"That's no excuse. I wasn't even drinking like the other guys, and he didn't hassle them at all."
"Did they look like you?"
"Better dressed, maybe, but yeah, they were all minorities."
"And Caswell busted the one stranger in town during the middle of a public scare when the population is being warned to be on the lookout for anything out of the ordinary."
"I see your point. But still, Nathan, if that's the way you guys play around here, no wonder you've got a problem."
"We don't play that way. I won't allow it. Caswell would have needed something much more substantial for me to hold you or anyone else, I can promise you that."
"Nathan, it was humiliating. It's been a long time since I've been called a spic."
"Caswell called you that?"
"Shit, no, the store owner did. I was pissed. Those guys just took it, paid for their beers and walked out like it happens all the time, and there was Deputy Dawg waiting."
Nathan listened as his accent reverted to heavy Hispanic. The words rolling off his tongue as smooth as silk made Nathan shiver. He reached up and smoothed the hair at the nape of his neck and sighed, throwing off the disquiet. "You do that too well, you know. Okay, so what's the name you're using on the street? What's your cover story? You should have told me in the first place, you know."
"I wasn't even supposed to contact you." Drew sighed, the anger leaving his body as he leaned forward in the chair and dangled his hands between his knees. "My name is Andrew Enrique Dominguez Walker. My street name when I was a kid was Preacher. I'm using Enrique Dominguez, but not Preacher."
"So, am I finally seeing the real you?" Nathan went around his desk and sat down. He smiled when Drew sighed and shook his head. "But the real you lies somewhere between uptight Agent Walker and some street punk named Preacher, right?"
"I was a skater punk in a middle-class neighborhood in Nashville, all right. I got the name because Dominguez means son of Domingo, which means Sunday in Spanish, follow me? We moved down to Miami when I was seventeen. I sort of got mixed up with the wrong crowd after high school and used up all my get-out-of-jail-free chances, and my old man packed me off to Paris Island. I grew out of most of it. Had to lock away the rest when shit got real." Drew shrugged as if his past didn't matter. "I can walk easily through both cultures, which serves the purpose at hand."
"As to that, do I have to beg for intel? Come on, man. I'll write Caswell up for being a racist son of a bitch, all right? Even if you don't tell me." Nathan hated that Drew became the super-quiet fed as he watched. "Remember what you said last night? That you wish you had told me what you knew about Harper. What if you know something that will help me stop the next Harper? Who will be next if you don't tell me?"
"You are one cold-hearted bastard, aren't you?" Drew leaned back in the chair, draping his arm over the back, there was a hint of a smile in his eyes.
"Most of the time. But I do have a talent of talking people into doing things they don't want to do. That's why the feds came knocking nine years ago. Now spill your guts, Preacher Boy, or I'll … " He picked up the first thing he laid his hand on, a spiral-bound address book. Looking at it, he smiled. "Throw the book at you."
"Funny. Nathan, my friend, you should not ever consider a career in stand-up, you'd starve." Drew's grin turned to a frustrated sigh as he ran his hand through his slicked-back hair, loosening the gel hold until it fell in his face. "I don't know any more than you do. Seriously, Nathan, you know more about what is going on than the community. They are afraid, sticking close to each other because they have no faith in you or the police department. Hell, they almost wouldn't talk to me until I convinced them I was harmless. Just moved here to take a job to feed my wife and newborn baby, shit like that. I'll tell you, though, whatever it is, I'm not sure it has much more to do with Truman Steel other than coincidence."
"Fuck." Nathan scrubbed his face with his hands. "I hate hearing that. I hate that people can't trust us, that makes the job so much harder."
"After this afternoon and that bruiser Caswell slamming me onto the hood of his car a couple of times, I can sympathize."
"Now why didn't you tell me that in the first place?" Nathan sat up straight in his chair, he pushed a button on the phone on his desk and barked for Caswell to get his ass in here now.