Blown (8 page)

Mateo parked about a hundred miles away from the abandoned service station so we could walk there without being noticed. Okay, it wasn't really a hundred miles, but it sure as fuck felt like it as we were stumbling around in the dark. A flashlight would have helped, but it also would have given Crimson and his lackeys something to aim at. Since I'm not about getting dead, I opted for darkness.

My night vision was good enough to keep me on the blacktop of Route
66, but beyond that I was lost. There could have been a full circus taking place ten feet in front of me and I wouldn't have realized it. That's the thing about the desert. There are no street lights. It's just dark, dark, dark. That's something I hadn’t realized until now, since all my nighttime outings were spent inside the city.

"Watch out for rattlesnakes." Mateo held my hand loosely in his and I liked the feel of his palm against mine.
It gave me something to squeeze when he dropped the rattlesnake bomb.

"What the fuck?" I crowded closer to
him. So much for not needing to be rescued.

He
laughed and wrapped his arm around my shoulder. "We're in the desert, Roni." He said it like it was the most obvious thing in the world.

I checked the holster at my back to make sure my gun was still there and briefly debated moving it to the front where I could grab it easier, but decided
not to. Instead I hugged Mateo around his middle. "Well, you better fucking kill it if there is one."

The faint moonlight, the millions of stars
, and the scent of Mateo's skin put me in a romantic mood. Not in a "I want to hit that" kind of way, but rather the sweet, hand-holding, "let's go steady" kind of way. It would have been really nice if not for the fact that we were on our way to a known drug manufacturing facility and could very well die if discovered. That kind of killed the mood if I thought about it for too long.

Finally, the building Mateo had showed me that morning loomed out of the night.
There were more cars parked behind it this time than there were this morning, including Crimson's BRZ.

"Looks like a full house." Mateo slowed and stepped carefully off the blacktop, pulling me with him. It was time for us to be a little less obvious as we approached. Not that there was much more than the occasional sagebrush to hide behind, but we worked with it.

There were a few guys standing around outside, but no sign of Crimson. He must have been inside. I snapped a few pictures with my phone for my boss. They were no doubt crappy, but he'd have to deal. Mateo tapped my shoulder, then pointed toward the closest side of the building. It was also the darkest and farthest away from the men.

I nodded and edged
in that direction. The last thing we needed was a misplaced footstep, followed by me falling flat on my ass and making enough noise to draw them all out of the building. I moved carefully and slowly, matching Mateo in stride. Frankly, I should have left him at the hotel. As a general rule, it was never a good idea to actively endanger the life of a civilian, even a hot, badass criminal like Mateo. But I liked how it felt to have him with me. I tried not to dwell on what that might mean.

Muffled voices
reached me through the window. It was closed, but they were yelling.

"What do you mean
, it's not ready?" That sounded like Crimson, but I couldn't be sure.

"We ran into
some delays." The second guy sounded jittery, detached. If I had to guess, I'd say the delays he ran into involved sampling too much product.

"You're fucking useless."

I peeked over the edge of the window. The room I looked into was empty. The door to the next room was wide open and I could just see Crimson and another guy I didn't recognize. He wiped what looked like blood away from his lip. I snapped a couple of pictures.

"Fuck, Crimson, I'm sorry. It's not my fault."

Crimson paced back and forth, his hands gripping his hair. He turned on the other guy suddenly and pulled his gun from his belt and said, "Fuck this," and shot the guy point blank in the face. Blood and brain matter splattered onto the floor. The guy crumpled to the ground, surrounded by a growing pool of red. I took pictures as fast as my phone would let me. Hopefully they would turn out. Suddenly grainy, crappy pictures weren't fucking good enough.

"We need to go," Mateo whispered urgently. He was right, of course, but I hadn't seen any sign of drug manufacturing. I wanted to check the next window. I gestured toward the only other window on our side and took a step in that direction. Mateo grabbed my arm and jerked me back. He shook his
head furiously and pointed toward the road.

I pulled my hand away and waved for him to go ahead. I had a job to do and Mateo didn't get to dictate the pace of it. I made it to the second window with Mateo close behind me. I could feel the anger pouring off of him.

Jackpot. That room held all the telltale signs of meth production. I took a couple of pictures then let Mateo pull me toward the road. He gripped my hand punishingly tight, like I was a naughty kid who might run away at any moment. When we cleared the circle of light thrown off by the building, he broke into a full on run, dragging me behind him. I run as a regular part of my workout routine because I refuse to be one of those cliché donut-eating cops. But Mateo's legs are about a foot longer than mine and I struggled to keep up.

