Judas Horse_ An FBI Special Agent Ana Grey Mystery - April Smith [11]
“No way. Are you nuts?”
I shrug. “That’s what my boss wants. He said to check out the source, make sure the bills aren’t traceable.”
“They’re not traceable.”
“I can’t take your word.”
I give her apologetic. She understands. We are both in the same fix: men.
She shakes her head. “They’d never agree to something like that.”
“Ask. Nicely.”
She hesitates. “Wait here.”
She confabs with the guy in the truck and comes back and tells me the “friend” wants $100,000 in cash, for the million in fakes.
We are inching toward a deal, but where to get the money? There is one more clue, waiting in my pocket.
I say I have to make a call.
She accompanies me to a pay phone, where I dial the number I was given in the van. A voice I do not recognize says, “Yeah?” I do not break character as I tell my “contact” to bring a hundred grand in cash to the mall. Twenty-five minutes later, a low-rider Chevrolet, driven by a black man I have never seen, pulls up and parks away from the lighted rim of stores. A hip-hop bass seems to fill the empty space of the parking lot.
“Be right back,” I tell Jennifer, aware that I am approaching an unknown individual alone.
The window is down. He watches with glittering eyes, fingers flicking the wheel. He is thirty, taut, wearing a do-rag and chewing gum. When I get close, I see his nose is running, and his hand trembles as he draws it across chapped lips.
“You it?” he says.
“Guess so.”
“You guess? Who sent you?”
He is out of the car. So we were to play another scene for Jennifer and her husband?
“Hey, motherfucker,” I muster. “What’s your problem?”
He is wired and I am slow. He slams my chest against the door and cracks my neck in a reverse chokehold.
“No disrespect,” I gasp.
“Don’t make me nervous.”
“It’s cool, it’s cool.”
I am feeling nauseous, seeing sheets of light.
His cell phone goes off. He glances at the number. “Fuck!”
He lets me go, spins back inside the car, and hands a gold-embossed Gucci briefcase through the window.
“You best not be fucking with us.”
“No way, bro.”
My throat aches from where he brutally compressed the trachea. When I get back to the Academy, I am going to find out who this asshole is.
“It better be righteous blow, or I’m coming to get your kids.”
Blow? Wait a minute. The deal is counterfeit money, not cocaine. Wrong scenario. Right?
I stare at him.
“I know where you live.”
Then he is gone.
So are Jennifer, the white truck, and the man with the shaved head.
I stand in the middle of the deserted shopping center, gripping the Gucci briefcase the brother thrust at me, which is allegedly stuffed with cash. I’m hatching a brand-new plan: I will hop a ride down the highway and disappear into the Blue Ridge Mountains, marry a coal miner with large spadelike hands, and live in a hollow with a clan of hill people, who distrust and despise the U.S. government almost as much as I do.
My head is swimming with fatigue. What is the “lesson learned”? Did I learn it yet? From deep in the gnarly undergrowth surrounding the now-dead shopping center comes the croaking of toads. No counselors have stepped out of the shadows to bring me in. The game is on. Pick up the thread. Find Jennifer. Connect with the counterfeiters.
I go back to the pay phone, but nobody answers the number I just dialed.
Someone taps my shoulder. “Darcy?”
I take my time responding because I have to run a mental check and the gears are running slowly. Yes, I am Darcy. Darcy from California. A criminal—remember that.
I turn to face Jennifer. “Where the fuck were you?”
“I wasn’t a hundred percent about your nigger friend,” she replies.
You redneck jerk! But, no. She’s pushing my multiracial buttons. Fight it.
“That fool is down.” I pat the Gucci case. “It’s all here.”
Then we are in the cab of the truck, with me between the two of them.
“Open it,” suggests the man with the shaved head. (Forty, weathered—Special Ops?) Jennifer has trained him well; his shoulders and biceps are huge, neck tattoo, and he must be local, because all he has on in the misty cold