The uniformed officer was no older than his midtwenties and clearly nervous, a flush in his fair cheeks and a slight tremor shaking the barrel of the weapon he’d trained on Sierra.
But his voice was firm, as was the look in his hazel eyes when he ordered, “Step out of the car, please, miss. That’s it. Now turn around and put your hands against the car.”
“Was all this really necessary?” Sierra grumbled as he frisked her, quickly but professionally, for any weapons—a search that turned up nothing more interesting that the zip ties she kept on her belt, which he decided to let her keep after she’d shown him both her bail bond agent ID card and Nevada driver’s license. “If Destiny and her boyfriend didn’t know we were here before, I’m sure they do by now.”
“Look, I’m sorry if I startled you,” said the cop, whose name tag read Ofc J. Donovan, “but my orders were to make sure we didn’t end up having a civilian triggering another shoot-out like the one at the motel the other night.”
“I’m not the one who started that,” she reminded him. “Not that you would know it based on your department’s persecution of one of the intended victims—not to mention the person who’s gone ahead and tracked down not one but two missing persons for you in the short time I’ve been in town...not that I’m implying your department needs to step up its game in that arena.”
Judging from his scowl, the look she’d slanted his way may have suggested otherwise. Could she help it if she had outspoken eyebrows?
“Don’t get so cocky quite yet,” he said. “We haven’t determined Destiny Jones is inside that house, but as soon as my backup gets here...”
He turned his head as an unmarked car pulled up a few doors down the street and Sergeant Colton climbed out, along with what she assumed to be a plainclothes male officer, maybe a detective or someone pitching in from the administration since the department was a small one. Both were wearing vests, she saw, and Spencer quickly ordered Donovan to put his on, as well.
“And as for you,” the sergeant told her, “we appreciate your call, but you need to stay in your car. And completely clear of this operation. Do you understand?”
“Fine by me,” Sierra told him before cutting an annoyed look toward the younger cop who’d searched her. “I only hope they didn’t slip out the back while Officer Obvious was alerting the whole neighborhood by frisking me right out on the street.”
“And I hope you’re not trying to back out of your earlier identification of Destiny Jones inside that house,” Spencer told her. “Or sending my people into a dangerous situation on nothing but a fishing expedition.”
“My best friend’s a cop,” she said, figuring that Brie counted as a best friend since she was really the only friend who’d made the effort to stand by her. Even if Sierra’s desperation to pay off Ice Veins, along with her need for secrecy, had made it harder than ever for her to really be there for anyone just lately. “I’d never, ever do that—or anything I thought might come back on Ace.”
Spencer’s serious blue eyes studied her, but she didn’t waver for a moment.
“All right, then, Ms. Madden,” he said, giving her a subtle nod she took to indicate a truce between them...at least for the moment.
From inside her car, Sierra watched as the female officer with the darker ponytail, the same petite woman she’d spotted peering into her Camry earlier that morning, trotted up, her rifle pointed downward. All four convened before two of them, Donovan and the female officer split off and headed behind one of the neighbors’ houses, probably to cover the rear of the targeted address.
Precisely two minutes later Spencer and the plainclothes officer both headed up the street to approach the front of the house, which Sierra couldn’t see at all from her vantage inside the car. But no one had been assigned to watch her, and she felt that familiar tingle of anticipation, a fizzing itch in muscles eager to get out there and be part of the takedown. Her father’s hunting instinct, as he’d liked to call it when he went out looking for the bail jumpers whose bounties fed them...and his gambling habit.
So she stepped out of the car—just to stretch her legs, of course, not to defy a direct police order. Once standing, she strained her neck and ears, catching the pounding at a front door, the deeply authoritative, “Police! Open up!”
Followed minutes later by a faint sound—one Sierra had only heard because she’d strolled to the end of a nearby walkway—of the female officer calling, “Sarge, the back door’s open, but the red van’s still in the—We’ve got a runner! White male, vaulting the rear fence! Donovan and I are in pursuit!”
Adrenaline pumping though her system, Sierra warned herself to get back to the car, stay clear of the situation, where she could end up, at worst, shot, or arrested for interfering with a police action. Sighing in frustration, she dutifully returned to her vehicle...
