Diego turned his head slightly. He sensed that he was being watched.
“No fast moves,” said the officer standing next to him. “Put your finger on the ink pad.”
Instincts honed from his days on the street told him he was under threat. The hairs on the back of his neck stood up. He felt that heated prickling of his skin that told him danger was close by. As he went through the motions for fingerprinting, he separated out the different sounds in the processing room. Low mumbling, papers being shuffled, fingers tapping keyboards. Then he heard it. Footsteps moving at a rapid pace and growing closer.
He whirled around, scanning the crowd.
“Hey.” The officer fingerprinting him gripped Diego’s upper arm.
It took him less than a second to lock on to the menace on the face of the dark-haired man approaching him. Though he slowed his pace when Diego spotted him, his intentions were obvious.
The officer squeezed Diego’s arm. “Face forward.”
Reluctantly, Diego took his eyes off his would-be attacker. Maybe Diego’s glare had been enough to ward him off. He’d lost the element of surprise.
“You might want to check out the guy in the red shirt,” Diego said to the officer.
“Let’s just get through this,” said the officer.
He couldn’t see the man out of his peripheral vision.
The crowd of people seemed to draw closer to him. A woman a few feet away from him screamed. He felt a sting across his upper arm where a sharp object plunged into his biceps. His body went into shock as he reached out for his assailant, who held a jagged piece of metal.
The officer grabbed him and pushed him back against a wall. Blood gushed from his arm. The cut was deep. He saw black spots around the edges of his vision.
Then Samantha’s face popped into view. Her lovely blue eyes reflected his own fear. “I saw. I got down here as fast as I could.”
The crowd whirred and mumbled around him. Another woman gasped in a way that sounded more like a soft scream. He slipped in and out of consciousness as he was lifted onto something and moved through space on his back. Ceiling tiles clipped by.
A hand slipped into his. And he heard her voice again. “I’m here, Diego.”
He was aware that he was being wheeled somewhere, but his strongest impression was of the softness of her hand in his.
He slipped into unconsciousness. When he woke up in a hospital bed, Samantha was sitting beside him.
He felt light-headed. He stared down at the bandage on his upper arm.
“It was a pretty deep gash, but it’ll heal. He was aiming for your heart.” She leaned toward him and twisted a corner of the bedsheet in her fingers. “I guess the fact that he missed is the good news.”
He stared at his surroundings. The room was small and without windows.
“It’s the infirmary in the jail. They said you could stay here until your bail hearing tomorrow morning. Now they believe me that your life is at risk, so they let me see you even though I’m not family.”
That was a good turn of events. “What kind of security do they have here?”
“They said they would post a guard outside the door.”
He nodded. He sat up a little higher. Samantha jumped to her feet to adjust his pillow. Her hand brushed the back of his neck.
Pain sliced up his arm. “I got it.” He sounded defensive.
He watched her deflate before his eyes.
“Sorry, stupid Latino pride,” he said.
She cast her gaze downward and spoke in a low voice. “Well, they said I could only stay until you woke up.”
He wondered if that was true or if she was trying to make a graceful exit after he’d snapped at her.
“I’ll be at the bail hearing tomorrow,” she said.
“Agent Brown must have set this up. We need to get out of here as quickly as possible. By now everyone who wants me dead knows where I am.”
“I will have the car waiting,” she said. “Maybe your friend Gabriel will be back by then.”
“Have we made bail?”
“I don’t know yet. I need to talk to your sister. I have to go.” She leaned forward as though to kiss him on the forehead but then thought better of it and straightened her back. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
He wrapped his hand around her wrist. “I’m sorry for snapping at you.”
She patted his shoulder. “It’s all right. It’s just been a really long day.”
His eyes searched hers. “Thank you for coming for me when you did.”
“I was on the viewing platform.” The temperature in the room seemed to drop. “Diego, I saw you...” Her eyes glazed. “I saw him coming for you and I...” She cupped her hand over her mouth as she turned away and left the room.
A heaviness settled around him. Despite his best effort, he and Samantha had bonded. It was clear from the way the thought of his death had affected her.
And he was affected just as badly. Because even injured, in a prison infirmary, all he could think about was that she was out there on dangerous streets tonight, without his protection.
* * *
Distraught, Samantha hurried down the hall. She’d watched Diego almost die. Nearly losing him made her realize how much she cared about him. What was going to happen to them when all this was over? If they made it out alive.
