Jessica crept down a dirt road blackened by a starless night. Thirty miles south of the Texas border, houses made of plywood and corrugated metal lay strewn about the desert like tumbleweeds, and she wandered the tire-rutted path between them.

 

The crack of gunshot blasted through the night.

 

She leaped from the road and slid against the nearest house for cover. Doors and windows closed with a thud or a creak. Lights winked out in the nearby homes, then silence surrounded her.

 

Residual heat from the day’s sun still warmed the wall she pressed into, as she hoped to become invisible. The night had grown cool, and she wished she could stay in the relative comfort of the building's heat and protection. But she’d come here to make a delivery for an important client, which might mean figuring out the origin of the gunshot, and where the bullet had landed.

 

Hopefully, the shots came from some idiot celebrating his kid’s birthday or his own manhood. Worst case, one end of the gun belonged to someone in the drug trade, a fairly common occupation on the US/Mexico border.

 

A hit of danger washed through her, clenching her gut with dread but prickling the skin on her arms with excitement. She shouldn’t be here, needed to figure out how her job had gone from fancy industrial real estate deals in executive offices to dropping off paperwork after hours in a part of town so isolated GPS didn’t know it existed. She glanced at the manila envelope clenched in her hand. What kind of crap job had Tomás gotten her into?