Risky Business

broke when I hired him. I know Luis lent him ten thousand pesos before his first paycheck.”
    “I’m sure he was.” He didn’t bother to add that he’d wired his brother two hundred before Jerry had left New Orleans. Carefully, Jonas reached under the stack of money and pulled out a small plastic bag, dipped in a finger and tasted. But he’d already known.
    “What is that?”
    His face expressionless, Jonas sealed the bag. He couldn’t allow himself any more grief. “Cocaine.”
    Horrified, Liz stared at the bag. “I don’t understand. He lived in my house. I’d have known if he were using drugs.”
    Jonas wondered if she realized just how innocent she was of the darker side of humanity. Until that moment, he hadn’t fully realized just how intimate he was with it. “Maybe, maybe not. In any case, Jerry wasn’t into this sort of thing. At least not for himself.”
    Liz sat down slowly. “You mean he sold it?”
    “Dealt drugs?” Jonas nearly smiled. “No, that wouldn’t have been exciting enough.” In the corner of the box was a small black address book. Jonas took it out to leaf through it. “But smuggling,” he murmured. “Jerry could have justified smuggling. Action, intrigue and fast money.”
    Her mind was whirling as she tried to focus back on the man she’d known so briefly. Liz had thought she’d understood him, categorized him, but he was more of a stranger now than when he’d been alive. It didn’t seem to matter anymore who or what Jerry Sharpe had been. But the man in front of her mattered. “And you?” she asked. “Can you justify it?”
    He glanced down at her, over the book in his hands. His eyeswere cold, so cold that she could read nothing in them at all. Without answering, Jonas went back to the book.
    “He’d listed initials, dates, times and some numbers. It looks as though he made five thousand a drop. Ten drops.”
    Liz glanced over at the money again. It no longer seemed crisp and neat but ugly and ill used. “That only makes fifty thousand. You said there was three hundred.”
    “That’s right.” Plus a bag of uncut cocaine with a hefty street value. Jonas took out his own book and copied down the pages from his brother’s.
    “What are we going to do with this?”
    “Nothing.”
    “Nothing?” Liz rose again, certain she’d stepped into a dream. “Do you mean just leave it here? Just leave it here in this box and walk away?”
    With the last of the numbers copied, Jonas replaced his brother’s book. “Exactly.”
    “Why did we come if we’re not going to do anything with it?”
    He slipped his own book into his jacket. “To find it.”
    “Jonas.” Before he could close the lid she had her hand on his wrist. “You have to take it to the police. To Captain Moralas.”
    In a deliberate gesture, he removed her hand, then picked up the bag of coke. She understood rejection and braced herself against it. But it wasn’t rejection she saw in his face; it was fury. “You want to take this on the plane, Liz? Any idea on what the penalty is in Mexico for carrying controlled substances?”
    “No.”
    “And you don’t want to.” He closed the lid, locked it. “For now, just forget you saw anything. I’ll handle this in my own way.”
    “No.”
    His emotions were raw and tangled, his patience thin. “Don’t push me, Liz.”
    “Push you?” Infuriated, she grabbed his shirtfront and planted her feet. “You’ve pushed me for days. Pushed me right into the middle of something that’s so opposed to the way I’ve lived I can’t even take it all in. Now that I’m over my head in drug smuggling and something like a quarter of a million dollars, you tell me to forget it. What do you expect me to do, go quietly back and rent tanks? Maybe you’ve finished using me now, Jonas, but I’m not ready to be brushed aside. There’s a murderer out there who thinks I know where the money is.” She stopped as her skin iced over. “And now I do.”
    “That’s just it,” Jonas said quietly. For the second time, he removed her hands, but this time he held on to her wrists. Frightened, he thought. He was sure her pulse beat with fear as well as anger. “Now you do. The best thing for you to do now is stay out of it, let them focus on me.”
    “Just how am I supposed to do that?”
    The anger was bubbling closer, the anger he’d wanted to lock in the box with what had caused it. “Go to Houston, visit your daughter.”
    “How can I?” she demanded in