Holly Lin Box Set | Books 1-3

by Swartwood, Robert

  I don’t answer. Just keep staring back at her. Wondering how I could be so careless. I thought I did enough research to make sure she was legit, but apparently not.

  “In case you’re wondering, my name isn’t Leila Simmons. But for now feel free to think of me as Leila. By the way, Eleanora is doing well. That’s actually her real name. Just like Juana was really the name of the girl those two agents killed.”

  She pauses, shakes her head with a soft sigh.

  “Such a shame what happened. But she knew what she was getting into. All the girls we take in know what they’re getting into. They’re desperate, you understand. They’ll do anything to save their children. They’ll do anything to make a better life for themselves.”

  Another pause, and now the small smile turns cold.

  “Of course, in the end, they almost always get fucked over. But blame that on today’s marketplace—it’s the children who are the moneymakers, not the girls. Most of them are damaged by the time they get to us. They’re no longer as … pure as our buyers would like.”

  Okay, enough of this shit. I’m done staying silent.

  “Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t shout for the sheriff and have you arrested right this second.”

  The woman smiles again, and presses the buttons on the briefcase to unlatch it. She lifts the top and pulls out some photographs. Like with Sheriff Gilbert, the photographs are large, but they’re not 6 x 9. These are in color, and there are three of them. She lays them out on the table in front of me. Seeing them, my heart stops.

  Leila taps the tip of her fingernail on the tabletop as she speaks.

  “I don’t have much time, so I’m going to cut to the chase. We know who are. We know your name is Holly Lin. That you worked covert missions for the United States government. That you spent your day keeping an eye on the children of General Walter Hadden. That your father also worked covert missions for the government, but that he went rogue a few years ago.”

  She keeps tapping her nail, a consistent, steady beat.

  “Do your sister and mother know what you really did? Or what your father did? Do you think they wonder why you disappeared, or did you tell them why you left?”

  In the center photograph is my mother. It looks like she’s at the grocery store, in the produce section. Inspecting a batch of bananas.

  “Your nephews are quite cute. What are their names? We know one is Matthew, but the other is …”

  She lets it hang there, as if she expects me to fill in the blank, but I continue to say nothing. I stare down at the photo on the left, the one that shows the two boys playing at the park. I’m not about to tell her the other boy’s name is Max.

  Leila keeps tapping her fingernail on the table.

  “And your sister’s husband’s name is Ryan. We know where he works. We know some of his coworkers. We know where he likes to have lunch during the week.”

  My sister and Ryan are in the third photograph. It’s taken from a distance. All the photographs are taken from a distance. My family—the ones I left D.C. to save, to protect—are being watched. Were being watched. It all depends on how long ago these photographs were taken.

  I lift my gaze to meet hers, and it takes everything I have not to launch myself across the table. Only I can’t. Not with my wrists shackled. She knows this, of course, and based on the look in her eyes, it amuses her greatly.

  When I speak, my voice is just above a whisper.

  “What do you want?”

  She lifts a finger, shakes it back and forth like a metronome, and reaches back into the briefcase. Pulls out another photograph, this one also in color.

  My heart stops again. Not in fear this time, but in surprise.

  Leila sets the photo on top of the others, turned so I can see it right side up.

  “Does this look familiar?”

  It does. Of course it does. The bedroom of a mansion overlooking the town of La Miserias. The mansion belonged to a man named Fernando Sanchez Morales. The Moraleses were the last remaining cartel family Alejandro Cortez had targeted because of what they did to his family. Morales and his men had stormed La Miserias that night out of anger because the people had risen up and defied Morales, leaving his wife and child behind only to be guarded by a few men. By the time Nova and I arrived at the mansion, those men were killed, and Morales’s wife and child were cowering in the master bedroom while Alejandro Cortez stood over them.

  Leila watches me stare down at the photograph.

  “Morales became paranoid being locked up in his home. He wanted to make sure his family was safe, so he had security cameras installed. But he didn’t want his wife to feel like she was being watched all the time, so they were tiny cameras, hidden very well.”

  They must have been hidden very well, but I don’t remember seeing any cameras. Of course, at the time I was too focused on saving the woman’s and child’s lives. The possibility of hidden cameras was the last thing on my mind.

  “Where did you take his body, by the way?”

  She’s watching me now intently, eager to learn where we buried the man known as El Diablo.

  I say nothing.

  With a shrug, Leila gathers the photographs and slips them back into the briefcase.

  “On second thought, I don’t want to know. I like the mystery. It keeps things interesting.”

  She closes the briefcase.

  “Your friend—he’s a big, handsome man. We’ve tried finding him, too, but with no luck. He’s managed to do a better job at disappearing, it seems. You, on the other hand … you did pretty well, but social media got the better of you.”

  She waits a beat for a reaction, and smiles again.

  “You see, the people I work for are well connected, and they have a lot of money, enough money to pay the right people to scour social media for whatever or whomever we want. We gave them your picture, and they used their facial recognition software to start digging through social media. The way it was explained to me, it’s like a spider that skims the Web looking for somebody with the same dimensions as your face. For seven months they searched until they found a match. Somebody’s Instagram, a photo taken at your place of employment. You were in the background, but there was enough of your face that it gave an alert. Once we learned the location of the bar, we sent people down to confirm it was you, and we’ve been monitoring you ever since.”

