His phone rang.
Jake pulled it from his pocket, glanced at the screen, and held it toward Ray. Ray leaned forward, read the name, and his eyebrows rose a quarter inch.
"I gotta take this." Jake was already moving toward the door. He answered as he walked. “Eric. Yeah, I got your message. Hold on one second."
He stopped in the doorway. Turned back.
Emily was watching him. So was Claire. Ray eased into his chair with the posture of a man who could see exactly what was about to happen and had decided to let it.
"Come have drinks with me and my friends tonight," Jake said. "Eight o'clock. The Anchor. Bar in Clearwater."
Emily stared at him. "What?"
"Come have drinks with me and my friends."
"You're asking me out."
"Yes."
"No, I?—"
"Bring Claire." Jake glanced at the woman beside Emily. "She looks like she knows how to have fun."
Claire's eyebrows rose. "You're inviting me based on vibes?"
"I'm inviting you because you've been fighting not to laugh since this briefing started."
He put the phone back to his ear. "Hold on, Eric. I'm dealing with something important." Then he looked back at Emily,whose face was showing the early signs of a flush she was going to be furious about later. "Well?"
She smiled. Then erased it. "I'll think about it."
Jake grinned. The kind that started before he gave it permission. He pointed at Ray. "Tell her where it is."
Then he was gone, his voice in the hallway shifting to the clipped, easy shorthand of a man who had a DEA agent on the line and a bar to get to and a woman in his head who'd just smiled at him before she remembered she wasn't going to.
Emily staredat the door he'd disappeared through. She could hear him in the hallway, laughing at whatever was said, his voice fading as he moved toward the stairs.
"Who is he talking to?" she asked.
"Eric Rodriguez. DEA liaison he ran joint ops with in Afghanistan." Ray leaned back. "Still active, still connected, still owes Jake about a dozen favors. Jake's got a network that makes my contact list look like a phone book from 1985. FBI, DEA, ATF, plus a dozen guys from his unit who landed in three-letter agencies after they got out."
Ray paused. Looked at Emily. Looked at Claire, who had given up any pretense of professional composure.
"Everything he runs is sourced and clean," Ray said. "His intel will hold up in your courtroom. That's a promise."
Emily was still looking at the empty doorway.
"He just put a DEA agent on hold," she said. "To ask me to drinks."
"He did."
"In the middle of a case briefing."
"Also true."
"And you're not going to say anything about that."
Ray leaned back and let out a sound that lived somewhere between a laugh and a concession. The sound of a man who'd watched his best friend walk into a room and do exactly what he'd known he was going to do once he'd decided to put them in the same room.
