A Gift of Thought Read online

  “What the hell?”

  Ty must have taken pity on the shock in her voice. “Gibbs tried to do a background check on the guy,” he explained. “He wound up in a basement somewhere. He thinks Arlington.”

  “The Pentagon?” Sylvie blinked rapidly. That didn’t make sense. Lucas wasn’t—he didn’t—how could he . . .

  “Oh, shit,” she said as the sirens started behind them.

  “No, he thinks maybe DEA,” Ty answered, not realizing what she was swearing about.

  “Ah, Sylvie?” James said, voice tentative.

  “Awesome,” said Sylvie. “That’s just peachy. I gotta go, Ty. Talk to ya’ soon.”

  With a sigh, she added, “Pull over,” to James as she disconnected.

  The cops used their loudspeaker to order them out of the car, but Sylvie didn’t hesitate, even as James obediently put his hands on the roof of the car. She marched straight back, past the police officer who ordered her to halt, glaring at him in passing as he reached for his weapon.

  “Stand down,” ordered a man in a lousy suit from the car behind the police car. The beige car was nowhere to be seen, Sylvie noticed. They must have called it in when James got away from them. Instead, there was a police car with two uniformed officers, one of whom was currently patting James down, the other who was staring after her, looking annoyed, and a blue Toyota, with Lucas stepping out of one side, brown suit guy on the other.

  As she reached Lucas, she cocked her head to one side. “Really? For a cup of coffee?” she said, voice dangerous. “Should I tell these guys what you were up to Friday night?”

  He sighed. He looked tired, she noticed with a pang, his blue eyes shadowed. “I’m sorry,” he said. “You wouldn’t believe the favors I called in for this.”

  Sylvie turned to the guy in the brown suit. “This is Raymond Chesney’s car,” she said. “You know that, right?”

  He grimaced, closing his eyes and shuddering with exaggerated dismay. Then he opened them and said cheerfully, “Five jobs, right?” to Lucas.

  “Yep.”

  Brown-suit-guy tapped his forehead and said, “I’ll leave you to it, then.” Grinning at Sylvie, he headed away, up to where the uniformed police officer was putting his gun away.

  “But not Zane,” Lucas called after him. “Not for another six months, anyway.”

  The guy waved over his shoulder as Sylvie said, keeping her voice low despite her fury, “What the hell is this, Lucas?”

  “I’m sorry.” He put his hand on her upper arm. Despite her anger, Sylvie didn’t resist, didn’t step away. “I know you don’t understand. I need—I want to explain to you. But it’s not—”

  A buzzing from his pocket interrupted him and he reached for his phone. “Oh, thank God,” he muttered as he looked at the screen. He put the hand that wasn’t holding the phone across his eyes, pressing as if to hide his expression or his tears.

  Sylvie saw him swallow hard and she felt the tidal wave of relief that washed over him. “Lucas?” she asked. What was going on? She was lost.

  “I know you must have questions. I know you must be angry. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you everything. But it’s complicated and—” He paused as his phone buzzed again.

  “What are you talking about, Lucas?” Sylvie asked as he looked at his phone. “What’s complicated?”

  He half smiled. And then he rubbed his face again and took a deep breath. ‘It’s okay,’ he thought to Sylvie.

  ‘What’s okay?’ she thought back, frustrated.

  ‘You’re cool.’ His thought was flavored with joy and Sylvie shook her head.

  “Lucas,” she said carefully, speaking out loud again. “Do you need help?” She hated therapists. But maybe Lucas needed medical attention. A psychiatrist, perhaps?

  “No,” he answered. “But I do need to talk to you. Will you meet me?”

  Sylvie sighed. She looked back at James, who was no longer leaning against the car. He was talking to the police officer and brown-suit guy, and although their conversation looked friendly enough, he was going to be pissed. She thought about her schedule. She was working long hours and would be until the flu finished beating up their team and Ty managed to find a new employee, but . . . .

  “Wednesday night. I’m off at 8.” It was two days away. Would he be willing to wait that long?

  “I can do that.” He nodded.

