“The man who approached you,” Sadir said. “What did he look like?”
“I don’t know, it was dark.” Waving a hand, Ian said, “Early fifties, I guess? Big guy, not really fat, just solid. Definitely Latino—maybe Mexican, I’m not sure. He had a thick accent.”
Charles’s mouth fell open. “Ángel . . .”
“There are tens of thousands of men who fit that description,” Ángel said, his voice tight.
Tens of thousands of men who fit that description and had motivation to fuck with Ángel’s mind this way? Sure.
“I’m sorry, I just have to ask.” Sadir leaned forward over the table, her sympathetic smile inviting confession. “It didn’t strike you as odd that this man would be willing to pay you so much money to sleep with and then harass his ex?”
“Well, after he showed me a picture of Ángel, I figured it was one of those gold-digger situations, you know, and Ángel had gotten bored and started fucking around on the side. No way is a guy who looks like that going to stay in some old dude’s bed for long, no matter how rich.”
Ángel’s nostrils flared. Charles took another step away from him, just to be safe.
“Look, I know it was a dick move, okay?” Ian said. “I’m sorry. I really needed the money. And obviously I had no idea he was a federal agent, or I wouldn’t have done it. But I don’t understand why this is such a big deal that I need to talk to the FBI, for God’s sake. Is what I did even technically illegal?”
Sadir hesitated, drumming her fingers against the tabletop. Charles didn’t need to see her face to infer her thoughts. He’d said it to Ángel himself just minutes earlier—after the way Ángel had brought Ian in, there was no way they could charge him with anything. Even a crappy lawyer would have the case thrown out in half an hour; a good lawyer could talk Ian into bringing charges against Ángel.
“There’s a possibility that the man who approached you was Raúl Esparza,” Sadir said carefully. “He’s a criminal with strong ties to Mexican cartels, and if it was him, he’s also wanted for questioning in connection with the disappearance of another ATF agent.”
Ángel clenched his fist and lifted it, as if he were about to bang on the glass, but pulled his hand back at the last second. “Raúl is dead, you idiot,” he muttered.
Deciding discretion was by far the better part of valor, Charles kept his mouth shut.
Ian, for his part, could not have looked more horrified. “Oh my God,” he said, scrubbing his hands over his face. “I . . . I didn’t . . .” Raising his head, he said, “I want a lawyer.”
Ángel did bang his hand against the glass then, causing both Ian and Sadir to startle. With a sound of deep disgust, Ángel stormed out of the room, slamming the door behind himself.
Charles stayed for a few more minutes, listening to Sadir unsuccessfully try to talk Ian out of his request for a lawyer before she gave up. Then he sighed and left to fill Eva in on this latest debacle.
What a fantastic start to the day.
Behind the office was an open concrete space where some of the staff took their smoke breaks. Ángel stepped out into the sunlight, smiled at the group of three smokers who were chatting among themselves, and moved as far away from them as possible. Leaning against the side of the building, he drew a deep breath and then pulled his phone out of his pocket.
Jesenia answered on the second ring. “Ángel? ¿Como estás?”
“Pues más o menos.” Ángel swallowed hard. “There’s something you deserve to know.”
“What is it?”
“There’s a chance Raúl Esparza may be alive.”
This was greeted by a long silence before Jesenia said, “What,” with absolutely no inflection.
Ángel gave her a quick account of the events of the past few days, beginning with the bloody delivery of his personnel record and ending with Ian’s confession. Laying it all out in a logical sequence calmed him down, and by the time he finished, he felt less like he was falling down the rabbit hole.
“Holy shit,” Jesenia said. “Holy shit.”
“I don’t think it’s him,” said Ángel. “I genuinely don’t. You know I was with him when he died, and I just don’t see how he could have faked that convincingly when I was so close to him. But I also can’t come up with another explanation for what’s been happening.”
“You need to leave California.”
