Locked and Loaded (6 page)

“Still not acceptable.”

“What’s that supposed to mean, Captain?”

“I mean, what’s in it for you, personally?”

He waited. She didn’t have an immediate response to give him. She’d only had this level of conversation with Hank, someone she’d known for years and trusted. She didn’t know Captain Davis from a can of latex paint.

“All right,” she said, releasing a long, impatient breath. “I know your ass is on the line, Captain, and I won’t—”

“Both our asses are on the line, ma’am, if I may speak freely.”

Sage took off her sunglasses and leaned forward as he entered the highway ramp. “Listen you arrogant, sarcastic—”

“I didn’t mean that as a dig or a lewd reference. I am stating the facts and respect the hell out of what you’ve probably had to endure. But
the fact
is, if I step on your toes in there because I don’t understand what your true, off-the-record objective is, then as the newcomer to the unit I could screw up fast. I’m trying to avoid that while also following my mission as stated by my chain of command. I also need to know if you’re going to go rogue in there, and in an attempt to create your own brand of justice, do something on the fly that could put me and any other men in my unit that are on this mission at risk.”

Sage eased back and stared out the window, reliving the painful memories that had brought her to this point in her life. She slowly put her sunglasses back on. In context, it was a fair question … but it was ironic that she’d be rehashing her past with a man who had kidnapped and tried to kill her only hours earlier.

“When I was in high school, my mother was walking into the local corner grocery store with my little sister and brother. They were home from school that day because they were both sick … she had to pick up some cough medicine. That’s also why my grandmother wasn’t watching them at her apartment so my mother could go to work. Nobody wanted Nana to possibly catch the flu, given her age. Roberto Salazar and his brother, Hector, were working their way up in the Guzman organization.”

She let out a weary breath after a long pause, glad that Captain Davis didn’t interrupt. “The Salazars were embroiled in a street turf battle and sprayed the corner where the Haitians were trying to sell. It wasn’t about my mother, my baby sister and younger brother, the old man at the bus stop, or the grocer’s son. It was just business. They all died. Everybody in the hood knew who did it and some even saw it. But no one would step forward to testify. I couldn’t blame them.
Don’t snitch
isn’t about loyalty; it’s about fear and knowing that no one can protect a poor person from the power of drug kingpins. Hell, they’ve seen presidents assassinated and police chiefs snuffed. So they figure, what chance do they have—what chance does their entire network of family and friends have? Silence is golden. But I couldn’t live with that sense of powerlessness.”

“I’m really sorry to hear about your family,” Davis said, after an awkward stretch of silence. Although his tone was professional, it contained an undercurrent of gentleness that she wished she hadn’t heard.

“Thanks … but that was a long time ago. I’m all grown up now and survived. So you don’t have to worry about me flipping out and blowing the man away in his sleep or anything crazy. Despite the circumstances, I am a trained professional.”

“With a distinguished record, Hank Wilson informed me. Much respect, Special Agent Wagner.” Davis nodded, keeping his eyes on the road. He paused as though trying to decide how to formulate the next question and then delivered it as though he were interviewing her for a Pentagon job. “When did you decide to go into law enforcement?”

“The day after I stopped crying and realized that nobody was going to testify or find the Salazars to lock them up.” Sage kept her gaze on the passing highway landscape, not actually seeing it as her family’s funeral flashed through her mind. “Figured if nobody from the outside could make a difference—at least, no one I’d ever seen in my old neighborhood had—then I’d get inside one day and fight them from the inside out.”

“Like I said, much respect,” he replied in a low, easy rumble. “But that decision has had to be hard on your grandmother and the rest of your family.”

“My grandmother
was
the rest of my family,” she said quietly. “My father died in a bottle long before my mother was murdered. But thank God I buried my grandmother before I went in deep.”

She shook the memories and forced herself to return to the present. “So, do you have family who could be threatened, compromised, held hostage? If so, you may want to really decide how deep you want in or not—and there’s no shame in that game. Screw that whole death before dishonor pledge, if you’ve got a five-year-old kid somewhere or a pretty wife that they’ll hack up into pieces and ship to you. No disrespect, but it’s different working stateside than being an armed combatant in a war overseas, Captain.”

