All the Wrong Moves by Merline Lovelace Read Free Book Online Page B

the two Border Patrol agents delayed their departure to join me at the bar for a few moments. I’d already had a taste of Jeff Mitchell’s bluntness. Still, the look he lasered in my direction caught me as unprepared as his question.
    “What do you know about the Marine Corps detachment on Fort Bliss?”
    “The detachment? Nada.”
    Interesting how many emotions an elevated eyebrow can convey. Particularly when it hikes up over a penetrating, cut-the-crap stare.
    “I saw your reaction when the subject came up.”
    “What reaction?”
    “You squirreled on your chair like someone just hauled into hard secondary for questioning.”
    Hard secondary being the containment area at border crossings where suspicious characters are taken for further questioning. Having made several jaunts across the Rio Grande to sample the ubiquitous delights of Juárez, I’m a little surprised I have yet to visit the holding pen. I’ve seen a few folks hauled off, though, and squirrel they did.
    “What was that about, Samantha?”
    “Nothing subversive,” I said with a nonchalant shrug. “I went out with one of instructors from the school a few months back.”
    Agent Mitchell, it turned out, was more interested in my connections than my currently nonexistent love life. “You’ve got an in at the school? Someone who might talk to you?” he persisted, those gold-green eyes drilling into me.
    “Well . . .”
    “Call him. Set up a meeting asap.”
    Now, I’m only a brown bar. That’s second lieutenant, in civilian speak. Just about every commissioned officer in every branch of the military outranks me. Including, I was surprised to learn, the uniformed officers of the Coast Guard, the Public Health Service and the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration.
    I’ve heard of the Coast Guard, of course, and know the PHS runs the Indian Clinic in El Paso. Don’t quiz me on NOAA, though. I think they’re hurricane hunters or space cadets or something.
    The point I’m laboring to make here is that the U.S. Border Patrol is nowhere in my chain of command. Even if it was, I’ve already confessed I haven’t completely mastered the art of taking orders. So of course I bristled and came within a breath of telling Agent Mitchell to go take a flying leap. He spiked my guns with a terse addendum.
    “Make the meeting off-post.”
    I deflated like the NASDAQ after another sharp spike in crude oil prices.
    “Why off-post? And why,” I wanted to know, “the end run around Mr. Comb-Over?”
    “Who?”
    I jerked my chin toward the now empty back room. “Special Agent Hurst.”
    Tess Garcia smothered a sound suspiciously close to a chuckle. Mitchell merely shrugged.
    “I’ve worked with Andy Hurst before. Or tried to. He tends to view inter-governmental cooperation as a one-way street.”
    “Yeah, I got that impression.”
    I nursed my grudge against Hurst and his notebook until Mitchell abandoned Tess and me for the men’s room. Swinging around on my barstool, I followed his progress.
    I’ll say this for the man. He exhibits all the personality of a warthog at times but he does have one fine butt. When I swung back around, Tess Garcia was watching me with speculative eyes.
    “What?” I asked, feigning an air of innocence that wouldn’t fool a five-year-old, much less a highly trained and heavily armed Border Patrol agent.
    She tapped an unpolished fingernail against her beer bottle, obviously weighing how much to share with an outsider. I was about to check my uniform for a hammer and sickle again when she finally responded.
    “You want to be careful there. Mitch hit a rough patch a few years ago. He’s still working his way back.”
    I’ve seen what rough patches can do to folks. Particularly the dysfunctional whiners and winos I call family. I was giving Agent Mitchell credit for dragging himself out of whatever pit he’d fallen into when I flipped up my cell phone and scrolled through the contacts.
    I’d thought