Both Dean and I blatantly stare. “Black coffee, please,” the man requests. “And a green tea for my partner, if you have any.”
“Sure thing, fresh mint tea okay?” Shelby says and the woman confirms that’s all right. Shelby looks down while she scribbles the order down on her notepad. You’d think she doesn’t have to, seeing as it’s only a coffee and a tea, but the pregnancy hormones are turning her brain matter into mush and by the time she reaches the counter she’ll have forgotten what the order is. “Would you like a menu too?”
“No thank you, but is there any chance you could lock the front door for a moment. We’d like to talk to Dean and Morgan without anyone noticing what’s going on.”
My head snaps up when I hear him say that. Fight or flight? Fight or flight? Crap. My instincts sucks, are these the good guys or the bad guys? They look like good guys, but I don’t fucking know anything about that. I can’t be trusted.
I try to get Dean’s attention, to see how we’re going to deal with this, but he just casually walks over to the front door and locks it. Shelby darts away to the counter to make drinks, all the while curiously eyeing us.
“I’m sorry for keeping our backs to you, but I think it’s best if people don’t know we’re looking for you. My name is Special Agent Beckett Sanders. This is my partner Special Agent Winona Luta. We’re with the behavioral science unit of the FBI. We’ve been called in to help with solving the murder on Julia Collins a few years back and the human trafficking that seems to be going on here. We’ve just come from Kinseltown police, had a talk with Jonah and he directed us to you. Are you willing to talk to us for a little?”
They keep sitting with their backs straight to us, which feels really weird. I look at Dean for confirmation, and he sits down on one of the stools beside me. I push the plate with the beets and the goat cheese in front of him and he gives me a side smirk.
Shelby sets the drinks down in front of the agents and then excuses herself. I take a deep breath and remind myself to have a stern talk with Jonah, for not letting us know he was meeting up with the FBI. Meanwhile, my insides are doing this twirling thing where it feels like I’ve drank an entire bottle of spirits.
“What do you want to talk about?” Dean asks.
The lady, Special Agent Luta, starts talking. Her voice is soft like honey, and I’m ready to tell her all my secrets. I snort, I’d admit to anything in an interrogation within seconds.
“Well, we wanted to thank Miss Pike for the help in taking down Mister Rosso. That was a very brave thing to do.”
Her compliment makes me flush. “Anyone would do that for their friend,” I answer.
“No, they really wouldn’t,” Special Agent Luta continues. “You were very brave.”
More like shitting my pants, but I’m not telling her that.
“Now that we’ve brought in Mister Rosso, we see that there’s a bigger problem here. They’ve tried using your boyfriend’s nightclub for illegal activities, but they know police are on to that. Mister Rosso has informed us that there’s someone higher up in the chain still dealing in women. That’s the person we’re after. It’s the same person that’s responsible for the murder of Julia Collins, which is a federal case.”
I can hear one of them rearranging in their seat, and it’s taking a lot out of me to not look back. I open a file on my laptop and start typing out random words, just to make sure I keep my eyes focused on the screen and not stare back at them.
“We can’t get to them through Jonah, they’re on to him. So what we want to ask you, if someone contacts you, with any information of any kind about this, will you tell us? Is that something you can do?”
Dean looks worried, and my savior complex kicks in again. Maybe I should take a moment to think this through. That would be the wise thing to do. But when have I ever been wise?
“Yes,” I say without thinking it all the way through. “Jonah’s mother came to look for his brother, Kellan, the other day. She implied she knew certain people who would do bad things if we didn’t cooperate. Does that help?”
It’s silent for a moment, so I start typing out the alphabet to keep myself from looking back and seeing what happens. I don’t want to turn into a salt pillar.
“That does help,” Special Agent Beckett says. His voice misses the warm tone of that of Agent Luta, he sounds more like a grumpy caveman. “If she contacts you again, see if you can find a way to go along with her plans. I’ll leave our card here, contact us if you learn anything else. We need an in, and you could provide us with it.”
Dean grunts. “Haven’t we been through enough?”
“Hasn’t the family of Julia Collins been through enough?” Agent Sanders counters.
He’s right now, isn’t he? We have to help. We can’t let this go by. Crap, the longer I’ve been back in Charlington, the more I feel it’s changing into a movie set, where all kinds of things happen that I don’t expect to happen in this little town. Hell, I don’t even expect it to happen in real life at all.
I forcefully try to relax my muscles and look up from my laptop, only to get scared half to death when I look up at the window and see two faces stuck to it.
Miss Frieda and Miss Patterson are looking inside with their noses stuck to the window. Those two are too nosy for their own good and one of these days it’s going to cause them trouble. I raise my finger to my lips and signal them to turn around. They give me an earnest nod and listen to me. I think this might be the day that hell has frozen over.
“We’ll tell you when we hear something,” I promise.
They slide their chairs back, make their way to the door as they say goodbye and Agent Luta mouths a ‘thank you’ to me. Did we just get ourselves into an even bigger pile of shit, or are we finally going to be able to crawl out of it?
Dean walks to the table where the agents had sat, grabs a few dollar bills and a card with contact information. He hands the card to me, his eyes sad and his shoulders slumped.
“Guess you’re an official FBI-informant now.”