Ellie’s heart rate ticked higher. She frowned and leaned forward. “Who is this?”

  On the other end of the line Chewy was staring at Ringo while he spoke into the phone. His boss had the beginnings of a smile on his lips. “I’m a friend,” Chewy said.

  “A friend...and do you have a name?”

  “Not one that is important for your purposes. Please listen. Mr. Mateo Nunez has a shipment coming in two nights from now at Turner Key, near Venice. It’s scheduled for two o’clock in the morning at the central east point of the island. There’s a small cove there with a dock and an old shack. It should be a good-sized fish for you to catch. If you like fishing.”

  “Forgive me if I am a little skeptical,” Ellie said. “How can I know this is not a setup of some kind, a prank call?”

  “Skepticism is good for the soul. It keeps one guessing. Makes life interesting. You might also like to know that the drop is happening with the permission and cooperation of a Norman Hardy, who happens to own the island.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “That’s also not important. I’ve given you all that you need to know. Happy fishing.” Her phone screen glowed showing the call had ended.

  Mark looked at her quizzically. “What was that about?”

  She held up a finger and momentarily forced the information her caller provided out of her mind. She concentrated on his voice. It was deep, measured and calm, uncloaked. Unusual for such a call. She would have expected some indication of nervousness; an anonymous caller afraid of being found out. The caller could be experienced, confident in his abilities to dwell in the shadows. Was he an associate? A former DEA agent or official who came across information but didn’t want to get involved? Ellie played the short call through her mind again. No background noise, no unique sounds. Nothing that might provide a clue as to his whereabouts or location.

  She picked up her phone and glanced at the call log. “Unknown Caller,” it read. Looking up at Mark, she relayed the specifics of the phone call.

  When she was finished, he said, “Norman Hardy? As in the Norman Hardy who owns Bristol Marina up in Sarasota and is Florida’s biggest recluse?”

  “I’ve never heard of him.” She stood up and walked across the room to Glitch’s open, double-wide cubicle. Mark followed. Glitch, also known by his given name of Samuel Brown, possessed an uncanny ability to unravel any technical problem or glitch. Garrett had given him the nickname soon after he’d arrived last year, and no coworker had referred to him by his Christian name since. As a technology gopher Glitch was as cliché as they came: unkempt, a large waist that spilled over his belt, red high-top Converse shoes, and a love for all things hippie. He had missed the sixties by a margin of nearly thirty years, but no one had the guts to tell him. The inattention to his appearance or bodily care was to be blamed on his religious-like focus on all things data, technology, and comic book heroes. Action figures of Hulk, Iron Man, Wonder Woman, and Minecraft tropes could be found amongst candy bar wrappers, empty Sunkist bottles, and the dizzying array of laptops and monitors cluttered into his area. A poster hung on an inside wall, an image of Captain James T. Kirk sitting brazenly in his captain's chair with a steely resolve in his eyes. A caption below in large letters read, “Bones! Buckle Up!” Glitch was the only person in the office allowed to get away with such clutter and fanfare and the only one upon whom a dress code of sorts was not enforced.

  Ellie walked up behind him and tapped him on the back of his shoulder. His arms flared out, and his legs jerked. His head whipped around, and he removed his Beats headphones from his ears. “Good God, you scared me,” he said. His hair fell long over his ears, and he wore a tie dye t-shirt with the words “Creedence Clearwater Revival” inked across it.

  Mark chuckled.

  “I could have unplugged your power strip,” she retaliated.

  He shoved his thick glasses back off the edge of his nose. “Scaring me is just fine. What’s up?”

  She handed him her phone. “I just received an anonymous call from someone claiming to have information on the operation of a drug boss we’re tracking down. It showed up as an unknown caller. Any chance you can track down the number’s owner?”

  Glitch took the phone and looked at the call log. “Let me see what I can do...it’s this one? The call from two minutes ago?”

  “Yes.”

