if you need a reference or anything...”
“No offense, Vic, but I don’t think I’ll be adding front desk clerk to my résumé.”
“I meant a coworker reference from when we worked together at Clarke and Johnston,” she said, playfully slapping her arm.
Heather smiled at her friend. Nearly all traces of the high-powered, New York City woman had disappeared from her over the past few years, except for the tiniest spark in her eyes when she talked about her former life in the city. “Thanks,” she said.
“I’m going to go feed the baby now,” Victoria said, choking up again as she left the room.
“No crying!” Heather called after her.
Luke checked the phone and then pointed at her. “You’re going to be crying if you remind Victoria again about how much she loved her life in New York.”
“WHAT ON EARTH is that old lady doing?” Jacob mumbled, leaning low in the driver’s seat of his squad car to peer through the windshield. The people around here made no sense to him.
Rolling down the passenger-side window as he slowed the car and pulled to the side of the road in front of Ginger Snaps, the bakery he avoided on Main Street, he called out, careful not to startle the woman and extra careful not to use the nickname he’d assigned to her. “Ginger! Mrs. Norris—what are you doing?”
The woman was standing on a plastic step stool on the icy ground outside her bakery, holding on to the side of the building for support and using the end of a broomstick to swipe at the large icicles hanging from the awning.
She stopped and turned to look at him. “I’m clearing the awning of icicles. You threatened me with a fine if I didn’t do it, remember?” she snapped.
“You’re eighty years old. You shouldn’t be doing that. I meant ask someone to do it for you.” He’d noticed her granddaughter, Leigh, and her husband going inside the bakery at least once a week. And he was sure the guy was renting the space above the bakery for an office. Some bestselling author or something. Jacob may not care about the goings-on in town, but little escaped his notice.
“I’m seventy-seven,” she said, resuming her attempt to knock them loose, swinging the broom haphazardly.
He swallowed a curse and climbed out, sliding his hands into his gloves. “Get down, please,” he said, taking her elbow to assist her.
“Don’t get fresh with me, young man.”
Wow. “Just making sure you don’t break your neck on all of this packed snow that I’m pretty sure I asked you to have cleared weeks ago,” he said, taking the broom.
“I’ll do that next,” she mumbled.
He shook his head as he opened her bakery door and waved her inside, trying not to breathe in the delicious smell of gingerbread and cinnamon.
She muttered something under her breath as she passed him, and he couldn’t be sure that it was an insult aimed at him, but it certainly wasn’t “thank you.”
“Hey, Sheriff Matthews, when you’re done over there, could you maybe come do mine, as well?” Tina Miller, or Nosy Nelly, as he liked to think of her, called to him as she wrote on the specials board outside Joey’s Diner.
He gave a mock salute and continued working. The day before, he’d issued twenty-four-hour warnings to the business owners along Main Street to clear their awnings of these dangerous icicles. By the look of things, everyone had ignored him. Except Ginger. Well, they wouldn’t be laughing when an icicle fell on a passerby, and they were suddenly smacked with a lawsuit.
Oh, what was he thinking—no one sued anyone around here. A New York City boy from the time he could walk, he was so far out of his comfort zone in Brookhollow, he couldn’t even remember what his comfort zone felt like. But it certainly wasn’t this sense of being watched from afar and speculated about on a regular basis. He’d told himself that he was being paranoid, and that was natural given the extreme circumstances. But after his conversation with Heather the night before, he knew that wasn’t the case. People were watching and speculating and judging.
After clearing the awning, he went inside the bakery and immediately wished he hadn’t. The tempting aromas were almost too much to resist. But diabetic from the age of eight, he rarely consumed sweets or refined carbs. Keeping his blood sugars under control was his first priority. “Here are your broom and your step stool,” he said, leaving them inside the door.
“Did you want a muffin or something?” Ginger offered begrudgingly.
“No. What I want is for you to ask your granddaughter or her husband to come clear the walkway...or at least put salt or sand on it or something.” He was wasting his breath. No one around here listened to him. He was just the big-city, hotshot cop who didn’t understand about small-town life. Well, they were right about that. And unfortunately, uncleared walkways and awnings just didn’t compare to drug deals and dangerous criminals on his scale of what mattered. But unfortunately, this was what he was reduced to dealing with...and he was still a cop, for better or worse.
“Will do,” she said, rushing to the kitchen at the sound of the oven timer.
“No, you won’t,” he mumbled, heading back outside.
As he returned to the squad car, his glucose monitor beeped. Great, he was low. He could have had a muffin. He sighed as he checked the numbers. Three point four and dropping. This stupid disease was responsible for all of this, he thought, the memory of his last day undercover never too far from his mind.
His blood glucose monitor had been beeping that day, too, revealing that his sugar levels were dropping steadily for almost an hour. He’d searched his vehicle for a juice box or a granola bar...an old doughnut or candy...
But found nothing.
He hadn’t expected to be waiting that long for Leo Gonzales to emerge from the warehouse. Most exchanges happened quickly, so as not to draw attention. All Jacob had needed was visual confirmation that Gonzales was dealing with Mario Lorenzo, the drug lord they’d been chasing, and he’d have everything necessary to put the man away for a long time. His two-year undercover stint would be over and he could resume some semblance of a life after debriefing and resocialization.
The longer he’d been under, the harder it had been to remember who he really was. He tried to visit his family—his sister and nephew—a weekend every month or a few stolen days over the holidays, but it had been getting tougher to leave the cartel unnoticed. Tougher to leave the persona behind and become Uncle Jacob again. Then to go back to being a drug-pushing thug.
Deciding to work undercover hadn’t been easy for him, knowing he’d have to leave his family for long periods of time, but he’d gone into policing to make a difference, and despite the extreme living conditions and having to pretend to be something he despised, he was so close...he was making a difference...
The door to the warehouse opened, and he sat straighter, but Gonzales exited alone, scanned the area, then went back inside. It wasn’t enough. He needed to see Gonzales and Lorenzo together.
