Page 71 of The Last One You Loved

“Love you more, chick-a-dee.”

Then, she was gone, leaving behind an air of warmth and love that I wanted to wear like a coat I never had to take off.

CHAPTERTWENTY-FOUR

MADDOX

GIVE IN TO ME

“And if you’re ever sad,

I’ll make you laugh.

I’ll chase the hurt.”

Performed by Garrett Hedlund w/ Leighton Meester

Written by Falcon / Hoffman / Falcon

When I gotto the station, I sent Amy and Bruce off to track down information on Dr. Roy Gregory and the damn burner phone before going into the conference room where a DEA agent awaited me. Enrique Salazar was a medium-height, deeply tanned man with rows of muscles sure to make a heavyweight boxer jealous. He was dressed in a black T-shirt, jeans, and military-grade boots with tattoos covering almost every piece of skin peeking out on his upper body.

“What brings you to Willow Creek?” I asked him.

“How much do you know about the Lovato cartel?”

I frowned. “Out of Mexico, right? Rising fast and furious. Y’all have been chasing them along the border for a couple of years now.”

He nodded. “They’ve been branching out, finding ways upstream. They’ve hooked up with small-time MCs and local gangs in an effort to stretch their wings and compete with some of the larger syndicates who already have their pipelines in place.”

“You think they’ve been talking to the West Gears?” I said, the itchy feeling on my neck coming back.

“I’ve got pretty good intel that says they’re way past talking. Your man, Chainsaw, has met several times with the Lovato family over the border. He’s neck-deep into it. I heard you pulled over a shipment of appliances yesterday, is that right?”

I wasn’t sure I liked how much of my business he knew, but I also wasn’t going to turn down interagency help if it meant undoing the West Gears hold on my county.

“We did. Doesn’t fit their prior MO at all, but it’s the second haul in as many weeks. We took a look inside, but it’s just appliances.”

“Mind if I let my drug dog take a sniff?” he asked.

I said I didn’t, and we headed out with his beagle to the facility behind Scully’s station in the next county where we’d stored the semi-trucks with the stolen goods. It took barely a minute for the dog to start barking, and after we’d carefully pulled apart the appliances, we found ten kilos of cocaine hidden deep inside the working parts.

I wasn’t sure if I was happy to finally have something solid or pissed that we’d missed it. Salazar and the district attorney spent the rest of the morning trying to get the two Gears we had in custody to flip on Chainsaw, and when they didn’t, they added the drug trafficking to the list of charges already lined up on their arrest warrant. I was in the middle of arranging transport to the state prison, where they’d be held until trial, when Uncle Phil called.

The man was not my favorite relative. I wasn’t even sure how he and our grandmother had come from the same parents. The way he looked at his female patrons made my skin crawl, but he’d never done anything overtly illegal or even morally questionable, so I just bit my tongue and avoided him as much as I could.

“What can I do for you?” I asked.

“I got a dead body by my dumpsters, so you can do your job and come pick it up before it scares the hell out of all my customers.”

It took me a beat longer than it should have to process his words.

“Who is it? And how do you know they’re dead?” I asked, grabbing my hat and hollering at Bruce to join me as I strode toward the door.

“The bullet hole in his head makes it kind of obvious,” Phil said, and I swore there was a tremor to his voice.

“Shit. You didn’t touch anything, did you?”

“I’m not stupid, Maddox.”