Don't Mess with Texas Page 2

  “That’s not how we operate,” Dallas said, but in his gut he knew they were all lone wolves. Life had taught them that was the only way to live. Getting set up by a lowlife drug dealer named DeLuna and then having almost everyone you believed in turn their backs on you—not to mention spending sixteen months in the slammer—well, it did that to you. It made you feel as if the only one you could trust was yourself.

  Dallas glanced at the silent television. “Any media coverage?”

  “Not yet,” Tyler said. “But the cops called for another unit to help hold them back, so they’re there.”

  “Have you tried to reach him?” Dallas dialed Austin’s number.

  “He’s not answering.” Tyler grabbed the remote and ramped up the volume. “We got something.”

  Dallas glanced at the redheaded reporter on the screen, but listened to his cell until the call went to Austin’s voice mail and he hung up. The camera closed in on the reporter as she announced a breaking news segment.

  “God, she’s hot,” Tyler said.

  Dallas studied the redhead as she held a microphone close to her lips. “You need to get laid.”

  “Okay,” Tyler said. “You want to give my number to that hot brunette I saw leaving here last week? Or tell your ex to pay me a visit. She could leave her underwear at my place, too.”

  “Funny,” Dallas said, and regretted telling the guys about his screwup with his ex. Then again, he hadn’t told them. His dog had. Bud had come traipsing into the office the next morning with a pair of red panties hanging from his jowls. Thankfully, Suzan—aka, the hot brunette—was careful to take her underwear with her when she left his bed. And she didn’t expect—or want—more than he was willing to give. The perfect relationship—pure sex. Twice a month, when her ex got her kids for the weekend, she showed up at his place. Most nights, she didn’t even stay over. Sex and the bed to himself—what more could a guy ask?

  The news reporter started talking. “We’re here at the home of Blake Mallard, CEO of Acorn Oil Company. An anonymous caller said Mallard’s dirty shenanigans, both with the company and his personal life, were about to be made public.” The reporter paused.

  “He had to have gotten out.” Tyler traced his finger over the scar at his temple. He’d earned it during their stint in prison. While Tyler never talked about the fight, Dallas knew the guy who’d given Tyler the mark hadn’t walked away unscathed. Rumor in the pen had it the guy hadn’t walked away at all, but had to be carried out on a stretcher. Jail time was never a walk in the park, but Dallas suspected Tyler had had a harder time behind bars than both he and Austin.

  The reporter started talking again, and a smile threatened to spill from her lips. “According to sources, Mallard was found handcuffed to his bed with a call girl. The missing files Mallard swore were stolen from his office were found in the room. We’re told the cops were called to the residence by Mallard’s wife, who was worried someone had broken in.”

  After a few beats of silence, the reporter continued. “We’re told the girl found with Mallard is claiming a guy dressed in a clown costume handcuffed them to the bed and pulled the files from Mallard’s private safe.”

  “Did y’all try to call me?” Austin’s voice came from the doorway.

  Dallas glanced up. “You…” Words failed him.

  “I love it,” Tyler said and laughed.

  “You mean this?” Austin motioned at his bright red-and-blue polka-dotted clown suit and multicolored wig. Whipping off the wig, he tossed it up and caught it.

  Dallas shook his head. “You love theatrics, don’t you?”

  “Theatrics? Are you kidding? This was brilliance. It’s a gated community. I had to get past security. A birthday party was happening next door to the Mallards. They wouldn’t let in a guy wearing a ski mask, but a clown? Not a problem.” Austin looked at the TV. “Did I make the news?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Tyler said.

  Austin tossed his wig on his desk. “It’s not every day we get to solve a cheating-spouse case and a real crime at the same time. It felt good. And now we can put this case to bed and I can focus on proving Nance is innocent.”

  Dallas raked his hand through his hair. “I’ll bet a hundred bucks my brother will be calling me within five minutes, wanting to know if we’re behind this.”

  Austin dropped his clown-suited ass into a chair. “Tell him Miller PD owes me a beer for solving their case.”

  The reporter appeared on the screen again. Austin looked at the television. “She’s hot.”