“First of all,” he said in an easy, nonconfrontational manner. “Start practicing my alias—Juan.”

“Right,” she said, now looking at him. “Camille.”

“Okay, Camille. Understand that I think that what you’re doing is ten times riskier than what I’ve had to do in a unit.”

She gave him a nod and kept her gaze on him now. His comment went a long way in easing her ire about her professional territory being breached. “Thanks. Means a lot coming from a guy from DELTA Force.”

“
De nada
. And for the record, I’m sorry that we met the way we did and that I accidentally trampled your setup. Won’t happen again.”

“I appreciate that,” she said, losing the agitation from her voice.

“We really are on the same side, Camille. We both want the bad guys.”

She nodded and kept her eyes on his profile, beginning to see past her anger and slowly beginning to notice how handsome he really was.

“Typically, we go in hard,” he admitted, “do an extraction, blow a bridge, hit a target with dead-aim sniper fire, or track moving targets … but we don’t live with the enemy. We do surveillance, but nothing as mentally and emotionally intense as what you’re dealing with. We’re in and out. Intelligence deals with going undercover.”

“That’s why I asked if you had people here you cared about,” she said, leaning forward again and causing him to take another look over his shoulder. “I don’t think I could handle being responsible for anything that might happen. Man … if you’re half a world away in Iraq or Afghanistan, the chances of some highly intelligent nut-job finding your people is low. But if you’ve got family in Broward County or something, even a coupla states away…”

“I appreciate the concern, Camille, and hear you loud and clear. No. I’m solo, too.” He seemed to sit up straighter in his seat, if that were somehow possible, and she watched him grip the steering wheel tighter. “Haven’t had the lifestyle that would really allow for a wife and kids, yet. Been on the move. Lost my dad when I was two. He was a Marine—tour of duty in ’Nam. They told me he got out in 1970, but not before getting hit with Agent Orange. His health was always bad from then on, my mom said. He didn’t last long past my second birthday. Died in seventy-nine. Had an older brother. The streets finally took him. Drug gang wars too.”

“Must have been hard on you and your mom,” she said quietly. “My grandmother always would say there was nothing worse than burying a child or her grandchildren.”

“Yeah … My brother used to keep the neighborhood gangs off me. I looked up to him and he pushed me in school—said I was the one that would piece Mom’s heart back together after he’d broken it. That’s how I wound up in the military and, unfortunately, he wound up in a body bag on the streets of Chicago. But me being in the Service didn’t glue my mother’s heart back together—just made her scared to death that she’d lose me, too.”

“Well, she can be proud of you … got to see you make it.” Sage heard her voice soften as she said the words. The drug war in the streets at home had also struck Captain Davis in a profound way, making them fellow veterans of sorts. She hadn’t wanted to know that, hadn’t wanted to care about this new, forced partner.

“Cancer took my mother a few years back,” he said in a quiet but matter-of-fact tone—the one that people use to disguise deep hurt. “But at least she didn’t have to see me come home with a flag draped over my coffin. That’s all she ever talked about not wanting to see. So I’m good.”

“I’m real sorry to hear that,” Sage murmured. She felt his statement at the pit of her stomach.

He simply nodded and allowed silence to linger between them for a while.

“No cousins and extended family?” She waited, understanding how saying it out loud and admitting that you were basically orphaned in the world was very different than just knowing it.

“I have some people in Arkansas … lotta folks I never got to know real well on my father’s side. My mother’s family was small and tight out of Chicago, but most of them are gone now. Nobody the enemy can make a direct link to.” He lifted his chin and spread his massive hands around the steering wheel again as though resettling himself. “My unit is my family.”

“Then we have that in common,” she said, fully appreciating where he was coming from. Her team members would be the only ones to attend her funeral, would be the only ones to lift a beer in her honor and maybe shed a tear or two when they ultimately lowered her casket into the ground.

