One Wrong Move (9 page)

CHAPTER EIGHT

Lacey

If I wasn’t doing everything around here…

She scoffed at Camden’s words, even after he’d been gone for hours. “If only you knew,” she murmured as she drummed her fingers along the steering wheel to the sound of the current hip-hop favorites.

Lacey pulled into Sanctions Gateway and parked. Darrell should be here. He spent his Tuesdays delivering food and gifts to the shelter.

Sanctions Gateway provided temporary housing for boys who were at risk of homelessness, those who ran away because of volatile family situations, or those whose families needed help getting them the care they couldn’t find anywhere else. Many of them were there because of drug or alcohol abuse, some because their parents couldn’t care for them until they straightened up. The shelter offered that opportunity without being a halfway house or drug treatment facility. They catered to boys who came from across hundreds of miles, on all stretches of the Texas coast. The program strived to help those in need, get them off the street, and teach them to live better lives.

Darrell helped to start the program, but eventually he’d stepped down and let others run it. He still volunteered and put a lot of money into it. The DEA often wondered if he was helping or hindering the children’s progress, but the food he brought had been studied numerous times and nothing odd was ever discovered. It was just as he presented it to be—food.

No one ever told the kids it was leftover food frozen from the past week’s meals at the restaurant. It was the only gourmet meal they might ever have a chance to eat.

There was an agent undercover as a nurse to watch over Darrell, but Lacey assumed she, along with every woman there under the age of ninety, was sleeping with him.

Lacey parked the car and exited the vehicle, doing her best to avoid Cyndi. The agent shouldn’t recognize her, but she didn’t take that risk. She walked in, carrying her own bag of gifts, and considered it her lucky day when she ran into Darrell in the dining area where the kids were eating.

“Oh, hello.” Lacey fumbled with the neckline of her shirt. “What a surprise.”

“What brings you here?” Darrell asked, eyeing her bag.

“My brother’s in this facility,” she lied. “I try to visit him on Mondays but I didn’t make it over yesterday. What about you?”

“Volunteer work. Which one’s your brother?”

Lacey studied the room. “Oh, there he is. Eddie.” She waved at the most sullen one she could find in the group and advanced on him. She laughed and glanced toward Darrell when Eddie looked at her like she’d lost her mind. “He always does this. Tries to pretend he doesn’t have a family left.” She dropped a package in the boy’s lap. “I brought you a few things.”

“Cool.” The boy took the sack and started rummaging through it, pulling out a used Smartphone, ear buds, and a gift card.

She made a mental note to call him Eddie next time she saw him and retrieved her phone to snap a photo. “I need to take a picture, Eddie. Our parents are asking about you.”

“I don’t have any parents,” the kid commented, his attention riveted on the handheld.

Lacey snapped a few pictures and dropped her phone back in her purse. Darrell studied her with an expression she couldn’t make out. Accusation? Disbelief? She linked her arm through his and walked away with him. “He doesn’t claim our parents anymore, and I don’t really blame him.”

“Why’s that?”

“They pretty much abandoned him a long time ago,” she said and, doing her best to change the subject, continued, “It’s great to see you again.” She didn’t have to fake the smile or the smitten expression she wore as she glanced up at him. They stopped in the hallway, and she turned to him and played with the collar of his shirt. “You wanna go get something to eat?”

“I already had lunch. How’s your husband?”

“Same old.” She traced his collarbone, down to his chest, then teased the buttons of his shirt with her long fingernails. “Will I see you at the beach on Sunday?”

He grinned, and she traced his jaw with her hand. “You don’t want to give these children the wrong impression, do you?” he asked.

She dropped her hand and studied him, pouting.

“I’ll be around,” he said, leaving that as his exit line.

She watched him walk away, seeing the good in him. He didn’t belong behind bars. He helped children live a better life, something most ordinary civilians didn’t do. Even if he did manufacture drugs, he didn’t make people take them. They made that decision for themselves.

She would definitely see him again. His livelihood, and possibly his life, might depend on that fact.

***

Rayma

Rayma debated on whether to take the information directly to the police station or go through it first. If she dropped it off with Officer Buckley—her contact with the Hammer Bay Police Department—she could move forward with her life, pack her bags and get out of here. She’d break the lease on her condo and never look back.

Problem was, she didn’t know if she trusted the police to follow through, if only because she was the one bringing in the evidence. Buckley was the only officer she’d been able to develop a relationship with, and that was pretty shaky. Although she’d been considered a popular news anchor, many cops avoided her. They hated her blog and the fact she posted about the bad and the good, and brought to the surface issues otherwise ignored.

She didn’t debate with herself for very long. She was a reporter after all. She couldn’t just hand a bag of information over without going through it first. So she went home and spread it out on the dinner table to get a good look.

It didn’t take her long to regret her decision. She couldn’t turn her back and ignore what she’d discovered. And she wouldn’t be calling the police.

Several police officers were involved with Darrell Weberley. She couldn’t tell which ones, and although there was still a lot to go through to make sense of it, evidence of Darrell’s drug manufacturing was definitely within these documents. Ingredients for some type of drug that he called
Dare Me
—pages and pages of names, contact information, meeting information, and other documents in jargon.

She called James, but didn’t tell him about what she’d found.

