“We can’t blow his cover,” Archie said.

“I’m guessing it was already blown,” Henry said.

Archie rubbed his face with his hands. “We don’t know that.”

“This was an assassination, Archie,” Henry said. “The bartender saw him. Says he was alone. He met someone in that bathroom. The toilet lid was down. He wasn’t in there pissing. He met someone, and that someone shot him in the head. No one heard anything, so I’m guessing our killer used a silencer. No one saw anything. Body was discovered by the next guy who went in there to expel some Miller Lite. This was planned. It was a hit.”

Henry was right. But it didn’t change anything. Richmond had been running a deep cover operation. Drugs. Dirty cops. It had been years in the making. Henry didn’t know the half of it. “We don’t do anything,” Archie said. “We follow DEA’s lead on this.” If they didn’t know Richmond was dead, they’d know soon enough. “We let this play out,” Archie said. He peered out the car window. An upstairs light was on in the house across the street.

“You think they’re watching?” Henry asked. He wasn’t talking about the DEA.

“If I imported massive amounts of heroin,” Archie said, “and I suspected someone was a cop, and I had him killed, that’s what I’d do.” A woman walked by the car with a black Lab. “I’d wait for twenty guys in DEA jackets to show up. Because if they do, I know for sure that I was right.”

“Either way, everyone your buddy worked with is in danger.”

“He wasn’t my buddy,” Archie said. He’d known Carl for fifteen years. But he had never liked him. Carl put his investigations ahead of everything, and he was willing to sacrifice anyone to make the case. A decade before, Archie had delivered Carl an intelligence jackpot—Leo Reynolds, the twenty-one-year-old heir apparent of the family that had controlled the drug business in the Pacific Northwest for the last quarter century. Leo had come to Archie for help getting away from his father; instead Archie and Carl had sent Leo back to operate under deep cover for the DEA. Ten years later, Leo Reynolds was still living a lie. If Archie had it to do over, he would have told the twenty-one-year-old Leo Reynolds to change his name and walk away.

Leo.

“Carl was Leo’s only contact,” Archie said, feeling his stomach tighten. If they had gone after Carl, Leo might be next. Archie fished his phone out of his jacket pocket and started to punch in Leo’s number. But halfway through pressing the digits, Archie stopped, his fingers hovering uncertainly over the phone’s keypad.

A couple walked past the car, holding hands. She was already a little tipsy, and stumbled and then laughed.