Sinful Deception (Covert Affairs Book 3)
One
Rain pelted Marcus Lucero’s face. Wind howled in his ears. Mud slipped beneath his boots. Ten yards ahead, the smuggler scuttled along a steep embankment of San Diego’s Otay Mesa on all fours, searching for a path to level ground.
“
Alto!
” Marcus bellowed over the storm. “
No se muevan,
you fucker.”
The smuggler didn’t listen. They never did. Marcus had long ago decided that yelling was about following procedure and releasing aggression, not expecting compliance.
The man’s tennis shoes sank into the mud. He clawed at filaments of exposed roots, scaling the dirt wall like a salamander in a fish tank. But he was gaining ground inch by inch, and if he reached that flat surface, he’d disappear into the storm. Marcus was
not
going to repeat this scenario when the guy tried to push another five tons of marijuana across the border tomorrow night. Or worse, cocaine, meth, or heroin. He was ending this here. Now.
And he was almost close enough…
The smuggler reached for the ledge, grabbed the trunk of a Manzanita bush, and hauled himself up.
Marcus lunged, grabbing two fistfuls of soggy T-shirt. He dropped back to the ground, hauling the smuggler with him, and they landed in an icy bog pit. The guy was small, a foot shorter and fifty pounds lighter than Marcus, but he was a scrapper and hella slippery. He clawed, squirmed, twisted.
“
Alto,
motherfucker!” Marcus said through clenched teeth. “
Alto!
”
The guy kicked, pushed, pulled, punched. His fist connected with Marcus’s cheek, snapping his head sideways. Pain streaked through Marcus’s face, lighting the last fuse on his already short temper, and he exploded.
“God
dammit
.” Marcus plowed his fist into the guy’s middle. The smuggler went down with a guttural sound of pain. And stayed down, curling onto his side, coughing.
Bent over the other man, Marcus pressed his hands to his knees and caught his breath. Shook off the pain radiating through his hand and probed his cheekbone and temple. Probably no breaks, but—he spit out blood—plenty of cut gums.
God, he hated the taste of blood.
“Trigger to Smoke.” Meier Hudson, known as Trigger in the field, spoke to Marcus over the bud in his ear. “Need backup?”
“Negative.” Marcus breathed the word, then took a couple more breaths before adding, “Runner in custody.”
“Sweet. We picked up the package he dropped, an eighty-pounder. Haul his ass thisaway. His ride’s waiting.”
Marcus winced as he straightened. After sprinting miles over rough terrain, his legs felt like rubber, but the storm, crashing from the north, had lowered temperatures twenty degrees, making him stiff. The wind had blown off his uniform ball cap, and the rain stung against his skin like icy needles.
Whoever thought the sun always shone in Southern California was dead wrong. And Marcus had the gooseflesh to prove it.
He nudged the smuggler with his boot. “
Levántate, cabrone
.” The man groaned and coughed again. “Your choice to be out here tonight, Einstein.
Levántate
.”
Marcus leaned down, made a cursory search for weapons—though if the man had them, Marcus was sure he would have used them by now—and dragged him up by the arm. After securing the smuggler’s wrists with zip ties, they trudged through the rain and mud and wind and dark back toward the main road.
What a fucking miserable shift.
“Eighty pounds?” Marcus asked. “Why’d they make a runt like you carry the biggest bale?”
He’d done nothing but chase and fight bad guys like this one, soothe the scared, and aid the injured the entire shift. Not one minute’s peace. Tonight had run the gamut from a family with a four-year-old hoping for a better life in the States, to a group of abused women led by cartel smugglers looking for American brothels, to these guys—drug dealers searching for American customers.
In the rain. In the cold. For twelve long fucking hours. For his twenty-fourth damn day in a row.
More than a fucking miserable shift. This was a fucking miserable existence.
For all of them.
“Why do you do this, man?” Marcus prodded when the smuggler didn’t answer. He’d asked this thousands of times during his career, growing more and more curious over the years what drove people to such extremes. And the more stories he heard, the more curious he became. Human nature fascinated him—though not necessarily in a good way.
But tonight he wouldn’t get another story. His prisoner remained silent.
A fifteen-minute hike brought Marcus face-to-face with the four other Border Patrol agents assisting in the capture of the drug smugglers. Two transport vans waited, along with four more transport personnel.
When he handed off his prisoner, the transporter took hold of the man’s arm, standoffish and grimacing, as if Marcus had handed him a bag of shit. “What the fuck happened here?”
“Afraid of a little dirt, Ace?” Marcus planted his hands at his hips and glared. God, he was so exhausted he wanted to fall over. “Are we going to have to change your name to Pussy?”
The others’ laughter floated on the storm. Ace’s partner stood from the passenger’s side of the van, one arm hanging over the frame. “What happened to you?”
Marcus threw both arms up. “What are you two? Dumb and Dumber? Rain plus dirt equals mud, dude. Did you not pass kindergarten? Have you not been monitoring the radio? Do you not know this has been the goddamned shift from hell?”
His partner, Trigger, slid the door to the van closed as Ace rounded to the van’s driver’s side, muttering some shit Marcus was glad he didn’t hear. “This shift isn’t your problem.” He had that damned know-it-all-grin tilting his mouth and rain dripping off the brim of his hat. “You need to get laid, dude.”
“You’ve been a bitch for months.” This came from behind Marcus, from one of the other agents nicknamed Zoomie. “Ever since what’s-her-name.”
