Kitabı oku: «In Too Deep»

ONE

Panic invaded Sierra Monforton’s nerves as she sprinted through the brush that led to the lakeshore. Trevor Bond, a troubled fifteen-year-old boy from the youth group she headed up, had not been on the road where they’d agreed to meet.

As she stepped to the edge of the brush, a fog rolled over the lake and crept along the rocky shore. The calm of the night sky twinkling with stars stood in opposition to the fear that hounded her. Trevor’s words from their phone call less than half an hour ago pounded in her brain. “Miss M, I’m here at Fishermen’s Crest to get drugs to sell. I don’t want to go back to using, but sometimes everything just seems so hard. Help me.”

She’d talked him out of his plan and agreed to pick him up. He had ridden his bicycle out there and would not be able to get away fast enough before the drug dealers showed up. Depending on how deep Trevor was already in with these dealers, he might still be in danger once she got him back to town. But she’d deal with that when she had to. Right now, she needed to get him home safe with his younger sister, Daisy, and foster mom.

And now Trevor was nowhere to be found. A hundred violent images crashed through Sierra’s brain as she scanned the beach. What if the drug dealers had shown up early and been angry about Trevor’s change of heart? What if Trevor had run away out of shame and would end up back on the streets of some city?

She ran along the rocky shore, calling out Trevor’s name. Silence answered back. She didn’t know exactly where the drug dealers had planned to meet Trevor, but Trevor said he’d be safe on the road. Why, then, hadn’t he stayed there and waited for her?

Another, more sinister thought played around the edges of her mind. Everyone in Scenic View knew about her fight to get kids clean and to push the dealers out of town. Trevor had used and sold drugs before. He was only six months clean. What if he was setting her up so the dealers could harm her?

She took in a sharp breath. She cared about that kid. She didn’t want to think the worst of him. And yet she knew firsthand the world he was considering going back to. When she was only a year older than Trevor, she had been headed down the same destructive road.

The sound of footsteps caused her to glance up the shore. A man in dark clothes emerged from the fog, jogging toward her along the rocky beach.

Even at a distance, she knew the man wasn’t Trevor. Trevor was a short, skinny kid. This man was muscular and tall. What were the chances of a man running on a rocky beach not being connected to the drug deal about to take place? Afraid for her own safety, she slipped back into the brush. As the man ran past, she recognized who he was. Her heart beat a little faster when she saw the gun in his waistband.

Though she’d never met him, she knew Joseph Anderson by sight. He’d taken over management of the skateboard shop only a few weeks ago. The kids in her youth group raved about him. Apparently, Joseph had charisma when it came to winning the hearts of teenagers.

Scenic View, Idaho, where she lived, was a small, close-knit community. Though the lakes attracted part-time residents who owned second homes here, the people who stayed year-round and had been here for generations were the core of the town.

Sierra slipped deeper into the brush. Joseph ran as though on a mission. The gun was cause for alarm. It couldn’t be coincidence that he was in the very same area where a drug deal was about to happen. Sierra clenched her jaw. Drug activity with teens had been on the rise recently. The skateboard shop would be a perfect front for selling drugs to kids. If Joseph Anderson was up to no good, she would see to it that he couldn’t hurt the teenagers she cared so much about.

Joseph disappeared around a bend. She stepped out and ran after him, not to confront him but to see what he was up to. Maybe he would lead her to Trevor. She knew she might be risking her own safety, but right now she could think only of Trevor and the other kids. If she witnessed anything shady with Joseph, she would leave and tell the police.

Trevor had sounded so lost and filled with shame on the phone. At least the boy had taken her up on the offer she gave all the kids and called her before he did something destructive. She hoped she was right about him.

Sierra’s tennis shoes padded over the rocks. She slowed as she rounded the curve. Up ahead was a structure everyone referred to as Old Boat, a thirty-five-foot recreational trawler that had been scuttled here years before. Kids came to this area to build bonfires and party.

She didn’t see Joseph or Trevor anywhere.

Half in the water and half on shore, the boat listed to one side, creaking as the waves bombarded it.

Something rustled in the brush farther inland. She saw a flash of red. Trevor always wore a red coat. She darted toward where she’d seen movement. She could hear the noise of someone racing through the brush, back toward the road. Maybe Trevor had panicked standing in the dark waiting for her to pick him up. At least he was headed in the right direction.

Her feet smacked the softer ground. She stepped into a clearing, about to call out Trevor’s name when she spotted a man, neither Joseph nor Trevor, kneeling over an open satchel. He held something in his hand.

He looked like a businessman about to board a plane; he was definitely not dressed for the outdoors. Moonlight washed through the trees. He turned to look at her. She saw his face as he grimaced at her.

