built inside her. Her gaze shot around the room, trying to find something familiar, something she knew. Nothing rang a bell. It all seemed strange and foreign.
Dylan gripped her hand. “Stay calm, Joss. It’s all right.”
She shook her head in spite of the pain. “It’s not all right. Nothing’s right. I can’t remember an accident or anything about Tucson. I don’t know who you are. You called me Joss, but I don’t know my last name.” Her head pounded with renewed force, so she squeezed her eyes shut. “I can’t remember anything!”
Hot tears leaked out from her tightly squeezed eyes and ran down her face. A soft finger wiped the tears off her cheek, and his voice pierced through the pounding inside her head. “It’s all right, Joss. I’m here. I remember, and I won’t leave until you do too.”
His words slid into her heart and loosened the tight band of fear that threatened to crush it. She gripped his hand as she slipped into the fog.
* * *
Dylan Murphy took a slow, calming breath and tried again.
“Look, Holmquist.” The other man was actually a special-operation supervisor for the border patrol. Dylan was a drug-enforcement agent, on special assignment from Washington, DC. He’d been back in Tucson for over a month now, and so far working with Holmquist and his agents had been a piece of cake...until yesterday, when Jocelyn Walker had disappeared.
Things had changed drastically, and now Dylan would have to fall back on his position as the tough hard-liner, the role that had earned him his reputation. He didn’t have any other choice.
When they’d first brought Joss in, he’d been so concerned with her survival, the possibility of her losing her memory had never occurred to him. This was a new wrinkle...one that had initially thrown him for a loop.
He didn’t want to believe Joss was guilty, but she couldn’t remember what had happened, and the cold, hard facts were undeniable. Dylan had to face them...and had to force her coworkers to do the same.
“You have to put in a request for a search warrant. We need to get into Officer Walker’s apartment to see what we can find.”
The supervisor turned to face him, his dark features growing darker. “Find? Exactly what do you think you’re going to find in my officer’s home?”
Dylan inhaled. “I don’t know. That’s why we have to get in there.”
Holmquist’s features hardened. “What’s the rush? If Officer Walker survives, she’ll be in this hospital bed for a long time.”
“I agree. Long enough for her partners...” All of the border-patrol officers standing around the hospital waiting room turned abruptly. Dylan raised his hands. “If—I repeat if—she has partners in crime...they will have ample opportunity to clean out any evidence.”
Holmquist looked as if he were about to explode. “I don’t care how special the Drug Enforcement Administration thinks you are, Special Agent Murphy, you have no right to come in here, accusing one of my best officers of a criminal act.”
“I’m sorry, sir, but she was found in a collapsed tunnel beneath the Nogales border, with a stash of heroin worth five thousand dollars.”
“I know how it looks!” The officer’s raised voice reverberated around the quiet room before the man halted. Fisting his hand, he shook it loose and looked around. “Let’s go someplace where we can discuss this more calmly.”
He spun and stalked away. Dylan followed. He didn’t look at the men and women around him—anger and bitter resentment would be reflected on every face. Jocelyn Walker was popular with her fellow officers. Despite the fact the twenty-seven-year-old had risen through the ranks rapidly, much faster than some of her older counterparts, she had managed to maintain a good rapport with most of her coworkers. Competent, eager to learn, outgoing and humble, she had earned their respect without a problem.
She’d earned Dylan’s as well. He’d liked her from the beginning and they’d developed a teasing banter that made working together pleasant. It didn’t hurt that she had a winning smile, silky, long black hair and the prettiest gray eyes Dylan had ever seen. Her beauty certainly turned his head the first time he’d met her. But he refused to let it get in the way of his investigation. As far as he could tell, her looks had not earned her special attention in the force. It just made the overall package of Agent Walker easy to take.
As soon as his suspicions began to take form, he knew he was going to have a hard time convincing her supervisor—or any of her coworkers—that she might be involved with the gang he’d been sent to Tucson to investigate.
Holmquist stopped at the coffee machine and punched in his order. A cup slid down and black coffee poured into it. The swishing, pouring sound echoed through the taut, conspicuous silence in the waiting room. When it finished, the captain removed his coffee and, without a word to Dylan, stalked through the hall, past the nurses station, to the elevators.
Dylan followed silently, suspecting the man needed time to gain control of his temper. They reached the bottom floor and walked outside. Even at 2:00 a.m., the emergency room was crowded. Holmquist crossed to the opposite curb of the parking lot, where it was quiet and the lights not so bright. He stepped over the curb, to the rock-filled interior of the divider, where he stopped and took a sip of his coffee.
Dylan waited and stared at the lightning crackling across the distant night sky.
August. Monsoon season in Southern Arizona, when storms from the Gulf of California sweep up from Baja to bathe the desert in torrential downpours. One minute everything was dry, and the next a deluge soaked the parched earth. The desert turned green and cacti blossomed with bright blooms. Everything turned brilliant and bright. Dylan hated to admit it, but it was beautiful. And the skies... Light or dark, the skies were always spectacular. Lightning would rip the clouds open, and thunder would rock the earth. This season, and all that came with it, was one of the things he’d missed about home. Probably the only thing.
He shook his head with an abrupt gesture, stopping the memories before they could flood in. “Look, I don’t want to think that one of our own could be guilty.”
Holmquist shook his head. The olive green of his uniform almost disappeared in the night, but the bright yellow lettering of his name and border-patrol patches stood out in the light from the entrance across the way. “Joss is not one of yours. She’s my officer and I don’t believe I could be that wrong about her. After fifteen years in the US Border Patrol, I know people.” He turned to Dylan, his features set. “I know my people.”
Dylan shrugged. “You said she hasn’t been her normal self. We’ve all noticed that she’s been off track, different for the past week—distracted and lost in her own thoughts. Now she shows up in the middle of a drug shipment, beneath a cave-in.”
“Yeah. One that looks like the perfect setup to me. You’re the expert on tunnels. You tell me how one of those new systems that, according to you, has been so ‘expertly designed by the Serpientes,’ would collapse like that.” The sarcasm in his tone wasn’t hard to miss.
Serpientes—Spanish for snakes—was the name of the new gang Dylan had been sent to Tucson to investigate. The appearance across the country of bags of heroin stamped with a distinctive red snake had sent the DEA scrambling for more info on the group based in Arizona.
The discovery of a sophisticated tunnel beneath the border at Nogales brought up a red flag. Usually tunnels dug under that border were hasty, ramshackle crawl spaces—scratched-out hollows a man could barely shimmy through. But these new tunnels were clean-cut and bolstered with supports that were strong enough for a mine. They made the transportation of drugs easy.
The violent kidnappings of two known Tucson gang members had ended in murder. All signs suggested that the Serpientes were transporting massive amounts of drugs across the border and were trying to take over the distribution of those drugs throughout the entire Southwest