Page 10 of Secrets Beneath the Waves (Beach Read Thrillers #2)

CHAPTER

TEN

Ramon spotted an anomaly in his rearview halfway back to their respective hotels.

He’d been calculating how long it would take the police to look up Mrs. Harrison and pay her a visit.

As the registered lessee of that storage unit, it wouldn’t take much time for them to show up at her house and ask why her husband and missing daughter’s best friend were stuffed in a freezer.

“Head’s up.” He gripped the wheel with both hands but didn’t change lanes. Sudden movements would make it far too obvious to the person following them that he’d realized they were back there. “We’re being followed.”

Zeyla shifted in the seat and peered at the side mirror. “Cops?”

“No antennae on the top.” Most unmarked police cars had their radio antennae on the roof, making it kind of obvious they had a radio setup in their car. “Blue wannabe SUV, a couple of cars back.”

“You think it’s your buddy Miguel?”

“Let’s see what happens.” Ramon switched lanes and took the next exit.

The blue vehicle followed them down the off-ramp, hanging back.

He wasn’t going to provoke Miguel into action just by pushing the situation.

Miguel wasn’t the kind of guy who would react because he got all riled up. Or, at least, he shouldn’t be.

That type of guy made a lousy contract killer.

Zeyla pulled out her phone. “If you can let him get close enough behind us for long enough, I could clone his phone. Then we can see who he has been talking to.”

“That would be great.” And yet, his tone likely told her all she needed to know. The fact was, he would be putting Zeyla at risk if they were too close to Miguel. The killer wouldn’t waste even that chance to try and take her out.

So not worth the risk.

“If we know who hired him, we’ll have a shot at finding the Count of Shadows.”

“I’d love to know who hired him, but he isn’t going to tell us. And whatever we do to find out, we have to make sure it doesn’t risk both of our lives.” Ramon turned the corner at the end of the off-ramp and headed for an industrial complex.

Between them, they probably had enough firepower to take out Miguel several times over. But putting that up against whatever the guy had planned presented plenty of risk. Not worth taking the chance.

Zeyla shifted in her seat, still keeping an eye on the vehicle, now only one car behind them. “I didn’t peg you for the overly cautious type.”

“I’m growing.”

She chuckled. “Ramon the renegade? No-holds-barred vigilantism that strikes fear in the hearts of goody-two-shoes everywhere.”

It was his turn to laugh—almost. “Did you just make that up?”

“I’ve been mulling it over.”

“In your spare time?” He turned into the industrial complex—a maze of parking lots, company buildings, a strip mall of restaurants that were probably overflowing on Friday after work.

Right now, the parking lots were mostly empty, and the crowds had shifted from the chicken place and the Mexican joint beside it to the bar at the end of the row with a rooftop and live music currently entertaining the crowd.

“You’re different from Bruce or Stairns or Jax. You’re…edgy.”

“Is that a good thing?” He glanced at her, then back at the rearview so he could keep an eye on their tail.

“I have no idea, but I decided I’d think about it because people say that about me.” Zeyla lifted one hand, then let it fall back to her lap. “Like I can’t just have strong boundaries. It has to be that I’m abrasive and hard to work with .”

“Doesn’t play well with others?”

Zeyla shook her head. “The way I grew up? You have no idea.”

He figured it wasn’t too far from the Marvel character Black Widow, who had been trained by a terrible group with exacting standards, who wanted their women to be a combination of assassins and master spies. More than that, he hadn’t asked, and she probably wouldn’t want to go into specifics.

Ramon took a sharp right turn and sped up, immediately turning right again. He wound up in an alley and pulled the car just past a dumpster. Tucking them, hopefully, out of sight.

“You’re no fun, you know that?”

Ramon watched his side mirror for the blue car and saw it speed past them. He pulled out and hooked a right at the end of the alley. “If there’s going to be a confrontation, it’ll be on my terms.”

Probably not when she was around, and definitely not at a place that he didn’t predetermine.

Whoever had been following them was out of the picture now. “Where to?”

“My motel. I need to sleep.”

He nodded. “I’ll drop you, and we can reconvene tomorrow.”

“Hopefully, before then, Maizie will be into that flash drive.”

Ramon drove to her motel and swung around to park close to the stairs. He peered up at her door but didn’t see anything amiss.

“Don’t worry. I hid it all like a pro.” She pushed out the door. “Later.”

Ramon didn’t leave until he had watched her go inside, and even then, he waited a minute. He called Maizie, but the program she had running to break the security lock on the flash drive hadn’t gotten through yet.

He didn’t like pulling away, but in the end, it wasn’t up to him to protect Zeyla twenty-four seven.

She had more than enough skills to take care of herself and probably had the room up there wired with defenses.

She also had past experiences that would give her a healthy fear of being captured.