  He swiveled back toward a screen and started typing. Then he grabbed a stray phone charger sitting along his desk and plugged it into the device. “Give me a few minutes. I’ll see what I can find.”

  Ellie thanked him and returned to her cubicle. She took a small notepad from a drawer and scratched down every word of the conversation exactly as it happened. Then she leaned back in her chair and bit down on her lower lip while she mentally massaged it all.

  One nugget appeared, that was all. It was a philosophy, a worldview, a specific way of looking at life. The caller had said, “Skepticism is good for the soul. It keeps one guessing. Makes life interesting.” She underlined it three times on the pad. It didn’t tell her who he was, where he was calling from. It did, however, offer a psychological window into the belief system of the caller. It could come in handy later.

  Ellie scooted her chair in and picked up the desk phone. She and Mark needed to make a plan. If the caller wasn’t lying, then they had just been given an early Christmas present. If he was, they could be walking into an ambush or a setup. Ellie liked presents. She did not like being played the fool.

  * * *

  Nothing had turned up.

  For the last twenty-four hours, Garrett’s office had scrambled to find any information on the anonymous caller that had reached out to Ellie. They found nothing to go on. Glitch couldn’t get anywhere. Two hours after Ellie had left her phone with him, Glitch had returned to her cubicle looking dejected and out of sorts. It wasn’t a traceable call, he said, and then went on to explain that there were only a couple ways to truly cloak a call’s origination point, something that was much different than simply hiding your number from the person you’re calling. The first way was to utilize a VPN - a virtual private network. Once the VPN was installed on a device, it could mask communication channels by encrypting data coming to and from the phone. This would make it appear as if the device were located in a different region. Glitch said this particular method still left a few bread crumbs to pick up since the provider was technically required to keep partial records of the communication. Eliminating this scenario led Glitch to conclude that Ellie’s caller had utilized a burner phone. Burner phones were prepaid numbers that used a service called a mobile virtual network operator, MVNO, for short. Signing up for an MVNO requires no identifying information whatsoever. So you make a call, pop the SIM card, and there’s nothing to trace. It’s like reeling in a fish. Once you bring in your line, there is nothing to trace where it had been in the water. Ellie liked the analogy, especially since she figured that Glitch had never been within a hundred yards of a fishing pole.

  So the caller didn’t want to be found, that much was clear. He had ensured that he couldn’t be traced. That alone probably negated him being ex-DEA who just didn't want to get involved. His confidence and mild bravado eliminated him from simply being an uninvolved bystander. Her caller was tied in to it all somehow.

  Then there was the matter of why Ellie had been called directly, and on her work cell. How did anyone on the outside know who she was or what role she played in the investigation? It was unsettling at best, concerning at worst. Up to this point her investigation had been relatively quiet and low key. Sure, there was the car chase and shoot-out three weeks ago when Victor Calderón's people had tried to break him out from his transport vehicle. But even factoring that into play, it still didn’t give anyone direct access to Ellie. She had posed as a transport officer. The gunfight lasted five minutes. Ellie had subdued everyone who had come after them. All six of them. But her name hadn’t landed in the papers. Garrett had made sure of that.

  So, what then? Why did he call her? Who had called her?

  Ellie had noted that while the caller went through the trouble of cloaking the call’s origination point, he did not cloak his voice. His voice was natural, nothing synthetic or mechanical that would indicate he was manipulating it. That showed a measure of confidence, not fear, leading Ellie to put forth a theory that could change the entire way they looked at the investigation.

  “If he’s not ex-DEA or FBI, if he’s not one of the good guys,” she had told the team, “then he’s not on our side. That still leaves a few scenarios. Either he’s lying and it’s a setup, or he’s leveraging us to bring down his competition. Or he’s retaliating against someone who really ticked him off.”

  Mark said, “It doesn’t make sense to me why someone would just call us out of the blue and give us a legitimate tip like that.”

  “Why is that?” Garrett asked.

