by Dana Marton
A small-time operation, but something. These three had to have a link on the other side. And that link would have an uplink. Follow the trail, and it might lead to the elusive Coyote.
He stayed on patrol while Shep ran the smugglers in, bringing Mo back with him so Mo could take the smugglers’ car for a thorough search and fingerprinting. They would follow even the smallest lead. The stakes were too high. There were no unimportant details.
They kept an eye out for others. Sometimes smugglers worked in separate teams. They figured if one team got caught, the others would slip through while the border patrol was busy with the unlucky ones.
But the rest of the night went pretty quietly, the borderlands deserted. When Keith and Ray came to take over at dawn, Jamie drove back to his apartment to catch some sleep. His ringing phone woke him around midmorning.
“A friend of yours stopped by to see me earlier,” Ryder, the team leader, said on the other end, sounding less than happy.
Jamie tried to unscramble his brain as he sat up and reached for his prosthetics. “Who?”
“Brianna Tridle.”
An image of her long legs and full lips slammed into his mind. Okay, now he was wide awake.
“She kept calling up the chain at CBP until they gave her our contact number. Tracked us down from there. She’s demanding to be involved in our investigation. If her town and her people are part of whatever our mission is here, as she put it, she wants in.”
“How did she take being disappointed?” With her looks, she probably didn’t often experience a man saying no to her. Jamie almost wished he could have been there to see when Ryder had done it.
But Ryder said, “Actually, I agreed.”
“Say that again?” His hand halted over the straps.
“She grew up around here, knows everyone. People respect her. Record clean as a whistle. We’re pressed for time. She could be an asset.”
“More like a pain in the asset.”
“Possibly. She’s pretty protective of her town. In any case, I don’t plan on that being my problem,” he added cheerfully.
A dark premonition settled over Jamie, immediately justified as Ryder said, “Since you’re the one who got her all riled up, you’ll be her liaison on the team.”
“I don’t think it’s a good idea to involve her.”
“You have my permission to try to talk her out of it. Tomorrow. Right now I need you to drive up to San Antonio. I got a new name from one of the men you and Shep caught last night on the border. Rico Marquez. He’s a known gangbanger.”
Which translated to: be ready for anything.
He was just as likely to come back with Rico as he was with a bullet in his back.
“Want someone to go with you? I could pull Keith from border detail,” Ryder offered. “This is a pretty promising lead.”
“Nah,” he said, unable, once again, to shake the need to prove himself, even if nobody but him thought that was necessary. “I can handle it.”
Chapter Three
Jamie tracked Rico to an abandoned warehouse where the man was apparently hiding out at the moment due to the fact that a rival gang member was hunting him. Information unwittingly supplied by his mother, who’d thought Jamie had come to help her son.
Jamie picked the lock on the rusted emergency door on the side of the building and eased inside little by little, as silently as he could manage. The temperature had to be close to a hundred; there was definitely no air-conditioning here. The cavernous place smelled like dust and machine grease.
The carcass of a giant and complicated-looking piece of machinery took up most of the floor; the ceiling was thirty feet high, at least. A metal walkway ringed the building high up on the wall, and some sort of an office was tucked under the corrugated metal roof in the back.
Jamie caught sight of a faint, flickering light up there—a TV?—so he moved that way. Where the hell were the stairs?
He walked forward slowly, carefully, listening for any noise that might warn him that he wasn’t alone down here. Nothing.
Once he was closer to the back wall, he could hear the muted sounds of the TV upstairs. Good. Maybe they wouldn’t hear him coming.
Now all he needed was to find a way up. He wished he had more light down at ground level, but all the windows were up high, just under the roof, and all were covered with enough grime to let through precious little light.
There were a million hiding places for someone to wait to ambush him. Then again, he’d also have plenty of cover if it came to a close-quarters shootout in here.
He scanned all the dark corners and found the stairs at last, hiding behind a bundle of foot-wide pipes that ran up along the wall. He approached it with as much care as possible.
The corner was a perfect place to ambush someone if anyone was down here, watching him. But he reached the bottom of the stairs without trouble.
Next came the tricky part—he had to go up the stairs. No more cover. He’d be in plain sight the whole time. The metal steps would rattle, drawing attention to him. He could be picked off with a single shot.
He took his gun out and moved up facing the main floor, ready to fire back if anyone took aim at him. Maybe he could keep them pinned down until he reached the top. But he made it all the way, walking backward, without anyone taking a shot at him.
Okay. That had to mean there were no lookouts on the lower level. If there were, they wouldn’t have let him get this far, not when taking him out would have been a piece of cake.
So far, so good. But the next step was even more difficult—sneaking by a wall of office windows that stretched from floor to ceiling and left no place to hide as he made his way to the door.
Anybody in the office would see him as soon as they looked this way.
He stole toward the windows and stopped as soon as he reached glass. He poked his head out a little to see what waited for him inside the room.
Overturned office furniture and stacked-up file cabinets cut the office space in two. He could see behind them through the gaps, could see part of a television set in the far corner, a mattress on the floor and naked bodies entwined in the act of lovemaking.
