A Bad Day for Scandal (29 page)

“I’m not
trying
to hold y’all up,” she found herself mumbling. “Only it’s got a little complicated.”

What would Goat say about the flash drive, about the pictures of Ferg Rohossen, who not six months after Stella’s vigorous session with him had got himself picked up by the Morgan county crew for jacking a load of cigarettes? The sheriff might be sympathetic. He might find his way to understanding the delicate balance between justice and vengeance. He might even understand that Stella had to use unorthodox methods to get there—after all, he’d saved her bacon several other times when the demands of her job had propelled her into the gray area.

Except for one thing: Goat was proud, and dedicated, and committed, and above all, he was a law man. He truly believed in the motto stitched on the pocket of his uniform, the one that said
HONESTY—INTEGRITY—COURAGE
in gold thread right above the state seal.

And damn if that didn’t just charge her up that much more.

“Everything’s complicated with you,” Goat said, his voice going dusky and low and growly. He lifted one big strong hand and pulled off the glasses, so that Stella found herself staring up into a thousand megawatts of blue-eyed fire. “I’m pretty sure you ain’t worth the trouble.”

And then he took his free hand and gently pushed a flyaway chunk of Stella’s hair off her forehead, tracing along the edge of her brow with a callused warm thumb. He followed a hot-blooded path along the curve of her ear, down the nape of her neck, across her collarbones, and dipped his fingertip into the hollow of her throat, at which point Stella figured Salty might as well keep on murdering all the ex-girlfriends he cared to, because she wasn’t going anywhere.

“But then again, I might be,” she managed to whisper. She stood up on her tiptoes and closed her eyes and aimed, and the next thing she knew, her lips found his and some crazy-assed energy went sparking off in every direction and there was tongue and there were teeth and there was more of that growling thing he did, and then she was somehow backed up against the Jeep and she wasn’t even teetering on her toes anymore, because Goat had practically lifted her right off the ground with his strong hands on her ass, his sunglasses clattering to the street as he leaned in and let her know just how he felt about how much trouble she was.

“Oh,” she gasped, because this new side of Goat was more than she dared to expect, and then he kissed her a little harder and lifted her legs right off the ground and she wrapped them around him before she remembered where she was, in front of Rolf Bayer, who had a habit of peering out his drapes and the Knowleses, who at any moment might come out the front door, and her brain sent a firm message to her feet to get right back on the ground where they belonged, only Goat picked that moment to wrap her hair around his hand and pull her head back so he could kiss her along the soft place under her jawbone and she wondered idly if he’d mind just taking all her clothes off right here or whether he might sling her over his shoulder and carry her into the house.

Instead he drew back and let her slide slowly to the ground, his expression both amused and irritated and smoldering. Stella was pretty sure she’d just keep sliding until her jelly legs collapsed on the ground, if Goat didn’t grab her shoulders at the last minute and hold her up.

“Didn’t plan on that,” he said. “Ought to arrest you twice, making me behave like a damn fool in the middle of the street.”

Stella sucked in sweet cold air and licked her bruised lips and tried to gather her wits. She didn’t care about Bayer or the Knowleses or anyone else who might have seen what had just taken place; she didn’t even care if Goat tossed her in the lockup—as long as she got to ride over in his car, and they took the long way.

But she was trembling. Chalk it up to some post-endorphin-rush effect—her teeth were a tick away from chattering out of her head, and her heart was thudding overtime. And a little blinky light was going off somewhere deep in her soul.

A warning light. A danger sign.

Because she was on the edge of giving it all away, of caring so much for Goat that she endangered everything else—the barriers she’d constructed, the side business she’d built up so carefully, the safe place she represented for the abused and helpless.

Reckless felt irresistible. In the moments that they touched, all that mattered was getting a little more of him, a
lot
more of him, and that wasn’t right. They both had jobs to do, and even if they sometimes seemed to be at cross purposes, the work still had to be done.

So Stella bit the inside of her cheek just hard enough to shock her system back to attention. The feeling in her limbs tingled and returned, and she stood up on her own power and gave Goat a gentle little shove, pushing him back away from the Jeep. Then she tugged her top down over her jeans—it had somehow managed to ride up in a scandalous fashion—and patted her hair back into place.

