Page 3

She hit the top contact on her favorite’s list. Jayson answered on the first ring.

“How’d it go?” he asked with palpable desperation.

Charlotte smiled. “I’m pretty sure I got it,” she decided triumphantly.

“What do you mean pretty sure ? I need more detail than that.”

“Buy me dinner and I’ll tell you all about it.”

“Can’t you tell me over the phone, Charlie? I’m working the night shift again this week. I can’t—”

Charlotte didn’t let him finish. “You’re the one who wants me to go undercover, Detective Natch. Pretty sure getting the low down on what happened counts as work.

Maybe you can even get the Miami-Dade Police Department to spring for sushi.”

Once he begrudgingly agreed, Charlotte turned up the radio and started for home.

CHAPTER 2

WHEN CHARLOTTE TURNED o the main avenue choked with tra c, she was grateful the deluge had stopped. The rainy season had arrived so early it didn’t bode well for the incoming summer.

“Damn it,” she cursed under her breath as she approached her apartment, one of four in the ugly, cement quadplex. They were all single-bedroom abodes built by the 1970s genius that decided to put them not only in a lowlying city ironically named Sweetwater , but next to a canal that routinely overflowed as well. A raised foundation kept the bottom two units from flooding every time it rained. The small parking lot wasn’t so lucky.

Driving very slowly over the flooded pavement so water didn’t get into her car or create a wake that sent the dirty river splashing into the ground-floor units, Charlotte rolled toward the grassy embankment where a few of her neighbors had already perched their vehicles. It wasn’t her first rodeo; she’d lived in the apartment nearly eight years and was always ready for the inevitable.

Reaching back, she grabbed the plastic grocery bag where she kept her rain boots and traded her heels for them before stepping out and sloshing through the mud.

“Another day in paradise,” her neighbor, Frania, said as she leaned over the second-floor railing with a cigarette between her fingers.

Charlotte agreed as she emerged from the brown pool and onto the cement staircase leading up to her apartment.

“Did you get that fancy job?” she asked between pu s.

“I don’t know yet, but I’ll share my bottle of wine with you if I do,” Charlotte replied when she reached the top of the stairs.

“Wine?” Frania picked something o the tip of her tongue before taking another drag. “We’ll get the real good shit. Champagne, girl!”

Charlotte laughed as she pulled o her Wellies and left them to dry by her front door. She couldn’t leave them there long or they’d go missing. “I have a nice twelve-dollar bottle with your name on it.”

As they chatted, a huge pick-up truck turned into their complex. Frania’s dark eyes widened as soon as she noticed it.

Here we go .

“You didn’t say my man was coming today,” she screeched, straightening the jeans and t-shirt that were too tight to move. “I would’ve dressed up.”

Charlotte glanced at Jayson. Tall, dark, and objectively handsome, he was rolling up the hems of his jeans before wading through the water.

“I know you don’t play for my team,” Frania said as she gawked at Jayson, “but even you have to admit that is one hot piece of—”

“Fran! Stop!” she pleaded before she could really get going. “I’ve told you a thousand times we grew up together. He’s like my brother.”

Frania eyed her with equal parts suspicion and pity.

“Foster care doesn’t count, mija. Mother Nature says he’s fair game.”

Charlotte cringed. “That’s not how that works.”

“Buenas tardes, muchachas,” Jayson said in a sharp American accent as he jogged up the stairs with a large paper bag in his hand. He was perfectly fluent thanks to having grown up with Hispanic foster parents, but he’d never managed to improve his accent.