Well, it wouldn’t hurt to introduce himself. Not to this guy.
Rojas lifted his arm, phone already in hand, and snapped a quick picture of the back of the vehicle with a clear shot of the license plate and the driver’s incredulous face reflected in the side view mirror. Jersey plates. He could’ve approached from the front, but there were no parking blocks in this lot to keep the driver from pulling forward and running him over.
Approaching from the rear gave Rojas a little more time to get himself and Souze out of the way.
As it was, the driver didn’t even start up the engine. The man actually got out of his car.
Rojas grinned.
“Just what do you think you’re doing?” The man was dressed in a basic blue dress shirt and cheap khaki slacks. There were a few grease stains down the front of the shirt, and Rojas was willing to bet there was a discarded tie lying in the passenger seat.
“Making sure I can track you down if I have any questions after we’re done here.” Rojas made his statement simple in a flat tone.
The lack of intimidation on Rojas’s part seemed to deflate the other man’s bravado some but after a moment, the man recovered and jutted out his chin. No blustering boast or threat, though, so the man was at least somewhat intelligent.
Rojas decided to go with the direct question, the easy one. “What do you want with Elisa Hall?”
Elisa had her opinion on the reason for her ex coming after her, but there could be other possibilities.
The other man smirked. “I’m just here on an errand. No particular reason.”
What a shitty liar. Or, more likely, the man wasn’t bothering to dissemble. He was just going to try to mock Rojas into an altercation.
Rojas matched his smirk. “Errand? I could believe that. The real team is watching us speak. They’ve probably captured images of both of us with their telephoto lens and they’re going to report back to your mutual employer that you were made. I’m guessing you’ll be contacted soon to be told your services are no longer necessary.”
The man’s jaw dropped open. Rojas revised his opinion of the man’s intelligence from somewhat to dubious.
“See. You were identified, caught on security feed.” Rojas decided to add on to the pressure. “I’m guessing you placed a GPS tracker on a car and decided to wait for the owner to return. But none of the information you’ve gathered to date is anything your employer won’t already have. Because he sent a second team to watch from a distance while you did the ‘errand’ run.”
The other man’s eyes darted left and right as he scanned the parking lot. Rojas watched as the man spotted the slightly dinged silver SUV with “baby on board” sun blockers in one too many windows parked down by the grocery store, much less noticeably. The man and the woman inside were dressed casually. They blended in. And there wasn’t any reason to notice an SUV in front of a grocery store that opened significantly earlier than any of the other stores in the strip. One of them had even gotten out and made a run into the grocery store and come back out. But they’d been there way longer than they needed to be.
“What the fuck?” The man took a step forward, but Souze uttered a low growl.
The man blanched white and stepped back.
Rojas remained relaxed, unhurried. He planned to have a similar conversation with the others he’d spotted next. “Your job is over, regardless. It can’t hurt to tell me what you’re doing here.”
There was a possibility the man would give up information they didn’t already know, or a different spin on the situation to give them an angle toward resolving it more permanently.
“Maybe.” The other man spit on the pavement between them. “For all you know, I could have backup.”
“Really?” Rojas didn’t bother to modulate the incredulity in his own tone. “Let’s be real here.”
The other man ground his teeth as he worked his way through admitting he’d already given away his ignorance. “Look. I was asked to locate and retrieve property for my client. It seems to have gone astray.”
Rojas raised his eyebrows. What bullshit. “What’s the property look like? Could be that I could help you recover it.”
“Yeah?” The man cracked a grin and studied Rojas with a calculated look. “I might be convinced to split my fee if you lend a hand in retrieval. Your mutt there could be good at distracting people.”
Rojas felt his face go blank as he shut down the reasoning side of his personality. No. There wasn’t going to be an easy way forward with this situation. Not with this man’s attitude. “Elisa Hall is not property.”