knew it. “Get out of state. Go to Albuquerque and I’ll meet you there. At the usual place. I know it’s not ideal—”
“Hell,” Rico snarled. “We could be caught because of your stupidity. She knows what you look like.”
He was on Rico, his hands around his throat threatening to choke the life out of him. Someone had him from behind and pulled him off.
“It’s over, Lucas, you don’t call the shots on this one,” Rico said with a knife’s edge to his voice. “Take Chen.” He gave the young man a shove.
Lucas had to fight to cool the anger that ran hot and blistering through his veins. He had to fight not to kill Rico here and now. But those feelings would only get in the way of what he needed to do. Rico was right about one thing: he’d screwed up royally. It was him the witness had seen—no one else. This was the first time there’d been a witness who had seen one of their faces. His face.
He couldn’t believe he’d screwed up so royally. He didn’t know what he’d been thinking, or more accurately, not thinking. He’d thought nothing of it when he’d bumped into her on the street. She was a passerby, nothing more. She didn’t know who he was or what he’d done or what he planned to do. Instead of on her, his mind had been on the heist.
The last place he had expected her to go was the same bank he was in the process of robbing. She’d been on the wrong side of the street for that. So was he, but that was part of how he entered any bank, from the opposite side. That upped the chances that anyone who might see him wouldn’t connect him with the bank. He was also superstitious. He considered an approach from the opposite side to be lucky.
Their encounter had been an inconvenience—that was it. They’d bumped into each other and gone their separate ways. And now, she had to die for what she’d seen.
He grimaced. Bad luck had tailed him since the beginning of this robbery. To have the woman who’d gotten a clear view of him enter the bank in the midst of the robbery was the height of bad luck, or so he’d thought. But it got worse. The interruption allowed one of the tellers to set off the alarm. There’d been no time to do anything but get the hell out.
As a result, they’d run down a back alley, jumping into the nondescript SUV that had brought them there. By the time they were in motion, the sirens were shrill. The call had been too close, and it had all been downhill from there. They’d gotten away with a few thousand dollars, and only one step ahead of law enforcement. That was way too narrow of a getaway and too little of a take. The whole thing had been a fiasco from beginning to end.
She had no idea who he was, but she knew what he looked like. The authorities would soon have his face on file. Everything had looked grim until he’d remembered the card he’d picked up when her belongings had scattered on the sidewalk. He wasn’t sure why he had done it—it might have been instinct. What it turned out was to be a bit of good luck. He had the witness’s identity and her address. He’d had to wait until dark and even beyond that. It was around eleven, late enough that if the neighborhood wasn’t asleep, it had mostly settled in for the night.
“Slow,” he hissed in Spanish to the driver of the vehicle as they took the turn into the crescent where she lived.
“Here,” he said a minute later. “Stop.” They were half a block from her house.
He paused on the sidewalk. The few streetlights left the street shadowy and the houses in darkness. Despite that, he knew what the area was—he’d learned that immediately after finding her identity. It consisted of a middle-class group of mixed ethnicities, he thought with disdain. Some day he would buy and sell an area like this. Small cozy houses and neatly kept lawns as if the residents had nothing better to do than to monitor grass.
His hand dropped to his gun. It was there and ready. He hated being in this position. The only good thing was that they’d waited until dark. Most people had settled down for the night. No one would get a good look at them and if they did, they’d see Chen. Lucas was sending him in first.
He felt good about none of this. The only thing that was going to make him feel better was a bullet between the witness’s pretty brown eyes. With that thought leading the way, he followed Chen. They’d go in through the back door. The alarm-warning sticker on her door meant nothing. The cheap door frame cracked when Chen shouldered it the first time and broke after the second. Nothing worried Lucas, not even the lights that he flicked recklessly on. They were masked and, as far as the alarm, by the time any monitoring agency reacted, they would be long gone.
But within minutes he knew one thing—she wasn’t there. There was no vehicle in the driveway and the toiletries in her bathroom—the essentials anyway, like toothpaste and toothbrush—were missing.
He spewed a string of curses in Spanish. He always resorted to his native tongue when his emotions got the best of him. Time was running short. He sent his accomplice to check the living area while he moved to the kitchen. There, he saw his first sign of hope, a notepad on her kitchen counter. He went over and couldn’t believe his luck. She’d written down flight information and it told him exactly what he needed to know. Two minutes later they’d left her neighborhood behind. Ten minutes after that, he was on the phone to his brother.
He explained the situation to him. “Are you in?” he asked and knew what the answer would be. His brother would do anything for money. That was why he was involved in one of the smaller Mexican drug cartels. He was counting on Yago’s ties and his greed. He needed someone on her tail immediately. He needed someone in charge of catching her in Mexico and that someone was his brother, Yago.
“She won’t get far. I know people who know people, if you know what I mean.”
He did. He knew how the cartels worked and how they could find anyone. Or at least the bigger ones could. He had his doubts about the men his brother was linked with. They were brutal, but he wasn’t too sure about their intel. What he did know was that right now, his brother and his connections were all he had. One way or another, she’d be found. He rolled the beads he always carried between the fingers of his right hand. They were lucky beads stolen from the hand of a dying woman.
He dropped the beads into his pocket. He hoped she’d savor her freedom, or for that matter, her life. Soon, all that would end.
“What do you mean, you’ve lost her?” United States Marshal Trent Nielsen couldn’t contain his frustration. Despite the fact that there’d been some interesting and complicated cases in his career that spanned a decade, this case was different. He knew the witness. It mattered like no case had mattered before. And he’d admit that to no one, not even to Jackson, a man he called friend. Going in, he’d been anxious to keep her safe—now it appeared she was far from that.
“Damn it, I should have been notified sooner.” His impatience wasn’t so much for the obvious reasons but something far more personal. Something that had had him volunteering for this assignment.
“Or what, this wouldn’t have happened?” asked Jackson Vidal, federal agent. “No one could have predicted this.” He raised an eyebrow. “Or is it something else that has your back up?”
“Having witness protection in place would have stopped her. You know it. This one’s on you,” Trent said. He took a breath. Anger couldn’t change any of what had happened. He needed info and he needed to get on the road after her. What was done couldn’t