Her phone rang. The screen on Tomas’s phone told her the call was from Mom... Claudia.
She pressed the connect button and cleared her throat to hide that she’d been crying.
“Yes.”
“Are you all right? How is it going with Diego?”
With only one word Claudia had been able to figure out all was not well.
“There was an incident in processing. Diego ended up in the infirmary.”
Claudia said something in Spanish that sounded fearful.
“He’s going to be okay, and he’s actually safer where he’s at now,” Samantha said.
There was a long pause before Claudia said anything. “The reason why I called was that I wanted to let you know that the den mothers—that’s what the women at the church who pray for the community are called—raised two thousand dollars.”
Samantha’s heart was touched when she pictured mothers and children emptying their piggy banks and pocketbooks. “A lawyer I talked to thought it might be closer to five thousand.”
“Oh.” Claudia sounded deflated.
They had to make bail. Diego would be killed if he remained in jail. “There is something I might be able to do. I might be able to come up with some money.”
“Okay,” said Claudia with a little hesitation. “Tomas will be around to pick you up in just a few minutes. Wait inside the building. He’ll call when he gets there.”
“Thanks, Claudia.”
“Samantha, I’m really worried about Diego.” Claudia’s usually strong voice faltered.
“Me, too.” She hung up and found a quiet alcove where she would be able to make her phone call. She stared down at the phone for a long time. She did not have any money to speak of, but she knew people who did. She knew Alisha’s number by heart. They had grown up together in Cambridge Heights. Contacting her, though, meant that Eric might find out where she was. She punched in the number. It was a risk she was willing to take for Diego.
The phone rang three times before anyone picked up.
“Hello.”
She recognized her friend’s clear, sweet voice.
“Alisha.”
“Sam, is that you?”
Eric had poisoned everyone against her, but Alisha didn’t sound at all guarded. Samantha’s throat went tight. She was having a hard time finding words.
“It’s good to hear your voice,” said Alisha. “I didn’t know if I ever would again.”
“How is everything there?”
Alisha let out a heavy breath. “I owe you an apology. You told me Eric was bad news. I should have believed you.”
Samantha felt as though she finally had air in her lungs after holding her breath for a very long time. “Thank you.”
“I don’t know exactly what is going on, but Eric was working some kind of business deal with Nelson Stride across the street. Nelson totally lost his shirt, and he says Eric cheated him. I don’t understand the whole thing, but anyway, I don’t think Eric is going to be living here much longer.”
“But he is still there...in the house my father bought for us?”
“Yes, he’s still here.” Alisha sounded as though she was talking through gritted teeth. “Are you—Can you come back? Where have you been for the past year, anyway?”
“I can’t get into that right now. Alisha, I need your help.”
“Of course.” Her friend’s response was without hesitation.
“It’s really important that Eric doesn’t find out that I called you.”
This time Alisha paused before answering. “Okay...sure.”
“I need to know if I can borrow three thousand dollars from you.” The money, enough to save Diego’s life, would be a drop in the bucket to Alisha. She had family money and her husband had done well as an investment banker.
“Sure. I can do that,” Alisha said.
“It would be a loan. I can pay you back over time.”
“No need. Consider it a gift, my way of apologizing for not believing you,” Alisha said.
Samantha’s heart warmed. “Thanks, Alisha. I’ll get back to you with the account information to transfer the money.”
“It’s good to hear your voice. Wish I could see you again. Give you a hug.”
The emotion in her friend’s words touched her. It had been so long since she’d felt accepted by the people she had known all her life. But now it sounded as if Eric was slowly revealing his true colors to the other people in the neighborhood and would soon be gone. She hadn’t ever thought she’d be able to return to her childhood home. “Maybe sometime in the future, I could see you. Please remember what I said about not telling anyone.” She thanked her friend and hung up.
Her phone buzzed and a text came up on her screen. I’m waiting outside. Tomas.
She stepped outside beneath an overcast sky and headed toward Tomas’s car. She had the feeling it was going to be a long night.
* * *
To Diego’s surprise, the night in the infirmary and the bail hearing went off without incident. The property clerk returned the few personal belongings he had had when he was arrested, and he headed up to where Samantha waited for him in the lobby of the justice center.
She was wearing a pink blouse, jeans and a jacket that he recognized as belonging to his sister. He regretted that he wouldn’t have a chance to say goodbye to Claudia and his nephews, but it would be safer for everyone this way. The brightness of Samantha’s smile warmed him through to the bone.