  “That’s what I said.” Tyler grinned.

  Austin looked back at Dallas. “Did you get anything at the park?”

  “Nothing,” Dallas said.

  “I’m going to try a few different parks around here,” Austin said. “Maybe the chick swaps off and jogs at different places.”

  “Maybe,” Dallas said.

  “Did you hear from Roberto?” Austin asked Tyler.

  “Yeah,” Tyler answered. “None of his leads point to DeLuna.”

  “Then tell him to get some new leads,” Austin said, his frustration clearly showing at having so much time pass since they’d had anything on DeLuna.

  Dallas’s cell phone rang. He checked the number. “See,” he told Austin. “It’s my brother.”

  “I thought pissing off the guys in blue was our goal.” Austin crossed his arms.

  “You’re wrong.” Dallas stared at the phone. “Pissing off the lowlife drug runner DeLuna is our goal. Pissing off the guys in blue…” He looked up with a grin. “Well, that’s just an added benefit. My brother being the exception, of course.”

  As his partners chuckled, Dallas answered the call. “What’s up, Tony?”

  “Damn, Dallas, tell me that wasn’t you,” Tony demanded.

  “What wasn’t me?” Dallas shot Austin an I-told-you-so frown.

  “Why do I think you’re lying?” Tony came back.

  “Because you’re a suspicious son of a bitch.”

  Tony sighed. “Can you meet me for a burger at Buck’s Place in half an hour?”

  “Why?”

  “To eat,” Tony said.

  Dallas wasn’t buying it. Not that he and his brother didn’t do dinner. They had weekly dinners with their dad. But something told Dallas that Tony wanted more than a burger and fries. To confirm it, Dallas asked, “You paying?”

  “Sure,” Tony said.

  Yup, Tony wanted something. His brother never agreed to pay.

  Nikki watched Jack rearrange his silverware in an attempt to avoid her question. “What’s going on, Jack?” she asked again.

  He shook his head. “Just trouble at work.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  He shifted his arm, knocking the linen napkin off the table. Scooting back in his chair, he reached to collect the cloth. Falling into old habits, she signaled for the waiter to bring a clean napkin.

  “It’s okay,” Jack said, sitting up.

  That’s when she knew something had to be seriously wrong. Jack, a germ freak, would never use a dropped napkin.

  “Look, the reason I asked you here is… I need a wife on my arm.”

  “A wife?” Had she heard him right? He didn’t need her. He needed a wife. Anyone would do. As long as they were trainable and, damn it, she’d proven she was. Only not anymore.

  “I realize I slipped up.”

  “Really, you think screwing my part-time help was a slipup?”

  He frowned but before he could answer, his phone buzzed again. He looked at the caller ID. “I have to take this.” He put a hand on his stomach and swayed when he stood up. Even though she was furious, she almost suggested he sit down, but then he grabbed her beer and set it down on a table that a busboy was cleaning.

  Damn him! She popped up, tossed her napkin on the table and went to rescue her beer. Eying the busboy, she grinned. “I think I lost this.” Then she plopped back down in her seat. She wasn’t Jack’s to train anymore and when he returned she would
, for the first time, tell him exactly what she thought of him. After, she enjoyed her dinner of course.

  Five minutes later, dinner arrived but Jack still hadn’t. Considering manners were optional tonight, she started without him. She even enjoyed some of Jack’s beef burgundy. She’d been so involved in savoring the food, she hadn’t realized so much time had passed.

  “Is he coming back?” the waiter asked.

  “Of course he is.” Panic clenched her stomach and she nearly choked on the steak. “He has to.”

  She waited another twenty minutes, even had the busboy check the bathroom, before she accepted the inevitable. Jack wasn’t coming back. The waiter returned with the check and eyed her suspiciously as if to say any woman who would stick her finger in her date’s soup was thoroughly capable of the eat-and-run offense.

  Glancing at the check, she muttered, “I’m going to kill him!”

  “Kill who?” the waiter asked.

  “Who do you think?” She peeked at the bill and moaned. A hundred and eighty without tip, then there was the fee the bank would charge her for overdrawing her checking account.