  Sylvie’s eyes narrowed. The desperation she’d sensed earlier was gone. He seemed close to relaxed. Still intent, still focused, still Lucas, but the chaotic emotions she’d felt at Starbucks had settled into a peaceful exhaustion.

  “I’ll be on duty at a holiday party at the Fairmont. Do you want to meet me there?” The words were straightforward but the thought asked for more. ‘Do you want to tell me what this is about?’

  ‘Wednesday,’ he promised. He slid his hand up her arm to her shoulder and grinned at her.

  ‘Lucas,’ she thought a warning, feeling the dangerous heat spark in her belly. They were not, not, not going to repeat past patterns.

  “It’s okay,” he told her, then leaned forward and brushed a fleeting kiss across her lips.

  It was worse than static electricity, less than lightning. Sylvie took a hasty step back, and glared at him. ‘Damn it,’ she thought.

  ‘Sorry.’ His thought felt both contrite and happy. ‘Wednesday?’

  ‘Fine. Wednesday.’ She turned and stomped away. Damn it. What had just happened? But the curling heat was its own answer. How was it that Lucas could always do this to her?

  Chapter Five

  “Whoa!” Dillon protested. “What’s up with that?”

  His dad had grinned at his mom. And then he’d kissed her. Oh, not a serious kiss, not like a kiss with tongue or anything. But lips had definitely touched lips.

  “She left us, remember?” he pointed out to the oblivious Lucas, who gazed after Sylvie’s departing back with a half-smile still tugging at his mouth. “Shouldn’t you be mad at her?”

  “You still here, Dill?” Lucas asked, his voice quiet.

  Dillon tried to answer, but all he could manage to send was a “Y.”

  Damn.

  Ghostly exhaustion didn’t feel like physical exhaustion. He had no sore muscles or itchy eyes telling him he needed sleep, but he didn’t have enough energy left to send the signals that would generate letters on Lucas’s phone. Spelling out “she’s cool” had finished him off.

  Trying to make that bitch of a girl’s phone ring in Rachel’s English class had been tricky. He knew how to send messages but powering on a phone was more challenging. It was totally worth the effort, though. Wow, Dillon was glad he hadn’t gone to an all-girls school. Rachel’s classmates were flat-out mean.

  His dad looked at his phone. “Why?” he asked. “Why what?” He frowned, looking puzzled and then said, “Oh, you mean yes?”

  Dillon groaned. Texting could be so annoying. “Yes, Dad,” he said, knowing that Lucas couldn’t hear him. “And you’d better answer some of my questions, too.”

  “I’ve been so worried about you,” Lucas said, looking at the display on the phone. “If I’d known, if I’d had any idea—”

  “Who ya’ talking to, Latimer?” The guy who’d been driving the car was back, his conversation with the police officers over.

  “Long story,” Lucas answered, tucking his phone into his pocket and opening the car door. He waited, hand on the door. Sylvie was already seated in the black Mercedes and the police officers were getting back into their squad car.

  Dillon felt torn between his choices. Did he want to stay with his dad or did he want to hurry and catch up to his mom? He definitely wanted more time with Sylvie—not to mention that haunting Rachel’s high school might be fun—but he wanted to talk to his dad, too.

  And his dad might give him answers. Yeah, he could either spend the next two days trying to convince Sylvie he was real and hoping she didn’t throw her phone away again, or he could hang out with his dad until Wednesday
night and maybe find out what had happened between his parents and why his dad had never told him about seeing his mom.

  His dad it was. With one last glance at Sylvie, Dillon entered the car through the open door, then shifted through the seat and into the back. Being sat on didn’t hurt, but it made it tough to see.

  The driver slid behind the wheel, saying, “Chesney’s an awfully big fish to be messing with, you know. Are you sure you want to show up on his radar?”

  Dillon eyed him curiously. He was on the skinny side, with a receding hairline, a wrinkly forehead and ears that stuck out, but his face was friendly. Dillon knew he must be some kind of a cop, but he sure didn’t look it.

  Lucas grimaced. “Call him what he is,” he suggested. “A shark.”

  “Ha.” The other man grunted in agreement. “An octopus, maybe. Tentacles everywhere.”

