“I hope tonight goes well,” I whispered as I cuddled up against Chase.
“Get some rest. It will be fine.”
He held onto me. I closed my eyes as I felt the safety and comfort of his arms around me.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chase
This was it. We stood at the edge of the park and waited for Ramos to come to us. The plan was simple. We would show Ramos the book I had stolen from Escabar. We would show him that he had names of police and FBI agents that he appeared to be meeting with and working with.
Ramos would go off and take care of Escabar for betraying their confidence, and we would get out of town and let things calm down a bit. The plan was simple – if everything went as we had planned.
“You stay back here, Jordan. There is no reason for you to come out here. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” she said.
I didn’t want her to get mixed up in the exchange with Ramos. If anything went wrong, I wanted her to be in an area where she could get out and get to safety.
“I’m serious. No matter what, don’t come out of here.”
“I heard you, Chase. I know. I’ll stay here. If anything happens to you, I’ll go straight to your father’s house. I’ve already got it programmed into my GPS.”
My plan seemed pretty bulletproof, but you just never knew what might happen. I didn’t want Jordan to get injured if Ramos decided to go after me. He didn’t even need to know she was there at all.
“Is that him?” she asked quietly as she pointed to a man with three others walking behind him.
“I think so. Stay here.”
I took a deep breath and started to walk toward Ramos on the other end of the park. I still had a feeling that we were being watched, but we hadn’t seen anyone around to prove that theory.
Slowly, I walked toward Ramos and tried to keep myself as calm as I could. I didn’t want to look like a total amateur, but I also didn’t want to look like some sort of professional. Ramos couldn’t be threatened by me, either. If he felt threatened by me, the whole plan wouldn’t work, at all.
“Mr. Foster, I hope this is really good information you have for me,” Ramos said as he stood in front of me.
I tried to decide if I should reach my hand out to shake his hand or not but decided to follow his lead and keep my hands in my jacket. It was dark outside, and I suspected at least one of the men behind him had their hand on a gun in their jackets. I did not have a gun. In fact, I had no way of protecting myself at all if Ramos decided he wanted to hurt me.
“I believe you will find my information very useful.”
“You better hope that I do,” he said to me.
Then, there was a noise coming from where I had left Jordan. We both looked back there, but it was too dark to see what was going on. I just hoped that she stayed where I told her to and didn’t come out.
“I stole a black book from Escabar because he threatened to kill me.”
“Yes, I heard about that. Stupid move, if I must say so myself.”
“Well, inside that book I happened to see that Escabar has been feeding information to the feds and had several contacts in there.”
Just then, there were footsteps behind me and we all turned to look.
It was Escabar with Jordan held in front of him. He had a gun to her head.
“Chase, I really thought you were smarter than this,” he said.
“Nice of you to finally join us, Jose,” Ramos said.
My heart sank. I had not planned on Ramos and Escabar working together. I didn’t expect that Ramos would have been fine with Escabar giving information to the police.