  “Honestly? Because we’re not in Mexico and we’re not in Miami. We know that drugs come in and out of here, and, while I’m sure there are backwater skirmishes between distributors, I don’t see a conflict ramping up to such a level that they would personally get the feds involved. That takes a lot of balls and comes with a lot of risk. Think about it. If we take down their competition, that creates a vacuum that they end up filling somehow and that means they click a notch higher on our target list. Why would they paint a target on their backs?”

  Jet, who had the most experience of anyone in the room, spoke up. “I’ll be straight with you all. This isn’t my favorite type of scenario. A colleague of mine in New Orleans was killed in a raid seven years ago that took place because of a call just like you had, Ellie. In spite of all our intelligence gathering, the whole thing was a farce. There was no exchange and no drugs. Just a few men hidden in the shadows with semi-automatic weapons. His surveillance didn’t see them until it was too late. I’m not imposing that narrative on this situation. I’m only suggesting that it work as a backdrop against how we look into this. Caution is in order.”

  Every agreed. “On that note,” Ellie said, “I think the only way to proceed is to assume that the tip was legitimate. If not, we drop it and continue as we were.”

  Garrett, Jet, and Mark all agreed that it wasn’t a tip they could walk away from.

  “Okay,” she said. “I want a game plan for tomorrow night. We’ll need to do some reconnaissance and determine a surveillance plan. The intent will be only to observe and track. We will not be engaging.”

  “Just let the deal go down?” Jet asked. He and his task force led any raids that took place out of the Fort Myers office. Letting a known drug exchange go down was like watching all the birthday cake getting eaten without getting a slice yourself.

  “Yes,” Ellie said. “I’m not interested in doing what we’ve always done. I understand you want to get out your broom, Jet, but I have to think bigger picture. I have to work off the assumption that my incognito caller is not on our side, and so that means he placed the call to further his agenda, not ours. He wants us to take them down tomorrow night. If it’s a setup, then by only observing we’re in the clear and out of the way. If it’s legitimate this will be a perfect chance to plug in and start tracking their movements.”

  Jet nodded weakly but did not object.

  “You three have been with the DEA far longer than I,” Ellie continued. “You know that the only way to make any progress is to decapitate these guys, not cut off a few fingers. I want to get to the top, not nab a handful of replaceable labor hands.”

  “I get it,” Jet said. “And I’m with you. Let’s see where this goes."

  Ellie turned to Garrett. “I emailed you a list of everyone I’ve given my card to, and it’s not many. That’s the only way I can think he got my name and work cell. It could be that I gave my card to someone and they passed it on or it got around their network.”

  “I’ll have someone run known associations against them and see what we come up with.” Garrett stood up. “Let me know as soon as you have tomorrow night mapped out. I want to be in on every step of this process.”

  Ellie stood up, nodded. “Will do.”

  Chapter Twenty

  Andrés Salamanca pressed the red-lined button on his Nokia 100 cell phone and tossed it into his lap. He gazed out the windshield, past the smeared mosquitos and tiny remnants of dismembered flies that had coasted into the glass at seventy-miles-an-hour. He stared off into the pine trees. Chewy turned off the old Malibu and took his hands off the steering wheel. He set them in his lap and looked over at Andrés. He waited.

  “Who?” he finally asked.

  “My cousin. Francisco.” Andrés clenched his jaw and shook his head. Then he punched the dash, screamed. “Carajo!”

  Chewy winced. He had always wondered if a move like that might set off the air bag.

  Andrés said, almost yelling. “I told him to come out here with me. I told him Ringo would bring him on. I said, ‘You stay here and you won’t make it to forty.’ I told him that.” He choked on the last three words. It was the first time Chewy had ever seen him cry. His chin was quivering.

  “What happened?”

  “He’s dead. Two in the head.”

  “How old was he?”

  “Thirty-eight. He was thirty-eight.”

  “How did it go down?”

  Andrés wiped at his eyes. “He was walking to the warehouse and stopped at a street vendor to grab some chicharrónes. It was a drive-by. They got the vendor too. Almost a thousand deaths in Juárez this year from drugs.”

