Jeff Shelby - Killer Swell

I scooted my chair back a couple of inches. “That good enough?”

Her mouth screwed into a tight circle, a clear sign that whatever patience she had allotted for me was now gone. Same old, same old.

She unscrewed her mouth. “Noah, Costilla is off-limits to you.”

“Officially?”

“Officially, unofficially, on the record, off the record,” she said. “Any way you want it. You go near him again, you’re done.”

She looked at Carter. “And before you open that sinkhole you call a mouth, that means you, too.”

Carter stared back at her with no expression.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because.”

“Gee, Mommy, I need something better than that,” I said.

She leaned forward on the desk, the silver bracelets on her wrists jingling softly. “Because I’ve got an ID on you both in San Ysidro and I’ll arrest you if you so much as wink at him.”

“Bullshit,” Carter said. “You got an ID, you’d arrest us now.”

“Contrary to the opinion of the rest of this city, I’m not looking to lock you up,” she said. “As far as I’m concerned, one of Costilla’s guys biting it isn’t such a bad thing. But I can sit you both in a cell if I need to. Those pain-in-the-ass twins you call friends, too, if I want.”

“So if I say no,” I said, “then you’re going to arrest us right now.”

She nodded.

I looked at Carter. He shrugged.

I looked back at Liz. “No.”

We all sat there. No one came rushing in with handcuffs and jumpsuits. I turned around to make sure. Nobody came in. They wouldn’t have fit in the room anyway.

Liz shifted uncomfortably in her comfortable chair and leaned back into it again. “He’s Federal, Noah.”

“So?”

“He’s Federal with our cooperation. Specifically, my cooperation.”

“So?”

She slapped her hand on the desk. “Goddammit, Noah. Don’t fuck around with me on this. He is off-limits. The Feds are on him, I am assisting, and they don’t want to see you near him. So keep your fucking ass far, far away from him.”

Carter looked at me. “Couldn’t she have left this on the machine?”

I ignored him, because I knew Liz was serious. The flames coming out her ears were my first clue.

“Okay,” I said to her. “Off-limits.”

She watched me, suspicion shooting out her eyes.

With good reason.

“But only if you answer me one thing,” I said.

Her mouth twitched. “What?”

“Were the Feds looking at Kate, too?”

She blinked once, shifted her neck like there was a kink in it. “You won’t get within a hundred miles of him?”

“Two hundred.”

She paused, staring at me like she was trying to decide if I was telling her the truth. “Kate was working for them.”

“The FBI?” I asked.

She let out a deep breath. “No. It’s DEA.”

If she had jumped over the desk and kissed Carter, it would’ve surprised me less. “No way.”

“She was inside.”

“Then how did she die?” Carter asked.

She set her elbow on the desk, made a fist, and leaned her chin on it, her face drawn. “They screwed up.”

Her words hung in the air like a neon sign. I knew by the way that she said it, that whoever had screwed up, whoever had let Kate die, wouldn’t admit to it. Collateral damage in a bigger operation.

I felt my chest tighten. “Back up. What the hell was she doing inside?”

“I can’t tell you.”

“The fuck you can’t,” I said, louder than I’d intended.

Her eyes widened, and she lifted her head off of her chin. “Beg your pardon?”

“You drop that cannonball on me and then tell me you can’t explain?” I said. “Like I’m just supposed to accept it, not be surprised by it? You give me more, or any promise I made to you is off the table.”

Liz shrugged. “Then I’ll arrest you both.” She looked at Carter. “Are you really dumb enough to think that someone wouldn’t notice that shitpiece you drive?” She turned back to me. “You don’t believe me? Try me.”

I wanted to reach across the desk and grab her by the throat. Maybe throw something at the wall behind her, something to let her know how badly she was pissing me off.

But none of that would get me closer to the reason for Kate’s death.

“So, you’ll tell me that she got killed because someone screwed up somewhere, but you won’t tell me anything about what she was doing?” I asked quietly. “Not even off the record?”

She shook her head slowly. “I can’t, Noah.”

“Then you know I won’t leave it alone.”

She thought about that, then nodded.

“And if you catch me near Costilla, you’ll toss on the cuffs,” I said.

She nodded again.

I stood up, and Carter did the same.

“Then catch me if you can,” I said and we left.

“Married to an asshole, a drug user, and working for the G-men. Not exactly the old Kate,” Carter said.

“No, not exactly,” I mumbled back to him.

We were headed north on the 5, Sea World and Mission Bay on the west side, beckoning the tourists that flocked to America’s Finest City. Traffic was moving smoothly for once but it didn’t improve my mood. Nothing was making sense, and I was getting angrier with each new revelation. I felt like the more I discovered about Kate, the further I got from the truth.

“Would they really use someone like Kate inside a world like Costilla’s?” I asked, unable to shake the question from my brain.

Carter shifted in his seat and tugged at the seat belt. “They’d use whoever they could to get what they need. Male, female, young, old. Doesn’t matter to them.”

I nodded absently.

“The ME said Kate was using drugs, right? DEA was using her for something in connection with Costilla. That says to me she got caught in something,” Carter said. “An immunity deal maybe?”

I thought about that for a moment. “Maybe. Just seems odd. What did they catch her with that would justify putting her under the gun like that?”

“It had to have been some heavy shit,” Carter said. “But I can’t imagine why the law enforcement geniuses would think she’d make a great undercover candidate. All of a sudden, some upper-crust white woman shows up and tries to secretly fit in? Fucking brilliant.”

The wind from the open windows whipped through my hair as I turned everything over in my mind. If Kate was involved in drugs and got caught, it would make sense that there might be some sort of a deal made. But I thought a court testimonial would make a lot more sense than sending her into the lion’s den.

“Yeah. Why would you put someone like her in a position like that?” I said. “How the hell would she know what she was doing?”

“If a deal was set up,” Carter said, “someone would’ve needed to do some string pulling.”

I was getting around to that thought. “Like Daddy Crier.”

We drove in silence for a moment, cutting under the twisting curl of concrete that jutted off the freeway and up to the bluffs of La Jolla.

“You think Costilla found out what Kate was doing?” I asked.

“Maybe,” Carter said.

“But…”

“But don’t you think he would’ve left a message?”

“Like?”

Carter waved a hand in the air. “A message that said ‘I know who she was and what she was doing.’ She was in a trunk, strangled. That’s not exactly a Colombian necktie.”

I considered that. No murder was mundane or ordinary, but Carter had a point. Now that we knew that the twists in Kate’s life were more severe, the way she had died, the way I’d found her, didn’t seem that dramatic.

“Not to change the subject or anything,” Carter said, interrupting my thoughts. “But that Cadillac has been with us for a while, dude.” He reached under his seat and retrieved my gun, a 9mm Glock 17, setting it in his lap.