Page 3 of Renegade

He lifted my T-shirt and kissed the bare skin of my belly, trailing his lips across the puckered scar from the bullet wound in my side. Both wounds, front and back, had healed up nicely after three months, leaving only small, round scars but Miguel often reminded me they were there when he left trails from his lips behind.

The wounds didn’t hurt anymore, and his lips tickled pleasantly.

I bent and kissed the top of his head and then pulled away, dropping my T-shirt. “Tell me about this new client.” I walked over to my desk, grabbed my jacket, and hung it on a rack in the corner before sinking down into my faux-leather chair. Miguel hadn’t questioned my choice of chairs for us. They weren’t actually made of leather, but he didn’t know the difference. I just didn’t like populating my space with the skins of dead animals.

I made one exception, though. I really liked the leather jacket Miguel had produced from the pile of boxes when he finally got around to unpacking and hanging them inside the house…or rather, I really liked the way it looked on him.

Before he could say anything, Judy came bustling into the office holding out a mug of coffee. She was smiling brightly. “I told you I just made a fresh pot.”

I’d been so consumed with the thought that we had a new client, that I’d completely put the need for coffee out of my mind. I smiled when she handed it to me. She’d made it just the way I liked it but then again, we’d been working together a long time. “Thanks, Judy.” I took a sip. It was perfect. After she’d left, I turned back to Miguel. “Okay, now tell me about the client.”

“The message was from an attorney who said he was handling the estate of the late Mr. Flores.”

“Okay,” I said, taking another sip. “What does this attorney want us to do?”

“He didn’t go into a whole lot of detail. He said his client was Mrs. Flores and that a priceless piece of jewelry was missing from the estate.”

“They must be looking at a list of items from a will or some such,” I said.

“That’s probably right. I mean you’d know better than I would but there’s no doubt a list of valuables which are insured unless this is something so valuable—”

“Like the Mulberry diamond,” I said, grinning.

He returned my smile. Our first meeting had taken place while trying to retrieve just that thing. I no longer saw the incident where Miguel had tackled me as well as the thief to the ground, as something inconvenient, but instead, with great fondness. Had that reward for the recovery of the diamond not been posted by my previous employer, Miguel and I might never have met.

“I couldn’t resist,” Miguel said, finishing his thought. “Anyway, the attorney—Mr. Aston—said that a priceless piece of jewelry was missing and he wanted to hire us to recover it.”

“Good. So, where’s his office?” I picked up my phone and pulled up my map.

“They want to meet at the Sagebrush Cantina in Calabasas because it’s safer,” Miguel replied.

I looked up sharply, frowning. “Safer?” I made air quotes.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought,” Miguel replied. “First, Aston asked me if we carry guns and then he told me he wants to meet there because it’s safer. I guess they have an outdoor seating area where he thinks we won’t be overheard or whatever. He considered it safer even though my preference would have been a sturdy wall at my back.”

I was nodding. “I’ve been there several times. Great Mexican food and drinks, and yeah, they have a huge patio area that runs along the whole length of the restaurant from front to back. They have those outdoor heaters on the patio, so you can sit outside in most weather. It’s south of the 101 Freeway at Valley Circle Boulevard.” I paused, thinking about the restaurant. It had probably been five years or more since I’d been there. It was a nice place…without a fucking wall in sight.

“What’s this about the gun and the safety thing? There’s only one way in from the parking lot because they serve alcohol, and they don’t want kids walking in and out indiscriminately. There’s a guard posted who checks IDs and I was always carded when I tried to access the patio for happy hour. I’m pretty sure there’s two or maybe three doors that lead directly from the patio to the restaurant itself and if I remember, they’re always in use because the bathrooms are located inside.”

“Yeah, okay,” Miguel said. “It’s not that, though. It’s the request that we be armed. Why would he specifically ask whether we both carry guns?”

“You didn’t ask him?”

He shook his head. “He was kind of abrupt. He just set a time and the place for the meeting, and I said we’d be there. I guess we should go armed.”

I frowned deeply. “I don’t like the idea of that at all.”

“Should I have turned him down?” Miguel asked.

He was frowning. I knew he wouldn’t object if I rejected the job, but I also knew we couldn’t affordnotto go meet with the attorney and his client if it meant money in our pocket. We had bills to pay. “No, we have to go.”

He nodded. “Okay, so I’m going to continue checking out whatever I can with regard to this Flores woman and her attorney. It’d be nice to be armed with that information as well as weapons. I don’t have a gun here at the office, so we’ll have to go home before the meeting anyway.”

Neither of us kept our guns at the office. I kept my brand-new Glock at home in my gun safe right beside Miguel’s. I’d bought it at his insistence when we’d started Trackers, somehow never expecting to use it except at the gun range where we’d been going every weekend for the past two months for target practice. I hated the thing. I hated the very idea of using a gun. But because we lived daily with the possibility of violence on the job, and especially after being on the receiving end of a gunshot, I knew guns were a necessary evil. Not to mention the fact that we’d been shot at while chasing down Howell Jr. I still didn’t believe in guns, but I tried to distance myself from that thinking. Miguel had taught me to think of a gun as a tool, and only that. I had to admit, it helped me sleep a little better.

I spent the next few hours going through banking records for the Flores estate. At the outset of our new business, I’d explained that Judy was an excellent skip tracer, but I hadn’t exactly been forthcoming about her other skills. In short, she was excellent on the computer, accessing spaces on the dark web with ease, doing searches I wouldn’t orcouldn’thave found on my own.

Because the deceased Mr. Benedict Flores was part owner of a large Indian casino out in the California desert as a member of the tribe himself, his corporate records were easy to locate. They were the ones Judy was able to access easily. As it turned out, Mr. Flores was a multi-millionaire, having half ownership not only in a casino, but multiple card rooms from California to Colorado. Gambling had made him rich, probably beyond his wildest dreams.

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