but it would also send up warning signals to the smugglers so they could scurry back under their rocks.

Too much frustration for even a patient man.

On Tuesday, an Oxford County sheriff’s deputy found Sudsy Pettit’s truck abandoned in the woods. Rick spent the rest of the day at the scene and at the state medical examiner’s building in Augusta. On Wednesday, hoping to see Juliana before she left for work, he headed to her apartment.

As he left the interstate at the Portsmouth exit, his cell phone sang out.

It was the Portland-based agent in charge of Juliana’s guard duty. “Something odd going on here,” the agent said. “Ms. Paris just left in her foxy neighbor’s Honda SUV. License plate CANALBT. She’s wearing a long black wig.”

Shock vibrated like a wire along Rick’s arms.

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