“I want to come home,” she said, her voice wavering. She’d hand this over to the feds, let them deal with it.

“I’ll come get you,” he offered, almost too cheerful.

“No. I can drive. I don’t have much but my clothes, a few dishes and things.”

“You’ll need help packing.”

“No, James. I’m fine. I can hire someone.”

“Why do that? Why not save money?”

She couldn’t answer his question. She needed to save all the money she had left, but she didn’t want to take help from James or anybody else. She wanted to be strong, didn’t want to be a failure. When she’d run to Hammer Bay, she was running from her past—her past relationship with Keegan, the man who tried to kill her, who wasn’t at all who or what he said he was. She had to do this on her own, maintain what little independence she had left.

“I’ll take care of it, James. Don’t worry about me.” She shouldn’t have even told him she wanted to come back to Austin. Maybe she’d hoped he’d tell her she was losing her mind, that she should stay and figure things out. But he had no idea what she was trying to figure out and if he did, he’d never approve.

“You’ll stay with me until you find a place.” James made it a statement, not a suggestion.

“I have a cat.”

“I know. You’ve showed me pictures. I like cats.”

As if he knew she was talking about him, Beacon plopped down in the middle of her project and demanded a back rub.

“You sound way too happy about this.”

“Of course I’m happy you’re coming home.”

His words disheartened her. She no longer had a home. Hammer Bay had been her home for the past year. Despite her boredom, she’d grown to like most of it—the long walks on the beach with her camera, the crowded boardwalk that housed a few of the piers, and the friends she’d made at work.

“It’ll probably take me a few days,” she said. More, if she kept vacillating.

“I’ll come down and help,” he insisted again, probably afraid her decision wasn’t final.

Rayma should take him up on his offer. With his help she could pack up and leave in a hurry. But she didn’t want to do that. She needed time to do this herself. She’d break down if he was here. She’d feel like a failure, feel like she was running home with her tail tucked between her legs.

She’d lost so much. Caitlyn, her friend who’d moved to North Carolina after reuniting with the love of her life, would demand she come see her. Caitlyn had worried about her for months after what happened with Keegan. But Rayma would remain strong.

“Please don’t,” she insisted one final time. “I need you there waiting for me. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

He agreed, probably only because he knew how close she’d come to losing it after everything had happened with Keegan. James had been the one to tell her she should get away, although he’d meant it as a vacation. He was giving her room and trying not to hover, especially after she’d warned him to stop.

She spent the evening posting on her blog, videos and pictures she’d taken the night before and some of what her informant had given her. The post was framed as to make the community aware of the dangers of drugs and advising them to be aware of what was going on around them. Vin Doux was situated in the background of one of those pictures, two indistinct officers in another, but she was careful not to blatantly accuse anyone of anything.

She didn’t write that it would be her final post, didn’t bother mentioning that she might or might not leave the blog up. She was leaving this and everything else behind. Why not have one last hurrah?

***

Camden

“What the fuck is that woman thinking?”

Moore was the first to speak after seeing Rayma’s blog post. Lacey sat with her fingers twisted around her napkin. Camden was too shocked to say anything. Always aware of what was going on around him, he was racing between two sets of feelings.

They had been discussing their next move and trying to decide how to get Camden invited to Darrell’s upcoming party. The bust would be easier if they had someone on the inside. Lacey insisted she go undercover and get in good with Dare because he’d need a date for the party. Moore thought it might be best to bring in extra undercover agents, and Camden agreed that extra waiters would help, but they had to be men he trusted, men he knew. He was getting closer to Dare, but his nerves were itching from lack of activity. He needed to
do
something.

Rayma might have just provided him with that something. She’d obviously acquired pictures and video from the man she met yesterday, and this information could be useful to them. On another level, though, they didn’t want the local police involved, or even to know about their operation.

He had to get that information, and he had to make sure Rayma didn’t post anything else and put herself in even more danger. The only way he could do that was if he exposed his cover to her, but that was classified and could open up another can of worms.

For now, Moore had agreed they should increase the surveillance on Rayma’s house and the surrounding areas. Camden called her to invite her to an early dinner before he went to work, but she refused, claiming she was too busy. He acted as if he hadn’t seen her blog, and since she hadn’t mentioned the name of his employer in the post, it would be easy to pretend he didn’t know about it.

Camden was alert to the tension at work. Men were discussing things in low voices and behind closed doors. He detected those waiters who weren’t involved just by the way they acted. He longed to be in that group with Dare, discussing what to do and hearing what they planned.

So he decided to take a risk.

He entered Dare’s office. “Have you seen that woman’s blog post?” 

Now that Rayma had been fired, and nobody in the community knew why, her blog was getting a lot of attention, so Camden didn’t bother mentioning who he was talking about. He figured his boss already knew.

Dare swirled scotch in his glass as he reclined in his high-backed leather chair. He eyed Camden like he wasn’t sure how to take his rude interruption. Camden wasn’t sure what he might have interrupted, since the office was empty and Dare had been staring into space.

“You mean Rayma, the woman you dated?”

“You told me to woo her. I went out with her one night.”

“You obviously didn’t woo her much.”

“Hard to find time when all I do is work.”

Dare nodded and sipped his scotch. “Maybe she’s using you for information.”

“I don’t know why. I don’t know anything.”