AllFreeNovel
Share Us
There it was. Harris most definitely was NOT her father.
He was her boss, and he looked about as far from happy as a person got without being on fire. Piper ran down everything she’d seen and heard at the MC since their last meeting; Harris kept frowning more and more until Piper started to think that his face was going to twist into a croissant.
“That’s it?” he said.
Piper said, “That’s it.”
“You’ve been in place for months now,” he said. “And you’re telling me you’ve got nothing, no signs of criminal activity?”
“Nothing federal.”
“You said these guys are dealing weed.”
“I suspect they are, but I can’t prove anything,” Piper said. “All I’ve witnessed is personal use around the clubhouse.”
Harris seemed to think that over. “Marijuana is still technically illegal on the federal level.”
“Sure, but like I said, I haven’t seen anything past personal use,” Piper said. “You want me to blow up my cover to bust a guy for a single joint? What U.S. District Attorney is going to take that case?”
“None.”
“Right,” Piper said. “And it’s not like even if they did, that it would make any difference. You’re talking a misdemeanor level offense, and that’s if it doesn’t get pled down to time served. No criminal is going to look to make a deal to get out of time served. It’s a waste of time to try.”
“So what makes you think that they’re dealing?” he asked.
“Things some of them say,” she said. “They don’t discuss club business around me, but you hear these guys chatter around the bar and you pick up bits and pieces.”
“What kind of weight do you think they’re moving?” Harris said.
“I don’t know,” Piper said. “There’s no way for me to tell.”
“That’s where you’re wrong, Special Agent,” Harris said. “That is your entire purpose for being in there in the first place. To dig up information that we can’t get by simply sitting outside their clubhouse with a pair of binoculars.”
Harris always called her ‘Special Agent’ when he was laying down the law with her. That or her last name. It was only ever ‘Piper’ when he was trying to sell her on something.
He’d been the one to approach her with this undercover assignment in the first place, plucking her out of her standard FBI duties with a plan to infiltrate a local MC with possible drug cartel connections.
She’d jumped at the chance. Piper had seen first-hand the extreme level of violence and destruction that the cartel could cause, and what she’d seen had not only shaken her, but had also created a steely resolve to put a stop to cartel activity anywhere and any way she could.
It was the entire reason she’d joined the FBI in the first place. Stop the bad guys. Stand in the way of those who would do evil, and protect those who couldn’t protect themselves.
But instead of chasing down murderous drug dealers or chaos-causing terrorists, she’d been working for most of her career sitting in an office, tracking the financial transactions of money launderers. It had its purpose, to be sure; if you wanted to catch somebody, you followed the money.
Still. It didn’t feel like she was doing anything of substance. It didn’t feel like she was making much of a difference, getting out there into the weeds and changing the situation for the better in a measurable way.
It felt like she was sitting in place. And then she’d gone to Juarez on one of her paper trail missions with a group of other agents, and everything had changed.
There, she’d seen the real world consequences of violence and crime, the kind of thing she’d wanted to stop from the beginning. Bodies in the streets. Families shattered.
The worst of it had been a bombing. It had been a school, a kindergarten, blown to pieces by one cartel trying to send a message to another.
Piper still had nightmares about what she’d seen that day. And she’d sworn that she was going to get into this fight, get into it for real, and not just shuffle papers in an office.
So when she heard that a middle-management cartel lieutenant named Navarro was trying to make headway into central Pennsylvania, and that a female undercover agent was needed to help take him down, she let it be known that she was game to get involved and take the fight to the cartel. Harris had come calling soon after.
Now, he was clearly unhappy with the speed of her investigation. He looked like a man waiting in a restaurant for food he’d ordered hours ago.
“This needs to move forward, Special Agent,” he said.