“Jesenia—”
“Lo digo en serio, Ángel,” Jesenia snapped. “This is crazy. What’s your plan here, to wait around for this to keep escalating until whoever it is tries to kill you?”
Ángel scuffed his toe along a crack in the pavement.
Softening her tone, Jesenia said, “My uncle—well, my ex-uncle, really—has a hunting lodge in the forest in Canada. It’s gorgeous and super private. I could talk him into letting you use it for a while, at least until the FBI finds Paul and this all gets straightened out. You should have had some time off before you jumped back into work, anyway. I think it would be great for you to go somewhere you can relax and be alone.”
“That’s very generous,” Ángel said, touched. “But if I run now, I’ll never be able to stop running. Here, I can be prepared; I have the office to back me up. Maybe the FBI will actually do their jobs for once, but if they don’t, this is going to get nasty before it gets better. I’d rather face that on my own terms than have it hit me in the back while I’m running away.”
Jesenia sighed. “This is the kind of nonsense that led to you going undercover in the first place, you know,” she said, though she sounded fond.
“¡Mira quién habla!”
She laughed. “The offer still stands. When you realize what a terrible idea it is to stay there—and you will—I’ll help you get out.”
They talked a bit more, until Ángel could no longer put off returning to work. He slipped back into the building, walking up four flights of stairs instead of taking the elevator, and stopped in the break room to fill a travel mug with coffee. With no other way to delay joining his new team, he headed for their cluster.
Everyone else was already there, and one glance at their faces was enough to confirm that they knew all about what had happened last night and this morning. They had too much class to say anything to him about it, though, and greeted Ángel normally as he took his seat.
The plan for the day was to scout potential sites for the Jackals’ expected weapons delivery. Jade had found a few possibilities the night before, and she and Ángel would continue the investigation, feeding information to the rest of the team on the ground in Chula Vista. Once assignments were made and the team broke up, Ángel’s tension eased. A day spent on the computer in Jade’s amiable company wouldn’t be too taxing for his stressed-out, sleep-deprived brain. He lifted his coffee to his mouth.
“Try not to pull your gun on any civilians while we’re gone,” Charles sniped at him as he walked past.
Ángel slammed his mug down on his desk, gritting his teeth, but Charles was already gone.
Jade peered at him over her computer monitor. “Don’t listen to him,” she said as Ángel picked his coffee up again. “He’s been super salty ever since his fiancée left him.”
Ángel didn’t quite do a spit take, but it was a near thing. “His fiancée?”
“Yeah, Amy. She moved out about a month ago.”
Jade returned her attention to her computer, and Ángel wiped the back of his hand over his mouth, considering the timing. Charles had been in Tucson just two years ago; it was unlikely he’d been transferred to San Diego right after Ángel had left.
“When did Charles move here?” he asked.
“Um . . . a year and a half ago, I think?” At Ángel’s answering silence, Jade met his eyes and said, “Yeah, it happened fast. Too fast, if you ask me. Honestly, I think it’s why their relationship hit the rocks, but I don’t know for sure. Charles isn’t exactly chatty about his personal life.”
Ángel snorted at the gross understatement, and Jade grinned. Kn
owing he couldn’t pursue this any further without making her suspicious, he focused on the queue of lease agreements waiting for his inspection.
Charles had spent over a year with Ángel, refusing to even call what they were doing a relationship—but then he’d met, moved in with, and fucking proposed to some random woman in little more time than that.
They hit on the right warehouse in the late afternoon. It was owned by a cousin of one of the Jackals, used for what appeared to be a legitimate import-export business. A bit of digging revealed that most of the regular employees had been scheduled off the following afternoon, during which there was a suspicious and unexplained lack of officially scheduled deliveries.
The necessary warrants were obtained, and it was child’s play for Jade to disable the warehouse’s security after dark so that Charles and Eva could slip inside.
“This place is a maze.” Eva clicked on her flashlight after they’d entered through the back door.
