Broken (4 page)

He spoke only when he absolutely had to, and unless it was something he had to hear, he didn’t bother listening to what others said. Talking struck him as an incredible waste of time.

So he didn’t bother wasting any words as he waited for Juanita, one of the receptionists at the Gearing Agency, as she came scurrying out from behind her desk. She had little pink slips of paper in her hand—messages. Three of them. The sight of them had him ready to swear, but he managed to keep it behind his teeth.

For now.

The last time he’d growled at her, she’d gotten all teary-eyed and started stammering. If it had been an act, he could have ignored her, but Juanita was a lousy actress.

“Sure I can leave,” he drawled, grabbing the doorknob and twisting it. “I open the door. I step out.” He demonstrated.

“But Martin wants you to wait! He has a job for you.”

Quinn cocked a brow and held up the check in his hand. “Just finished one.”

She frowned at the check she’d issued him five minutes earlier. “He has another one for you.” She gave him a perplexed look, as though she couldn’t comprehend that he really didn’t care that she had a job for him.

Jobs meant money. In his line of work, sometimes that money could be very, very lucrative. But he wasn’t in the mood.

“Not interested.”

She shoved a picture in front of him.

Juanita might be a lousy actress, but she definitely knew what made people tick. The picture she held had him stopping dead in his tracks. As he stared at the battered face of a young woman, rage and hatred curled through his gut.

Hell, she barely looked old enough to be out of high school.

“How old is she?” he asked, his voice rough.

“Nineteen, I think.”

“Who’s the skip? Her boyfriend?”

Juanita rolled her eyes. “No. He’s her husband, if you can believe that. She married him a few months ago. I read the report while I was waiting for you—there were a couple of domestic disturbance calls made to the local police, but this last time was the first time he’d actually been arrested. His mom ended up paying the bail and then he up and disappeared.”

“Shit.” He shoved a hand through his hair. The long, wheat blond strands fell right back into his face. He stared at the picture for another ten seconds, a muscle jerking in his jaw. “Shit. Fine. Give me the damn file.”

“NOT how I wanted to spend the day,” he muttered to himself.

His skip had proved to be pretty good at keeping a low profile, not hanging out at home, or with the few friends Quinn had managed to track down.

So he hadn’t been able to finish the job yesterday, which meant he had to get it done today. Had to, because he didn’t want to waste any more time than necessary on a fucking wife beater.

Of course, the wife wasn’t all that interested in helping Quinn find her bastard husband, as evidenced by the fact that he was leaving her apartment with nothing new.

Irritated, he shut the door behind him and made his way down the busted sidewalk to his car. It was one of those crossover SUVs, a Taurus X, black with tinted windows, equipped with GPS, and it was roomy enough to haul in the people he picked up for skipping out on bail.

He’d spent most of yesterday talking to people who knew his current skip, Louis Blanford. That had been a waste of time and today he’d gone by to talk to the wife.

She hadn’t wanted to meet his eyes, wouldn’t even really look at him, as she spoke in a hesitant, whisper-soft voice. And of course, she didn’t know where her husband was, hadn’t seen him, blah, blah, blah . . . After spending half an hour trying to get her to talk to him, he gave up and left.

“Hey, wait up.”

Quinn glanced back over his shoulder as a young woman came rushing out of the apartment. She was probably a few years older than her sister and her pleasant, round face might have looked sweet and innocent to some. The look in her eyes, though, was anything but.

Quinn looked into those eyes and saw fury. Hatred. Disgust.

Directed at her brother-in-law, he decided as she came to a stop a few feet away and said, “I can tell you where you might be able to find him.”

“Where?” He cocked his head, studying her.

“That dickhead hangs around some bar in East St. Louis.” Her blue eyes flashed from behind a thick pair of glasses. “I think it’s called
Babes
or
Bitches
—can’t remember.”

She smirked and added, “It’s Wednesday so it’s possible you might see him there tonight—Kari used to complain that she never saw him during the week because of her schedule. She had Wednesdays off, but he was always at that dumb bar because they have some sort of special on the wings.”

Quinn nodded. Something moved just out of the corner of his eye and he glanced up, saw Kari there. She wouldn’t meet his eyes, but she glared at her sister like she wanted to smack her.