But Spencer hadn’t said a thing about remaining parked there, so she decided, with that fizzing itch inside her growing, to circle the block, just to offer an extra set of eyes and ears well versed in tracking fleeing suspects. And to call in to dispatch anything she spotted that might constitute a threat to officers or lead to the escape of—
Right there, between a hedge of red-berried pyracantha and a stone retaining wall near the corner, Sierra caught sight of a movement, along with the waving of the shrub’s canes, whose wickedly long thorns were notorious for piercing skin and catching clothing. That has to be him. The runner the cops are after, she decided as she parked along the curb as close as she dared and pulled out her phone.
Before she could dial, the runner broke cover—not the male in the Cardinals cap, as she’d expected, but Destiny herself, her platinum pixie cut partly hidden by a black watch cap and an oversize chambray work shirt serving to obscure her small, neat figure. She was cutting diagonally past Sierra’s hood as she sprinted across the street.
Unwilling to let her get away, Sierra popped open the door, the surge of fresh adrenaline propelling her past the flare of pain in her ribs as she vaulted after the bank teller. Thanks to the bank teller’s poor choice in footwear—a pair of sky-blue spike-heeled pumps—Sierra gained on her quickly, shouting, “Hold it right there! Freeze! Fugitive recovery!” just as the blonde wobbled to the opposite curb.
Whirling around with her honey-brown eyes flaring, Destiny turned to frown at Sierra before her painted nails dove for her rear pocket. Fearing she was reaching for a weapon, Sierra stepped in, twisting her body, and popping the blonde’s midsection with an upper cut that knocked Destiny out of her heels and sent her tumbling to the ground.
Kneeling beside the gasping, sputtering woman, Sierra quickly confirmed that Destiny had been going for a cell phone rather than the gun that she’d imagined.
Thrashing in her attempts to rise, Destiny recovered breath enough to cry out, “H-help! Let me go! Police!”
“Just stay down, woman, or next time I won’t pull my punch,” Sierra said, pressing on her shoulder to keep Destiny from flailing about and injuring herself. Once she’d zip-tied her captive’s wrists, she followed the direction of the teller’s desperate gaze and sighed to see Sergeant Colton stalking her way, looking mad enough to arrest her, along with Destiny, on the spot.
Oh, snap.
“Didn’t I tell you to stay inside your car?” he demanded. “This is a police action to recover a material witness, not time for an amateur to interfere with our operation.”
“A simple thank-you would suffice,” Sierra grumbled, wondering if the man imagined she routinely caught fugitives as some kind of hobby. “Or maybe you’d have preferred that I allowed her to keep right on running, wasting your officers’ time and possibly putting them in harm’s way, when she practically ran out in front of my car, trying to escape?”
Pushing herself into a sitting position, Destiny complained, “This woman struck me! Did you see her? I—I want her arrested for assault!”
Sergeant Colton swung an even harsher look in the teller’s direction before saying, “Before you make any decisions about that, Ms. Jones, I think we need to have a long, hard talk about the company you’ve recently been keeping—”
“And I think you might want to check out, too,” Sierra told the officer, “what she was up to at that bank where she was working. Because from the way her coworkers and her manager acted when I started asked questions earlier, I have to wonder exactly what an audit might turn up.”
The following afternoon, two jailers escorted Ace from the infirmary, where he’d been stuck since the judge had denied his bail after the prosecutor had successfully argued that a wealthy man who’d already run once was the very definition of a flight risk.
It still hadn’t sunk in that he would remain behind bars until his trial, that the only way he could hope to meet Nova and the grandchild she was carrying for the first time would be inside a jailhouse visiting room.
As the shame of it seeped through him, Ace realized that something was up, since neither guard had answered his question about where they were going. But the look the two men passed between themselves triggered a tightening in his gut. One that warned that he had more bad news coming.
“Is my lawyer here again?” he persisted, confused since Michael Seaver had told him yesterday he would be tied up in court this afternoon. “Or is this the family visit I’ve been promised?”
After weeks of separation, he was desperate to see a familiar face and hear the latest news firsthand—and to know that at least some among his family members were still speaking to him. Desperate enough that he was willing to swallow his pride and allow them to see the same man who’d once represented Colton Oil wearing expensive hand-tailored suits, designer silk ties and Italian leather shoes sporting the latest in bright orange jail garb and what was beginning to resemble a ragged beard. At least he was moving more freely now that the bulky dressing on his wound had been replaced with lighter bandaging.
