HE WAS STILL UNPACKING one of his boxes when Special Agent in Charge Don Chesney walked in. Chesney was only three years younger than Garrison but had aged better. The trenches hadn’t been kind to the older agent, and he knew it; a lifetime of long surveillances and late nights were visible in his heavy midsection, the gray at his temples, the deep lines carved in his face. Chesney, however, was tall and still thin, his hair dark—perfectly cool and composed in an equally dark, perfect suit he’d had tailored while assigned to Chiang Mai. He’d reported to El Paso directly from headquarters well after the events in Murfee. He’d read about it, read about Garrison, but both were no more than a set of reports to him, thick file folders he’d glanced through a handful of times. He didn’t know Garrison, and he sure as hell didn’t know the border, either. The city across the river was just another report to him.

It wasn’t that Garrison didn’t like the man—he hadn’t worked with him long enough yet to have an opinion one way or the other—but Chesney had a way of looking at him he didn’t like. It was a mixture of sympathy and shame. Embarrassment. The look you reserved for your lonely drunk uncle, or a newly divorced friend who was talking and laughing and crying a bit too fast and loud at the bar, both situations that Garrison understood all too well. Chesney probably saw Garrison as a relic, an unpleasant reminder of all the things that could go wrong on the job or in life. Garrison figured Don Chesney was waiting him out, hoping he’d retire so he could bring someone else in, one of his own men. Someone he trusted. The decision to keep Garrison and promote him had been made above Chesney, and that still rubbed the new SAC raw. No doubt it got under his expensive tailored suit and his skin.

What his look said was: Sooner or later, you’ll make another mistake. You know it, and so do I.

And that was the look in Chesney’s eyes now, as he stood in Garrison’s door.