He blinked. Okay, that was unexpected. Awkward.
But also lucky.
He could make it across the walkway, passing in front of all those windows, without being seen. Nobody was paying the slightest attention to him.
He twisted the doorknob. Locked, which he’d kind of expected. But it was a simple office door lock and he had it picked in a flat minute.
Heck, a secretary with a hairpin could have done it.
He moved inside silently and kept down as he inched forward, using file cabinet for cover. Any noise his boots made was covered by some moaning and a lot of heavy breathing, not to mention the TV running a Mexican soap opera and a fan that was going somewhere behind the pile of furniture.
The scent of sex hung in the air, which made him think of Deputy Sheriff Bree Tridle, for some reason.
He pushed her out of his mind as he pulled his backup weapon and stepped forward with a gun in each hand. “Freeze!”
The woman screamed and scampered off her man in a panicked rush, nearly kicking him in the head as she grabbed for the sheet to cover herself.
Jamie’s eyes were on the guy. “Freeze! Hands in the air!”
Rico was in his early twenties, covered in gang tattoos, his gaze rapidly clearing as he grabbed for the handgun next to the mattress. He wasn’t concerned with modesty.
Jamie shot at the gun and the force of the bullet kicked the weapon out of reach. Rico went for a switchblade that had been hidden under his pillow, apparently. He was nothing if not prepared.
He lunged toward Jamie.
“No! Mi amor?” the woman screamed, scampering farther away from them, looking shocked and horrified at the scene unfolding in front of her.
Jamie deflected the knife and knocked Rico back. “I don’t want to have to shoot you, dammit!”
Tha
t slowed the guy down a little. “You no come to kill us?” He held the blade in front of him, ready for another go.
Jamie kept his gaze above neck level. “Customs and Border Protection. I’m here to talk about the smuggling your gang is involved in. You look like a nice couple. Nobody has to die today.”
Wow, he was getting downright soft here. He sounded almost as optimistic as the deputy sheriff.
Rico didn’t look convinced. “Her brother didn’t send you?”
Jamie stashed his backup gun into the front of his waistband, then reached for his CBP badge and held it up. “I’m only here for information, man.”
Rico raised his knife and his chin, sneering with contempt. “I don’t talk to pigs.”
“That’s generally a good policy. Snitches don’t live long in this business.” Jamie glanced for a split second at the young woman who was white with fear, pulling her clothes on with jerky movements, and he did some quick thinking. “But it looks to me like you have something to live for. What if you two could get away both from your gang and your father?”
“Mi amor?” The woman’s gaze flew to Rico, hope mixing with alarm in her voice.
“Can’t be done.” Rico reached for his jeans, didn’t bother with underwear. He was tough enough to rough it, seemed to be the message.
Since he wasn’t sneering anymore, Jamie took that as a good sign. “A chance at true love, the two of you together. What’s that worth?”
Rico considered him through narrowed eyes. “You let Maria go. Right now.”
“Okay,” Jamie agreed, as a gesture of good faith. Maria probably had zero useful information for him, anyway. He looked at the woman. “Go.”
She cast a questioning glance at Rico, who repeated the order in Spanish and explained that he would find her later, but she stubbornly shook her head.
A rapid argument followed before she finally ran for the door. They could hear her footsteps on the metal walkway, then down the stairs.
“I could kill you now,” Rico said, still holding the knife, a nasty-looking piece that had probably seen plenty of business on San Antonio’s backstreets.
“You could try,” Jamie answered calmly, feet apart, stance ready. He actually preferred Maria out of the way. No sense of her getting in the middle of this and maybe being killed.
Rico measured him up again. Swore in Spanish. “What the hell do you want from me?” he asked at last.
“I’m looking for a man called Coyote.”
“Don’t know him.” But the corner of his left eye jumped.
“Any information would help. All I need is a link I could follow to him.”
“And if I give you this, me and Maria go to witness protection?”
He nodded.
“Where?”
“Someplace where nobody can find you. You can get rid of the tattoos. They’ll hook you up with a job and a place to live. You can get married.”
Rico still hesitated.
“Ask yourself this,” Jamie gestured at the ratty, messed-up room with his free hand. “Is this the life you want for your children? Or do you want something better? Doesn’t she deserve more than this?”
God help him, he was appealing to true love. Something he wasn’t even sure he believed in. But maybe Rico did, and that would be enough to settle matters here.
The man lowered his knife and filled his lungs, his ink-covered shoulders dropping as he exhaled. He looked pretty damn young with all the bluster gone out of him. He barely looked twenty. “There’s no way out for guys like me.”
“There is now. This must be your lucky day.”
Tension-filled silence stretched between them.
“Okay,” Rico said. “Let me think. I might be able to get something for you. If you can keep us safe. Maria the most.”
An opening. “I’ll talk to my people. But I need a solid lead.”
More silence, then, “How do I find you?”
Jamie reached into his back pocket, pulled out a business card with his number on it and tossed it on the mattress between them.