“You ready to go?” she said. “The car is waiting. There wasn’t any street parking. I had to park in the parking garage.”
Less safe, but he couldn’t change it. Rain drizzled from the sky. Once inside, their footsteps echoed inside the parking garage. Word was probably getting back to Agent Brown that he’d made bail. He half expected to be shot at in the parking garage.
She walked beside him. “I did manage to find a spot on the second floor.”
They arrived at the car and got in. As he turned the wheel, his arm stung from the gash. He pulled out of the space when he heard a thump on the trunk. A man, clearly a gang member, had hit the car with his fist. Another man and a tall woman came out of the shadows and began to beat on the hood of the car.
He saw the terror in Samantha’s eyes.
“They’re intimidating us, that’s all.”
Another man came out of the darkness and tapped on Samantha’s window with his knuckles.
She drew back. “Are you sure about that?”
He backed up slowly as the pounding continued. “If they wanted to kill us, they would have by now. These are some low-level thugs willing to do this for a little cash. They’re probably not even armed.”
Diego knew what the top-down message was. Agent Brown or whoever controlled the operation from the inside wanted him to know he and Samantha were being watched, and that it was just a matter of time before they were killed.
When he got the car turned around, he hit the gas, leaving the band of intimidators behind. He sped out onto the street.
“How much longer until Gabriel gets back?”
“I’m not sure. He should have been back by now, but an investigation isn’t like a business trip—it doesn’t have a scheduled end date. He’ll get back into the country when he finds what he needs to find. He hasn’t responded to my text. I know if he was able to communicate, he would.”
“Could we try one more time?”
Gabriel was their last hope for getting this thing resolved without stirring the hornet’s nest again.
He handed her the phone and recited the number to her, which he knew by heart. “When you send the text, call him Ricky.”
“You said his name was Gabriel.”
“It’s just a precaution in case the phone falls into the wrong hands.”
She shook her head. “Very James Bond.”
He shook his head. His life was nothing like the fictional British spy’s. He saw the darkest part of humanity and tried not to be overtaken by it. “When you send the text, don’t be specific. Just ask him if he’s done with his previous engagement.”
She sent the text and then stared out at the passing landscape. “That’s my old high school.”
She’d gone to school less than twenty blocks from where he’d grown up.
Diego glanced at the school. “I remember when students from there would come into our neighborhood to clean it up, paint over the graffiti and stuff, some sort of community project.”
“I remember doing that. How did that make you feel when we showed up?”
“Like a bug in a glass jar,” he said.
“We were trying to help.”
He shrugged. “As a group, you seemed a little bit afraid of us.” Their childhoods had unfolded such a short distance from each other, but were radically different.
They rolled through a neighborhood where the large houses were behind gates.
“Are you thinking about how different our childhoods were?”
Did she know him that well already? “You must have grown up around here.”
Her voice dropped half an octave, and she stared at her fingers. “Yeah, my old house is about five blocks that way.”
“Think you’ll ever go back?” He drove past a house with a groomed lawn.
“Not as long as Eric’s there.” She ran her fingers through her hair. “But he might be leaving.”
“So, it’s a possibility,” he said.
She crossed her arms over her chest. “I don’t think I would fit in here anymore. I don’t know where I belong.”
He felt an empathetic stab to his own gut. His phone buzzed.
She glanced at the phone. “It’s Gabriel.” Her voice had a hopeful lilt to it. But then she wrinkled her forehead.
“Read the text out loud,” he said.
“He says he’s been back a few hours, and he’s taking inventory in the store.”
“That means he’s trying to figure out if other agents are involved.”
“He wants to meet us at the Woodland Park Zoo in an hour by the lion cages,” she said.
He switched lanes of traffic. “Guess we’re going to the zoo today. We can kill time there or we can keep driving around.”
“Do you think it’ll be safe?”
“I don’t know.” Agent Brown knew he’d got out of jail, but he didn’t notice anyone following them. “We can drive around awhile longer.”
He switched lanes again as the sign for the zoo came up. Hopefully, Gabriel could arrange some sort of protective custody for Samantha. Once she identified Agent Brown as the man who had tried to kill them, they could get the ball rolling on how deep the corruption went.
He wanted her to be safe more than anything, but he had to admit, he would miss riding around in a car with her and the way her voice reminded him of spring rains and ocean waves.