Fearless by Diana Palmer Page B

you.”
    “Long shot,” she returned.
    He grimaced. “Well, there’s always Jon Blackhawk,” he began. “He owes me a favor, and he’s a fed.”
    “I am not working with Jon Blackhawk,” she said flatly. “I don’t care how sorry he is about charging his assistant with sexual harrassment.”
    “Maybe we can lure Marco back to the big city with the offer of a really lucrative drug run,” he said then. “At least we’d have one gang member out of the picture.”
    “That isn’t such a bad idea. Marco needs money,” she said, recalling the scene in the kitchen. “He had his mother in tears, demanding money that she didn’t have.”
    “He may be using the stuff as well as selling it,” he replied. “A lot of dealers can’t resist the temptation.”
    “It might explain the violent mood swings I’m seeing in him,” she agreed.
    “I know a couple of narcs in the city,” he replied. “I might get word to them and see if they can flush out any information about Marco or Castillo.”
    “I just hope Marco isn’t going to land himself in prison. Poor Consuelo!”
    “She seems like a nice sort of person,” Marquez replied. “Shame she has such losers for a husband and a son.”
    “You know about her husband?”
    “I arrested him once,” he said, his lips making a flat line. “She’s probably going to remember that, so if she says anything to you about me, we went steady in high school. Okay?”
    Her eyebrows lifted. “We did? I must have a bad case of amnesia. You’d think I’d remember something like that!”
    He glowered at her. “You’d have been lucky. I was a catch in high school,” he told her. “Girls couldn’t keep their hands off me.”
    “That’s not what your mother, Barbara, says,” she replied smugly.
    “What does my mother say?” he asked warily.
    “She says you hid behind potted plants any time a girl started walking toward you.”
    “That was in grammar school!” he protested.
    She laughed. “Really?”
    He shifted his weight. “Maybe I was a little shy. But I never hid behind a potted plant.”
    “Is that so?”
    “I might have fallen into a potted plant, once,” he relented. “When the cheerleader captain asked me to vote for her in the class president race. She was a dish.”
    She couldn’t stop laughing.
    “It’s not funny.”
    “Yes, it is.”
    He moved away from the truck. “I hate losing arguments to lawyers,” he muttered. “I’m going back to work.”
    “What are you doing down here on a Monday?”
    “I almost forgot,” he chuckled. “Your boss sent you a love letter.” He handed her an envelope.
    “This isn’t my boss’s handwriting,” she pointed out. “And my name is misspelled!”
    “We have a mole. He doesn’t like the new regime, or the new drug lord. He sent that to you via your boss. But he’s only giving us information on Fuentes. That—” he indicated the envelope “—is the closest he’s going to come to revealing himself as a witness. We have no idea who he is.”
    “Have you read this?” she asked. It was sealed, but barely.
    “No. And I resent having you insinuate that I try to read other people’s mail.” He stuck his hands into his jeans pockets. “Anyway, we couldn’t get the steam to work ungluing it.”
    She laughed. “Some detective you are!”
    “I’m a very good one, thanks. Read that and tell me what’s in it. Then you’d better let me have it back. Even with your name misspelled, we don’t want anybody locally making connections.”
    She slid her thumb under the seal and pulled out a small piece of lined paper that looked as if it could have come from a steno pad. “It’s an address,” she said, looking up at him. “And a date and time. That’s all.” She read it to him.
    “A drop,” he said at once. “A drug drop.”
    She handed him the note. “You could have opened it.”
    He shrugged as he pocketed the note. “I wanted to see how you were.”
    She smiled up at him. “That was