Page 64 of Westin

Clint shot him a dark look as he gestured for Lee to continue.

“There are cartels everywhere,” she sighed. “Every time we take one down, it seems like three more pop up to take its place.” She ran her hand over the top of her head, smoothing her palm over her braided hair. “We tracked the supplier to Sacramento. I got a job working for the guy—he had a little bakery in a suburb, so I learned how to properly frost a cake—and we discovered that he was working for this cartel, and they were using ranches and farms and small businesses in rural areas to sell and move their drugs.”

“This cartel is behind the boxes?”

“Was.” Lee glanced at Clint, aware he was following her story easily because they’d already talked some of it out. But Westin… he was watching her with such trust in his eyes, and she felt like a liar, like she’d deceived him when he’d trusted her most. “They would bury these boxes in remote areas, usually on private property, not only to protect themselves should the boxes be discovered when they were full of product, but so they could use them to set up enemies, people they wanted taken out of the equation, whatever equation it might have been. We saw them call the police on some strawberry farmer outside of Sacramento because he’d been causing trouble for one of their members who happened to have a home that butted up against his. And that wasn’t the only time…”

She sighed. “It’s not an uncommon thing, these dead drops. Drug dealers have been using them for years. But the boxes, the code they write on the top—”

“Code?” Westin asked.

“The lettering on top,” Clint said.

“Like the box we found,” she told Westin. “It had a man’s name on it. Petey J.”

“Petey?” Westin asked, tilting his head just slightly. “Are you sure?”

Lee nodded. “Positive. It took us a little while to break the code, but once we did, it was simple to remember.”

Westin shot Clint a look. “I told you one of those guys was wearing a Rocking D logo on his jacket!”

“What?” Lee looked from Clint to Westin, suddenly aware she was missing something here. “What are you talking about?”

Clint cleared his throat. “We put a camera on the box. When they came to clean it out, and then to remove it, we got footage.”

“Are you kidding me?” Lee wasn’t sure if she wanted to kiss them or kill them. “What did you see?”

“It was too dark to see faces. But Westin thought one of the guys who came to put something in the box was wearing a jacket with the Rocking D logo on it.”

“It had to have been!” Westin cried somewhat triumphantly. “How many grown-ass men do you know who go by Petey? Only the fucking foreman over at Rocking D!”

“We don’t know positively that it was him,” Clint warned. But Westin clearly thought it was. He was smiling like the Cheshire cat, more pleased with himself than Lee imagined he’d been in a long time.

“Listen,” Lee said. “You don’t know the whole story yet. Don’t get too excited.”

Clint tilted his head as he regarded her. “What is the whole story?”

“These people are dangerous. They’ll stop at nothing to get what they want.” She made a wide gesture. “Two years ago, Will and I traced the hierarchy of the cartel back to this politician in Sacramento. He wasn’t anyone terribly important, not yet, but he might have been someday. Turned out the boxes were his baby. He came up with it to get rid of a few political rivals. He was making so much money from the drugs he was selling over several states, that he could afford to lose a few here and there to set these people up. He was ruthless.”

The memory of it was almost painful to her. She rubbed her shoulder, remembered a fight with the guy’s personal security when he came to the little bakery, a fight that had ended with her blowing her cover. She was damn lucky that Will was there to get the guy out of the way before he was able to warn anyone else what they were up to.

Or maybe she wasn’t.

“Look, I thought we took the head of the operation down, that it was over. When I saw that box out there in your field, I knew something was up. I knew it wasn’t good. Someone else must have taken over this guy’s operation, but I didn’t know who or when or how. Not until now.”

“You’re getting ahead of us again,” Clint told her. “Back up a little.”

Lee sat back down, landing hard on her tailbone. “There’s no time for a bunch of explanations!” She ran her hands over her face again, rubbing so hard that her cheeks ached. “The thing is, I thought it was over. I thought we got this asshole and that he was rotting in jail, waiting for his trial date. I thought we put it in the past. So, when I saw that box, I didn’t know what to think, but it didn’t occur to me not to tell my partner. Yet, telling him told him exactly where I was.”

“That’s how Fang found you.”

Lee pointed a finger at Westin. “Bingo!”

“That means your partner knew about the boxes ahead of time.”

“Give that man a prize!”

Lee stood again, so much nervous energy built up inside of her that she couldn’t stay still. “I looked over the files I got from Fang’s computer. Most of it is crap. Just names and transactions we already knew about, most of which I made myself. But there were phone calls that Fang recorded, conversations with his bosses and his gang, information that it will take days to gather from listening to his ramblings. But I heard a few familiar voices, and that sent me looking in a different location.”

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