Page 43 of Westin

Clint lowered his head slightly. “Assuming that.”

Lea ran a hand over the top of her head. “I don’t know what to tell you. I’ve run it through my mind over and over again, but I can’t remember saying anything to anyone that might have given my location away.”

Clint nodded slowly. “My concern is that what happened is you told your friend on the phone about that box, and that somehow got back to the people who put the box on Miss Dulcie’s property. I’m afraid this is bigger than just some guy coming after you.”

“I know. That occurred to me, too.”

She’d been thinking about it all day. Since Westin had practically accused her of putting Miss Dulcie in the line of danger, she couldn’t stop working it over in her head, trying to figure out how Fang knew where she was. Just like Clint, the only thing she kept coming back to was someone had somehow overheard her conversation with Will. Someone who knew about those boxes. Or maybe he made a call after she’d talked to him, and that call was overheard. It was the only thing that made sense.

She moved away from Clint, her thoughts raging once more. She kept going back and forth, trying to figure it all out. Will wouldn’t have betrayed her. It had to be something else, some other explanation. It had to be.

“Look, I trust Will. He’s been my partner since I joined the DEA. There’s no way he could have caused this to happen. Not knowingly.”

“Then tell me about the case. Tell me about the box. Maybe there’s something we can figure out, some way we can make sure we haven’t just put Golden Sphinx in the middle of something we can’t control.”

Lea nodded, still pacing, kicking at the snow with her now thoroughly wet tennis shoes. “We were working a faction of the Southern Bloods. The Phoenix Police Department has been battling them for years, and we’ve been after this guy, Razor. I told you that last night.”

Clint nodded, standing patiently, just waiting for her to go on.

“We got a lead that Razor was involved with the Bloods. They have this club in downtown Phoenix where they run drugs and guns and women. It’s a pretty slick setup. Everything seems on the up and up, but when you look close enough, it starts to crack—you know?” She ran her hands over the top of her head again, shivering a little as she pressed the cold against her scalp. “I got a job at the club. I was a bartender, but I was also passing drugs to customers. They had this whole system, this way of slipping the packets to people who ordered these specific, made-up drinks.”

“You told Westin you were a chemist.”

Lea laughed, though there was absolutely nothing funny about the whole thing. “Yeah, well, I’ve been one of those, too. I’ve been a lot of things in the past five years. It’d make your head spin if I told you everything.” She shook her head, kicking at the snow a little more as she paced. “So, I was working the bar, and Will would come in sometimes, established himself as a regular customer, and we’d exchange information any way we could. We’d been at it for weeks, but we weren’t making any headway. I was beginning to think we’d never get the information we needed to find Razor. And then one of the girls told me about Fang’s computer.”

“And what role was Fang playing in all this?”

“He managed the club. The whole thing—the illegal shit and the legal stuff. It was all his.”

“You got into his office and stole information off it.”

“Yeah. He was keeping track of all kinds of stuff. Emails he probably should have deleted, texts he’d downloaded from his phone, audio files of conversations he’d had. The boy was keeping things that I’d never seen one of these gang members write down, let alone save to a computer. Ridiculous, really. I’m not even sure of everything that’s on there, because he walked in on me.”

“How did that happen?”

Lea sighed, turning to face him. He was leaning against the fence, just staring down at the ground like he wasn’t even listening to a thing she had to say, but she knew he was. She knew the words coming out of her mouth were the most important thing to him right now simply because of how hard he was concentrating on the ground. She was beginning to figure Clint out, and he was a lot more complicated than he first appeared.

“It was after closing. I was alone in the bar, putting away clean glasses before I left. He came out of his office, said good night and told me Danny—the bouncer—would lock up when I was gone. I watched him leave, went to the back where the security cameras were and watched him drive away. He never came back after he left. There was a joke around the bar that he had some pretty thing handcuffed to his bed and he was always anxious to get back to her.”

Lea groaned. The memory of it made every muscle in her back tighten up. He wasn’t supposed to come back. He shouldn’t have come back. But he did. In minutes.

“I slipped into the office, shoved the memory card into the port and began grabbing files randomly, dropping them onto the memory card. I’d had a look at it a couple of days before when that girl told me about it, so I kind of knew what to put on the card. I was working as quickly as I could and had about three-quarters of what I wanted when he walked in.”

“Why did he come back?”

Lea shook her head and lifted her hands. “I have no idea. I didn’t stop to ask.” She pressed a hand to her chest, felt for the heavy pendant that still hung there. “I pretended I was trying to email my mother. But he didn’t buy it. He seemed to know exactly what I was up to.”

He’d grabbed her by her hair, jerking her up out of his office chair. He’d dragged her across the room, tossing her onto the low couch against the far wall. She knew about that couch. All the girls talked about it. It was where he tried out the new girls, made sure they’d be able to satisfy his customers to his satisfaction. He made a mistake putting her on that couch, though. She could still feel the semi-hard mass in his pants that she’d slammed her knee into, still felt the satisfaction of watching him fall to the ground in silent agony.

“I got out of there and took off; called Will. I told him what had happened, that I was burned. He told me that as far as Fang knew, I was just some stupid girl who thought she could steal information from her boss. Told me to stay undercover.”

“You let him follow you.”

“No, not exactly.” She sighed. She was tired of pacing, but the ground was so covered in snow that there was nowhere dry to sit. She finally just went and leaned against the fence beside Clint. “The plan was for me to meander for a few days, then make a beeline for Seattle. I flew to New Orleans, stayed a night in Dallas, and drove straight from there to Denver. I was going to stay there for a night or two, but Will called me, said they couldn’t locate Fang. They thought he might have followed me out of Phoenix.”

“You kept driving.”

“And I was starving, exhausted. I needed coffee if I was going to keep going. Some carbs.” She sighed. “I saw the sign for that diner, and it was like a gift. I hadn’t seen anything else for miles on miles, and figured I wouldn’t again if I kept going. I had no idea he was anywhere close. I hadn’t seen another car for nearly an hour. I have no idea where he came from.”

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