Because the moment had become almost surreal, it took her a second to register that what he held in his hands was a brick of some kind of drug—cocaine, heroin? Moonlight reflected off the metal on the large face of the watch he wore. She cast her gaze downward and then took a step back. The entire satchel was filled with drugs.

“Well, this is bad timing!” Rage tainted his words.

Time seemed to slow down as the man stood up, pulled out a gun and aimed it at her. On instinct, she turned and sprinted back toward the road. A shot whizzed by her so close it hurt her eardrum. Her heart pounded out an intense beat as adrenaline surged through her, feeding her instinct to stay alive.

Footsteps echoed behind her and then off to the side. Another shot zinged through the air. The man had positioned himself between her and the road. She sprinted deeper into the brush. She’d have to run parallel to the road until she could put some distance between herself and the shooter in order to get back to her car and escape.

His footsteps never let up. She could hear him moving through the brush. She ran, willing her legs to pump harder, go faster.

Then a shot came at her from behind, from a different direction. She caught a glimpse of a second man, his baseball hat just visible above the brush. A new wave of fear swept over her. Two men were shooting at her. She ran haphazardly, trying to stay close to the road but knowing that escape route was no good. She couldn’t shake the first shooter.

She pivoted and headed back toward the shore. Another shot sounded through the night.

A body crashed into her from the side, taking her to the ground. She lay on her stomach with the man on top of her.

Terror gripped her as she tried to wiggle free of the man.

“Could you be any noisier?” The man’s voice came out in a harsh whisper. “You sound like an elephant at a dance party.”

She could hear the other two men moving through the brush. One shouted a command at the other.

“Get off of me.”

“I will. But you need to be quiet.” He took his knee off her.

She flipped over. Joseph Anderson stared back at her and put his finger to his lips. Fear struck a new chord inside her. What was going on here?

Joseph leaned close and whispered in her ear. “Come with me. I’ll get you out of here.”

Her instinct was to pull away and to run. He had a gun. Was he involved with those other men? Did he intend to hurt her? Or was he a rival drug dealer and she’d been caught in some sort of turf war?

She shook her head.

The two shooters closed in on them.

Sierra rose to her feet prepared to run away from Joseph. She’d take her chances on her own. She could follow the shoreline back into town or try to get to her car. She turned and sprinted.

Joseph was right on her heels.

He grabbed her from behind, spun her around and gripped her wrist so tightly she couldn’t get away. “I’m trying to keep you alive.”

Her heart pounded as she tried in vain to pull away. “What are you doing out here?”

“I might ask you the same thing,” he said.

He pulled her through the remainder of the brush down to the shore, where a motorboat waited in a cove. He lifted her up and put her in the boat. “You’ll thank me later.”

She doubted that. She felt anger toward anyone who pushed drugs on kids. Drugs ruined lives. Was that what Joseph was up to?

She moved to get out of the boat just as Joseph pulled the starter rope and the engine sputtered to life. The two shooters emerged through the brush. One, the man she’d seen with the drugs, looked right at her and then slipped back into the trees. The other man, the one wearing the baseball hat, lifted his gun. A red dot appeared on Sierra’s chest. She ducked down in the boat.

Sierra had no choice. If she ran back on shore, she’d be shot for sure. She had to stay in Joseph’s boat.

But just what did Joseph have in mind? Why had he kept her alive?

Undercover DEA agent William Joseph Anderson glanced over his shoulder as a gunshot shattered the silence on the water.

The woman he’d pulled out of the forest lay flat in the boat. What had she been doing out there, anyway? Certainly not going for a stroll on the beach. Her interference messed up his investigation. Were the two thugs after her because she’d betrayed them?

Maybe she was trying to horn in on the drug activity.

Whether she was innocent or guilty, it was clear she was under threat. Now that he’d saved her life, she might have valuable information she’d share out of gratitude and a desire to destroy the men who were after her. As long as he could get it without giving up who he really was. At all costs, he had to maintain his cover.

Earlier in the day, Joseph had heard talk in the shop that a big drug distribution was about to go down at this spot. Other agents had traced a shipment out of Mexico headed to the northwest. It wasn’t hard to put two and two together. He’d come out to this part of the shore not to interfere with the transaction, but to see if he could spot who the players were. Investigations like this took a long time. A lot of information had to be gathered, or they ran the risk of the big players slipping from their clutches.

It was nothing to arrest the low-level dealers; most were kids just trying to support their own habit. DEA was after the big fish, whoever was behind this point of distribution. At best, they had blurry photos of him. Or pictures of the back of his head. His only identifying characteristics were that he dressed well and he often wore a large-faced gold watch.

He revved the boat engine. When he glanced over his shoulder, the men on shore were still taking aim at them. He’d come in the boat because he could anchor it in a cove unnoticed and sneak up to the site where the transaction was supposed to happen. A car parked on an underutilized road would have called attention to itself.

