Chapter 4 - The Toast at the Country Club
The Park County annual charity gala was held at the Bridger View Country Club—a sprawling stone-and-glass lodge overlooking the valley where Livingston’s elite gathered to pat themselves on the back and drink expensive imported wine.
I arrived at 8:00 PM. I wasn't wearing the blazer Rachel had bought me. I wore my everyday dark denim, clean leather boots, and a simple, well-fitted black button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up to my forearms, exposing the faint, jagged scar across my left wrist from a night extraction in the Euphrates Valley.
When I walked through the grand mahogany doors, the ambient chatter in the ballroom dropped noticeably. Heads turned. Whispers rippled through the rows of tables decorated with white linen and crystal glassware.
Rachel, sitting at the head table next to the mayor and Sheriff Travis Cole, went completely pale. She stood up abruptly, her napkin falling to the floor, and hurried over to me, her heels clicking angrily against the polished hardwood.
"What are you doing here?" she hissed, grabbing my arm with white-knuckled desperation. "I told you not to come! Look at you! You're wearing work clothes to a black-tie event!"
"I came to support the community, Rachel," I said smoothly, looking past her shoulder toward the stage where Sheriff Cole stood with a glass of champagne in his hand, laughing heartily with the town council president.
"You're embarrassing me! Get out of here right now or—"
"Or what, Rachel? Are you going to divorce the mechanic?" I looked down at her, my eyes cold enough to freeze boiling water. For the first time in three years, she saw the commander, not the guy who fixed her car. She stepped back, trembling slightly, unable to find her voice.
I walked past her straight toward the mahogany podium on the stage.
Sheriff Travis Cole noticed me approaching. His smile faltered for a fraction of a second, replaced by that arrogant, predatory smirk that had made him feel like a king in his own small kingdom. He raised his microphone, tapping it to get the room's attention.
"Well, look who decided to clean up after all!" Travis boomed into the PA system, his voice echoing off the vaulted ceilings. "Ladies and gentlemen, Livingston’s finest grease-monkey, Ethan Hayes! Come to apologize for spilling your drink on my hand the other day, mechanic?"
The room chuckled nervously. A few wealthy landowners snickered behind their champagne flutes. Rachel stood frozen near the back of the room, her hands covering her face.
I walked up the three wooden steps to the stage, stopped two feet away from Sheriff Cole, and looked him dead in the eye. Up close, I could smell the expensive scotch masking the sour stench of corruption.
"You know, Travis," I said, my voice carrying clearly through his own wireless microphone without me even raising my volume, "in my past life, I spent a lot of time studying low-level operators who thought their little badges made them untouchable."
Travis's smile vanished. His hand dropped instinctively toward his service weapon, but his reflexes were sluggish—dulled by years of easy power and whiskey lunches.
"What did you just say to me, you little—"
"I said," I interrupted, reaching into my shirt pocket and pulling out a small flash drive, "you should have checked my background before you poured that milkshake."
With my left hand, I stepped inside his guard, caught his right wrist with terrifying, bone-crushing speed, and twisted his arm behind his lumbar in one fluid, textbook defensive maneuver. The sheriff let out a sharp gasp of pain as his posture collapsed, his face slamming down onto the polished wooden podium.
The entire ballroom erupted into absolute chaos. Women screamed. Several local councilmen jumped to their feet, shouting for security.
"Don't move," I told the room, my voice dropping into the cold, flat register I used when briefing joint-command strike groups. "If any of you reach for a phone to call the local department, save your battery. The local department's communications are currently being locked out by federal agents stationed five miles outside town."
Right on cue, the heavy double doors at the entrance of the ballroom blew open.
May you like
Not with local deputies.
With a dozen armed federal marshals in tactical gear, led by a senior DOJ investigator holding a stack of federal arrest warrants as thick as a telephone book.
