Easing back in her chair, used by numerous others before her time, she glanced around the room, taking in the corkboard bulletin board and steel file cabinets.
Her office wasn’t fancy. Her job wasn’t, either. Lousy pay. Long hours. Lots of yelling when things went wrong. Nicole wouldn’t change a thing. She’d seen the other side of things, the money and power. And she’d paid the price.
Agent Flores, thankfully, put away his phone. Nicole was ready to end this conversation. “You can’t bring a witness in from nowhere and expect me to be okay with it.” She held up a staying finger to stop the argument she knew he’d offer. “We are talking about putting the biggest drug lord in the known world behind bars. I’m not going to do anything to jeopardize that. I haven’t even met your witness.”
“The agent is your ticket to conviction. If you can’t see that, maybe the U.S. Attorney can.”
That flared her temper. She didn’t want Dean bothered with this. He had enough to deal with right now. “Don’t even go there, because I promise, you won’t like the results. Dean doesn’t like it when his people are crossed. He’ll back me and shut you down. The bottom line is this—we won’t put a witness on the stand who we can’t meet before the trial. Either give me a meeting with your agent or this discussion is over.”
“It’s too dangerous,” he said, his lips tight, his words terse.
“Dangerous is going into court blind,” she said, pushing to her feet, a strand of blond hair slipping from her neat bun to fall into her eyes. Swiping at it, she started gathering her things for court and shoving them into her briefcase. She wasn’t foolish enough to walk away from a witness that could help her case; she just needed to validate his worth, which meant playing hardball. “I have to go.”
He stared at her, silent a little too long. “You need him, Nicole.” His voice was low. Intense.
She knew Agent Flores quite well. He rarely used her first name, and she didn’t miss the plea being issued. Nicole felt torn about her decision, questioning her own judgment when she normally would not. She imagined she had her weekend adventure in that bar to thank for that.
She hadn’t used her head then. And she didn’t want to let Alvarez slip away by refusing a witness. Still, gambling on an erotic encounter with a stranger was one thing. This case was too important to roll the dice and take unnecessary risks. Her resolve thickened. Putting a witness on the stand under these circumstances would be reckless, and she had no doubt that her boss would agree.
“I can’t give in on this,” she repeated. “There’s simply too much at stake.”
“Fine,” he said, drawing a deep breath and letting it out. “You can meet him.”
She rearranged some of the things on her desk. “I’m listening.”
“I have to talk to Vega, but he won’t come here, I know that much. You’ll have to go to him.”
That didn’t sound good, but neither did missing out on a chance to ensure a conviction. “Where?”
“I’ll call you with the details,” he said. “But tonight. I’ll make it happen. For you alone, though. No one else. Vega is going to be pissed as it is.”
“You won’t be able to reach me. I won’t be out of court until around six.”
He nodded. “Call me when you’re leaving. I’ll have everything arranged by then. And don’t tell anyone else about this. It’s too dangerous. Any leak could get him killed.”
“I know the way it works,” she said, but a feeling of unease danced along her nerve endings. Nicole grabbed her briefcase and purse and headed for the door, but not before fixing him with a hard stare. “Don’t make me regret this.”
***
NICOLE SAT IN the passenger’s side of a government-issued, unmarked Buick Sedan with an unfriendly U.S. Marshal driving. She stared out of the window, noting the sun shrinking beyond the horizon as a rainbow of color filled the sky. She’d been required to stop at three pay phones and then leave her own vehicle behind. Why she had allowed herself to be talked into coming out to the middle of nowhere, she didn’t know. As soon as she asked the question, though, she knew the answer.
Alvarez.
He was as bad as they came, linked directly and indirectly to getting a lot of kids hooked on drugs. To Nicole, the kids mattered in a big way. She’d grown up in Padre, ten minutes from Brownsville, a city on the border of Mexico. A city that sucked teens into drugs, both using and dealing. She’d seen them destroy too many people.
She was about to ask how much farther they had to go, when she spotted a small house tucked away in a cluster of trees, nearly invisible but for the moonlight.