“Didn’t they tell you in the infirmary where they’ve been keepin’ you all by your lonesome like some kind of rock star?” the younger of the two guards asked, his disapproval palpable over what he clearly considered special treatment. Even though at the present time, the county’s small jail had no other prisoners in need of the infirmary. “It takes at least forty-eight hours for your visitors’ list to be approved. If we can get to it.”
Ace’s heart sank, but he didn’t respond to the taunting tone, the clear effort to get a rise out of him. Instead, he thought about the names he’d added to his list, including Sierra Madden’s. Part of him hoped that none of them would show up, would see him humbled like this. Another part of him feared exactly that.
“I ever tell you,” the taller of the pair, a scowling man, asked his partner, “how I was all set to start a job for Colton Oil once? Hard, dirty work, but honest, with good benefits and the kind of paycheck a man can be proud to take home to his family.” His glittering, dark eyes were set deep beneath the shelf of a high forehead.
“Yeah, I think you did.” His frog-faced younger cohort smirked in Ace’s direction. “But why don’t you go ahead and refresh my memory, Pete? I’m sure that Mister Bigtime CEO here would just love to hear that story.”
Ace felt his stomach clutch, though nothing about the guard had struck him as familiar, no more than the name Pete rang any warning bells.
“I was all set to start in a few days,” Pete said, scowl deepening. “They just needed me to come on in and fill out a little paperwork. And that was when the boss man—this same fine fella we have before us right here—puts a stop to things. Calls the Human Resources lady and tells her my rusted-out pickup is parked in the space marked off for his fancy imported sports car.”
“If you’re going to tell the story,” Ace said, stopping to stare back a challenge as the incident came back to him, “maybe you ought to tell it right.”
“You got something you want to say, prisoner?” the guard said, pulling his baton out of a holster as his small eyes glittered with menace. “Because I’m not your daddy, and you’re not skulking around the office with a loaded gun.”
Bruised and stitched up as he was already, Ace should have kept his mouth shut. And maybe he would’ve let the jackass tell his story his way had it not been for the crack about his father’s shooting. And the fact that Ace had never had any patience when it came to lying bullies. “I was just going to say,” he said, raining down the full weight of an authority he no longer had any claim to, “you left out the part about how Colton Oil security cameras caught you sideswiping my administrative assistant’s car on your way in—the first brand-new car she’d ever bought in her life—after you’d stopped along the way for a few celebratory slugs from that flask you had on you.”
Scowl deepening, the tall guard raised his baton high to strike, but instead of flinching, or turning a shoulder to block the inevitable blows, Ace stood there, saying, “Go ahead, man. Do what you want, if it makes you feel any better. Heaven only knows you can’t make me feel much worse.”
Lowering the stick, Pete sneered, “You’d like that, wouldn’t you? Seein’ me lose this job, too, when we march you in to meet with the DA and your lawyer, and those others, all black-and-blue and bloody?”
“I’m meeting with the—” Dread coiled cold and oily in Ace’s stomach. Were the charges against him about to be upgraded? Had any chance to make things right with the only father he had even known—or to get to know his daughter—passed him by forever?
“Don’t get too cocky, though, Colton,” the tall guard warned, “because the minute you’re out of there, we’re taking you straight to the general lockup—”
“After we’ve had a little talk with a few of our favorite troublemakers about the way you’ve been talkin’ about how you don’t want to be associated with broke-ass trash like them,” his frog-faced younger colleague added. “And then we’ll both get busy catchin’ up on all that paperwork we’ve let pile up just lately. Maybe we’ll even get around to seein’ to your visitors’ list—if there’s anything left of you to visit.”
As the two men shared a chuckle, Ace smothered a sigh, wondering if there was any chance that Sierra could possibly make good on her promise to free him from his nightmare—or any hope he could survive it long enough for the real truth to come to light.
Ace was still shaking two hours later when his attorney walked him out through the jail’s rear sally port and into the bright spring sunshine.