The fog enveloped them. To lessen the risk of hitting something, he clicked the boat down to an idle. It had been at least five minutes since the last shot was fired. The woman sat back up. He heard water lapping around the boat, but could see only a few feet in any direction.

He kept his voice low. “So do you want to tell me what you were doing out there at this time of night?”

“What were you doing out there?” Suspicion clouded her words.

He had to assume his cover wasn’t blown. “I like going out there at night. It’s quiet.”

“If you must know, I went up there to pick up a kid before he got himself into trouble. Trevor Bond is in the church youth group I help out with.”

So she ran a church youth group. A perfect way to build trust with kids and then get them hooked. “I know Trevor. He comes into the shop.” Trevor was one of the quiet ones. It broke his heart to think of any of those kids using. “He seems like he has his act together.”

“He’s only six months sober. He’s struggling not to go back into that life. To stay away from the people who got him involved in the first place.”

He caught the note of passion in her voice.

“Anyway, I’m worried about him,” she said. “I still don’t know where he went or what happened to him.” She lowered her voice half an octave. “Or why he ran away. Maybe he’s already in too deep.”

Trevor sounded a lot like Joseph’s little brother, Ezra. For Joseph, being a DEA agent was personal. Always a quiet kid, Ezra had died of a drug overdose when he was just seventeen. Joseph had been a junior in college when he got the call about Ezra. Such a waste of a beautiful life. His heart still ached over the loss.

Though he was not ready to let go of all his suspicions, he thought he detected genuine concern in her voice when she talked about Trevor. “What is your name, anyway?”

“Sierra,” she said. A moment of silence passed before she spoke again. “Where are you taking me?”

He glanced over at her. “I’m taking you home.”

She met his gaze. Her black hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and her blue eyes were the color of robin’s eggs. There was something almost cute about the way she pulled the sleeves of her hoodie down over her fingers. She really didn’t act like a drug dealer. All the same, she could be a girlfriend of one of those men. The shooters certainly seemed to want to take her out. Men like that didn’t put up with betrayal on any level.

It would be foolish to let go of his suspicions just yet. In any case, he was still irked about her messing up his surveillance.

“Why don’t you take me to the police station? I need to report this. And unless Trevor headed back home, he’s still missing.”

He wasn’t sure what to say to that. Because they suspected one of the local cops was tipping the dealers off, DEA didn’t want the city police getting wind of their activity.

“Or you can just take me to my car,” she said after he didn’t answer. “I can deal with this myself.”

“Obviously it’s not safe to go back there. You can go back tomorrow and get your car,” Joseph said. Her thinking was a little messed up, which was a normal response to the trauma of being shot at. Really, she was handling things quite well overall.

Joseph slowed down, so he could hear above his own motor.

She turned slightly in her seat. “What is it?”

“I thought I heard another boat.”

The fog hadn’t lifted at all. He didn’t see light anywhere.

Sierra whirled to one side and then the other. Her voice faltered. “I hear it, too.”

Joseph killed the motor. He doubted anyone was out for fun on a night like this. The other boat seemed to be circling around them, the motor growing louder and then fading. The motorboat swayed in the water as waves suctioned around it.

“They’re looking for us,” Sierra whispered. Her words were iced over with terror.

Joseph crouched. “Stay low.” Did they wait here and hope the searcher gave up, or did they risk making noise while trying to escape?

He wondered, too, why they were even coming after Sierra and him. He and Sierra been scared off, so why hadn’t the two men just gone back to their planned transaction? Why draw attention to themselves by hunting them down?

A light broke through the fog with the intensity of a knife slicing meat. Joseph could see the outline of a larger boat—and the man behind the helm lifting a gun. It was the man in the baseball hat. The one who had taken aim at them on the shore.

Joseph started the engine and pulled forward. The shot echoed around the boat and had probably lodged in the hull somewhere. His boat gained speed.

The other boat was eaten up by the fog, but not before another gunshot echoed around them. Joseph turned the throttle, hoping to put distance between himself and the other boat.

The roar of the other boat’s motor remained steady in intensity.

His boat slowed and vibrated.

“What’s wrong?”

He gritted his teeth. “We’re in shallow water filled with reeds. We’re not going to be able to get anywhere.” The disorientation from the fog had caused him to get too close to the shore. He revved the throttle, hoping to make some progress.

The other boat rammed into them. Their boat shook from the impact. The man leaped off his boat and reached for Sierra. She screamed and struggled to get away. Joseph lunged toward the man who had his hands around Sierra’s neck.

Sierra twisted her body in an effort to escape his grasp. Joseph heard a loud splash as Sierra and the man both fell into the water. He could see only flashes of movement in the fog.

He dove into the blackness, praying he wasn’t too late to save Sierra from the clutches of the man who sought to kill her.