Better When He's Brave

It was good to be home. Sigh . . .

Chapter 8

Titus

IT HAD BEEN A couple of days since the shootout at Spanky’s, and once again I was buried in work and avoiding Reeve like she had the plague.

Tracking down witnesses was impossible. It wasn’t like the people that spent their off-hours at a strip club wanted anyone to know where their hard-earned money was actually going, and when I found the family of the girl who had been behind the massacre, I was stunned that she was indeed just a normal college girl with a mom and dad who lived in a nice house up on the Hill. Her parents had no idea that she was dancing at Spanky’s, and when I told them she had shot the place up and injured no fewer than five people, they were stunned. It was completely out of character for her, and according to them, she had never even seen a gun, so they couldn’t believe she was capable of pulling one on a roomful of people. So not only were they tasked with burying their daughter, they also had to process that they really had no clue who she had become or what she had gotten herself into down in the bowels of the Point.

It seemed like Reeve’s theory that Roark had sunk his claws into the girl might have some merit. People did crazy things in the name of love. I just didn’t have it in me to tell her that she was right. If my head hadn’t been spinning, if everything inside of me hadn’t been tugging ferociously at the leash to get at her, to get in her, to have her no matter what common sense said, I would’ve noticed the gun was real. I was watching the girl take off her clothes dispassionately. No naked girl was ever going to compare to the one that I had almost nailed on the counter in Spanky’s bathroom and that was just a hard-and-fast fact. But there was something about the stripper that bugged me. I just couldn’t place it because my head was still thundering with lust and my nerves were still jangling with want.

I should have spotted the tiny .22-caliber from a mile away, but all I could see was Reeve on her knees in front of me with all of that dark hair of hers tangled in my hands as she turned me inside out with a creative twirl of her tongue and the perfect scrape of her teeth. She knew how to work me over and take such good care of me at the same time. I was trying to keep her alive, trying to keep myself alive, and maybe, just maybe, get both of us out of this situation without broken hearts.

She wasn’t helping. I could see it in her eyes when she looked at me. She cared. I didn’t think a girl that made the kind of choices she did, who had to look out for herself above all others to survive, could be that empathetic, but it bled out of her and got all over me. She cared a lot. About me. And I wasn’t sure what to do with that. I was the one always worrying about everyone, about everything. I had never had someone else in my life that was concerned for me and for my well-being. It made my resolve to stay away from her even weaker than it already was, and goddamn, did I want to see what else she could do with that clever mouth of hers.

I jerked my head up when my office door suddenly opened and an older man dressed in khaki pants and a white polo shirt waltzed in and made himself comfy in the chair across from my desk. He had steely-gray hair and a flinty face that reminded me of Clint Eastwood in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. All he needed was a ratty poncho and a cigar.

I closed the case folder I was going over and leaned back in my chair. I didn’t know who the guy was but everything about his posture and the way he made himself comfortable as I assessed him screamed “cop.” We tended to be able to spot our own no matter what branch or badge we might carry.

“Can I help you?”

The stranger crossed his ankle on his knee and started tapping his fingers on his leg. “I sure as hell hope so, son, otherwise we’re all going to be neck-deep in a bloodbath.”

His voice had a quiet drawl, not exactly a southern or even a Texan twang, but there was some country to it, so I put him from somewhere around Virginia or the Carolinas. I lifted an eyebrow at him and waited for him to formally introduce himself. He watched me silently for a long minute before a weathered grin cracked his face.

“Deputy Chief Marshal Otis Packard. I heard through the grapevine you have one of my witnesses in protective custody with no intention of turning her back over to us.”

I snorted. “The situation is a lot more complicated than that.”

He nodded and narrowed his eyes. “Tell me about it. Out of the four witnesses that we either placed or had plans to move while we were waiting for the Novak case to go before a judge, she’s the only one left breathing. Hartman went down first, Ernie Diaz, the club owner, went missing last week, and Benny Truman didn’t even make it out of the joint. Hartman was buried so deep in a shithole town in West Texas there was no way anyone should’ve been able to find him and Ernie was so scared of retribution that he quit talking to anyone without credentials, so we know he had to have been popped by someone on the inside.”

I made a noise low in my throat. “You knew someone was offing the witnesses from your case and you just left her out there unprotected?”

“She took off when we were starting to put it all together. She was quicker than we were. We were planning to go in and get her right after the info on Hartman came in, only she was gone, and so was the marshal in charge of her case.”

“You had a fox guarding your henhouse from the get-go.”

The other cop considered me thoughtfully for a second and then nodded solemnly. “It looks that way.”

“You’re looking at Roark for the rest of the murders, right?” ”

His jaw started to tick furiously. “We put it together. Too late. Conner has a stellar reputation in our division. He was a marine, and when he got out of the service he worked for Border Patrol. He was always our go-to guy until all this stuff broke loose with Novak. We didn’t realize the correlation until it was too late. A few years ago he started taking a real interest in what was going on here in the Point, started asking to be assigned to cases that were here. When you got the feds involved to take down Novak, he was the first one that wanted in on the action.”