Page 6 of Shadow Strike
He didn’t wait for an answer, striding across the lawn to his truck.Behind him, he heard the front door close.
SPS’sstandard procedure was to run a background check before any client consultation.Standard procedure kept jobs clean and people alive.
CB had built his life on the principle that skipping steps was how you ended up in situations you hadn’t planned for.So he had SPS’s tech expert run Regan Hill’s background check while he sat in the bar’s parking lot during the lunch rush.
When CB had been a kid, the bar had just been a bar.In recent years, they’d added a grill and now served sandwiches and a few appetizers.He suspected that was Regan’s doing.
The background check came back clean.No record, no flags.She was his age, born here, and had a journalism degree from the University of Montana.She’d spent six years as a working journalist before returning home to take over the bar after her father died.
She was the producer of a true-crime podcast called Cold Circuit, which had an impressive subscriber base and, according to the show’s own website, had been described by the Billings Gazette as “the most tenacious investigative voice in Montana journalism.”
She was tenacious, all right.He knew all about what her podcast had done to the Outlaws, outing Ryder’s father for looking the other way on illegal activities.Ray now sat in prison, thanks to Regan Hill.
CB pulled up the podcast and scrolled the episode list.Forty-six episodes across three years, ranging from cold cases to investigative pieces on public corruption to a four-part series on a prison system’s medical neglect that had, apparently, resulted in two legislative hearings.
The most-played series on the list was a three-parter titled: “Blind Eye: How One Montana Sheriff Protected the Canon Outlaws for a Decade.”
CB had never listened to it, but a whole lot of people had—the play count was substantial.He clicked play on the first episode.
Regan’s voice came through his truck’s speakers and caught him off guard.She didn’t use a performance voice or have a news-anchor cadence.Her voice was clear and intelligent.It sounded like she was sitting across from him.
There was no theatrical music, no breathless revelation staging.Just the facts, organized and sourced and cross-referenced.She was patient, thorough, and apparently incapable of letting a thread alone once she’d picked it up.
By the end of part one, Ray’s crimes had been laid out carefully, specifically, and irrefutably.
CB listened to part two.Then part three.
He sat in the parking lot long after the last episode ended, engine off, windows down.
Ray had made his choices.That was the truth of it, and he’d known it long before Regan said it into a microphone.His uncle had been charming, genuinely useful in certain areas, and rotten in others.The rottenness had not been secret to anyone who’d grown up in the Outlaws.
And the apple hadn’t fallen far from the rotten tree.Ryder hadn’t been intimidated by his father’s prison sentence.If anything, from what CB knew, Ryder was in full business expansion mode.
What CB hadn’t expected was to sit in the Hill’s Tavern parking lot and feel something that wasn’t quite gratitude, but in the same neighborhood.A woman he’d never met had said what he’d known his whole life—his uncle was a dirty cop.
His phone pinged with an incoming email.A new report came from SPS.There had been three disturbance calls to law enforcement in the past few months.All resolved without action—of course.
Because Ray Briggs might be in prison, but some of his fellow officers were still at it.He recognized one of the names in the responding officers’ reports: Denny Crue.
Denny had been three years ahead of CB in school and had been at the Outlaws’ campground every summer of CB’s childhood.He’d taught CB and Ryder to fish at the lake.
CB stared out the windshield for a moment, remembering an eleven-year-old Denny who’d been patient with him and Ryder, teaching them to cast.Now, he was a foot soldier for Outlaw business, which included extorting people like the Hills for protection money.
The sign above the door was old, but the windows were clean.It was the kind of place that had regulars and kept the same hours it had always kept.With the exception of the new lunch menu, the place was the same as it had been before he’d left to join the Army.
CB hadn’t called to schedule a meeting with Lucy.He wanted to case the place first, to walk in unannounced and get a feel for things.That was the intelligence work in him, arriving before expectations could be managed.See the room as it was.
A bell above the door announced him as he entered, and inside, the smell of coffee, stale beer, and old wood gave the place its atmosphere.
The lunch rush was over.Only four customers at tables, and a woman behind the bar in her mid-sixties, who looked up at the bell and went immediately, visibly pleased.
“You must be Clive,” she said, as he settled on a barstool.“I’m Lucy.Can I get you some coffee?A beer?”
“Friends call me CB.Coffee, please.”
She poured while he scanned the exits, the sightlines, the table positions.One customer was reading a paperback; the other three, who were deliberately ignoring him, were their own kind of data.
There was a door behind the bar, partially ajar.Beyond it, the sounds of someone in the back shuffling things around filtered out.