“That’ll be good for us tomorrow,” said Charles.
The two-story warehouse was jam-packed with movable shelving units that towered to the ceiling and were crammed with crates of iron and steel products. The few aisles between the units were narrow and claustrophobic.
Charles and Eva picked their way around the shelves, heading for the warehouse’s docking bay. When they emerged from the maze, they both stopped short, and Charles let out a low whistle.
Over a dozen cars of various makes and models had been parked in the bay, taking up every inch of available space except for an area that was just big enough to squeeze in a good-sized truck. The cars were all popular, common sedans in neutral colors, worn in but not banged up—nothing a person would look at twice on the street.
“Guess they’re going to split the shipment up right away,” Eva said.
“Looks like it’ll be a big one, too.” Charles shone his flashlight through the windshield of the nearest car and glanced at the driver’s side dashboard. “Siren, you ready for these VINs?”
“Roger.”
While Charles read off each car’s VIN and license plate, Eva moved silently around the loading bay, setting up a few tiny cameras in strategic positions. She rejoined him just as he finished with the last car.
“No point in tagging these cars now,” she said. “They might scan them for trackers before they load them up.”
Charles nodded. “What do you think they’ve got coming in, WASR-10s?” The Romanian knockoff of the AK-47 was a popular choice among Mexican cartels.
“Probably. Though I don’t know why they’d break their MO and risk bringing them all this way by truck before splitting them up.”
“So far all the cars are coming back clean,” Jade said over comms. “I can see a couple of family connections to the Jackals without even trying.”
The gang’s favored method of smuggling was to conceal weapons in hidden compartments inside cars belonging to family members with clean records. One of their highest-volume smugglers was a Jackal’s seventy-six-year-old grandmother.
“I think we’re all set for tomorrow,” said Eva. “But we’re going to have to come up with another method of entry. We won’t be able to just stroll in here in the middle of a workday while the warehouse is full of gangbangers.”
Charles looked around the warehouse, his eyes lingering on the wide awning-style windows at the very tops of the walls. They were positioned close enough to the top shelves of the units to allow for a safe drop.
Following the direction of his gaze, Eva said, “Ugh. Okay, which one of us is going to climb up there and unlock one of those?”
Charles turned back to her. “Rock, Paper, Scissors?”
He went with scissors; Eva crushed him with rock. She crowed in quiet triumph.
“He throw scissors?” Jade asked.
“Yep.”
“Every time, dude. Get some new moves.”
Charles sighed, grabbed a grease-stained towel from a bench in the loading bay, and headed for the opposite side of the warehouse. He navigated the shelving units until he reached a movable staircase, then climbed all the way up and eased himself onto the top of the crates against the wall. Moving carefully, he walked along the crates to a corner where the shadows would provide decent cover even in daylight.
These windows hadn’t been opened in years—if they’d ever been opened at all. Charles cranked the lever as much as he could, but he had to throw his shoulder against the window a few times before it finally popped out of its frame. He opened and closed the window until the hinge moved smoothly, then threaded the towel along the frame so that pieces of it stuck out at either end when he closed the window again. Tomorrow, he and Eva would be able to use the makeshift handles created by the towel to open the window from the outside.
Charles returned safely to the ground and met Eva by the back door. Once Jade had given the all clear, they left the warehouse and crossed the street, walking the three blocks to Eva’s car.
“All good on our end,” Eva said as she buckled her seat belt. “See you tomorrow, Siren.”
“Roger that, Valkyrie. Siren out.”
Charles took out his earpiece and dropped it into his pocket. Eva started the car and pulled away from the curb.
“Want to come over for dinner?” she asked. “Greg’s making pot roast.”
“I have plans,” Charles lied.
Eva gave him a frankly incredulous look.
“I do,” he said. He couldn’t tell Eva that he couldn’t bear to be around her, Greg, and the kids right now.
“With whom?”
“A woman I met at the gym.”
