Page 80 of Westin

By then they’d reached an arrangement of chairs at the back of the room where Petey’s buddies were waiting for them. He gently sat her in one of the chairs, careful with her ankle, kind in the way he set her down. Again, it felt as though they were just a couple of friendly people, having a conversation.

Petey grabbed a chair and brought it close to hers before straddling it backward. “What were you saying? About Will’s computer?”

“Did you know he was also making recordings of phone conversations? That he had surveillance pictures and snapshots of someone’s customer ledger?” She tilted her head slightly. “I always thought it was kind of ridiculous that criminals write down all this information. I know you need to keep track of what’s coming and going, but there’s got to be a better way than writing it down, creating an evidence trail.”

Petey dropped his head down, clearly thrown a little by what she’d said. “Will kept that stuff?”

“He did.”

“How do you know?”

She rolled her shoulders. “Maybe he told me.”

“I doubt that. He was very insistent that he hadn’t told you anything. In fact, he swore to it. He didn’t want you to die. He was hoping you would wrap the case in Phoenix and just walk away, but that didn’t seem to be happening.”

“How long was he on your payroll?”

Petey glanced at one of the men sitting just a few feet beyond them. The man shrugged. Petey turned his attention back to her and shrugged, too. “A little over a year. He approached us, said that he knew we were continuing what a friend had been doing in California. Said if we put him on the payroll, he’d protect us from future investigations by the DEA.”

“That worked out well, didn’t it?”

Petey sighed. “Well, the thing is, our people in Phoenix got a little ambitious and started doing things that we hadn’t sanctioned. We’ve taken care of that—you helped by taking out Fang—so things should settle down there now. You and Will might actually get credit for it. Posthumously, but, well, you know. Credit is credit.”

“It is that.” She tucked a piece of hair that had come loose from her braid behind her ear. “A year ago. That would have been about the time his daughter needed an operation on her spine.”

“I wouldn’t know. I don’t get into the personal life of my employees. I just pay them and send them on their way, unless they screw something up.”

“That happen often?”

“Sometimes. Criminals can’t be trusted.” He laughed. “I suppose that’s the nature of the beast.”

Lee looked down at her ankle. It throbbed like crazy, but the pain was finally lessening. Her ribs ached more now. She took a deep breath, testing them out. Not terrible. They weren’t broken, just bruised.

The question was, could she run if she got the chance? She wasn’t sure.

“You should know that Will did everything he could to keep you out of this. He set it out for us at the very beginning; you weren’t to be involved. And then this thing in Phoenix came up. The plan was that we were going to allow you to take down Fang, maybe a couple of his dealers. But somehow you found out about Razor, and you started digging. Will said he tried to get you on a different track, to keep you from going down that road, but you wouldn’t let it go. He said you were like a dog with a bone.”

“Yeah? When did he try to bring me in on it, then?”

“Weeks ago, when you stumbled on Razor. He said some things to you, hypothesized what it would be like if you just walked away from it all.”

Lee bit her lip, suddenly flooded with a memory of sitting in Will’s car, dressed in the sexy outfit she wore to tend bar, exhausted after a busy shift.

“Have you ever thought about giving it up, Lee? Just throwing in the towel and retiring to some beach somewhere?”

“Wouldn’t that be fantastic? The only problem is, I don’t look that great in a bikini.”

“That’s a lie. If you said that to my wife, she’d break your nose.”

Lee laughed. “Yeah, she probably would.”

“But, seriously, what if we just forgot about all this, forgot about these guys, let them go kill each other. You know that’s what would happen if we just left them to their own devices.”

“I know it seems frustrating, Will. But what we do is a good thing. We keep these people from destroying good people like your wife, my mom. We keep them from turning your kids and my little brother and sisters into drug addicts. We do good.”

Will had agreed with her in the end and dropped the subject. She’d thought it was just his frustrations with the case, his guilt for not being at home, that drove the conversation. It’d happened many times, but he always came back around. At least, she’d thought he did.

She wished she could go back with what she knew now and make a better argument. She wished she’d pushed him, made him tell her the truth so that she could help him out of his predicament, maybe save his life.