Angels (Nevada James #3) (Nevada James Mysteries) Read Online Free PDF Page A

Late, but anyone who had been trying to reach me
probably wasn’t in a position to complain about the hour.
    I dialed
the number. After three rings someone picked up and a woman’s voice said, “Who
is this?” The voice was familiar, but I couldn’t place it.
    “Who is this ?”
I asked. “You called me. Well, not right this second, you didn’t. I called you.
But you called my line at the police station.”
    There
was a brief pause and then I heard a deep sigh that sounded like relief. “Oh,
god,” the woman said. “Nevada. You’re my angel, Nevada.”
    That
seemed excessive. I was pretty certain I knew the voice now, though. “Is that
Krystal Harris?”
    “Yeah,”
she said. “Didn’t you know from before? I told them my name was Blueberry.”
    “I’ve
never called you Blueberry in my life, Krystal. I’ve never called anyone Blueberry.”
    “That
story I told you about when I was little, I crushed blueberries between my
fingers and tried to use them as lipstick?”
    I had no
idea what she was talking about, but I didn’t really want to admit it. It must
have meant something to her. “Sure,” I said. “Blueberries. What is it you need,
Krystal?”
    “Hang
on,” she said. “I need to make sure I’m alone.” I heard her cover the phone’s
mouthpiece with her hand. A moment later she was back. “I’ve got something you
need to know.”
    Krystal
had been a very low-level member of a very low-level gang that had a very
low-level business selling meth to bikers. I’d worked homicide and couldn’t
have given a shit about drugs, but Krystal was considered so pathetic by her own
peer group that nobody thought twice about talking in front of her. She also
spent a lot of time in drug houses and bars frequented by very unsavory people
who talked more than they should have. That made her valuable to me. Tips
solved a lot of crimes, and every now and then she overheard some tidbit that
she knew would be useful to me. I’d paid her out of a fund the police
department had set aside for exactly that purpose. All told, she’d been one of
maybe a dozen informants I’d had around San Diego while I’d been a cop. It
wasn’t an unusual situation. A lot of detectives had similar networks.
    In the
end Krystal’s gang had been busted, a feat on the part of the narcotics
department that wouldn’t have exactly required Encyclopedia Brown-level work to
take care of. Krystal had received word of the raid half an hour before it took
place from a certain homicide detective that believed in taking care of her people.
The guys in narcotics didn’t care. She really was that unimportant.
    After
that I’d lost track of her. I’d assumed she must be dead by now; Krystal liked
the meth her gang had sold as much as the bikers they sold it to did. Nobody
with a taste for that junk lasted long.
    “Tell me
why you called, Krystal.”
    “I said
I know something. Can you pay me for it?”
    “I’m not
a cop anymore. If you watched the news you’d probably know that.” I’d been
listening to the tone of her voice and didn’t like the note of desperation I
heard in it. I’d heard it before. “You trying to get a fix?”
    “No,”
she said. “I mean, not right now. Sometimes I am.”
    “You’re
just a casual meth addict? Great. I’m sure that’s not a problem, then.”
    “Look,”
she said. “What I know is big. It’ll be worth something to someone you know,
but I need money.”
    “I don’t
really feel comfortable supporting your drug habit,” I said. “I mean, I’m not
judging you, but I don’t want to contribute to it, either.”
    “I need
the money to get out of here,” Krystal said. “I have to get as far away from
here as I can.”
    Now I
was less sure the desperation I was hearing was about drugs. “Has someone
threatened you?”
    She
didn’t say anything at first, but her breathing sounded almost panicked. “I
screwed up, Nevada. I was trying to…blackmail, I guess…I guess