Kira checked her watch. It was nine fifteen. She felt a flutter of nerves as she walked into the guest room. The twin bed was piled with surveillance equipment. She unpacked her Canon camera and checked the memory card. Then she went to the window and peered out at the vacant house down the street.
Trent’s black SUV wasn’t in its spot anymore. Instead, it was Jeremy’s gunmetal-gray pickup truck.
Kira took a deep breath. She knew what she needed to do tonight. She’d known since yesterday. The question was, how to do it?
Ultimately, it’s up to you. We work for you, not the other way around.
Had Jeremy meant that, or was that a tactic meant to placate her?
She pulled out her phone and called him.
“Hey, it’s me.”
“I know.” His low, masculine voice put a tingle inside her. She loved the way he sounded.
“I need to ask a favor.”
Silence.
“Jeremy?”
“Where are we going?”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
JEREMY DROVE, and Kira navigated. Aside from giving him directions, she didn’t talk. Her focus was on a spiral notebook in her lap, and she kept flipping through the pages and shaking her head.
“I never should have turned in that damn phone.” She huffed out a breath and shoved the notebook into the cupholder. “It was the best lead I had, and now all I’ve got is a pile of chicken scratch.”
He glanced at her in the seat beside him. She was dressed like a cat burglar again and had her hair pulled back in a ponytail.
“What good would Ollie’s phone do you? You didn’t know the code,” he said.
“At least I’d have his incoming calls, and I could run the numbers. Now I’ve got zip.” She glared at him, as if he were the reason she’d turned the phone over to the police and not her conscience.
“Not zip.”
“Almost zip.”
“You’ve got Shelly Chandler, who pointed you to a court case,” he said. “And you’ve got the location of his last stakeout.”
She darted a glance at him.
“What’s that mean?”
She looked out the window.
“Kira?”
“Probable location.” She wouldn’t make eye contact. “I have reason to believe he was running surveillance in Channelview, but I’m not a hundred percent.”
Of course, she was mentioning this now, after he’d already driven half an hour across town to help her run down a lead.
“What’s this based on?” he asked.
“A fast-food receipt.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s solid. It lines up with Ollie’s MO. Whenever he went on a stakeout, he would load up on fast food, usually from Whataburger, and then go set up someplace.”
“So you don’t know exactly where we’re going?”
“I’ve got an idea.”
Jeremy shook his head.
“He made notes about a company called Ballard Shipping, which just happens to be less than three miles from the Whataburger in Channelview. That’s a solid lead.”
Jeremy didn’t argue with her. Not because he agreed but because he didn’t want to get her all worked up. He liked it too much when she got that way, and he was determined to stay focused on the job tonight.
Kira was getting to him. He wasn’t sure if it was her looks or her words or her step-off attitude that directly contradicted the flirty glances she gave him when she wanted something. Probably, it was all of it, and the fact that he couldn’t pin her down was messing with his head. She wasn’t like any client he’d had before, and he was beginning to wish he’d been assigned to one of the lawyers.
Jeremy looked at her beside him. Her hair was still damp from her shower, and he could smell her shampoo.
He’d never been so distracted on a job before. It was probably a combination of jet lag and the op that had gone sideways, but whatever it was, he needed to get over it and focus on the task at hand.
He trained his gaze on the road.
“I have to tell you, I’m surprised you agreed to this,” she said.
“To what?”
“Coming out here with me.”
With her. Like she’d be out here alone in her piece-of-shit car if he hadn’t agreed.
“You have a job to do. I get that,” he said. “Would I like it better if you holed yourself up in a sixty-story office building and did it from there? Yes, I would.”
“That’s not how investigations go.”
“I know.”
He was resigned to it. Which didn’t mean he had to like it, and it didn’t mean he had to let her do whatever the hell she wanted. They were going to check out this lead, and then he’d get her home so she could spend the rest of the night tucked safely into bed.
“Okay, heads up. This is our exit,” she said.
He coasted off the freeway and spotted the orange-and-white-striped roof of the burger place.
“Turn right at this light.” She consulted her phone, then looked around. “Okay, get in the turn lane and hook a left at the next street. It’s right up here. Slow down.”
Jeremy followed instructions. Her bossy voice turned him on, which was the dead-last thing he ever planned to tell her, but it was true.
“Cross the tracks, and then take a right on Waterfront Road. See it?”
He glanced at her. “We’re headed for the ship channel.”
“I know.”
They bumped over the railroad tracks and picked up a two-lane highway paralleling the shore. The ship channel connected the Gulf of Mexico to the Port of Houston, and traffic up and down it was one of the primary drivers of the city’s economy.
The neighborhood quickly became industrial. Warehouses. Concrete lots filled with heavy equipment. More lots filled with endless rows of shipping containers. All the properties were surrounded by high security fences, some topped with razor wire.
Jeremy glanced to his left, where a wall of trees blocked the view of the businesses located directly on the waterfront. A white glow above the tree line indicated that several of the places were up and running, even this late at night.
“One more mile,” she said.
Through a gap in the trees, he caught a glimpse of the ship channel. Not the water itself but the towering steel cranes that lined the shore.
“Okay, see the sign up here?”
They neared a sign for Ballard Shipping. A chain-link fence surrounded a big lot, five acres at least. But the lot was empty. Not a light anywhere, and stalks of weeds sprouted through cracks in the concrete.
Kira sighed. “Shit.”
Jeremy drove past the lot without stopping.
“We should pull over and look around,” she said.
“Not yet.”
A high pair of headlights moved toward them on the narrow highway, and Jeremy could tell from the silhouette that the vehicle was law enforcement.
Kira seemed to notice them, too. She watched as they passed the SUV that had a fence buster on the grate and a light bar mounted on top.
“ICE,” Jeremy said.
“How can you tell?”
“The crest on the door.”
Jeremy watched in the rearview mirror. When the taillights faded to nothing, he found a side road and turned onto it.
Kira was tapping away at her phone. “I looked up the company. They’re in business still, so they must have moved locations.”
“What kind of business?”
“Industrial shipping.”