He maintained that pace all the way back to his car. Once inside, he banged his fist against the steering wheel and said, "Fuck, fuck, fuck." He kept muttering the same word, but never looked in my direction. I didn't understand his reaction since I'm sure it wasn't the first time he'd witnessed something like that. Odds were he'd been the one holding the gun
in the past. That also went into the file of things about Mateo that I refused to think about.

"
Are you okay?" I placed my hand gingerly on his shoulder, then massaged around to cup his neck. I played with the skin there, just a gentle, easy movement of my fingers intended to comfort.

"That wasn't supposed to happen." His voice was shaky.

"No, probably not," I agreed for lack of something better to say.

"
What if he'd seen you? I brought you here and he would have
killed
you."

I played with the
short hair at the base of his skull. It prickled against my fingers. "But he didn't."

"No, he didn't."
He grabbed my face and kissed me soundly, then released me just as suddenly. It was jarring. He had a habit of doing that. He started the car. "I need to get you out of here."

He flipped around in the road, headed back toward our hotel. "Where to?" We'd packed everything up and left the key on the table inside the room. We'd planned to go straight to the city after our surveillance gig.

"I can't drive past there. Crimson is there and he'll recognize my car." Mateo activated his GPS and plotted a course back to LA that avoided the service station. It was long as fuck, but he was probably right.

"Okay." While he drove, I forwarded the pictures I took to my email. Then I sent them to my boss. It took for fucking ever because our signal kept popping in and out.

He settled into cruising speed, far faster than strictly legal, and took my hand in his. I dozed in and out, but he didn't release my hand once on the way back to the city.

#

Mateo pulled into the lot in front of my apartment just before two in the morning. I only had a few more hours until my boss would respond to the pictures I'd sent. Then the fantasy would officially be over. No more cover to justify spending time with Mateo. Continuing our relationship in the real world was career suicide. Or possibly just suicide if Luis found out what I did for a living.

Mateo didn't pull into a space, but rather stopped at the curb closest to my door. He let the car idle.

Sleep? Or Mateo? It really wasn't much of a decision.

"You want to come up?"

He gripped his steering wheel hard enough to turn his knuckles white. "Is that a good idea?"

"Probably not." I pried one of his hands off the wheel and held it between mine. "But I still want you to."

He sat there far too long, staring silently into the distance. Finally he sighed and squeezed my hand. "I really shouldn't."

"I know."

"I really want to."

"I know." God
, did I know. All the reasons that we shouldn't be together really didn't compare to how good it felt when we were. Somewhere in the middle of everything, he'd stopped being just a source of kick-ass orgasms. That's the part that sucked the most. This wasn't going to end well, and neither of us had been smart enough to head it off.

"Okay." He backed neatly into an open space and turned off the car. "This is a really bad idea." Maybe he thought the redundancy would keep him from following me up the stairs and into my apartment. It didn't. He was even all gentlemanly
and shit about it and carried my bag for me.

He followed me all the way to my bedroom, then dropped my bag by the door. I could have pretended this was something else, maybe asked if he
wanted to watch a little TV, or offered him something to eat or drink. But why? I wanted him one last time before we had to say goodbye.

"What happens in the morning?"
he asked while pulling his shirt over his head. He dropped it, then slipped his shoes off. He apparently had the same thoughts I did.

"I'll check in with my boss and see how he wants to proceed." I purposefully answered around his question. I doubted he cared at all about my boss, my case, or my career. Well, the last part he cared about plenty since it was in direct opposition
to his.

"But you're done working undercover, right?" He let his pants slip to the floor and pushed his shorts off as well. I realized that I was still fully clothed and simply staring at him
in his beautiful naked state.

I removed my shirt and bra. "Probably. I'll have to wait and see what he says." My skirt and panties followed. I stepped out of my shoes and closed the gap between us.

He held me at arms length. "You can't go back. They'll kill you."

I snaked my arms around his waist and pulled him close. The feel of his naked skin pressed up against m
ine was pretty fucking close to perfect, but this was so much more than normal. He was genuinely worried about me and all I wanted to do was comfort him. I wanted to hold him until he felt better. And hopefully his feeling better would lead to a whole different kind of feeling good as well.

"Odds are against it. With the pictures I took, they'll likely move in immediately. He'll probably flip rather than face the murder charge." I said it like it was absolute truth, but Mateo probably didn't believe me. It rarely happened like that. The people he worked with would threaten him with something a lot worse than some time in a jail cell.

He tightened his hold on me. "I hope you're right, but if you're not, you have to tell your boss."

"Tell him what?"

"Tell him you can't do it, that you're compromised."

I definitely felt compromised. I felt ripped clean apart. I loved my job, loved making bad people pay for d
oing bad things. Then there was Mateo. On paper he looked very, very bad. In my bedroom, with only the filtered light from the hall to illuminate him, he looked very, very good.