standing on end. His broad face looked tired. From the amount of dark stubble on his jaw, it had been at least a week since his last shave.
“Hey, bro,” Hunter said, grabbing him. “I was just texting you. I’ve been in the Yucatan for two weeks.”
Grinning, Jase stepped into the one-armed hug and mutual back whacking. “Figured that. Haven’t seen the blinds open until a few minutes ago.”
“Ali and the kids okay?”
“Colds, spit-ups, Christmas gotta-haves—the usual.”
Hunter let out a silent sigh of relief. The kids were okay. Anything else that was wrong could be dealt with. He motioned Jase in and shut the door behind him.
“You home for a while?” Jase asked.
“Until the phone rings. The family business is exploding like popcorn. All the narco violence has people on both sides of the border checking under the beds.”
“I don’t blame them.” Jase threw his manila envelope on the kitchen counter. “The crap going down now has to be seen to be believed.”
“That why you need me?”
Jase’s smile faded and his face looked years older than thirty-four. “They’re going to fire me on the twenty- second. Merry Christmas, mope.”
Hunter went still. “What the hell?”
“Some stuff went missing from ICE’s warehouse. You know what that place is like—lockers crammed to the ceiling with guns and goodies, drugs and money.”
“Brubaker thinks you’re selling drugs out of evidence lockers?” Hunter asked, not hiding his shock.
“No.” Jase sighed, poured himself some coffee, and took it to the small cafe table. He slumped into one of the two mismatched chairs. “I’ve never flipped an investigation or taken a drop of all that black money pouring through our hands and he knows it. But if I don’t find this missing stuff before the twenty-first, I’ll be cleaning bathrooms at Mamacita’s. With my tongue.”
“Three days?” Hunter demanded, unbelieving.
Jase nodded. He was counting down the minutes. Hell, the seconds.
“What went missing?” Hunter asked. “Guns?”
“Maya stuff. Or Aztec. Or what’s that early one?”
“Moche? Olmec? Mixtec?”
“Whatever. I don’t know diddly or squat about that stuff. That’s why I need you.” Suddenly Jase put his face in his hands. “Ali told me she’s pregnant. I was grinning at the moon. Then this. I don’t know what to tell her. It’s not like the missing stuff is gold or coke or anything, but Brubaker’s dick is in a knot and it all has to do with politics. How do you explain politics to a pregnant mother with children to feed and a husband who’s about to get sacked?”
Hunter took the remaining chair at the tiny kitchen table. Their knees knocked. The men automatically shifted to make room. They had been raised around small tables in small kitchens.
“Walk me through it,” Hunter said. “How did ICE come across the artifacts?”
“About two, three weeks ago,” Jase said, rubbing his eyes like a man who hadn’t had enough sleep. “Around the first of December. I’m out there supervising a training session at the Matamoros crossing. Everything is dry like burned toast. Everyone out there is swearing and edgy. Beagles start howling just because they’re so miserable.”
“Beagles? What, you’re gonna lick the bad guys to death?”
“Those beagles are unstoppable. Noses that won’t quit. Stubborn and cute as puppies. They’re a lot more tourist-friendly for airports and cruise-ship terminals than your average German shepherd.” Jase glanced up from his coffee. “Politics, you know. Nobody’s afraid of beagles. Ali swears she’s gonna steal one and take it home to the kids.”
Hunter almost smiled. “Okay. You’re out on a beagle training session. Then what?”
“It’s a joint training session. ICE and DEA, getting along just like stepbrothers. But when the president tells you to play nice, then you damn well don’t get caught playing dirty.”
“What happened?”
“We get a stake-bed truck with plates out of Quintana Roo. The dogs freak. Howling and pawing the air and stretching leashes all over the place. All we see are commercial bags of concrete and some boxes of tools.”
“Coke?” Hunter asked.
“Yeah, the dogs hit on coke stashed with the concrete bags. But not a lot of it. A few kilos, nothing like a full shipment.”
Hunter’s mouth quirked at one corner. “And the dumb driver swears he didn’t know coke from concrete mix, right?”
“How’d you guess?” Jase asked dryly. “The coke was packed amateur, and it looked like at least one of the packages had gotten messed up before it was wrapped. Dogs locked onto the smell of the coke even though it had been doctored with kerosene or jet fuel.”
“Bad night for the driver,” Hunter said.
“I suppose, but he seemed almost relieved to get caught. Was real eager to talk. Acted like we would protect him from the witch doctors. He gave us the address he was supposed to be taking this load to.”
“He talked before he had a lawyer?”
Jase shrugged. “He didn’t care about lawyers. All he wanted was to get away from the shipment quick as he could. We processed him the snitch route, even ran a transfer to Cameron County custody on an empty charge just so he wouldn’t be kept with us or labeled as a DEA collar. He got shanked anyway within a few days.”
Hunter whistled softly. “Someone is connected like muscle to bone.”
“Welcome to the border, where money is black, coke is white, and you never know who’s got a rocket in his pocket.” Jase’s voice was weary rather than bitter. The border was what it was—a war zone.
“Who did the hit?”
“Some gangbanger from the Latin Kings out of Harlingen.”
“Did he give a reason for the killing?”
“Said the dude looked at him funny. He’s already in for life on killing four people, including two kids asleep in their beds, but he’s not giving up whoever told him to do the driver from Quintana Roo.”
“Not even to get some time shaved off a life sentence?”
Jase looked like he wanted to spit. “Cameron County’s D.A. is ambitious. He wants to run for governor and makes no secret of it. You don’t score a lot of points by making deals with kiddy whackers.”
“You can get a lot of points for nailing whoever ordered the whack.”
“Bird in the hand, man. Can’t guarantee what’s in the bush.” Jase drank some cooling coffee. “The ADA went ahead and tried to make a deal. The gangbanger acted like he was alone in the room.”
“Which tells me that whoever gave the order for the hit on the Q Roo driver pulls some serious weight. Is it a Latin King?”
Jase shook his head. “Ain’t none of the LKs ever had a lick of interest in the artifact trade. The amount of coke we found might get someone killed, but…” He shrugged, the liquid movement of a man whose ancestors came from both sides of the border.
“So would a handful of dirt,” Hunter said.
“Yeah. The driver didn’t have a drug background. Pretty much a Q Roo dirt farmer, not someone the Kings would be dealing with directly.”
“What about the artifacts? Do you think they were the real cargo?”
“DEA must have. They sneered at the five kilos of coke. That’s a lot of personal use, but not really a blip on DEA’s radar. But they were real eager to hand the artifacts over to Mexico for a big gold star in their good-neighbor file. So was our very own AIC Brubaker.”
Hunter shook his head and spit out a single word. “Politics.”
“Oh yeah. There was the usual pushing and shouldering. Then we cut a deal. DEA got the drugs and ICE got the artifacts. Since they weren’t evidence of anything prosecutable—the driver was dead—Brubaker fast-tracked the
