Johnson broke the quiet. “You okay?”
Not at the moment. “I’m not sure.”
“Well, if I did wrong by bringing you, I’m sorry.”
“Was he really your contact all along?” How far had she gone to bring Lucky and Bo together?
“No. I originally met with a guy named Ricky, but he worried he’d been made, so we brought Bo in.”
“What the fuck?” Lucky whipped his head to the right at a red light. “You put Bo in danger?”
Johnson snorted. “He may have gone through a rough patch with the whole Mangiardi case, but you know as well as I do there’s no better undercover agent in the bureau. Besides, he’s been tending bar here for weeks as part of his own case.”
Yeah, Lucky did know. He’d been the best undercover agent not so long ago. Not anymore. Bo became one with whomever he pretended to be, and barely managed to separate the two after assignment. Which made him good at his job, but might wind up taking his sanity. “You didn’t see him after Stephan shot him up with drugs for weeks.” The vision of a broken Bo still haunted Lucky’s dreams on occasion. “I worry he went back undercover too soon.”
Johnson patted Lucky’s thigh. “Of course you do. You love him. But Walter’s not the type to send someone out who’s not ready.”
Yeah. Lucky loved Bo, and Walter never deliberately endangered his team. And he wouldn’t have sent Bo out against his will. “You didn’t see him, Rett. What it did to him.” The image never strayed far from Lucky’s mind. Bo, a defeated man, doubting himself and all he’d tried to accomplish.
“It’s not like he took drugs on his own. Motherfuckers made him. And remember, I saw the bastard who hurt him, Lucky. Took all my self-control not to tase his sorry ass right then and there. Or worse.”
Damned Stephan Fucking Mangiardi! Lucky used to want to bring him back from the dead to kill him all over again. Now he’d bring the bastard back and let Johnson go all South Texas on him. “What mattered to Bo was starting over on his sobriety.”
“He still in therapy?”
If Lucky gripped the steering wheel any tighter it would have bent. “Last I heard. Not sure how that works with him on assignment.”
Johnson patted him again. “Trust him, okay?”
Lucky snorted. “I’m the one shouldn’t be trusted, remember?”
The air grew ten degrees colder. “You’re sitting here talking about a man who won’t forgive himself, and you bring up your own past? It’s gone. For both of you. You see yourselves as you used to be. No one else does.”
“Maybe not you.” Asshole Keith never let Lucky forget about starting with the SNB as a felon working off a ten-year sentence. Or being a drug lord’s plaything. What a difference time made. Back then Lucky lived his life unapologetically lawless, cruising for the next thrill. Now he watched his back every moment for the past to creep up on him.
Thirty-eight years old, almost a third of that time spent with the bureau, equaled one hundred and dead in dealer years. A combination of sheer dumb luck and stubbornness kept him alive this long. The time would soon come for him to hang up the badge.
And do what? His life didn’t suit him for many other jobs. He used to dream of driving a cross-country rig. Now, every moment away from Bo tore at his soul. Bo could always join him on the road.
No, since fulfilling his probation obligations in service to the SNB, Bo worked his ass off to prove himself, to be more than a waste of skin like his dad.
“Lucky, the light’s green,” Johnson said, pulling him out of his musings at the exact moment a horn blasted behind him.
Uh-oh. Better watch out. In his line of work, distracted could mean an obituary on the bureau’s memorial page. What if he went to work one morning and never came home? Or for that matter, if Bo never came home?
His chest ached. He couldn’t lose Bo. Life wouldn’t be worth living.
“Whatever weird shit you’ve got going on in that brain of yours needs to stop.” Johnson clutched Lucky’s shoulder, one of the few people who didn’t get growled at for touching him. “Pull over.”
Lucky wasn’t prone to following other people’s orders, but he pulled into the parking lot of an all-night grocery store and faced his passenger. “What?”
Her eyes glimmered in the low light. “What’s eating you?”
“Nothing.”
He attempted to pull his arm away, but she tightened her grip. “You know, whatever it is, you can tell me, right?”
Yes, he did. Loretta Johnson might be a coworker, he might currently be her boss, but she’d become the closest thing to a friend he’d made in years. “I’m letting my age get to me,” he said.