That was Charles’s only option for a cover story; he didn’t go anywhere else besides work, which was obviously out. Eva raised her eyebrows but didn’t push it.
After Eva dropped him at his car, Charles stopped by the grocery store to pick up a precooked rotisserie chicken and a bag of frozen vegetables. Back at his apartment, he settled on the couch with his dinner, cracked open a beer, and turned on the Indiana State football game he’d DVRed over the weekend.
He glanced at the clock on his cable box. Ángel wouldn’t be stupid enough to go out again tonight, would he? Bored or not, he would know better than to risk it. Maybe Charles should check to make sure, though . . .
Charles had keyed in the pass code to his phone before he fully realized what he was doing. “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” he said, irritated with himself. Setting his plate aside, he took his phone into his bedroom and threw it into a drawer so he wouldn’t be tempted to use it. All evidence to the contrary, Ángel didn’t need a babysitter.
Charles’s towel trick worked like a charm, and after creeping up the side of the warehouse the next day, he and Eva got the window open with little fuss. Eva lowered herself in first; Charles followed, dropping to his feet on the crates and immediately hunkering down into a crouch.
Their side of the warehouse was deserted, but the loading bay was chock-full of boisterous Jackals milling around and shooting the shit while they waited for the delivery. Charles and Eva had a relatively clear view of them from their perch, which meant there was a chance the Jackals could spot them too.
“We need to get on the ground,” Eva whispered.
They crept along the crates to the nearest staircase and made it to the ground without incident. As they touched down, Jade said, “I count fourteen Jackals . . . no, fifteen. One just came out of the bathroom.”
She and Ángel were monitoring the video feeds from a nearby van; Shane and Sakura were posted on either end of the block, monitoring the environment and prepared to lend tactical assistance if necessary.
“Hey, Marcus got a haircut,” Jade said. “He looks pretty good.”
“Which one is Marcus?” Ángel asked.
“That one there, with the neck tattoo.”
“Hmm. Not bad.”
“Is there anyone you’re not attracted to, Siren?” Shane said with a laugh.
“Your mom,” said Jade.
“Guys.” Eva’s voice was no less fierce for its low volume. “Could we please concentrate a little more on the armed gang members?”
She and Charles inched through the warehouse. As they approached the loading bay, Shane said, “I’ve got a truck coming from the west.”
There were no more jokes after that. A breathless, focused tension crackled over the line while Shane relayed the truck’s information to Jade. Hunkered down close to the floor, Charles pressed his back against the shelves and peered around the corner.
The Jackals were a white gang, though they had friendly ties with a few Latino gangs with whom they had no territorial disputes. Most of the members present were men, with a couple of women mixed in, all tanned from the San Diego sun and tattooed with the esoteric symbols of gang communication. As would be expected of gunrunners, they were well and heavily armed.
The loading-bay door rumbled and rose. Snapping to attention, the Jackals moved out of the way of the large truck that backed inside, which was marked with the logo of a produce company.
Charles and Eva kept themselves hidden and silent as the Jackals shouted back and forth, opening up the truck and beginning to unload it.
“Only crates of produce for now,” Jade reported, since Charles and Eva didn’t have a clear sight line to the back of the truck. “Onions and garlic and stuff.”
A couple of minutes later, there was a succession of thumping and rolling noises that had Charles frowning in confusion.
“Now they’re just dumping the onions out on the floor. This is a terrible waste of— Oh hey, a gun case. Marcus is gonna check inside . . .”
Jade and Ángel gasped in unison.
“What is it?” Eva asked under her breath.
“That’s not a WASR-10,” said Ángel. “That’s an M4 carbine. With a grenade launcher.”
After a moment of startled silence, Sakura said, “A military M4 or a civilian replica?”
“Military,” said Jade. “No doubt. Fully automatic, 14.5-inch barrel. Also, the grenade launcher kind of gives it away.”
Charles and Eva exchanged a grim look.
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