  “Your cousin, he was in the trade?”

  “Yes. He brought me into it. He was good at it. The best.”

  It was quiet in the car for some time, Chewy feeling for his friend and his friend just...feeling. Finally he said, “I’m sorry.”

  Andrés nodded absently. “When we were young boys we were close - as brothers. We used to chase each other through the dry washes and get scraped up on crucifixion thorns. When his madre died, mine took him in and he lived in my room with me. We roamed the streets and watched each other’s backs. Finally, El Pistola - he showed us how much money we could make on runs over the border, across the Rio Grande. Those looking to escape the putrid streets of my city called the secret border crossings - in English, ‘The Holy Highway.’ But me, me and Francisco we called them simply, ‘Franklins.’ You got your kilos over the border - over or under - and you came into many Benjamin Franklins. I wouldn’t be here, working for Ringo, if it were not for him. He told me to go, to go and follow my dreams to America. But...now he is gone away. He is gone away into the arms of the Blessed Virgin.” Andrés crossed himself.

  Chewy said. “That’s hard. I remember when my grandmother died. I was ten.”

  “Ah...it is fine. I will be okay. It just makes me angry, you know.” He picked his phone up and set it in the console. “I tell you, Chewy. You and me. We are going to keep helping Ringo grow. Francisco was very close to my madre. I think if I can make just a little more and get a good place on the water, she would finally agree to join me out here. We are going to help Ringo expand,” he said again. “I need to buy my madre a beautiful house. She does not need to live in Juárez any longer. No more dying.” He sighed hard, the way a man might after dropping a heavy burden. “I should call her tonight.” Then Andrés flapped a couple fingers toward the CD player. “Play me some of your...what you call it? Your prophets of personal power.”

  “You sure? You hate it.”

  “Just play it.”

  Chewy pressed the power button, and the car’s speakers came to life. “...and all my heroes are self-made.” The man’s voice was deep - almost as deep as Chewy’s, but more energetic. “America grew from a few isolated colonists with a dream to a build a country. They did, and that country became known for getting whatever it wanted! Not whatever it took. Whatever it wanted. The American Dream! We went and worked for what we wanted. We were disciplined, we were smart, we dreamed a dream and put our weary, blistered feet and hands to those dreams!” The speaker took a breath, kept going, giving away his energy. “You want more? Then work hard, work smart, stay up until two in the morning working at it and then wake back up at five. There are only so many tomorrows…”

  “Who is this?” Andrés asked.

  “Hopper Carlson.”

  “He’s good.”

  “You like my mentors now?”

  “I did not say that.” But in fact, Andrés was starting to like Chewy’s motivational speakers. It had been two years coming. The first time he heard one of these guys he told Chewy they all sounded like greased horsecrap. But over time some of the little things they said stuck in him like a Mexican prickly pear. Things about taking control of your destiny, being a doer, being hungry for more, feeding the fire laying dormant in your veins.

  Hopper Carlson kept at it. Andrés could picture him running back and forth across some stage in a rented downtown hotel ballroom, working the crowd into a frenzy: “None of you are going to reach the next level of your potential unless you do what you’re not doing now. There is always another level, another floor, another altitude to achieve. Your limitations are perceived limitations. The problem...the problem, you see, is…” He slowed for emphasis. “Is in...your...mind. Your mind. Do you hear me? Do you hearrrr meeeee?” His voice rose with every sentence, finally reaching an intoxicated crescendo. “You! You must get past your perceived limitations and go forth! Go forrrrrth!!”

  Hopper Carlson was done.

  Andrés closed his eyes. His head bobbed, almost unnoticeably. “Yes...yes. That is good.”

  The bumper music faded in and then faded out leaving them once again in silence.

  Andrés sighed again. He looked through the dirty windshield. “We need to get the car cleaned.”

  Chewy said, “Well, if we’re going to help Ringo expand, we’d better go ahead and take care of what we came out here for.”