To my astonishment, Rondeau gives me a grim little smile. “I am not,” she says, and she actually quirks an eyebrow. “You think you’re the first woman who’s ever flirted with me?”

“Well, shit,” I say. “And here I thought we had ourselves a special connection.”

She waves me off with one hand, a dismissive gesture, but she’s still got that grim smile. “I’ll take care of Agent Scott,” she says. “And his son. Timmy knows me and trusts me. You show up and the nanny will call 9-1-1 before you hop off your bike. I’ll get them all somewhere safe.”

“I know you have to follow some FBI rule and tell your boss everything that just happened. Just give me a few hours before you do that so I can set up the Sureños.”

“You’ve got one hour.”

I pout. “Alisha, after all we’ve been through?”

“Ninety minutes, starting now. And then I tell my boss. You just make sure you take care of your end.”

THERE’S A WAFFLE House at nearly every interstate exit in Georgia, sometimes more than one. The Waffle House at Northside and I-285 is special, though. For one, Dad would sometimes take me here for breakfast. The hash browns were always good. For another, there is a gunmetal-gray Chrysler sedan parked at one end of the diner. No matter the time of day, according to Agent Scott, that Chrysler is in one of three spots by that end of the Waffle House.

A yellow cab comes up the off ramp from 285 and onto Northside, then turns into the Waffle House lot and parks next to the Chrysler. Fitzroy the cabbie gets out, his slacks and polo careworn but clean and ironed. Casually, neither fast nor slow, Fitzroy walks around his car to the driver’s side of the Chrysler and folds the side mirror inward so it’s flush against the door. Then he takes a piece of chalk from his pocket and, crouching by the front tire, draws a line across the top of the tire. Fitzroy puts the chalk in his pocket, walks back around the cab, gets in, and pulls out of the parking space before driving out of the lot, heading back onto 285.

Sitting on my bike at a BP station across the street, I watch all this through my binoculars. That was the easiest money Fitzroy ever made. If anyone had come out of the Waffle House, he could have just played the bored cabbie waiting on a fare. Scott said no one would come out, but I wanted to make sure. And I assume the Sureños know what I look like by now. But Fitzroy is nobody to them. Still, I wanted to be here when he moved the mirror and chalked the tire, in case one of the Sureños is around and trigger happy. And now Fitzroy is gone and two hundred dollars richer.