Death Angel

looked closer, turned out to be highly stylized horses in an even deeper red. Instead of the flat rectangular fold of white handkerchief, his breast pocket sported a few subtle peaks in the same rich red. Altogether he was subtly more flashy, his movements faster, his accent was as undefinable as that of a television news anchor. The expression in his eyes was decidedly sharklike, but unlike Hulsey, his attitude toward Agent Cotton was that of respect.

Neither of them was going to die anytime soon.

She got that, plucked the sudden conviction out of the air as if it were a ripe apple dangling in front of her, but saw no need to tell them. Jackson thought he was bulletproof, and Cotton was looking forward to retirement and having more time to spend with his wife, doing things he enjoyed. No death worries darkened their minds, so she didn’t introduce the subject.

Jackson gave her an incredulous look. “Are you really Drea Rousseau?”

She laughed, and he immediately said, “Oh, yeah, I recognize that laugh.” Curiosity burned in his eyes. “I thought you might be dead. You just disappeared.”

“On purpose,” she assured him. “Running for my life.”

“Salinas wants you dead?”

“He did. After I left town, though, I was in a car accident and the news release mistakenly said I’d died in the accident, which was actually a lifesaver because Rafael called off his hounds.” There had been only one hound, and he’d been the one to report to Rafael that she was dead, which was true, but her glib skirting of the truth was much more believable than what had actually happened.

“So he thinks you’re dead,” said Cotton. “You’re safe. Why come back to the city, back to his territory?”

“Because if I know anything about him that would help you build a case against him, help put him in prison, then it would be wrong for me to play it safe while he goes on bringing drugs into the country every week. Rafael’s smart,” she said. “You might never be able to get enough evidence against him, unless you somehow catch a break. I might be that break. I don’t know that I am, but I’m willing to give it a shot.”

“Do you know who his accountant is? The real one, not the one who does the books for the public stuff?”

She shook her head. Knowing the accountant, and his, or her, location, would have been the linchpin to Rafael’s entire operation. “I never heard a name mentioned. He was careless about a few things”-like his bank password-“but not about that. I don’t think any of his men know, either. They talked in front of me, but they never mentioned anything about books, or an accountant.”

“Did he ever disappear, and not take any of his men with him?” That was Jackson chiming in.

“Not that I know of, though he could have left with his usual guard and ditched them somewhere afterward. But like I said, I never heard them talking about anything like that. Rafael’s paranoid about going out by himself. He thinks the streets are knee-deep in rivals waiting to knock him off. He wants to be surrounded by other bodies, at all times.”

They both peppered her with questions, about any detail they could think of. They talked for hours, with Andie pitching in any detail she could think of, but she began to despair because nothing seemed to be enough to hang on him. She’d been afraid of that, afraid she might have to resort to more desperate measures.

“There’s one option I have to mention,” she finally said, when even the two agents seemed discouraged because their golden opportunity to nail Salinas was turning out to be a dud. “It isn’t a federal charge, but the idea is to get Rafael out of business and off the streets, right? If he sees me, he’ll go nuts. I’m supposed to be dead. When I left, I…took something that was very important to him.” Yeah, she could honestly say that two million dollars was important to him, but equally important to someone like Rafael was the affront she had landed to his ego. Come to that, his ego might be more important. He’d convinced himself that he loved her, and she’d thrown that love in his face. “If he can, he’ll kill me where I stand. So how can we use that against him?”

“IT WON’T WORK,” Jackson said softly, after Drea Rousseau left-a vastly changed Drea, but it was definitely her. “Even if we could use a civilian as bait, which the A.D. would never allow anyway, an attempted murder charge doesn’t carry a severe-enough sentence to keep him off the streets for much more than a year or so-and that’s if he even did any jail time.”

“I know,” said Cotton. His voice was tired. “I know. We still can’t nail the bastard, even with her help. And God forbid if we set her up as bait and he actually did shoot her down in the street. I couldn’t forgive myself if that happened.”

ANDIE STOPPED AT a diner for lunch, so discouraged she could barely swallow the soup she ordered. She had been so certain she could come back to New York and, in short order, somehow have Rafael either in federal custody or dead. She had honestly been thinking “dead,” as if there would be some big dramatic shoot-out, which would certainly juice up a slow news day, and Rafael would be killed. Looked at logically, now that she was here, she couldn’t say how she had arrived at that scenario. This wasn’t like the sudden impressions she had concerning other people; she’d never had one relating to herself.

Her plan, if it could be called a plan, had been big in scope but very sketchy on details. Now that she was here, she felt pretty foolish. She hadn’t thought anything out, which was so unlike her she could only shake her head. She wasn’t brave, she wasn’t intrepid, she wasn’t any kind of heroine, but she had conceived of this grand scheme without having any way of carrying it out. What the hell was wrong with her?

Unless she really was meant to die here-unless her death would be the avenue by which Rafael was finally put away for good.

Blindly she stared out the window at the street, with its endless stream of pedestrians. She wasn’t afraid of death, but she was afraid of not being good enough to go back to the place where Alban was. She had tried hard to become a more worthwhile human being, to work for what she had in life, to stop using her looks and sex to get what she wanted, but only eight months had passed. Eight months, stacked against fifteen years, was bound to be on the light end of the scale. If she died now, had she gotten enough attagirl points to make a difference?

Maybe her death, a final death, was the true test. A greater love hath no man, and all that. If it came down to it, and her death was what it took to bring Rafael down, then she would do it. Somehow she’d get the courage to do it.

But oh, she didn’t want to leave Simon. Despite their history, what was between them felt new and tremulous, barely explored. And despite his history, despite telling herself that he was the bad choice to end all bad choices, she wanted to place her hands along his beard-roughened jaw, look into the dark opal colors of his eyes, and watch tenderness bloom where before there had been only emptiness.

She wanted the time to get to know him, really know him. She wanted more than the superficial knowledge he’d given her during their question-and-answer session at the IHOP. She wanted to tell him silly jokes and make him laugh, she wanted to share meals with him, she wanted to be with him as he changed from a man who sutured his own wounds to someone who could let others help him.

He was so alone. If she died, what would happen to him? Would he stay on the path he’d chosen, or would he return to his old ways? She didn’t believe she was so unique that he could never find anyone else he could love, but the question was: Would he? Would he try? Or would he wall himself off even more solidly than he had been before? She knew the answer to that, because she had seen how completely he shut down all the overtures she’d made during their afternoon together, refusing even to tell her his name. He hadn’t wanted her to kiss him, either; she remembered how he’d frozen, at first, as if about to push her away. But he hadn’t; something in him had craved being held, being kissed, and when he had started kissing her in return she had felt as if she’d never before been kissed so deeply, so hungrily.

If she hadn’t seen him at the truck stop, if he hadn’t gone to her place to reassure her, if he hadn’t kissed her, she would have always thought of him with the pain and regret she hadn’t been able to shake, but she wouldn’t long for him. Thoughts of him wouldn’t make her regret doing what she knew she should do.

After finishing her soup, she left the diner and took a bus across town to the Holiday Inn where she was staying. The route went fairly close; she had to walk only a couple of short blocks. She got into the squeaky elevator alone, and rode up to her floor. A housekeeping cart was parked at the end of the hallway, and from the open door she could hear the drone of a vacuum cleaner.

Inserting her key card, she opened the door and froze, holding it open.