Chapter 6 #3
“Have you at least listened to that 911 call?” I asked, taking a long sip of my coffee and finally feeling the buzz of energy from the caffeine. I had another day off tomorrow and I promised myself I would actually get some sleep. If my jerk of a neighbor could keep it down, that was.
Otherwise there might be another murder for the FBI to solve.
“You know I haven’t,” Noah said, and I could tell by the sound of it that he was clenching his teeth.
I grinned to myself. He might be the only person I was certain was on my side in all of this, but the two of us hadn’t gotten along at the start and I still enjoyed riling him up a little.
It was the simple pleasures in life that kept you going, after all.
“Why not?” I asked, watching a young mother guide her son down the sidewalk, giving him just enough space to feel like he had his freedom while still hovering close enough to keep him from toddling off into the road.
I wondered if my mother had done that for me, or if she’d been as overprotective in my early years as I remembered her being as I got older.
As the little boy got too close to the curb, I had a moment of panic as I imagined a car turning the corner and heading straight for him, but the street was empty and the mother was paying close attention.
She called him back to her side and held his hand before looking both ways and crossing the street together.
“Doing anything related to that case is a massive red flag,” Noah said in a tone that told me I ought to know this by now.
And I did, but that didn’t change the frustration that was driving me to grill him yet again for answers that I knew were not going to change.
“Even without the chance of high-level corruption being involved they’ve already interviewed me about our time together at the Academy twice now.
If I dig into those case files my login ID will register and they’ll start looking even closer at me and my connections, which will lead them straight to you.
You have to wait, Hale. You have to be patient. ”
“It’s been six weeks, Noah.” I slammed my head back against the headrest, a fit of rebellion that hurt no one and didn’t exactly make me feel better either.
But I was so tired of feeling like my hands were tied, cuffed behind my back my whole life while monsters with too much good luck and not enough morals got away with ruining lives.
“And three of those were spent getting you to accept a new identity and a safe place to lay low,” he pointed out.
I could just imagine him hissing those words into the phone as he crossed a busy street dressed in slacks with a gun hidden under his suit jacket.
“Don’t throw away everything we’ve accomplished because you don’t like your new life.
Think of it as a cover. If you were on assignment right now you wouldn’t be throwing in the towel, would you? ”
“If I were on assignment right now, Monica wouldn’t be dead,” I snapped, scowling at the little sticker on the back of the stop sign at the curb.
It looked like a piece of toast with cartoonish eyes and two sharp little fangs.
It was so absurd that it immediately broke me out of the dark mood I’d fallen into.
Noah let out a heavy sigh, and it reminded me of a dozen other times he’d sighed at my stubborn willfulness while we ran scenarios in Hogan’s Alley or raced each other on the Academy track in the early dawn hours. I had no idea back then how much I would miss those days.
“Touché,” he said. “Look, I’m sorry I don’t have more for you yet, but I’m working on it. I promise.”
“I know you are,” I told him.
“Listen, Hale, I have to go.” He sounded distracted and a little out of breath as he spoke, like he was going up a set of stairs now.
“Just, don’t blow your cover. Even if the bureau suddenly decides you aren’t the prime suspect, someone in their ranks wanted you to take the fall and they were smart enough to convince the rest of the FBI that you did this.
There’s no telling what they might do if you surface before we’re ready to take them down and you aren’t going to outsmart them by being impatient.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my time working corruption cases, it’s that smart criminals are only caught by smarter agents. So be smart about this, okay?”
“Okay,” I said softly, not bothering to mention the fact that I wasn’t an agent.
That I never would be after going into hiding like I had.
His point still stood, and now he’d given me a way forward.
Because I had been treating this situation as a temporary inconvenience, but thinking of it as a cover gave me an opportunity I hadn’t considered before.
Monica’s killer hadn’t managed to put me behind bars like they planned, a flaw in their flawlessly orchestrated plan, and that had only been their first mistake.
Their second was giving me time to get my feet under me, because now I was free to disappear, to become someone else entirely; someone smart, observant, and always one step ahead.
Now, I could truly become Hale Hastings, bide my time until I had the proof I needed, and then strike when the time was right. And they would never see me coming.