  “Don’t insult the octopi,” Lucas muttered. Dillon smiled. His dad always claimed that the octopus was the smartest animal in the ocean.

  “Seriously, man, I was willing to do this one for you. No ticket, no record, everybody’s cool. But Chesney’s got half the senate in his back pocket. You mess with him and you’re going to find yourself legislated into a black hole. Or worse.” The cop started the car and pulled out onto the road.

  “Worse?”

  “The IRS. The SEC. OSHA. Chesney’s got connections everywhere. If he decides to destroy you, you’re already dead. He could probably get the CDC to investigate you for potential zombie outbreaks if he wanted to.”

  Dillon’s smile disappeared. That didn’t sound good. Not the zombies, he was cool with them, but all those other initials. Was his dad in trouble? Was that why he’d been using a fake name?

  Lucas shook his head. “The guy is corrupt as hell.”

  “Not the point, my friend.”

  “I’m serious. He’s selling guns to the Mexican drug cartels. I know he is. God knows how many deaths he’s responsible for.”

  The driver sighed. “Proof?” he asked, as he turned onto the highway.

  Lucas let his head fall back against the head rest of his seat. From the back seat, Dillon winced. He recognized that look. His dad was not a happy camper.

  “Look, you know I believe in you and what you can do. You guys at GD have been invaluable for me. That little blonde—”

  “She’d probably kill you if she heard you call her that,” Lucas interrupted.

  “Yeah, whatever,” the driver said. “Tell me she’s not married yet.”

  Lucas chuckled. “Still engaged.”

  Dillon frowned, trying to think of who his dad meant, then said, “Oh, you’re talking about Serena!”

  He’d met Serena a couple of times. She was a clairvoyant. She could touch an object and tell you its entire history: the last place it had been, who had held it, what it had been used for. None of the information was admissible in court, of course, but he could see that a cop might like working with her. And yeah, she might murder a guy who called her a little blonde, even if it was technically true. Despite her name, Serena was not the serene type.

  “Is she ever gonna dump him?” The cop’s voice was plaintive.

  “Nope.” Lucas sounded sympathetic.

  The cop heaved a sigh, tapping his fingers on the steering wheel before returning to the subject. “Still, compared to Chesney, you’re small potatoes. The dude has an inside track on everything that happens in DC.”

  “Yeah,” Lucas replied, sympathy gone and voice grim. “And he’s selling guns to the cartels, Andy.”

  “But why?” protested Andy. “He’s got more money than God, more power than the devil. Why would he take that sort of risk?”

  Dillon didn’t care about that. He wanted to know the important stuff, like why was his mom working for a bad guy?

  Lucas shook his head. “Zane did a job last year. With Maia out of the Orlando office, you remember her?”

  “Yeah, yeah.” Andy nodded, taking one hand off the wheel and gesturing as if trying to hurry Lucas’s story along.

  “It was a local job. He found a stash of drugs, guns and cash. No big deal. Completely unimportant. But they’d built a tunnel.”

  Dillon remembered that tunnel. It had been right after Akira moved to Florida. His Uncle Zane had taken her with him that day and she’d come back muttering things about quantum entanglement and paradoxes.

  “A tunnel in Florida?” Andy glanced at Lucas. “What were they gonna try? Digging under the Gulf?”

  Lucas chuckled. “Exactly. Total overkill for the location. Florida’s not prime territory for border crossings. So why a tunnel?”

  The cop scowled as he smoothly navigated the heavy traffic on the roadway. “The Sinaloas do the tunnels. They’re West Coast.”

  “Yeah. So two possibilities—”

  Andy shook his head. “One,” he said, voice grim. “The Sinaloas shouldn’t be challenging the Zetas. Not after the BLO in 2008 and the AFO situation. It’s gotta be the Zetas, planning to expand their operations into Sinaloa territory.”

  Dillon scowled. He had no idea what Andy was talking about. He’d never heard any of those names before. But the tone in Andy’s voice made it clear that it was not good.

  “Maybe, maybe not,” Lucas answered. “One way or another, though, Maia figured this was trouble. And the guy they caught was a Mexican national. She sent him up here and I sat in on the interrogations.”

  “And the guy tagged Chesney?” Andy raised an eyebrow, voice skeptical.