The last thing she would want was for Dominatus to take her again.

Ramon drove to a bar two streets over, parked out front, and found an empty stool in the middle. The bartender wandered over, so Ramon said, “Beer. Whatever’s on tap.”

The guy lifted his chin and poured Ramon a cold one.

“Thanks.” He took a sip.

It didn’t take long for a man to slide onto the stool next to him and groan a little, clutching his side. Miguel looked almost normal sitting beside him. Together, they’d seem like two old friends meeting up for a drink.

Miguel asked for a whiskey, and when it came, he took a healthy sip.

“How’s your side?”

Miguel muttered a disparaging name, and for the first time, Ramon realized why Kenna always got on him about swearing. It sounded jarring from this guy now that he’d spent so much time around people who didn’t curse much. They’d started to rub off on him in more ways than one.

Even Zeyla’s assessment of him probably wasn’t all that correct anymore.

Ramon wasn’t some lily-white upstanding citizen, but he hadn’t been a vigilante in a while.

Maybe he was growing. But that didn’t mean that people like Miguel wouldn’t always remind him of the man he’d been. The past holding him back like chains.

Maybe one day, he’d grow far enough to be free of it, but right now, he couldn’t even see how that was possible. It seemed more like who he’d been would always be a part of him. Despite what Kenna said, it couldn’t just be washed away.

“You gave me no choice.” Ramon took a sip of his beer. “And you pushed me off that roof with every intention of murdering me. I figure that makes us even.”

Miguel snorted. “No chance.”

“Too bad I’m not dead.”

“That was an oversight I won’t repeat again.”

“Good luck.” He tipped his bottle toward Miguel and drank again. “I’m not going to let you kill Zeyla.”

“Is that her name?” Miguel rolled the ice around in his glass. “Nasty piece of work that one.”

“You know about her, but you don’t know her name?”

“I know what I need to know.”

Ramon asked, “How’d you get into the business?”

“You taught me a certain skill set. I figured out how to use it.”

Ramon’s mind flashed back to that empty warehouse in Mexico City, back to when Miguel had been barely seventeen. It had been quite an education. And it was on the short list of Ramon’s biggest regrets. “I should never have done that.”

“It’s the life.”

“That doesn’t make it okay.” They’d killed people and, in the process, shredded at least part of both of their souls. “I knew better. I just got sucked into the life.”

“Never would’ve pegged you for a fed.”

After it had come out, Miguel wasn’t likely the only one surprised to find out Ramon had been an FBI agent before becoming part of the cartel.

Then he became everything he was accused of being, swept away by that world.

Not even bothering to fight the stain of cartel life. The things he’d seen. What he’d done.

Ramon said, “That’s kind of the point of undercover work.”

Miguel muttered something in Spanish about dirty traitors.

“You left the cartel as well.”

“You destroyed it. What else was I supposed to do except use the skills I have to make a name for myself? Isn’t that the American dream?”

“Make as much money as possible and hope they don’t catch you and put you in jail? Doesn’t sound much like a dream.”

“It isn’t like I had a choice. I wasn’t going to make money doing anything else.” Miguel sipped his drink. “Is this what you do now? Try and get people to find the straight and narrow, see the light, and change their ways?”

Ramon pressed his lips together. How could he do that with someone else when he was the person others were trying to redeem?

“I don’t have it all figured out. I’m just… I regret a lot of things. That’s why I work cases with Banbury Investigations and try to do the right thing. Like finding justice where there is none.”

“There’s nothing you can do that will make up for what you’ve done.” Miguel knocked the remainder of his drink back. “You could spend the rest of your life trying to fix what you’ve destroyed, but it will never be enough.”

He tossed two square photographs on the bar and walked away.

“You’re paying for his drink, right?”

Ramon didn’t look at the bartender, he simply nodded and pulled some bills from his wallet.

Probably covered it—and then some. He lifted the photos.

The first one was of a dark-haired young woman with clear skin and huge dark eyes wearing far too much makeup.

She wore a clingy top with no straps, chains hanging low around her throat.

The second image was a trash can.

Ramon frowned. After a second, he realized what lay in the can, on a pile of tissue or wipes, was a pregnancy test. No way to zoom in, but he got the gist of Miguel’s point. She’d been pregnant when she died.

No.

When they had killed her.

He had to be honest with himself about that, at least, even if he could hardly remember her face and definitely didn’t remember her name.

She’d betrayed the cartel, and that was all they’d needed to know.

Some people in his situation might remember every second—every victim.

Maybe it was a kind of mercy that he didn’t.

But he certainly wasn’t deserving of any concession.

He left the half-drunk beer on the bar and headed out, walking way too fast to his car. When he slammed into the driver’s door, he realized he’d been running.

It didn’t matter how far he went or who he tried to be, he was never going to escape it.

Ramon would always be a killer.