“Arrest me all you want,” she said, making her voice sound bored, “only it won’t change the fact that
you
started that, not me. Now git on out of the way, I got to go. And before you head back to all your law duties, make sure you get them boxes down like you promised Noelle.”

Then she edged past him and walked around the front of her Jeep to the driver’s side and managed to get the door unlocked and her seat belt on and the engine started without looking back.

And that felt so good, so brazen, that Stella figured she’d push her luck and got her lipstick out of her purse. Oh, she loved that Regal Red. She applied it with care in the rearview mirror, mashing her lips together when she was done, and only then did she start driving slowly away from her house.

And she didn’t look, not until she was safely past both Goat and his damn department-issue Charger, and then she peeked in the mirror just long enough to see that he was standing with his fists on his hips, shaking his head and laughing.

Guess I won that round,
she thought happily as she put the pedal to the floor and left him in the dust.

Chapter Twenty-nine

By the time she got to the Mingus home, her heart had stopped hammering and her skin had stopped tingling, though the memory of Goat’s hands on her ass was proving difficult to shake.

Still, she pushed those thoughts from her mind as she parked a couple of houses down the street, behind a mud-splattered Ford pickup. No sense alerting Salty that she was back to pay another visit. At least it looked like she might have him to herself, which would make things far simpler—the minivan was nowhere to be seen, and Salty’s truck was parked neatly where it had been the last time.

She got her lightweight portable rig from the cargo hold, slinging the high-tech pack over her shoulder. She’d brought only the simplest gear along for this job, because even though Salty’s innocence was looking far more dubious than before, she still didn’t get the kind of vibe from him that warranted the heavy-duty treatment. And more and more these days, Stella was going with her gut.

Her luck continued. After getting no answer at the front door, she slipped carefully around the side of the house and found him in the backyard, tinkering with the electrical that he was laying down in the half-finished shed. It clearly wasn’t working the way he’d planned, since he had a work light strung on a fat yellow extension cord running from inside the house, and he was cussing a blue streak while he poked at a galvanized floor box. Stella was treated to a fine view of his mostly adequate rear end, but she leaned against the framed-out shed wall for a moment and considered how, once you get one nice man-butt stuck in your mind, you can look at all kinds of others and they don’t do anything for you.

Finally she coughed delicately. Salty dropped the screwdriver he was holding, and it clanked on the poured concrete floor and rolled away.

On top of Salty’s other problems, the shed wasn’t level.

“I’d keep my day job,” Stella suggested.

Salty managed a terse string of curses and got to his feet. “This ain’t the best time, Miz Hardesty,” he said. “My wife’s taken the kids over to her sister’s so I can get this fucking thing finished, and I want to take advantage of daylight.”

“Dark’s coming early today, I expect,” Stella said mildly, setting her pack on the floor and unzipping it. She crouched down and sorted through the contents, and when she stood up again, she took the Bersa from the leg holster under her loose fleece pants, almost as an afterthought. The Mak was a loss at this point—she only hoped the boys babysitting Walsingham would have the good sense to wipe it, but otherwise, it was just another in a long line of unregistered weapons, one of the sunk costs of Stella’s business.

Salty regarded the gun with resignation. “Well, hell. What now? I told you everything.”

“You didn’t tell me you talked to Priss last month,” Stella corrected him. “Probably more than once. Am I right? You know, I can look at your cell phone bills, if I want.”

She wasn’t 100 percent certain about that last bit, but she wouldn’t be surprised; Chrissy had gotten so slick with her online poking around that Stella guessed she could probably get a hold of his baby pictures and first grade report card if she wanted, too.

Only, to her surprise, forty-five minutes later, Salty had admitted only to occasional drink-and-dial sessions where he tried to get Priss to indulge in phone shenanigans. Beyond that, he was still sticking to his story. Stella had got him rigged up to the foundation two-by-fours with a simple set of plastic restraints and some boot cuffs that she had recently treated herself to because they came in a rainbow of colors. For Salty, she used a vibrant purple, though he didn’t seem to appreciate her thoughtfulness.

