Page 35 of Baby One Last Time
“Thought is still protected by the Constitution,” I said. “For now. I’m more worried about protecting our flank if we’re walking into something blind.”
“Have you told TJ?”
I shook my head. “No proof. Nothing solid to go on. Nothing except...”
“A gut feeling,” she finished for me.
I nodded “It’s stupid, huh?”
“No.” She glanced sideways at me. “I can’t tell you how many times I was pinned down under enemy fire with nothing but my gut to rely on.”
“Did it ever let you down?”
She averted her eyes. “Once. But this time, we’re both feeling it. So I guess the question is, what do we do about it?”
“I have an idea, but you might not like it.”
She took a beat, then threw back her shoulders and nodded. “Try me.”
“I have a guy. I cultivated him a few years back when I was still a Fed. He gave us some good intel when we were shutting down a human trafficking ring being run by a rich asshole flying young girls to his private island.”
“You worked that?” Mai nodded her approval. “Good for you. But how deep was this piece of shit in that operation?”
“Just to the ankles. Frankie’s a two-bit player. He lives on the bad side of the law for the fun of it. And to avoid paying taxes. But Miami’s his hometown and he hears everything. I’ve been in touch with him a few times since then for other cases. He’s always been able to dig up something useful.”
Mai skimmed her fingers over the water in the fountain. “Sounds like it’s time to pay a visit to your old pal.”
“You willing to be my wingwoman?”
“Just try to stop me.” She smiled. “Good to see you being more yourself. I thought I was going to have to barricade you in your room tonight to keep you from picking up inappropriate men.”
“I’m getting mixed signals from you about who I should be sleeping with.”
“I have one word for you,” she said, shaking off her wet hand. “Celibacy.”
“Let me guess, you had to take up celibacy when you were pinned down under enemy fire.”
She laughed. That was new. And a little scary. But mostly good.
“It’s still my advice to you,” she said. “At least until we get through this mission. After that, you pick the bar, I’ll pick the guy, and we’ll make sure you forget all about whatever happened in LA.”
“Deal.” I held out my hand to her. “On all of it.”
She hesitated. Her doubts—about me, my motives, my capabilities—played across her face. “If we get something actionable from Frankie, we’ll take it straight to TJ, right?”
“Right.” Probably. Maybe.
“Shit,” she muttered as she shook my warm hand with her cold one. “I hope I don’t live to regret this.”
Chapter 10
Frankie Holloman wastedlittle time getting back to me. I’d texted his gopher at midnight, and by 7 a.m., I had a ping on my phone. I stepped out of the shower, wrapped a towel around my wet hair, and read a text from a blocked number that contained an address and a time. Two that afternoon at a familiar location.
If Frankie hadn’t responded so quickly, it’s where I would have started looking for him. He hung out at s a washed-up dive of an ice creamery that was built in the sixties, hit its glory days in the seventies, and had been fading into oblivion ever since. Frankie liked the coffee, the company of the third-generation owner, and the fact that they allowed him to smoke inside even though it was illegal.
Mai and I spent the morning discussing ops possibilities with logistics, which we wouldn’t be able to finalize until they uncovered where Miami Pete had stashed the oligarch’s weapons, then slipped away after lunch on the premise of sightseeing. Because who doesn’t love tooling around Miami at Christmastime? More palm trees and sunburn. Fucking perfect. But if we did this mission right, we could take down a lot of really bad people in a really short time and be on vacation by January. And I could put Derek and everything about our past behind me.
At 1 p.m., we pulled into a curbside parking spot a block down from Frankie’s hangout to keep an eye on who was coming and going and to make sure Mai had a clean shot if any uninvited guests crashed our little party. Frankie wasn’t a gangster, but he sure as shit knew a lot of them, had probably crossed some of them, and relied too much on his weirdly charismatic charm to get him out of tight spots. I didn’t want to be sitting next to him without protection if anyone showed up to settle a score. Worse than getting caught in the crossfire, I couldn’t risk getting made and blowing the entire Miami Pete Job.
