She slid her hands nervously over the steering wheel. “Jackson said you were a criminal. So what’d you do?”
“Are you telling me you believe everything that guy says to you? Just in case you didn’t notice, he’s a psycho. I haven’t seen eyes like that since they executed Ted Bundy.”
“Are you saying you’re not in Witness Protection?”
“No. But the program isn’t just for the bad guys.”
She looked at him, puzzled. “What does that mean?”
“Do you think criminals can pick up the phone and get the sort of info I got on you?”
“I don’t know, why can’t they?”
“Pull over.”
“What?”
“Just pull the damn car over!”
LuAnn turned into a parking lot and stopped the car.
Riggs leaned over and pulled out the listening device from under LuAnn’s seat. “I told you I had bugged your car.” He held up the sophisticated device. “Let me tell you, they almost never give out equipment like this to felons.”
LuAnn looked at him, her eyes wide.
Riggs took a deep breath. “Up until five years ago, I was a special agent with the FBI. I’d like to think a very special agent. I worked undercover infiltrating gangs operating both in Mexico and along the Texas border. These guys were into everything from extortion to drugs to murder for hire; you name it, they were doing it. I lived and breathed with that scum for a year. When we busted the case open, I was the lead witness for the prosecution. We knocked out the entire operation, sent a bunch of them to prison for life. But the big bosses in Colombia didn’t take all that kindly to my depriving them of about four hundred million a year in disposable income from the drug operation component. I knew how badly they’d want me. So I did the brave, honorable thing. I asked to disappear.”
“And?”
“And the Bureau turned me down. They said I was too valuable in the field. Too experienced. They did have the courtesy to set me up in another town, in another gig. A desk job for a while.”
“So there was no wife. That was all made up.”
Riggs rubbed his injured arm again. “No, I was married. After I relocated. Her name was Julie.”
LuAnn said very quietly, “Was?”
Riggs shook his head slowly and took a weary sip on his coffee. The steam from the liquid fogged the window and he traced his real initials in it, forming the D and the B for Dan Buckman with great care as though doing it for the very first time. “Ambush on the Pacific Coast Highway. Car went over the cliff with about a hundred bullet holes in it. Julie was killed by the gunfire. I took two slugs; somehow neither of them hit any vitals. I was thrown clear of the car, landed on a ledge. Those were the scars you saw.”
“Oh, God. I’m so sorry, Matthew.”
“Guys like me, we probably shouldn’t get married. It wasn’t something I was looking for. It just happened. You know, you meet, you fall in love, you want to get married. You expect everything to sort of click after that. Things that you know might come up to ruin it, you sort of will them away. If I had resisted that impulse, Julie would still be alive and teaching first grade.” He looked down at his hands as he spoke. “Anyway, that was when the brilliant higher-ups at the Bureau decided I just might want to retire and change my identity. Officially, I died in the ambush. Julie’s six feet under in Pasadena and I’m a general contractor in safe, pastoral Charlottesville.” He finished his coffee. “Or at least it used to be safe.”
LuAnn slid her hand across the front seat and took his in a firm grip.
He squeezed back and said, “It’s tough wiping out so many years of your life. Trying not to think about it, forgetting people and places, things that were so important to you for so long. Always afraid you’re going to slip up.” He stared at her. “It’s damn tough,” he said wearily.
She raised her hand up and stroked his face. “I never realized how much we had in common,” she said.