  “How long?”

  She seems surprised I asked the question.

  “What do you mean?”

  “How long have you been monitoring me?”

  “About two months. Don’t look surprised. It’s not like we had people sitting in a van outside your apartment. We just made sure to keep an eye on you until the day came that we would need your assistance.”

  “I’m not helping you.”

  “No? Come now, Holly, look at these pictures of your family. We know that Ernesto Diaz’s son threatened them. That’s why you killed him and his men, and why you went to Mexico to kill Ernesto.”

  She’s right, of course. Javier Diaz did threaten my family, and because of that I did kill him and his men. I knew that once word got back to his father of what happened, his father would retaliate, and so I went to Mexico to kill him, too—and it was there that I stumbled into the war between Alejandro Cortez and Fernando Sanchez Morales.

  Leila smiles again, clearly impressed with herself.

  “The dots were always there. We simply needed a starting point. Don’t think Javier Diaz didn’t alert only his father that he planned to confront you. Others were aware. That’s how we’ve known about your family all this time. We just weren’t sure what to do with them, if anything. But like I said, we decided to keep an eye on you until we needed your assistance, and with those two ICE agents … let’s call it two birds with one stone.”

  She laughs suddenly, a soft chuckle, and shakes her head.

  “Now that’s an expression that makes sense. There’s something so simplistically barbaric about the ide
a of killing two things with one item, don’t you think?”

  I don’t bother answering. I keep thinking about the photographs in the briefcase.

  Leila snaps the briefcase shut, pulls it close to her.

  “Obviously you aren’t taking this seriously. I guess you want your family to die. So be it.”

  She starts to stand, but I tell her to wait, and she stands there, watching me.

  I say, “What do you want?”

  “Right now? I want you to know we have people watching your family. At any moment they’re prepared to kill your mother and sister, even your nephews. If you don’t want that to happen, you’re going to do exactly what we tell you to do.”

  “And what is that?”

  The small smile lights back on her face.

  “That will come in time. For now, I want to make sure we’re on the same page. And I know what you’re thinking—that maybe you’ll try to get them to arrest me on my way out, see the photographs in my briefcase, but I wouldn’t advise that. If I don’t leave here in the next five minutes, your family dies. And in terms of phone calls, I’ve already made them aware you don’t want any phone calls. Besides, the U.S. Marshals will be here shortly. And once they take you into their custody, you won’t be in any position to make phone calls.”

  Without another word, she heads for the door.

  I watch her go, wanting to say something, wanting to lift the table and throw it at her and snap her back in half, but the afterimage of my mother and sister and my sister’s family stays in my mind. As long as they’re in danger, I can’t make any moves against this woman or anyone else she’s working with.

  Leila knocks on the door to let the guard outside know that she’s done. She glances at the camera in the corner by the ceiling, at the cord she’d pulled, and shrugs at me. Not her problem.

  She smiles again.

  “We’ll be seeing you soon, Holly.”

  The door creaks open, and she steps out into the hallway.

  Twenty-One

  For a solid minute, I don’t move. Don’t breathe. Don’t even blink. I stare at the door, at the space where that woman stood, and do everything in my power not to scream.

  Those photographs Leila showed me are seared into my brain. Even with my eyes open, I can still see them. My mother at the grocery store. My nephews playing in a park. My sister and her husband standing together.

  Everything I did after I killed Javier Diaz was to protect them—my trip to Mexico, to take out Javier’s father, and then returning to the U.S. and starting a new life in the middle of nowhere. Did I miss my family, even though they often drove me nuts? Of course. But it was my love for them that kept me strong, ensured I never gave in and contacted them.

  I thought I eliminated the only link between my family and the world of killers. Apparently, I was wrong.

  Finally I close my eyes, suck in a heavy breath. I need to come up with a game plan. Something to get word to Atticus. Atticus will know what to do. He’ll make sure my family is safe. He’ll—

  The door opens again.

  I expect it to be Sheriff Gilbert, or a deputy, or maybe one of the U.S. Marshals, but it’s not any of them.

  Erik Johnson has on jeans and gray T-shirt. He stands in the doorway. Leans in slightly to glance up at the camera, does a sort of double take when he notices the wire has been unplugged. He focuses his glare on me.

  “You make me sick.”

  I can tell he’s been practicing the line, probably running it over and over in his head. The way he would eye me down. The way he would stand there with shoulders back, his chin tilted up. He’s pissed because he thinks I’ve been lying to him all this time, and while it’s true I have been lying to him, I’ve been lying to him for a completely different reason. Not that it would matter to him right now, or even make sense, but that doesn’t stop me from seeing him as my last chance of saving my family.

  “I need your help.”

  This clearly surprises him, but his glare doesn’t waver.

  “Why the fuck would I do anything for you?”

  “Don’t think of it as for me. It’s for my family. They’re in danger.”

