Drugs ruined lives. Was that what Joseph was up to?
She moved to get out of the boat just as Joseph pulled the starter rope and the engine sputtered to life. The two shooters emerged through the brush. One, the man she’d seen with the drugs, looked right at her and then slipped back into the trees. The other man, the one wearing the baseball hat, lifted his gun. A red dot appeared on Sierra’s chest. She ducked down in the boat.
Sierra had no choice. If she ran back on shore, she’d be shot for sure. She had to stay in Joseph’s boat.
But just what did Joseph have in mind? Why had he kept her alive?
Undercover DEA agent William Joseph Anderson glanced over his shoulder as a gunshot shattered the silence on the water.
The woman he’d pulled out of the forest lay flat in the boat. What had she been doing out there, anyway? Certainly not going for a stroll on the beach. Her interference messed up his investigation. Were the two thugs after her because she’d betrayed them?
Maybe she was trying to horn in on the drug activity.
Whether she was innocent or guilty, it was clear she was under threat. Now that he’d saved her life, she might have valuable information she’d share out of gratitude and a desire to destroy the men who were after her. As long as he could get it without giving up who he really was. At all costs, he had to maintain his cover.
Earlier in the day, Joseph had heard talk in the shop that a big drug distribution was about to go down at this spot. Other agents had traced a shipment out of Mexico headed to the northwest. It wasn’t hard to put two and two together. He’d come out to this part of the shore not to interfere with the transaction, but to see if he could spot who the players were. Investigations like this took a long time. A lot of information had to be gathered, or they ran the risk of the big players slipping from their clutches.
It was nothing to arrest the low-level dealers; most were kids just trying to support their own habit. DEA was after the big fish, whoever was behind this point of distribution. At best, they had blurry photos of him. Or pictures of the back of his head. His only identifying characteristics were that he dressed well and he often wore a large-faced gold watch.
He revved the boat engine. When he glanced over his shoulder, the men on shore were still taking aim at them. He’d come in the boat because he could anchor it in a cove unnoticed and sneak up to the site where the transaction was supposed to happen. A car parked on an underutilized road would have called attention to itself.
The fog enveloped them. To lessen the risk of hitting something, he clicked the boat down to an idle. It had been at least five minutes since the last shot was fired. The woman sat back up. He heard water lapping around the boat, but could see only a few feet in any direction.
He kept his voice low. “So do you want to tell me what you were doing out there at this time of night?”
“What were you doing out there?” Suspicion clouded her words.
He had to assume his cover wasn’t blown. “I like going out there at night. It’s quiet.”
“If you must know, I went up there to pick up a kid before he got himself into trouble. Trevor Bond is in the church youth group I help out with.”
So she ran a church youth group. A perfect way to build trust with kids and then get them hooked. “I know Trevor. He comes into the shop.” Trevor was one of the quiet ones. It broke his heart to think of any of those kids using. “He seems like he has his act together.”
“He’s only six months sober. He’s struggling not to go back into that life. To stay away from the people who got him involved in the first place.”
He caught the note of passion in her voice.
“Anyway, I’m worried about him,” she said. “I still don’t know where he went or what happened to him.” She lowered her voice half an octave. “Or why he ran away. Maybe he’s already in too deep.”
Trevor sounded a lot like Joseph’s little brother, Ezra. For Joseph, being a DEA agent was personal. Always a quiet kid, Ezra had died of a drug overdose when he was just seventeen. Joseph had been a junior in college when he got the call about Ezra. Such a waste of a beautiful life. His heart still ached over the loss.
Though he was not ready to let go of all his suspicions, he thought he detected genuine concern in her voice when she talked about Trevor. “What is your name, anyway?”
“Sierra,” she said. A moment of silence passed before she spoke again. “Where are you taking me?”
He glanced over at her. “I’m taking you home.”
She met his gaze. Her black hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and her blue eyes were the color of robin’s eggs. There was something almost cute about the way she pulled the sleeves of her hoodie down over her fingers. She really didn’t act like a drug dealer. All the same, she could be a girlfriend of one of those men. The shooters certainly seemed to want to take her out. Men like that didn’t put up with betrayal on any level.
It would be foolish to let go of his suspicions just yet. In any case, he was still irked about her messing up his surveillance.
“Why don’t you take me to the police station? I need to report this. And unless Trevor headed back home, he’s still missing.”
He wasn’t sure what to say to that. Because they suspected one of the local cops was tipping the dealers off, DEA didn’t want the city police getting wind of their activity.
“Or you can just take me to my car,” she said after he didn’t answer. “I can deal with this myself.”
“Obviously it’s not safe to go back there. You can go back tomorrow and get your car,” Joseph said. Her thinking was a little messed up, which was a normal response to the trauma of being shot at. Really, she was handling things quite well overall.
Joseph slowed down, so he could hear above his own motor.
She turned slightly in her seat. “What is it?”
“I thought I heard another boat.”
The fog hadn’t lifted at all. He didn’t see light anywhere.
Sierra whirled to one side and then the other. Her voice faltered. “I hear it, too.”
Joseph killed the motor. He doubted anyone was out for fun on a night like this. The other boat seemed to be circling around them, the motor growing louder and then fading. The motorboat swayed in the water as waves suctioned around it.
“They’re looking for us,” Sierra whispered. Her words were iced over with terror.
Joseph crouched. “Stay low.” Did they wait here and hope the searcher gave up, or did they risk making noise while trying to escape?
He wondered, too, why they were even coming after Sierra and him. He and Sierra been scared off, so why hadn’t the two men just gone back to their planned transaction? Why draw attention to themselves by hunting them down?
A light broke through the fog with the intensity of a knife slicing meat. Joseph could see the outline of a larger boat—and the man behind the helm lifting a gun. It was the man in the baseball