  Her stomach roiled again, this time in a bad way. Snatching up her purse, she found her debit card. Thankfully, she had overdraft insurance. With anger making her shake, she handed the card to the waiter. Her stomach cramped. She considered complaining that something she’d eaten had upset her stomach, but she knew how that would look.

  “Yup, he’s as good as dead!”

  “I’m killing him,” Nikki muttered fifteen minutes later as she pulled out her already overdrawn debit card again.

  The grocery store cashier scanned the Pepto-Bismol, Tums, Rolaids, and antidiarrheal meds before looking at Nikki. “Kill who?”

  Why did people think just because she was talking, she was speaking to them? Was she the only one who talked to herself? Nevertheless, with the cashier’s curious stare, Nikki felt obligated to answer. “My ex.” She placed a palm on her stomach as it roiled.

  Holding her purchases in a plastic bag, Nikki couldn’t escape quickly enough. She darted out the door. The ball of orange sun hung low in the predusk sky. Her eyes stung. She almost got to the car when the smell of grilled burgers from the hamburger joint next door washed over her and the full wave of nausea hit. A woman with two kids dancing around her came right at Nikki. Not wanting to upchuck on an innocent child, she swung around in the opposite direction, opened her bag and heaved as quietly as she could inside it.

  Realizing she’d just puked on her medicine, she lost her backbone, and tears filled her eyes. Only the weak cry. The words filled her head, but damn it, right now she was weak.

  She rushed to her car, wanting only to get home. Tying a knot in the bag, she grabbed her keys, hit the clicker to unlock the doors and then popped open the trunk.

  Tears rolled down her cheeks. Her stomach cramped so hard her breath caught.

  She got to her bumper, was just about to drop the contaminated bag into the trunk when she saw… She blinked the tears from her eyes as if that alone would make the image go away.

  It didn’t.

  There, stuffed in the back of her car, was a body.

  She recognized the Armani suit first. Then she saw his face. His eyes were wide open, but something was missing.

  Life.

  Jack was dead.

  Jack was dead in the trunk of her car.

  Her vision started to swirl.

  She tried to scream. Nausea hit harder. Unable to stop herself, she lost the rest of her two-hundred-dollar meal all over her dead ex-husband’s three-thousand-dollar suit.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “BUT HERE’S THE best part.” Dallas picked up his coffee and eyed his brother over the rim of the cup. “The wife came out of the bathroom and started beating him with a toilet brush. A toilet brush!”

  Tony smiled, something he seldom did lately. Then his humor faded. “And this is what you want to do for the rest of your life?”

  “We only take on a few of those. We’re working real cases, too.”

  “Like the Mallard case?”

  “Mallard?” Dallas feigned innocence, hoping to avoid lying, and looked out the window as a patrol car, lights glaring, pulled into the parking lot next to the restaurant.

  “Okay, let’s talk about the case you’re not even getting paid for,” Tony said.

  “What case?” Then Dallas remembered telling his brother about the Nance case last week over beers. He probably should be less forthcoming—especially since it was a Miller PD case. Not that robbery was his brother’s division.

  Tony stirred sugar into his coffee. “Detective Shane called me.”

  “So you’ve been sent to tell me to back off.” Dallas congratulated himself for knowing something was up.

  “He’s a good cop. He’s certain he has the right guy.”

  “He’s wrong.”

  “You’re not even getting paid for this case, so I don’t—”

  “You think this is about money?” Dallas, Tyler, and Austin had all gotten a fat check from the state of Texas—as if the state could ever buy back their mistake. Not that they wanted to blow through the cash, but they’d all agreed that stopping another innocent man from going to prison came before getting paid. And Eddie Nance was innocent. Dallas would bet his right testicle on the fact.

  Dallas leaned in. “The only thing Nance is guilty of is being black and wearing gray sweats like the guy who robbed who convenience store.”

  Tony dropped his spoon on the table. “The clerk pointed him out in the lineup. And the kid was picked up less than two miles from the store an hour later. He has priors.”

