“I see,” Makana paused for a moment. “Well, I suggest if you don’t have any ties with him, get far away from him as soon as possible.”
“What do you know? Is he a rogue FBI?” He looked the type. The beard was not standard issue.
“He’s not a rogue FBI agent. He doesn’t work for them.”
“You’re killing me, Mak,” Harley turned around, resting her arms on the hood of the car. The afternoon heat scorched her forearms. “What’s up?”
Makana hesitated. Whatever she had to say clearly bothered her. “Harley, he’s Special Tasks Bureau, International Homeland Safety Terrorist Unit.”
“What?”
“He’s one of us.”
Through the glass window Harley watched Dante emerge from the dressing room and made his way through the crowd of sales women waiting for him. “Really?”
“I promise you he’s an agent, I’ve worked with him. He’s good at what he does but he’ll do anything and say anything to make a case.”
Harley’s eyes glanced down at the empty spot on her ring finger. Her thumb rubbed against the smooth skin between her ring and middle finger. The gold band burned in her back pocket. “Tell me about it? What is he doing in Tallahassee?”
“It could be anything. Two of his team members have ties in Tallahassee and the last I heard, most of the department was calling them the Undesirables on account they keep taking the craziest assignments.”
The last adjective Harley would ever use to describe Dante would be undesirable. The man’s presence screamed walking-sex louder than a neon billboard sign over the interstate. “He claims he’s on the hunt for someone named Leonardo.”
For a moment Mak stayed quiet on the phone. When she finally spoke, her voice was steady, deadly. “Whatever Dante is doing with Leonardo, stay the hell away from it. Those two have a long history and you don’t want to get in the crossfire.”
Five years working with Mak and she’d never been steered wrong. Harley took her handler’s advice and thanked her. Dante stood at the counter paying for the outfit he already had on, a fitted black t-shirt and a better fitting pair of jeans. His thick muscular legs were made for denim. A car alarm sounded off, causing Harley to blink back to the present. She reached behind the wheel of her front tire for the spare key and extracted it from the box. A slight ding of the bell over the shop jingled as her engine came to life. Like a child, she couldn’t help but giggle at the sight of Dante with his bags getting smaller and smaller the further she left him in the dust.
Chapter 5
Dante refused to call Chet to pick him up. Chet would have a field day knowing he’d pissed Harley off. Chet warned him. Stupid of him to underestimate Harley. Of course, she’d stashed a hideaway key. Dante also did not want to involve Chet with anything remotely close to Leonardo Marchette.
Now Dante sat in the passenger’s seat of his teammate and best friend’s ’74 Monte Carlo Super Sport tapping his hand on the orange roof listening to Roman Torres’s belly laugh. Roman found Dante’s abandonment on the funny side. Dante found the laughter bittersweet, glad for his friend’s better mood since he and his wife divorced five years ago.
“Okay-okay, I’m done.” Roman sobered, “Anything for a case, eh Rossi?”
“Shut up and drive,” Dante banged the roof one more time, the shoulder strap brushed against the new black t-shirt he purchased. “Thanks for coming.”
“Whatever. This beats the hell out of what I was doing.”
Back in Washington Heights, Dante shared a place with Roman and their other teammate, Tito. They all worked for STB and carried the odd downtime hours. Dante didn’t realize Roman left New York until he’d called their handler Tim who informed him Roman’s whereabouts. Roman grew up not far from Tallahassee in Villa San Juan; so did his ex-wife—which explained the bad mood. Between the two of them, they’d come up with a compromise to not be in town when the other was there. He wondered if Roman ran into his ex.
“You need to talk?”
“Do I look like a fucking girl?”
Dante held his arms up in surrender. “All right, don’t rip my head off, I’m the one supposed to be in a bad mood right now. Have you been stranded half naked?”
“Does having all your clothes set on fire count?”
After what Roman went through with his ex, Sofia, Dante would let him win the argument. “Maybe so.”
“So what chick did you piss off last night?”
The GPS on his phone came back to life with a red indicator. “Go northwest. I didn’t piss her off until three hours ago.”
“Do I want to know?”
Dante filled his friend in on what happened in the last twenty-four hours, excluding the wedding. The stupid thing would be over soon enough. Telling Roman would be like telling the entire group and Dante did not want the jokes.