“That’s because what’s-her-name was the last chick he banged,” Trigger said.
“What
was
her name?” Lucky called over the wind from where he leaned against the side of the second van, soaked to the bone but kicked back, arms and ankles crossed like it was eighty degrees and sunny.
“This doesn’t have anything to do with what’s-her-name.” Even Marcus couldn’t remember her name. “Excuse me for getting pissed when someone tries to break my face.” He started toward his SUV, which was equally caked in mud. “I’m gonna be tasting blood for a fucking week.”
“Trigger’s right.” Lucky called as he climbed into his own vehicle. “You need some tail.”
“Like I have time.” He lifted his hands, gesturing to the group. “Like any of us have time.”
“If you won’t go pick someone up,” Zoomie said, rounding to the passenger’s side of Lucky’s SUV, “grab a sexcam girl and get personal with your hand. But do
something
, dude.”
Trigger’s grin was bright in the darkness. “A lot of those chicks are seriously
hot
.”
“And a lot less trouble than the real thing,” Lucky added. “With the same result.”
Sexcam?
Marcus climbed into his truck and turned the engine over. Finally—no rain hitting his face. He reached forward and turned the heater up. Trigger opened the passenger’s door, and another gust of wet wind swept in. A shiver snaked down Marcus’s spine.
Would this night ever end?
Trigger shut the door and pulled on his seat belt, grinning. “That was fun.”
Normally, Marcus would have agreed. But more and more often over the past six months, his adrenaline burned out faster and faster.
“For you maybe.” Marcus slid his jaw to the side, testing his mobility. Pain sliced through his face.
He shoved the SUV into drive and swung it around to head back to the station. With their shift finally over, Marcus was dreaming of a hot shower and a soft bed. Having a woman ride him to a rocking orgasm before he drifted off to sleep sounded pretty damn heavenly too. But, no woman in his life meant no one giving him a rocking orgasm either. There was a real drawback to that whole too-busy-for-women thing.
“What was Zoomie talking about?” Marcus asked.
“What do you mean?”
“The sexcam thing.”
Trigger turned a frown on him. “You don’t know what a sexcam girl is? Where the fuck have you been, dude? Under a rock?”
“I’ve been out here with you, asshole.”
“That’s one of your problems. Cut back on the crazy OT, and you’d have time to find a woman.”
“And who’s gonna cover these shifts until we get the new guy ready to work on his own?”
Almost a year had passed since their teammate, Cody, had been killed during a bust. But every time Marcus stepped onto the desert floor, the wound felt fresh, like they’d lost him yesterday. And still…nobody had paid for his murder.
“Cooper’s doing great,” Trigger said.
Marcus shook his head. “It’s too soon.”
The kid wasn’t on his team, but Marcus had made an arrangement with the watch commander and the other team leader to provide coverage for an extended amount of time to allow Cooper to keep a partner longer. More often than not, agents worked alone. And even when they did work as a team to take down a large group of illegals, they ended up separating to chase them down, and often confronted one or several suspects on their own. But keeping a second agent with Cooper required another body to fill the vacant shift, one Marcus had been taking the brunt of, since it had been his idea. His passion.
“If he had a few years on the streets,” Marcus said, “or at the border crossings, search and rescue, military, something…maybe he’d be ready. But…”
“You wouldn’t have said that a year ago. I swear you’ve aged ten years in the last one.”
Marcus blew out a heavy breath, propped his elbow on the window ledge, and wiped mud from his forehead. He’d have to shower and scrub for an hour to get this sandy shit off. When the hell had that become a chore? “A lot was different a year ago.”
“Got that right. You were fun. Total chick magnet. In fact, hard to imagine now, but I was getting sick of going to bars with you and always ending up with your leftovers.” Trigger snorted. “Who knew you’d turn into such a fun suck?”
“Fuck you. You haven’t exactly been the life of the party either.”
Trigger shook his head and stared out the rain-and-mud slicked windshield as they made their way back to the station where they still had paperwork waiting. “At least I’m still living life.”
Animosity simmered between them on the rest of the drive. That, more than anything else that had happened over the last year, told Marcus he needed to make some kind of change. He and Trigger were never at odds. In the six years they’d worked together, nothing had ever hung between them. And Trigger was the most fun-loving, easygoing of the group. If Marcus was rubbing him wrong, he had a problem.
As they pulled through the outer gates to the station, Marcus said, “You didn’t answer me. What is this sexcam thing?”
“Sexcams, camming, webcam models, they’re all the same—hot women performing on webcam, doing whatever you want them to do, saying whatever you want them to say, while you jerk off watching. You see them, they don’t see you. Totally anonymous, interactive, personal, safe, and way better than porn.”
The idea shot heat through Marcus’s gut, but his psyche was muttering
not my thing
.
“And I know what you’re thinking,” Trigger said as Marcus pulled to a stop at the back of the building. “It’s not your thing.” Marcus almost laughed, but his teammate was serious, so he didn’t. Trigger met Marcus’s gaze across the cab and grabbed the handle, pushing the door wide. “But how would you know if you’ve never tried it?”
Marcus unlocked the front door to his townhome in the East Village of San Diego near Balboa Park and dumped his gear down on the tile in the entry. His mind still whirled around the events of his shift as he dragged the uniform he’d hosed down at the station to his laundry room. He remembered the women, far more scared of their smugglers than of the Border Patrol agents, all with visible bruises. The drug smugglers, three of the eight, wanted in other countries for violent crimes.