“You all right? You should be walking on air now, what with all the charges against you being dismissed.” A tall man in his late fifties, Michael Seaver led him toward a long, black Escalade with tinted windows in the rear of the parking lot. Dressed as usual in an expensive, slim-cut suit and designer glasses, he grinned as if he’d expected this outcome all along, even though they both knew that at their most recent meeting, the outlook had been far grimmer. “Instead, you look about ready to fall over. You feeling okay? Or are your injuries still—”
“I’m healing fine,” said Ace, wearing an oversize sweatshirt with a pair of cheap, ill-fitting denim pants and canvas shoes he’d been issued for the unexpected release. “I’m in shock, that’s all. I can’t believe I’m walking out of here, a free man, and that—is that...?”
His attention was captured by Sierra, a sight for sore eyes in her silver hoop earrings and jacket over form-fitting jeans and soft, gray boots. A breeze stirred her long, red-gold hair as she raised her hand in a muted greeting from where she was standing near the Escalade.
When their eyes met, the warmth of her smile loosened the tightness inside his chest enough for him to breathe again.
She’d kept her word after all, he understood, earned her finder’s fee and then some. And more than that, she’d elected to come here in person, to meet him at the gates of hell.
“You know this woman?” the attorney asked as she approached.
“Not as well as I’d like to,” Ace admitted, his mouth going dry at the perfect combination of beauty and athleticism in her movement.
Seaver gave a snort of amusement. “I see your recent troubles haven’t affected your good taste in ladies.”
“Too bad they’ve made me the last man on the planet any sensible woman would want to get tangled up with.”
“Never say die, man,” the attorney fired back. “Never say die.”
“You must be Ace’s mouthpiece,” Sierra said as she drew within earshot. “I’m a friend. Sierra Madden.”
“Ah, the famous bounty hunter.” Seaver scrutinized her with a look of frank admiration before he offered her his hand. “Yes, I understand you are a very good friend to the defense indeed.”
A wicked smile lit her eyes over their brief handshake. “Don’t let it get around. I’d hate to ruin my reputation as a heartless mercenary.”
“Thanks, Michael,” Ace said. “I’ll be going with Ms. Madden now.”
“You’re sure?” The attorney’s gaze flicked to his shiny black Escalade. “I did promise your sister I’d bring you straight to the family compound.”
“You don’t have to worry about that, Counselor,” Sierra said with a nod toward Ace. “I’ve been in touch with Ainsley, and we’ve agreed we’ll be meeting up at eight at Ace’s condo in town.”
“What about right now? I’m sure he’d love to get back home to the Triple R and his loving family.”
“Don’t you think Ace deserves a little time and space to get looking and feeling like himself again, eat a solid meal on neutral ground and shut his eyes without looking over his shoulder for a change?”
“Of course,” Michael was quick to agree. But he darted a questioning look at Ace nonetheless. “I just wanted to make sure this is all right by my client.”
“If it was any more all right,” he said, both relieved and touched by Sierra’s consideration of how ill prepared he’d been to dive into the emotional tumult of an immediate reunion, “I’d be kissing this woman on the mouth right here and now.”
Seaver grinned. “Just don’t be late or your sister will be blowing up my phone with calls and texts. And we both know what Ainsley’s like when she drops into full protective mode.”
Cracking a smile, Ace shook the man’s hand. “I won’t be late. I promise. I’ll even turn my phone back on—they returned it to me on the way out—once I’ve had the chance to charge it.” He wouldn’t promise to switch on the ringer, though. The thought of coping with what he suspected would be scores, or maybe hundreds, of notification tones from all the calls and messages he’d surely missed was enough to break him out in a cold sweat.
Once Seaver had climbed into his Escalade, Sierra showed Ace to a different car than the one she’d previously been driving, an older Chevy with Arizona tags. But Ace didn’t have it in him to ask what had happened to her damaged Camry, or where she was driving him as she turned away from both the ranch and his personal downtown condo.
All he could manage was, “I still don’t know what I’m doing here instead of getting my head caved in about now by a couple of choice inmates while the guards look the other way.”
She winced. “Sounds like a good time. But didn’t they explain it to you inside? Why the charges were dropped?”
“Dropped for now, pending further evidence. I did catch that part. I’m afraid that after that, though,” he admitted, “the rest was drowned out by the roaring in my ears and the pounding in my chest. So I have no idea how you pulled off this miracle.”
