Marcus dropped his head forward and closed his eyes. Rio was right. “Yeah.”
“She’d stay in a vehicle until the scene was secure, then do a walk-through to see if she could identify Cedro. It would be simple and fast,” Rio said, his voice dipping back into a serious tone. “If she’s with us and he’s there, he’s less likely to run, less likely to fight, and less likely to kill. There is no doubt, this is a complex situation. Not many outside our line of work can understand the nuances. I don’t do this often, Marcus, and in the end, it’s your decision, but considering the cargo, considering the threats against the sister, I would suggest you make this simple for her. Can you do that?”
* * * * *
Tova woke to Marcus’s voice, distant and muffled. She blinked at the sun filtering in through his bedroom window and started to stretch. Pain crawled along her nerves, tightened her muscles, and she winced, then groaned, “Shit.”
She glanced at the clock on Marcus’s nightstand. Nearly 9:30 a.m.
“I’ll need to get my shift covered—” Marcus started, sounding less than happy with the prospect. Then, “Yes. Thank you, sir.”
Tova grimaced as she sat up and pushed to her feet. She pulled on Marcus’s T-shirt again and combed her hands through her hair as she moved into the living room. The scent of coffee greeted her, but better, so did the sight of Marcus standing in the kitchen in gym shorts, his butt against the counter, ankles crossed, one hand braced on the tile.
“Mmm,” she hummed with a smile.
Marcus glanced up and met her eyes but didn’t return her smile. He was dark and muscled and beautiful. And he held out his arm to her.
Damn, she could really get used to this.
She took his hand and curled against his bare chest, kissing the warmth of his skin.
“Yep,” he said, his voice rumbling in her ear. “I’m sure. We’ll be in as soon as we can. See you at the station.”
He disconnected and set his phone on the counter, then curved his arms around her and held her in a cocoon of happiness, comfort, and safety against his body.
“Get some sleep?” he asked, voice husky.
“Mmm-hmm.”
“Good.”
“Was that Zoe?”
“Yeah.”
“Are we still going in for the lineup?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Have you called in to work yet?”
“No.” She glanced up at him and found his gaze distant. “I thought I’d wait to see what was happening. I don’t go in until three. I didn’t think the lineup would take more than an hour.”
He ran his hand down her hair, clasped her shoulders, and pushed her back to look down into her eyes. The concern in his own struck an uneasy chord in her chest. He licked his lips before he spoke. “The guys who took you told agents about three different stash houses.” He seemed to be watching her closely. “Do you…happen to have a picture of your brother?”
“Not a recent one.” Excitement prickled her neck. “What’s a stash house? Did the men say Cedro was there?”
“A stash house is a house, here, in the US, where smugglers keep illegal immigrants for a few days after they cross the border. Then they’re picked up by trucks or vans and distributed throughout the US. They didn’t confirm Cedro was at one of the houses, but they suspect, based on intel they’ve received from confidential informants and undercover cops.”
Her chest tightened. Despite the endless secondhand stories she’d heard about others who’d tried to run the border, she was admittedly naive about the process. “That all sounds…complicated. And dangerous.”
“It can be. When a person’s livelihood and freedom are threatened, you never know how they’ll react. Which is why I’m not crazy about this next part.”
She stepped out of his arms and crossed her own over her middle, suddenly cold. “What part?”
He braced his palms on the counter behind him, and the muscle across his chest rippled. Heat pinged through her body, but she forced herself to ignore it. “Zoe’s boss would like you to come on the raids.”
She stiffened, tightened the cross of her arms. “What? Why?”
“You wouldn’t be part of the raid. You’d stay in a vehicle outside until the scene was secure, then come in to identify Cedro if he’s there.”
She wanted to say yes, automatically. To do anything to help Cedro and get him to safety sooner. But something didn’t feel right. “Why wouldn’t they just ask the men their names?”
“Because they lie. They’d just tell us they were someone else or not give us a name at all. Many of these people are criminals, Tova. Like the men who abducted you. When we discover who they are and what they’ve done, we turn them over to authorities in their own countries. They’ll do anything to escape that fate.”
They held each other’s gaze as silence descended on the kitchen.
She finally said, “You don’t want me to do it.”
“I…” His gaze rose toward the ceiling, and he drew in a breath before he looked at her again. “I don’t like anything about this.”
He looked tortured. Like a black cloud hung over him. And she was torn. Given the kind of work he did on an almost daily basis, his unease created an apprehension inside her, a sense of something brewing beneath the surface. “Why?”
“Because it’s dangerous.” He pushed off the counter, stepped toward her, and wrapped her in his arms. “Because all sorts of shit happens during these raids, and I…” He exhaled heavily and pressed his face into her hair. “I don’t want you hurt.”
Affection warmed her body from the inside out. “Do you think my being there could help Cedro?”
“Yes,” he said without hesitation. “If Cedro is at one of these houses, I have no doubt that you identifying him quickly will keep him safer than if you weren’t there.”
“Then there’s no question,” she said, closing her eyes and holding him tight. “I’ll do it.”
Twelve
Tova sat next to Marcus in the back seat of an ICE van on their way to the second stash house, through a depressed neighborhood in Calexico, but she still couldn’t get the first one out of her head. The van took a sharp turn, and Marcus braced a hand on the seat in front of them so he wouldn’t fall into her.
“Jesus Christ, Paulson,” the ICE agent in the passenger’s seat said. “Where’d you get your license?”
The driver quipped something Tova didn’t hear, but the other agents in the van laughed. Marcus was leaning forward, elbows on his thighs. His lips turned in a marginal smile, but it disappeared instantly. He seemed out of sorts. Tense. Uncomfortable. As if waiting for the other shoe to drop. But she reminded herself she really didn’t know him well enough to judge. This was his intense work world, and she had no idea what type of facade he had to wear to get through it.
