Page 48 of Wicked Suspicion

“What else? Beyond tactics.”

“You’re thinking of the lack of air conditioning and the fact we have no running water.”

“And once our supplies are gone, we’ll have to leave to get more.”

“You set this up as a stop-gap measure if everything went to hell.”

Case liked how quickly she put things together. “Do you have any ideas on where I take you next? And don’t suggest the hotel the Paladin League is using in Trujillo. That’s not happening.”

“I know. It puts Frankie and Ellis at risk. Those are my teammates,” Nyx explained.

He didn’t need the additional intel. Case had met both women briefly. Since he wasn’t supposed to know them, he nodded.

“What about a random hotel?” Nyx asked. “If we moved around every night, it would be hard to track us down.”

“It’s a possibility.”

“But?”

“Vargas has his tentacles everywhere in Trujillo. If he decides he wants you back badly enough to send men out to find you, a hotel isn’t going to keep us hidden long no matter how often we switch.”

“So what are the options we haven’t already discussed?”

Case shook his head. He’d run all of them through his mind and the only one he liked was getting her back home.

“I’ll think some more,” she said, “and so will you. Something will come to us.”

He sighed but nodded. If nothing else worked, he would take her to the safe house. He could deal with the captain. Probably.

Moving to another topic, Case asked, “What were those papers you stole from Vargas’s library yesterday?”

“Why?”

Her voice was neutral, not a single note of suspicion, but he was insulted anyway. “Because it could influence whether the man sends anyone after you.”

“That’s provided he even realizes those pages are missing. I don’t think he ever looked at that stack of documents.” They had a stare down. Nyx capitulated first. “Did you bring the pages I took? You didn’t leave them, right?”

Case shook his head. “The jeans are in the bag.”

Nyx bent over. He heard the backpack’s zipper open and there were sounds of her digging around before her head reappeared over the tabletop. She held a folded wad of paper. She put it on the table and used both hands to smooth out the creases.

“I can’t believe you folded up historical documents,” Case said.

“They’re not historic. Not unless you think twenty years is notable.”

“Twenty years?”

“That’s what the date on the top of the pages said. See?” Nyx turned them so he could see the writing. There was a date and a name scrawled beneath it.

“What are twenty-year-old papers doing in with two-hundred-year-old documents? And why did you take them and not something historic?”

She slid the pile back to her side of the table. “These pages are the notes another researcher made about the documents. He summed up—well, if not everything in the stack, close to it from what I saw.”

“You trust some random researcher?”

Nyx’s lips turned up at the corners, giving her a mischievous look, something Case didn’t expect to see from her. “The researcher in question was Diego Ramos.”

She said it as if he should know who that was. “The only Ramos I know was Vargas’s predecessor as drug lord and his first name wasn’t Diego.”

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