“They’re coming here,” I said.
“When?”
I looked at the time the last text was sent. The one saying they’d be here in an hour. Fifty-one minutes ago.
“Now.”
“Nownow?” Shooter stood, her voice moving up an octave.
“At three a.m., they said they’d be here by four.”
Shooter looked at her phone, and her face tightened at the recognition that a carful of armed men might be rolling up at any second. She pulled her Glock from the holster at her waist.
“We should go, Gardner. These guys show up and see us? Three months of casework is blown.”
I remained on the arm of the couch, Freddie’s phone in my lap. All four of us at PAR had been working this case, but it was my job to assimilate the details and set strategy.
“If we leave like this,” I said, “they’re going to take the guns and the bank cards and torch the place with Freddie’s body in it.”
The Sandoval gang had been deliberate in destroying evidence via arson and murder, and this mobile home was remote, planted tenmiles outside of Hambis on a piece of land owned by Pecos’s aunt. The structure would burn quickly, and the fire would not be seen for hours.
“So we do it first,” I said.
“Burn the place down?” Shooter’s voice spiked.
I held my partner’s gaze. Our team member Cassie had already linked two Hambis cops to the criminal ring, so trusting local police was not an option.
“Gardner,” Shooter said, focusing me.
“I’m going to grab the containers with the bank cards,” I said. “Then bag up his trash in case there’s anything valuable in it. In five minutes, I’ll have everything over to that hedge we snuck through by the highway.”
Shooter stared at me, nodding as she followed my logic. “So Freddie was drunk,” she said. “He fell asleep. Woke up amid the smoke, but couldn’t get out?”
“I’ll rig the door,” I said. “Break his key off in it.”
“And me?” Shooter asked.
“We can’t have locals thinking he died of a GSW,” I said. “You’ve got five minutes to cut him open and remove any bullets.”
Shooter squinted at me. “Upper management at the Bureau, Gardner… they’re not gonna be happy about this.” She motioned around the mobile home. “No fingerprints, DNA destroyed in a fire, no bullets.”
“Right,” I said. “Take the bullets with you.”
I got up to leave, but Shooter was shaking her head.
It was not uncommon for others to react to me in this way. As if I were all logic and no feelings. When I was younger, my mother told me that my mind “just worked differently than others’.” That my affect was simply “a bit lower than normal.” But I’d learned it could be an advantage to not be bothered by emotional details.
“Freddie has no wife or kids, Jo,” I said. “No relatives in the area. If local police are compromised, this is the logical thing to do. Let the fire department find the body. We find a new informant.”
“All right.” Shooter nodded in understanding, then flicked out her pocketknife and stared at Pecos. “Okay, Freddie.”
She eyed the filthy trailer. “Did you hear the one about the germ? Never mind. I don’t want to spread it around.”
Shooter went to work, and I hustled into the bedroom. Grabbing the first stack of boxes, I walked out the door, examining the countryside around me.
3:54 a.m. and quiet.
At least for a few minutes.