Silence became a third passenger in the van as they exited the highway and entered South Beach’s main thoroughfare. Yet, Captain Davis kept glancing up to his rearview mirror, his intense gaze seeming haunted.

“It’s not my place to say this, but … are you sure this is a good idea, ma’am?”

“Camille, remember? Ma’am makes me sound old, by the way.” She offered him a smile, sat forward, and placed a supportive hand on his shoulder as he turned into a covered parking garage.

The moment he navigated into a space, he turned around in his seat to fully face her. “Does your team have a GPS locator on you? Do you have enough artillery? If this guy gets pissed off—”

“I’m going to have to let him slap me around a bit for going off without his consent,” she said as calmly as possible. “And, no … I’ve never allowed the government to put a chip in me. I’ll be fine.”

“Unacceptable. You already have a concussion and don’t need to be reinjured.”

“I know, Captain … but rest assured, as soon as we get the word, I will kick his ass for the trouble.”

She smiled, Captain Davis didn’t.

“Juan, remember.”

His surly reminder made her smile wider. “It’s going to be all right,
Juan,
” she said.

“I don’t want you to have to do anything in there that you don’t want to.” His statement was blunt and delivered with crisp military diction, but his intense dark gaze was definitely haunted. “You’ve given enough. We have all the intel we need. Whatever we don’t know yet, we can gain through other methods. You shouldn’t have to deal with that shit, no matter how badly we all want to bring these bastards down.”

They sat in the dim parking lot staring at each other. It was a standoff where no one would mention the unmentionable, and yet this man whom she’d just met was trying his best to ask her to not go back in and put her body on the line.

Men had come and gone in both her personal and professional space; she’d had suitors, lovers, crushes, mentors, but had never truly allowed herself to become vested in the hopes and dreams of having anything that resembled a normal relationship. She could tell that this undercover scenario had to be unfathomable for a man like Captain Anthony Davis, someone who seemed to have a very straight-arrow, black-and-white view of the world. This was a man, she guessed, who had probably experienced normal relationships all his life. Her assignment undoubtedly contradicted everything he believed to be right with the world. She could only imagine that to him, she might as well have been an alien … and as she stared at his handsome face and deeply troubled eyes, for some reason now that made her very sad.

“I only have to be there for maybe another forty-eight to seventy-two hours.… That’s when the delivery will probably go down, if they solidify the deal. My goal is to find out exactly when and where, then I’m out.”

She slowly removed her sunglasses and captured Captain Davis’s troubled gaze within her own. “I’ll allow him to slap me around and then take off my makeup, so he’ll think he’s responsible for the bruises from the fight that you and I had. I’ll weep and cower and make the man feel as badly as I can … and claim an inability to function. But with a stressful deal going down, his lack of time and patience, and my little tantrum for attention—which is how I’m sure he’ll view my running away in a speedboat—I may be able to avoid being with him again. Understood?”

“And if not?”

Again, silence slipped into the spaces between them.

“I’ll handle it.”

Sage grabbed her large, gold-tone designer purse and slung it over her shoulder. She had no other answer for Captain Davis, beyond the one he didn’t want to hear for some odd reason, and the one she didn’t feel like saying out loud. His eyes seemed to beg for answers to questions she couldn’t let herself think about right now.

There was pain and outrage in his gaze, but oddly no judgment as she placed her hand on the door and he popped the lock for her. He wore the expression of someone trapped within a reality he hated, unable to change what was, wishing with all his might that he could. The reality of her undercover assignment clearly violated everything the man before her believed in, yet for the sake of the mission, there was nothing either of them could do about it. The fact that he cared while not even knowing her was troubling on a level that was hard to sort out.

Sage lifted her chin and took in a deep, steadying breath. Captain Anthony Davis’s gaze never wavered. She understood feeling powerless and knew that look in a person’s eyes all too well. It was the same one that had once haunted hers. But until now, she’d never had a champion. Although he hadn’t said that he was or wanted to be that for her, there was something unmistakable in the depth of the captain’s angry eyes that let her know that he’d kill Salazar twice if he could.