“Don’t give me too much credit,” she said, using one hand to wave off his statement. “The whole thing was a team effort.” She described her visit to Destiny’s bank, along with how the manager had escorted her out after she’d started asking questions about the missing teller. “So after I found Destiny shacked up with her boyfriend, whom Spencer told me was a serious drug dealer, I suggested that the police start digging into her activities over at the bank.”
“I did catch something about financial crimes,” Ace recalled, noticing Sierra’s frequent glances at her mirrors and how carefully she’d been checking every parked vehicle they passed. “But what’s any of that got to do with Destiny’s testimony against me?”
“I’m getting to all that,” she said, slowing as a bell dinged, a red light flashed and a pair of rail crossing arms came down to block the road ahead for an approaching train. “Oh, great,” she grumbled, her hands knotting on the wheel.
“Is everything okay?” Ace asked her. “You seem a little—”
“Sure, yeah,” Sierra said dismissively. “Just eager to get you away from here and back to the free world as fast as possible.”
Shaking off the interruption, she went on to explain, “After Destiny’s disappearance, her manager had discovered evidence that she’d been laundering money for her creepy boyfriend’s drug operation—enough to send her to federal prison for at least a decade, with zero possibility of parole.”
“Sounds like a solid dose of karma, considering all the lies she’s told about me,” Ace said, not giving a damn if it made him sound bitter.
“Except Destiny wasn’t too keen on the idea,” Sierra said as the engine passed, “so she cried and pleaded and finally offered to come clean about the so-called confession. All Spencer had to do was agree not to turn her over to the feds.”
“So he made the deal?” Ace asked, absently watching as the rail cars, many of them marked with colorful graffiti, clattered along.
She nodded. “The feds would get the drug supplier, which was who they were really after, and Spencer wanted the truth. The truth about what really happened to your father. About what’s really been happening with your family since that email arrived claiming you’d been switched for the real Ace Colton soon after birth.”
His gut tightened, as it always did, at the thought that there was another version of him, his family’s missing son and brother, out there somewhere. That he’d been the cuckoo’s egg left in the nest. Though he’d been told there was a reason to believe he’d been the son of a long-missing nurse named Luella Smith, he had to wonder if anyone in his family had had any luck tracking her—or the prodigal firstborn Colton heir—down while he was gone.
But those questions, he’d known for the past month, would do nothing except drag him down a rabbit hole of misery, so he dragged his brain back to the conversation at hand.
“So what did Destiny tell him?” It must have been something pretty big, since he was sitting here with Sierra rather than killing time—or possibly dodging fists, thanks to his guard friend—behind bars.
“She said someone called out of the blue and offered her ten grand to plant the gun inside your condo when you’d be otherwise engaged. Then she was instructed to call the cops and give them the whole pillow talk story—”
“I’ve said it from the start. I never touched that woman.”
“Even she admits that now,” Sierra told him, startling as a poorly dressed, stooped man shuffled past them on the street, drinking from a longneck, partly wrapped up in a paper bag. If the suddenness of his appearance caught Ace off guard, the slip in the bounty hunter’s normally cool demeanor surprised him even more.
“That old fellow’s harmless enough. He’s always around this neighborhood,” Ace reassured her, now certain that something was amiss. “Definitely a local, if you’re still worried about your friends from—”
“Ice Veins is in the morgue, so everything’s okay now,” Sierra said in the tone of someone who might be trying to convince herself of something. “Just taking note of my surroundings.”
“Is that why you switched cars, too?” he asked, peering at her through narrowed eyes. “Or is this one just a loaner while yours is in for repairs?”
She hesitated before answering with one of her usual shrugs. “So I’m still a little keyed up. Who wouldn’t be? Some habits are harder to get past than others.”
“You’re sure it’s just a habit?”
She barked out a laugh. “Don’t you have enough to worry over? For example, this story Destiny claims she was bribed to tell, saying that you’d confessed to the shooting of your father.”
Ace scowled, quick to anger at the thought of all the damage the bank teller had done. “Why should anyone believe anything she says now—an admitted liar who launders money for drug dealers?”
“Maybe they wouldn’t, except her story checks out from her phone records, though the caller couldn’t be traced, to the timing of an anonymous initial payment to her bank account. And her prints were found inside your condo, underneath the flooring she lifted up to plant the gun.”
