Costello been peripheral to an operation Conall had worked in Southern California and had escaped the net before arrests were made. He wasn’t important enough then for them to bother pursuing aggressively. A confirmation of his identity now, though, would help justify a warrant that might bring this case to a close.
And then he’d pack his duffel bag, toss it in the Suburban, say goodbye to Walker, Brendan and Lia and drive away.
He swore again, low and ragged.
He was good at moving on. A regular champion at it. Increasingly, he’d gotten bored with whatever he was working; he wanted nothing more than to move on to a new challenge, something that might engage him. It was ridiculous to think he was so happy living the bucolic life he didn’t want to leave. He pictured the damn cows chewing their cud and everything in him rose in outrage. No! This wasn’t him. It was…an interlude. That’s all. Pretty damn amazing sex, sure. Nice kids. He should be glad he’d been entertained while he was stuck here, because he would have gone out of his flipping mind otherwise.
He ran both hands over his face, turned off the light and made his way to the bedroom and twin bed he currently called his. Where he lay awake entirely too long, his gut roiling with some unnamed anxiety as the same scene kept playing through his head: him saying goodbye to those two boys then turning to do the same to Lia, knowing this was it. Moving on.
* * *
BY AFTERNOON CONALL WAS getting emails giving him names to go with faces. Lia’s neighbors were, of all damn things, survivalists. White supremacists. The group with whom these three were affiliated was small. A couple of members had recently bought a chunk of acreage in rural Idaho, triggering some interest but no action. They hadn’t taken out a loan, but nobody within the organization had ever held the kind of job that would have brought in money like that. Whatever was going on next door to Lia was the answer, or part of it.
Conall hadn’t seen any evidence yet that they were moving drugs, although he hadn’t ruled out the possibility. It was a tried-and-true method of raising big bucks, after all. Maybe Gordy Costello had switched his trade from weapons to white powder. Anything was possible. Conall kind of doubted it, though. He thought the neighbors were buying guns, but whether for resale or to arm themselves was another question. They wouldn’t be the first nuts with an us-against-the-world mentality. When they gathered on their Idaho enclave, they were likely to embrace a paranoid lifestyle, certain the FBI was watching through long-range binoculars.
He smiled grimly at that. Little did the fools imagine they were already being watched by federal agents.
Henderson, it developed, had worked an operation involving white supremacists who cultivated high-quality marijuana to support the war they envisioned coming between their kind and the U.S. government in its too-liberal, multi-ethnic arrogance.
Telling Conall about it, Jeff had shaken his head. “Despite the quantity they were growing and dealing, the sentences handed out were pathetic. They probably bought a new piece of property and went right back to farming the minute they got out. The profit was worth the risk.”
Yeah, wasn’t that always the case?
It occurred to Conall that his frustration with outcomes had been fueling his growing dissatisfaction with his job. Was he accomplishing anything meaningful? He’d begun to doubt it. Sometimes he wanted to do something where he could see a measurable impact. Maybe not a big one, but the faces of people he’d helped. The victims of the drug wars were mainly faceless to him. He spent his life immersed in the underworld of users and dealers. Too often decisions made and handed down from above were tainted with politics.
Maybe that was why these weeks had felt so clean to him. Why he half envied his brothers, who protected the townsfolk they considered their own.
He shook his head over the idiocy. Niall and Duncan arrested their townsfolk, too, some of whom were scum not that different from the men Conall put behind bars. Their crimes were committed on a smaller scale, that’s all.
Part of his mood, he admitted, had to do with the fact that here it was mid-afternoon and he was working instead of hanging out with Walker and Brendan. Lia had taken them somewhere a couple of hours ago; he’d heard the engine and from one of the attic windows