  Lucas rubbed his hand across his forehead, looking tired. “Of course not. That would be too easy.”

  “Not that it would matter. Even if the guy swore on a stack of Bibles and his mother’s grave, no way would anyone believe him.”

  “He didn’t. He didn’t talk. Didn’t say a word.” Lucas looked out the window of the car.

  “Uh-oh,” Andy said. “I’m detecting guilt, my friend. Let me guess—murdered in prison?”

  Lucas shrugged. Dillon tried to see his dad’s face and find out what he was feeling but Lucas had his head turned away, still looking out the window.

  “You didn’t kill him.”

  Lucas rocked his hand back and forth in a gesture of equivocation.

  “You didn’t kill him,” Andy repeated, enunciating each word. “The Zetas killed him. Hell, he was dealing drugs for them. He had to know the risks.”

  “During the interrogation, I caught a name. It was a guy who worked at the Mexican embassy. We arranged surveillance. He spotted it, but not before he’d met with Chesney.” Lucas’s sentences were short and clipped.

  “It’s a long way from a casual meet to selling guns.”

  Lucas shook his head again. “I was there. The conversation was innocuous but the thoughts weren’t.”

  “Ahh,” Andy said. “And he made you?”

  “Not Chesney. But the Mexican, yeah. Enough to be suspicious, anyway.”

  “And you think he put a hit on the dealer because he thought the dealer identified him to us?”

  Lucas shrugged. Dillon sat back in his seat, scowling. He knew his dad did jobs for the government, sometimes dangerous jobs. Lucas had already been shot twice, once in Oregon with Zane and another time somewhere overseas. He’d been home for two whole months the summer Dillon was twelve because of it. But listening to them talk about hits and dealers and cartels made it more real. And scarier.

  “He was a drug dealer, Latimer.”

  “He was twenty-four years old with two kids and a third on the way. Yeah, he screwed up. But he didn’t do anything that deserved a death sentence.”

  “You didn’t kill him,” Andy repeated.

  “No,” Lucas agreed, but he was back to staring out the window.

  “Is that why you’re after Chesney? Guilt?”

  “No.” Lucas shook his head immediately, and then looked at Andy and smiled, a little rueful. “I have easier ways to soothe my guilt. A good immigration lawyer and a trust fund for the kids worked wonders.”
>
  “Ha. Must be nice.”

  Lucas sobered. “It has its pros.”

  There was a silence. Dillon wondered what his dad was thinking. Andy must have been wondering as well because he shot Lucas a pointed look before prompting, “So, Chesney?”

  “A nice, clear thinker. When he met up with the guy from the embassy, he was trying to figure out if he could offload a bunch of Calico M960s on him.”

  “Huh.” Andy looked intrigued. “Submachine guns? Old, though. They stopped making those in the 90s, right?”

  “Most of Chesney’s money comes from AlecCorp, a private military contractor. They did great in Iraq for the first few years of the war, but by 2008 the money over there was drying up. And then the market crashed. Not everyone recovered. Chesney was rich, but I’m not sure he’s rich anymore.”

  “Dude still has money.”

  “Yeah, but maybe not money like he used to have. Or maybe he panicked when the market tanked and got into something that there’s no way out of. Or he sees it as a profitable line of business and doesn’t care about the human costs. I don’t know what his motives are. But he’s working with the cartels.”

  Andy shook his head. “And all you’ve got is what you heard?”

  Lucas grimaced. “I know, I know. Not admissible. Not enough for a wiretap, not enough for a search warrant, not enough for anything. But selling guns to drug dealers is about as low as a human being can go these days.”

  “The Zetas deserve their reputation.”

  “Only thing worse would be dumping guns into Somalia. And I wouldn’t put that past him.”

  Andy sighed as he turned onto the bridge into downtown DC.

  Dillon sighed, too. He desperately wanted to ask his dad questions, starting with the first one that had occurred to him: why was his mom working for a bad guy?

  *****

  Sylvie stumbled over the box on her way out the door for her morning run on Wednesday.

  Lucas.

  It had to be. Who else would find a way to get a box into a secure building and then leave it lying in the hallway?