He glanced over his shoulder, checking Tova’s expression. He’d stayed close by her side at the previous house, where the group had been equally split between men and women and only two of the inhabitants had been Mexican nationals. All the others had traveled from all over South and Central America to reach the United States.
None of them had been Cedro, but all of them had been someone—someone from somewhere. Someone with family and friends.
That was when her first sense of awkwardness at being included in the raids had hit her. Thousands of other family members and friends had to be searching or waiting for each of these immigrants, yet no one else outside law enforcement had been included in these raids. She understood Marcus going out of his way to help her find Cedro, but the grand scale of these raids had hit, and she wondered why they’d allowed her to come instead of making her wait to find out what they’d uncovered. And Cedro’s own words kept playing over in her head.
“I’ve got a lead on some work in Calexico.”
Had something with that work gone wrong? Had Cedro gotten himself caught in yet another tight spot? Her mind kept spiraling with questions and what-ifs and maybes until she was so confused she began to grow angry.
Marcus leaned back, slid one of his big hands over the two of hers, clasped in her lap. “If you don’t want to go in again—”
“I want to. I want to find him.”
And then wring his fool neck
. After she knew he was safe
.
“Are you okay?”
He smiled, the expression soft. “I’m with you. That means I’m great.”
They turned down the street of the second house, and everyone in the van went quiet. All joking and sparring died as chatter picked up on the radio. Tova swore tension thickened the air, making it heavy. Making it hard to breathe. Though that could be caused by the Kevlar vest Marcus had insisted she wear.
He released her hands and sat forward again, gaze sharp on the radio, jaw tight.
They were talking directions, entries, cover, leads… Nothing Tova understood. Then a smattering of “
Go, go, go, go, go,
” sputtered over the radio, and the van shot forward. “Runners out the back.”
Before the van stopped, Marcus leaned over and slid the door open, then sat back as all the other agents jumped out of the vehicle, weapons drawn. The van swerved toward the house, jumped the curb, and jerked to a stop on the lawn. The agents in the driver’s and passenger’s seats bailed at a run as people streamed out the back of the house in every direction.
Marcus gripped the passenger’s headrest with bloodless fingers. On the radio, men shouted information to each other—locations, directions, numbers of runners. Tova’s head spun with the sheer chaos of the situation. She couldn’t fathom how anyone knew what anyone else was doing.
“You can go,” she said, breathless from the hammering of her heart against her lungs. “I’m okay.”
His attention darted toward her a second, then away. “No.” But he moved to the door. His chest was covered in Kevlar, jean-covered thigh wrapped in a black holster holding his weapon. “I’m good right here.”
When the shouting died down and movement quieted, agents periodically announced an area clear, a fugitive caught. And finally, “Smoke, all clear.”
He turned and held his hand out to her, expression both serious and questioning. She took it without hesitation, and he helped her out of the van.
“Why do they call you Smoke?” she asked, nerves crawling with tension.
“I’m good at sneaking up on people,” he said with a squeeze of her shoulder and a quick grin. “Ready?”
She licked her lips, squinted at the house. She anticipated the smell—something she could only describe as a human dump—took a deep breath, and nodded.
Stomach tight, Tova crossed the dead lawn toward the front door with Marcus’s strong hand on her arm. They stepped aside as a couple of agents came out, then Marcus urged her ahead of him through the door. The space was as dark as the last. As dank as a cave. Body odor and the smell of urine mixed with dirt and grime and rotting garbage.
Within steps of the front door, Tova halted. Men lay at her feet, lined up on the concrete facedown, hands up by their heads. All men. Different from the last house.
“Why are they all men?” she asked.
When he met her eyes, his gaze was intent. “These houses are used by the Zetas cartel for smuggling criminals into the country. The last house was filled with mostly noncriminals—”
“Mostly?” she asked, a cold streak developing at the back of her neck.
“Mostly. There were two violent offenders there from El Salvador.”
“And this one?”
His serious gaze broke away and scanned the room filled with bodies, his jaw clenching. “We’ll know soon enough.”
Zoe picked her way toward them from across the room. “Every one of the guys we’ve fingerprinted has a criminal record, but no one is pointing out the principals.” She met Marcus’s gaze, and something seemed to pass between them. “Sounds like the smuggler’s in the wind, but…we’re not finished going through these guys yet.”
Tova had learned from the last raid that they called the men running the stash houses principals and that the smugglers stayed with the groups until they were picked up. She was sweating beneath the Kevlar, and just walking through these houses made her feel disgustingly grimy. But in addition to all that, she had a bad, bad feeling in the pit of her stomach.
When Zoe passed them for the front door, Marcus stepped deeper into the house, but Tova pulled him back by the arm. “Is there something you’re not telling me?”
A flash of emotion crossed his face but she couldn’t tell what. He leaned toward her and closed his hand gently at the base of her neck. “We have a lot to talk about, honey, but we need to get through this first.”
That only made her feel more anxious.
Marcus tapped the man lying closest to them with his boot. “Hey,
mira aquí.
”
The man turned his head and looked up as Marcus had directed. His gaze darted from Marcus to Tova, then back. Not Cedro. Tova shook her head, and Marcus stepped over the man and nudged the next. As they continued down the line, moving farther into the house, Tova grew claustrophobic and nauseated.
Other agents milled around, searching the house and the men, taking fingerprints and photographs. After Tova gave a negative identification, the men were removed to a waiting van where they would be taken back to a detention center and processed for return to their countries. And the longer this went on, the more crimes she heard the agents talk about the men committing—assault, rape, murder—the more wrong this felt. And she was questioning the boss’s request to have her come in the first place.