“The real question is who paid her? Who was willing to buy her off to do it?” As Ace’s overheated brain formed an image of his father’s second wife, the same woman who’d coughed up an even larger chunk of money to bring him in, his shaking hands clenched and twisted the cheap fabric of his baggy jail garb. “Was it—was Selina involved in this? She seems to have a penchant for using her money to cause trouble for me.”
“Or to return you to the safety of your family,” Sierra quoted, sounding as dubious as ever about the line the woman had initially fed her over the phone the day she’d first called to hire her to find Ace. “But be that as it may, Destiny swears she doesn’t know who it was. She claims the caller blocked the number and the first half of the payment posted anonymously to her account. But the voice—”
“Was it a woman’s?” he asked impatiently.
Sierra shook her head. “Male, she insisted, though she said it was rather high-pitched and younger-sounding. And now, get this. Destiny’s furious that she went to so much trouble, brought all that scrutiny down on herself, and this dude stiffed her for the second payment.”
“She knows more. She has to. Who would take a risk like that, sell those kind of lies for some strange young guy?”
“She might’ve looked and talked the part of the reliable witness, but Destiny Jones has got an expensive drug habit of her own that convinced her to take the risk in the first place,” Sierra said as the final train car crossed before them. “But the longer things went on, the more nervous the whole deal made her.”
“No wonder she took off, then, especially with her being involved in other crimes, too,” Ace said. “So what’s going to happen to her now?”
The railroad arms rose slowly, allowing Sierra to finally cross the tracks.
“They’re holding her for the time being for possession, filing a false police report and whatever else they can come up with,” she said. “There’ll be additional charges, too, based on her breaking and entering your condo and planting the weapon.”
“After everything she put me through, I ought to sue her, too,” Ace said. “But it doesn’t sound like she’d be worth the effort.”
“I suspect you’re right about that,” Sierra said, “though at this point, no one could blame you for wanting to rain down some righteous retribution. Honestly, just thinking about the whole mess is enough to make me wish I’d slugged her harder.”
“You punched her?”
“Yeah,” Sierra said. “Right in front of Spencer, too, it turned out, who wasn’t amused in the least, but I seriously thought the lying little hustler might’ve been reaching for a gun.”
“I take it she wasn’t.”
“Oops. My bad,” Sierra said, a smile in her voice.
In no mood for levity, Ace said, “When I find out who’s really responsible for what she did, who gave her that gun to leave inside my condo, they’ll have damned more than a little retribution coming their way, I can tell you.”
Nodding, Sierra glanced his way. “Not to change the subject, but I need to make a quick stop.” She nodded in the direction of a small Mexican cantina, a humble hole-in-the-wall strip center where Ace hadn’t gone in years.
“Ah, I’m not really in the mood to eat,” he said, unable to imagine facing the stares of other people who’d been reading about him in the paper or hearing about him on the evening news.
“I figured as much,” she said, “which is why I phoned in an order for us right before you came out. Just hang tight. I’ll be right back. Then I’ll get you over to the lodge where I’m staying, where you can shave and shower and change into the clothes your brother Grayson brought over for me.”
“You had—” Ace shook his head, surprised, since the two hadn’t been especially close through the years. “Grayson knew you were planning to shanghai me, too?”
Pulling into the parking lot, Sierra nodded. “Actually, it was his idea in the first place. He understood how overwhelmed you might feel, and that you might need to prepare yourself before Ainsley and the others sprung your pregnant daughter on you. So he asked if maybe I could stick around a little while and help out. He seems like a good guy, and I could spare an extra day, so—”
“I’ll be sure to thank him for that,” Ace said, touched by his brother’s thoughtfulness. “And thank you, too, for delaying your trip back to Vegas. I know you must be eager to get back to your life.”
“I—ah—I’ll be right out,” said the bounty hunter, her green eyes avoiding his at the mention of her home city.
But not before he spotted the unease in them, the tell, as he’d learned to think of such things in the world of high-stakes business negotiations. It was yet another hint that Sierra Madden remained nervous. Though he imagined that anyone might suffer some level of fallout—or even PTSD—considering the brutality she’d suffered at the hands of her father’s loan shark and his henchman, he hoped like hell it wasn’t more than that.