Rico didn’t move to pick it up. He’d do that when he was alone.
“Don’t wait too long to call,” Jamie warned. “I found you once, I will find you again. If I have to track you down, I’ll be coming to bring you in.” Then he backed away, gun still in hand.
He didn’t relax until he was down the stairs and out of the building.
Damn, he hoped this would get them results. Because otherwise he would have to explain to Ryder why he wasn’t taking Rico back to the interrogation room with him.
He’d just taken a hell of a gamble.
* * *
BREE WAS HEADING back to her office with her first cup of coffee of the morning, thinking about the talk she was giving at the middle school later about crime prevention, when Jamie Cassidy strolled into the Pebble Creek police station.
“I’m armed and I’m not handing my weapon over,” he advised Lena by the metal detector, looking as surly and aggravated and sexy as ever. He took off his cowboy hat and ran his fingers through his hair to straighten it.
“Let him through,” Bree called out before Lena could tackle him.
Or something. The officer had that dreamy-eyed look again that said she wouldn’t mind seeing Jamie Cassidy on his back. There were probably a million women out there who shared the sentiment, although today he looked somewhat worse for wear.
Bruises and cuts marred the right side of his face—looked like he’d taken a beating since Bree had last seen him. Given his attitude and general disposition, she could see how a person would be tempted.
She flashed him her “this is my station and I’m the boss here” look, but when she spoke, she kept things cordial. “Mr. Cassidy. Nice to see you again. Why don’t we talk in my office?”
“Jamie.” He strode in past her, his mouth set in a line that was suspiciously close to a snarl.
A part of her that was apparently easily distracted wondered what it would take to make him happy. Not that she was volunteering for the job. Not even if those sharp eyes and those sculpted lips of his could have tempted a saint.
She closed the door behind them. “Please, take a seat. How can I help you today?”
He lowered his impressive frame into the nearest chair as he gave a soft growl of warning that he probably meant to sound threatening.
She found it kind of sexy, heaven help her. “Are you all right? What happened to your face?”
“Somebody whacked me.”
“While the rest of us can only dream,” she said sweetly. “Life is nothing but unfair.” She set her mug down. “Came to share information?”
“Came for my equipment.”
“Heavy-duty stuff.” She didn’t want him to leave until she got at least something out of him, so she grabbed the first-aid kit from the bookshelf on the back wall and went to stand in front of him, half sitting on her desk. “Let me see this. Look up, please.”
He did, but only to send her a death glare. “I’m fine.”
“Of course you are, mucho macho and all that. Which is how I know you won’t be scared of a little sting.”
He’d cleaned and disinfected his injuries from the looks of it; the smaller scrapes were already scabbed over, but she didn’t like the larger gash over his cheekbone where his skin had split.
“I assume you didn’t go get stiches because you don’t have the time, not because you’re scared of the needle?”
He shot her a dark look. He did that so well. Must have been part of his training.
“Why don’t I slap on some butterfly bandages, as long as we’re both here. Then you won’t have to go see a doc. You’ll save a ton of time that you can use to glare at people. I’d hate to see you slip off schedule.”
His eyes remained stoic, but the corner of his sculpted mouth twitched. “Make it quick.”
“How about you tell me who you guys are for real? Who do you really work for?”
“That’s on a need-to-k
now basis.”
“You’re in my town, on my turf. I need to know.”
“I don’t think you have the right clearance, Deputy Sheriff.”
He said deputy sheriff as a slur, as if he was calling her babe or maybe some other word that started with a b.
She focused on the disinfecting and the butterfly bandages to keep herself from engaging in contact unbecoming a police officer. When he was good to go, she closed her kit and walked back behind her desk.
“How about you tell me the basics,” she suggested. “Something to get started with.”
“I’m here for my equipment,” he repeated.
Okay, then. He wasn’t going to be an easy nut to crack.
She shoved aside a manila envelope somebody had left on her desk and folded her hands in front of her. “Just so we’re clear on this one thing, this is my town. You make trouble here and I’ll know why.”
Being a Southern belle and a lady came naturally to her. She’d been raised on the beauty-queen circuit, but some days she did have her lapses. Looked like it was going to be one of those days.
His eyebrow slid higher. “Do I look like trouble?”
“Double serving. With whipped cream and cherry on top.”
A bark of laughter escaped him, softening his face, and she caught a glimpse of what he might have been at one time, without all the darkness he was now carrying. It took her breath away.
Phew, all righty, then. She shook her head to clear the image.
So unfair that she would find him attractive. He was in her town doing secret things. He was about as pleasant as a wild boar with a toothache. He was high-handed. She didn’t want to like him, not even a little.
“What’s your team really doing on the border?” she asked again, and waited.
And waited.
“Ryder McKay said that you’ll be my liaison. Liaise.” She raised her eyebrows into her best schoolmarm look.
He still waited another couple of stubborn seconds before he finally said, “We’re here about the smuggling.”
“But not to make policy recommendations,” she guessed.
He shook his head, watched her, measured her up again. “We’re here to intercept a special transfer.”