A little work with a suede flogger seemed to unsettle him more than causing him any real pain, but it did get him to admit that Priss had occasionally asked him to wear an Oasis Pool Maintenance uniform in the bedroom while she ordered him to check her filters … and a turn with a leather riding crop had him coughing up some rather dull details about tax reporting for his father-in-law’s firm, but despite Stella’s best efforts, he continue to maintain his innocence in the matter of knocking off his rival for Priss’s attention, or Priss herself, or Liman.

And that was perplexing. It was exceedingly rare that Stella got this far in an interrogation without turning up the dirty little nuggets she’d been looking for. In fact, she didn’t recall ever interrogating anyone who turned out to be innocent before, and she didn’t care for it one bit. For one thing, it meant she would have subjected an innocent—well, relatively speaking—man to unnecessary pain. And for another, she did not care to be wrong.

That was why, when she felt the whoosh of something moving fast through the air behind her only a fraction of a second after hearing the snap of a footstep in the shed, it was almost a relief. She had been breathing hard from exertion, and Salty had been making various sounds of protestation, so she wasn’t really surprised she’d been snuck up on, but just as something heavy crashed down on the top of her head with a distressing amount of force, Stella had the satisfaction of knowing that while she’d been wrong about Salty, she’d been barking up a tree that wasn’t growing too far away from the right one.

Chapter Thirty

Stella had woken up from being beat unconscious a couple times in the past, and it had been a disorienting experience, involving grogginess and double vision and tingling in the extremities.

This time, however, Stella found that within seconds of waking up with a considerable headache, she had a crystal-clear memory of being beat at her own game. She also noticed that her mysterious bludgeoner had got into her supplies and secured her wrists her with a pair of her own disposable black plastic riot cuffs. Something weighed uncomfortably against her midsection, but she couldn’t see what it was over her bound wrists.

It took her all of half a second to figure out where she was: the backseat of a minivan that was clearly used more often for toting kids than captives, judging from the faint smells of Frostees left in a hot car, and diapers and spit-up and lost french fries. And there were visual clues, too, armless action figures and wild-haired dolls and Legos lodged in the corners and under the seats, and car seats bolted tight to the captain’s chairs.

She couldn’t make out much in the way of the driver, from her vantage point in the backseat, other than a thin wrist fiddling with the radio.

Well, it wasn’t Salty—that was for sure—since Salty was built bigger and wasn’t wearing maroon nail polish or jangly silver bracelets the last time Stella saw him. No, it appeared that Stella’s fate was in the hands of his wife. Interestingly, Doraleigh hadn’t brought her husband along. Maybe she hadn’t even bothered to take off his restraints. The more she thought about it, Stella figured that must be the case, or Doraleigh would have used the boot cuffs on her; as it was, her feet seemed to have been left free, which she confirmed by jiggling them.

Which was, in itself, a useful development. A woman who comes home and finds her husband tied up and being tortured, and then elects to leave him there, is a woman dealing with a complicated set of emotions. Something to be delved into, for sure, as soon as Stella was in a position to delve.

Which she would be in a matter of moments. Funny thing about those riot cuffs—you’d think all the rabble-rousers and protesters and demonstrators who ended up in them might have had the foresight to watch any of the dozens of YouTube videos showing exactly how to get out of them. Of course, real foresight would mean tucking a straight pin—preferably one of those nice .50-millimeter steel-shaft glass-head pins she sold at the shop—into the stretchy bit of lace covering the underwire of her bra, as she had trained herself to do before each and every mission.

Because preparation was one of those things that separated Stella from the amateurs. Which Doraleigh clearly was.

She slipped the pin from her bra and went to work on the cuffs’ roller locking tension system. It took only a few minutes of fiddling to get the pin where she wanted it between the roller lock and the strap, and her left hand was free. Thirty seconds later, her right hand was, too. It was the sort of thing that took hours and hours of practice to master, but slow times in the shop were perfect for that sort of thing.