  This clearly surprises him too, and he frowns for the first time.

  “What family?”

  “They’re not going to let me make a phone call. That woman—she’s not a real lawyer. She’s—”

  Well, who is she? It’s too complicated to get into it. I don’t have time to explain how she set me up to kill those two men. Because she knew I was the kind of person who would kill them. The kind of person who wouldn’t let the murder of a girl go unavenged.

  Erik takes a step back, leans his head out the door to look down the hallway, then focuses his glare on me again.

  “I shouldn’t even be here right now. They’ve suspended me. They interrogated me. I’m under investigation. Like I had any idea what kind of monster you are.”

  Obviously he’s talked his fellow deputies into sneaking him in here before the U.S. Marshals take me away. So that he can tell me off. I don’t blame him, and if I hadn’t just had a visit from the woman I knew as Leila Simmons, I would let him vent.

  I say, “Will you remember this number?”

  He doesn’t answer.

  I recite the number Atticus gave me a year ago, the one he said to call if I’m ever in trouble or need to get hold of him. After I recite it, I say it again, slowly this time, to make sure it sinks into Erik’s head.

  “Nobody will answer. It’ll be for a company called Scout’s Dry Cleaning. Leave a message. Say Holly’s family is in danger.”

  His face changes, clouds with confusion.

  “Who the hell is Holly?”

  Before I can answer, there’s a sudden whistle down the hallway, one of the deputies giving him the signal that his time’s up.

  Erik doesn’t waste time—he steps away, quietly shuts the door.

  I’m left sitting there, shackled to the table, staring at empty space again, and it’s another minute before the door opens and Sheriff Gilbert peers in, his face as hard and severe as his gruff voice.

  “Your ride’s here.”

  Twenty-Two

  There are only two U.S. Marshals. Neither one speaks to me. They pat me down, one of the Marshals signs off on a form on a clipboard, and then I’m being led down a hallway toward the side entrance.

  A brand-new Chevy Caprice is parked outside. It gleams under the midday sun. A few deputies stand off to the side, as well as a few state police officers, and beyond them—past a barrier of police cruisers—sits a local news affiliate van, a cameraman already set up with the reporter standing next to him. They watch me, just like everybody else, as I’m loaded into the back of the Caprice, shuffling across the seat with my ankles and wrists still shackled.

  Soon the Marshals climb into the car and we begin to move.

  The cameraman shifts his weight as he tracks us with his camera. I sense him from the corner of my eye, just outside the window, but I keep staring forward.

  The Caprice’s engine purrs as we accelerate down the street, headed for the highway.

  The Marshal in the passenger seat makes a quick phone call, says that we just left, and then sets his phone aside. Both of them have on sunglasses, and neither acknowledges me. I can’t tell if the driver even glances at me in the rearview mirror.

  While I’ve murdered two federal agents, it hasn’t become a national story. At least, not yet. A news chopper doesn’t follow us. The local affiliate van doesn’t follow us. Nobody follows us as far as I can tell—not even a deputy’s cruiser—and soon we’re speeding down the empty highway, headed south, the landscape mostly desolate except for the foothills off in the distance.

  The air condition is on, set to low. An uneasy silence fills the car.

  Not once do I feel the need to argue my case to these Marshals. They’re merely my escort. Eventually I’ll be taken in front of a judge for an adjudication hearing. I’ll be prosecuted on the federal le
vel. There’s a lot of damning evidence against me—the photographs, of course, as well as my weapons—and I’ll be lucky if I don’t end up with the death penalty.

  My only hope now is that Erik moves past his sudden hatred for me and makes that phone call. All I need is for Atticus to hear that my family is in danger. At this point, I have no illusions I’ll be saved. I’ve always known a day like this would come, anyway. All my years of killing for the government, knowing if I were ever caught the government would disavow me and that I would be on my own. I’ve always known that risk, and I’ve been okay with it just as I’m okay with it now. Those men were corrupt, and the previous night they had killed Juana, and there was no telling what they planned to do with Eleanora.

  Up front, the Marshal in the passenger seat leans forward to adjust the air. He lowers his window a crack, and air whips in through the slit.

  He says, “I could use a cigarette.”

  The driver, keeping his face tilted forward, grunts in agreement.

  A billboard looms ahead, only a couple hundred yards away. It’s the only thing marking the landscape, one of those full-size billboards that goes right down to the ground. There isn’t even an ad on it, just a message saying that the thing is for rent with a number to call.

  I find myself focusing on the billboard for some reason, and it’s only a moment or two before I understand the reason why.

  Movement beside the billboard, what appears to be somebody stationed there, and the sun is angled in the sky just right that it glints off what I instantly realize is a scope lens.

  I shout, “Look out!”

  The windshield spiderwebs and half of the driver’s head disappears. Blood and bits of brain tissue splatter the inside of the car.

  The passenger reacts at once, pulling his gun while he leans over to grab the wheel.

  That’s when I hear an engine coming up behind us and glance back through the rear window. A massive pickup truck is right on our tail. Two men sit up front, both wearing balaclavas.