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“Don’t tell me the files I gave you are at your office?”
“No.” She’d reverted back to twisting the ring again. “Relax. The only thing at the office is my inquiry related to Lester’s involvement. He’s sort of a white whale at our office, always slipping through and surviving our attempts to bring him down.”
“Where were you when you made the mistake that implicated me?”
“At the office. I changed up the files you gave me. Things aren’t as bad as they look.” He hoped he sounded convincing.
“Of course not.” She pushed her hands through her hair. “Myrtle Beach is the opposite direction from tonight’s fights. If they don’t move them.”
“They won’t move the fights. Lester’s too cocky and if Bingham is working with him, they have every reason to believe they’ve outsmarted us.”
“I wish I believed they haven’t.”
“Trust me.” He wanted to reach out, to let her feel his conviction in his touch. The idea was ludicrous. He kept his eyes on the road, until her silence got under his skin. “Heather?”
“I trust you.”
It wasn’t the most emphatic of statements, but he accepted it. “You were terrific in there when we were attacked and later with Bingham.”
She nodded, her gaze on the scenery whipping by as the city gave way to the tree-lined state roads.
“I would have prepped you if I’d known it was going to play out that way.”
“No problem,” she replied, her voice flat. “We got through it.”
“We have your camera and my pistol.”
“Okay.”
“We’ll go in tonight and gather enough evidence to take to the prosecutor.”
“All right.”
Exasperated, he reached over, lacing his fingers with hers and resting their joined hands on her warm, firm thigh. “What’s wrong?”
She turned, gifting him with a soft smile. “Nothing really.” She squeezed his hand. “It’s just been a day.”
“We’ll get to a safe place and then talk through a plan for tonight.”
She nodded, dropping her head back against the head rest and closing her eyes.
He didn’t like it, but he accepted her silent request for a break. From him. From the horrors of the day.
He drove on toward the beach and when the road was clear in all directions, he pulled over and scanned the car for a GPS tag. Discovering the car was clear felt like a massive victory under the circumstances.
When the stop didn’t wake Heather, he realized the toll this was taking on her. Untrained, she was clearly in over her head, but they were out of options. And apparently time, with Bingham sniffing around.
Tonight was a risk, but it was one they had to take. They needed faces to match up with the code names. They needed photos to share with the prosecutor. A money trail would be nice, but so far, he hadn’t found one.
So far. He repeated it over and over, like a chant. A determined investigator stuck with it, ferreting out leads until something panned out and a case could be made. No criminal skated forever, with or without the help of corrupt officials.
Lester was overconfident, as he should be with the local head of the FBI in his back pocket. They needed hard evidence and based on Heather’s expert analysis, they would have it tonight.
Unless the crew moved the fight.
They weren’t going to move the fight. They couldn’t. They had fresh dogs. They had an expectant clientele. Reorganizing would be costly and Lester wouldn’t waste that kind of money unless someone held a gun to his head. Dale’s experience proved the law of profit ranked right up there with the law of power among organized criminals.
At his second stop, a self-storage facility closer to the coast, Heather woke up.