  “One eyewitness doesn’t make a case. I’ll bet there were fifty black men wearing gray sweats in that two-mile radius. And his one prior is for a fight with his buddy over a girl. He’s not a criminal. The kid had a scholarship to go to college. Had!”

  Tony shook his head, but didn’t argue. Dallas wanted to believe it was because his brother knew he was right.

  “I can’t believe you really want to do this kind of work when you could be doing the real thing,” Tony grumbled and pulled his coffee closer.

  “It’s real. We’ve even managed to get about six of DeLuna’s drug runners off the street.”

  Tony’s frown deepened. “That’s why you’re doing this whole PI shit, isn’t it? To get DeLuna?”

  Was his brother just now figuring that out? The way he, Tyler, and Austin saw it, if they kept poking at DeLuna’s dirty little operation, sooner or later the drug lord would get mad enough to crawl out from the rock he’d hidden under and face them. When he did, they’d be ready.

  “It’s not the only reason.” That was true, too. Dallas leaned back in the booth. Making sure others didn’t get screwed by the system—the same system that had let him, Tyler, and Austin down—mattered as well. And as Austin mentioned earlier, if they managed to piss off the guys in blue, the men who had stood there and watched three of their own get sold down the river, well, that was okay, too.

  “You’re gonna get yourself killed. And when you do, I’m going to be fucking pissed!”

  A second police car, siren blasting, whipped into the parking lot next door.

  “Dying’s not on my agenda,” Dallas said. “Justice is.”

  “Damn it, Dallas. If you want to go after DeLuna, get back on the police force.”

  Dallas set his coffee down. “Yeah, well, cops and I don’t get along anymore.”

  Tony pulled out his badge and slammed it down on the table in front of Dallas. “What do you think I am?”

  “You’re a pain in my ass, but you’re family.” Dallas wished he could say he didn’t miss the job. He did—part of it. But the political bullshit that came with the job… well, they could shove it up their asses. Working cheating-spouses and missing-poodles cases was better than going back to a system that let three of their own get tossed to the wolves. And after all, he and his business partners could turn down the wacky cases.
Hell, they did turn down most of them, but they had agreed that the small cases could lead to bigger cases. Plus, it kept some cash flow coming in and gave them something to do besides play spider solitaire.

  Dallas’s attention went back to Tony. “Besides, you’re Miller PD, not Glencoe.”

  “Then come to work at Miller PD. I could get you on.”

  “Not interested.”

  “You’re as stubborn as our old man, you know that?”

  “Funny, that’s what your wife said about you yesterday.”

  Dallas waited for Tony’s reaction. He wasn’t disappointed. Tony nearly came out of his seat. “You saw LeAnn? When? Is she okay?”

  Dallas had dreaded mentioning his sister-in-law, but Tony would be pissed if he found out Dallas had seen LeAnn and hadn’t said anything.

  “She had some car trouble about a block from the office. She looked fine.”

  “Why didn’t she call me?”

  “Like I said, she was about a block from the office. Turned out to be a loose battery cable. I fixed it and she went on her merry way.”

  “You should’ve called me. I’d have done it. Maybe she would have finally talked to me. Did you know she won’t return my calls?”

  Yeah, Dallas knew. It was practically all Tony talked about when he wasn’t chewing Dallas out about his newfound profession. But if he’d called Tony, LeAnn would have been pissed. Not that his loyalties went to LeAnn, but… “Weren’t you the one who preached to me about finding closure with Serena? About just breaking ties?”

  Tony’s expression hardened. “That was you and Serena. LeAnn and I are different.”

  Dallas started to argue, but the pain in his brother’s eyes had Dallas pulling back. Tony and LeAnn’s situation was different. Heartrendingly different. Dallas wasn’t sure that meant they had a chance in hell at reconciling, but what did he know?

  Tony leaned in. “Did she ask about me?”

  “Yeah, I think she did.” She hadn’t. But Dallas had told her that Tony had been in a piss-poor mood, that he probably missed her. Another police car whipped into the lot next door. “I wonder what’s up,” Dallas said more to change the subject than because he was interested in the drama.