Hit and Run by Allison Brennan, Laura Griffin Page A

ready.”
    He read it off. It was a cell phone; she could tell by the prefix.
    “Thanks, Greg.”
    “Don’t mention it. Seriously—don’t tell anyone. I could get into trouble.”
    “Mum’s the word.” She hung up and called Mac. She almost didn’t need to—as she watched, Tony Mercer left the precinct, and he didn’t look happy. But she went through the motions—documenting what she knew.
    Mac answered on the first ring. Krista must have given him the heads-up. “I need you to get the owner of this number,” she said and read him the ten-digit cell phone.
    “I’ll text you,” he said and hung up.
    Mercer got into his car and Scarlet followed. He didn’t drive far—only a few minutes—to the San Fernando Mission. He parked and Scarlet kept her distance, parking along the edge of the road as if she were here to visit a gravesite.
    The Mission was a good place for a clandestine meeting. It was largely open, with trees interspersed here and there through the fields of graves. Mercer would have good visibility if anyone was watching him.
    Fortunately, she had good equipment. She put her strongest zoom lens on her digital camera, the one she always feared she’d drop and break and cost Moreno & Hart Investigations two thousand bucks. She focused and snapped a couple pictures, watching him walk to the middle of the center graveyard and stop.
    He pulled an envelope from his pocket and placed it on the base of a small statue at the head of the grave. She couldn’t read what was on the marker, but she snapped a couple extra shots.
    Then he turned and left.
    Well, shit.
    She watched him leave, but didn’t follow him. Clearly he’d left a message for someone and she wanted to see who picked it up.
    She also wanted to know what the message said.
    But she couldn’t risk it. His partner in crime could be here watching, waiting for Mercer to leave, and if he saw her approach the grave, they’d know she was onto them.
    She bit her lip. She wanted desperately to know what was in that message.
    She waited five minutes, her lens focused on the gravesite. No one came to pick it up.
    She got out of her car and started walking toward the grave, taking a roundabout way, keeping her eye on the prize while scanning the perimeter for anyone who looked out of place. She trailed a small group of old ladies who were quietly chattering about their departed friend. Apparently, Ethel Driscoll had been eighty-nine when she died after playing eighteen rounds of golf and beating her handicap, or some such thing. It was the one-year anniversary of her passing and they were leaving golf balls on her grave.
    As Scarlet was about to turn toward the headstone where Mercer left the note, she stopped. A white male dressed in black was approaching from the opposite direction. She sidestepped and stood against a tree, about a hundred fifty feet away. She trained her camera on the guy.
    He walked like a cop, but he was no cop. He was one of the men who had shot out Diego’s house Sunday morning. He’d been the one who’d gone around the back, the first guy she’d seen, six feet tall, blond hair, all muscle. He wore black slacks and a black T-shirt and a leather jacket even though it was ninety degrees. It was clear that he had a shoulder harness and it looked almost like he had a badge on his belt.
    “He was a cop, Scarlet,” Jason had said the other day about Gina’s shooter. “He had a badge on his belt. I saw it as he ran, under his jacket.”
    She zoomed in on the belt and snapped some shots, though she couldn’t make out what the badge said. Maybe Mac could enhance it with contrasts or whatever it was he did to make sense of the insensible.
    Mr. Leather Jacket bent over, picked up the note, pocketed it, and kept walking. Toward Scarlet. She put down the camera and looked around for the four little old ladies with the golf balls, but they were standing around a grave twenty feet in the open. This guy would certainly recognize her if