Silver Basilisk (Silver Shifters 4)

Too bad nobody had asked for her opinion on timing.

So they got coffee, then crossed the street to the enormous parking lot they’d entered their first night. It served not only the post office, but several adjacent businesses, most of which were not yet open this early, so it was largely empty except for a cluster of cars at one end.

One of these was Alejo’s rented van, which Rigo steered them toward. On the other side, away from the already intense morning sun, stood two men and two women. Alejo was one of the men, tall and rangy in build. But he was nearly dwarfed by an enormous, extremely handsome man, his hair and skin as dark as his eyes.

Godiva would not have recognized Lance Jackson Junior, who she recollected as a weedy kid with glasses and a gigantic Afro, except for his build. That was Lance Jackson Senior’s build—Mr. Jackson the firefighter and Boy Scout Master.

Lance no longer wore glasses, and he kept his hair short, but he was every bit as big as his father had been, if not bigger. At Rigo’s and Godiva’s approach, the group split up, Lance giving her a huge grin. “Ms. Cordova?”

“It’s Hidalgo now,” she said, “but you’re no longer in high school. Call me Godiva. Oh Lance, it’s great to see you again. So . . . what happened here?”

Lance’s smile vanished, and his dark eyes turned cold as he gestured toward the open back of the van. On the floor, trussed up tight, lay a man. His blond combover was messed up, his battered face a study in petulant fury.

“Mom,” Alejo said. She noticed distractedly that a bruise marked the side of his face. “I think you might remember Doug Barth.”

Godiva stared, then whispered behind her hand, “Is that Barf the Bully?”

Alejo gave a nod, suppressing an inadvertent grin. Then he said, “Waltzed into the post office lobby just after midnight. Straight to the box. Then right into my waiting arms.”

Godiva glanced at those bruised faces, and interpreted the words correctly: Barth had put up a fight. But he’d lost bigtime.

“Apparently he has a pal on the inside of the office who saves up the mail for a week at a time, then puts it into the slot at the end of the designated day. Which happened to fall yesterday. Isn’t that your test letter there?” Alejo was holding what looked like a much-used dayplanner or ledger. He used this to point the floor of the van near the tied man, where a bunch of mail had been neatly laid out.

There was her own handwriting on one, but to her absolute astonishment, the addressee on all five of the other letters—in a variety of hands—was ‘Alejandro Cordova.’

“I don’t understand,” Godiva said.

“I think it’s my fault,” Lance spoke up, his voice a basso rumble. “Alejo says he told you how he asked me to check the box after he took off to find his dad. Which I did, the first time late that summer, then after school pretty much every day I didn’t have football practice, all through senior year of high school. And every couple of months after that, right up until a few weeks ago. What I didn’t know was, Barth followed me, my guess is that very first summer. Saw me work the combination. Stole the letters out of spite—”

Here Barth started cussing them both out.

Lance just raised his voice, drowning out the noise. “—and what we’re beginning to piece together right now, is that he apparently decided that this would be the perfect front for running scams. He seems to have thought it foolproof. If he ever got caught, the authorities would go after Alejandro Cordova.”

“Only there isn’t any Alejandro Cordova,” Alejo spoke up, addressing the sweaty, crimson-faced man lying on the floor of the van. “I changed my last name when I turned twenty-one.”

Barth stopped cussing, and snarled, “You never said anything in that crap you wrote.”

“Because changing my name was the sort of news to discuss in person. So you read the letters before destroying them?” Alejo asked, without a hint of embarrassment.

“They were a laugh riot,” Barth sneered. “Until they got too boring even for that. I just tossed them.”

Shock numbed Godiva, then fury swept through her as she thought of all those letters Alejo had written that she never saw, and would never see. “That’s mail fraud!” she cried.

“Oooh, cry me a river,” Barth jeered. “I’m terrified.”

“You should be.” One of the women, silent until now, pulled a book from her shoulder bag and held it where Barth could see it. “But not about the feds.”

The book’s binding looked like it had been stitched centuries ago. When Barth saw it, his bloodshot eyes widened and his face betrayed real fear before the smirk was back. But it looked forced. “How did you . . .”

“Get past your so-called security? Easily. Took me about a minute and a half. Didn’t anyone ever tell you in Criminal 101 that whatever else you do, you don’t cheap out on your security? Anyway, one look at this thing, and I recommend we don’t even bother with the feds, or the local police,” the woman stated with a grim-reaper smile. “This is going straight to the Midwest Guardian.”

At that, the younger woman, who looked a lot like Lance, especially through the eyes and cheekbones, uttered a deep laugh and cracked her knuckles.

Rigo leaned down to whisper to Godiva, “Alejo says that Kaydi Jackson is a knight. Same as her dad and granddad.”

Lance tipped his head toward his daughter and the older woman as he said to Godiva and Rigo, “Alejo reported in last night. These two spent the night searching Barth’s house.”

The first woman said, “Our orders are to take it from here.”