“She knows you’re out here talking to me,” he said, angling his head toward the sister.

The girl set her jaw. “I don’t
care
. He won’t stop until somebody makes him and Kari won’t.” Then she sighed and brushed her hair back from her face. “I don’t know. Maybe she can’t.”

Quinn wished he could tell her that he’d make the bastard stop, but unless he put the man in the ground, it wasn’t likely.

OF course, putting him in the ground was an appealing option.

Hours later, as he dealt with the skinny, smelly son of a bitch, he decided the option was growing more appealing by the second. Then the fucker spit at him.

“Do that again and I’m going to knock your teeth down your throat.” Quinn reached into his pocket and pulled out a blue bandanna, used it to wipe the spit off his face. Then he threw the bandanna in the face of the wife beater he’d just hauled in off the streets.

The bastard’s bounty wasn’t all that much, but for guys who knocked women around, Quinn would do the job for free. If he didn’t need to pay for nice little things like food, rent, and gas for his bike.

Lewis Blanford swallowed and stared at Quinn, some attempt at bravado trying to make an appearance. “You can’t do that, fuckface. It’s illegal and I’ll sue your ass.”

Quinn lifted a brow. “You’d be amazed at what I can get away with, Blanford.” Then he smiled.

It wasn’t a nice smile. It was a smile that had made more than one man feel like pissing in his pants.

“You want to see just how much I can get away with? Try it again.” Quinn leaned in and lowered his voice as he made the threat.

Blanford went white. He swallowed, a muscle jerking in his jaw. He curled his lip in a sneer, but didn’t quite manage to meet Quinn’s gaze.

“You just wait until you get a bitch screwing you over and see how you handle it,” he muttered.

Quinn didn’t bother replying. He’d been screwed over by bitches before, he’d been screwed over by friends, and he’d been screwed over by total strangers. Hell, he’d been screwed over by his mother every day of his life, right up until the day she died.

The day he reacted to any damn thing by beating up a woman was the day he’d sprout wings and fly.

He stepped to the side and gestured to the Taurus. “You going to get in on your own or do I need to help you?”

The last time he’d been forced to “help,” it had ended with a trip to the emergency room after he’d broken a man’s arm. He really hoped that wasn’t going to be how things went this time, but he never really knew how things would play out when he located his skips.

He needed the job, he liked the money, but he was getting damned tired of some of the shit.

Blanford was apparently smarter than he looked. Of course, lice were probably smarter than Blanford looked. The jeans he wore were slung so low, they’d fallen down when he tried to run from Quinn. He’d tripped and ended up landing facedown in the dirt with his skinny, naked ass hanging out. The sweatshirt he wore was so grimy and stained with sweat, no amount of Clorox was going to clean it. He stank to high heaven, and Quinn wondered if the man had any idea soap and deodorant existed.

As Blanford climbed into the back of the car, Quinn decided he was damn glad he hadn’t ever gotten around to getting his own car to use for work. He’d just keep using company cars—there was no way in hell he’d let something that dirty in a car he owned. And even though he could do pretty much whatever was needed to bring in the people who went and skipped bail, he figured tying somebody to the top of a car to transport him might just be pushing it.

How in the hell had he gotten into this?

“Because you’re good at finding scum,” he muttered.

Not a rancher like his dad. Not the doctor-type like his twin brother. Hunting down trash seemed to be his calling.

It was a sly, insidious whisper, the echo of his dead mother’s voice. Long dead—more than twenty years had passed since she’d overdosed.

If it hadn’t been for the guy who’d been shooting up with his mom, Quinn didn’t know where he’d be right now. It turned out the police were looking for the man, though, and very enthusiastically. They’d busted the door down early that morning, discovered their suspect, lying on the floor in a drugged daze next to a corpse . . . and Quinn, in the closet.

If the police hadn’t found him that morning, if Quinn had woken up and found his mother dead, he would have hit the streets and never looked back. Which meant he wouldn’t have landed with his dad and Luke on the ranch in Wyoming. That one little twist of fate had probably saved his life. If it hadn’t been for Dad and Luke, he might have ended up a bottom-feeder like Blanford.

“Now that’s a depressing thought,” he muttered, slanting a look at Blanford. He rolled his shoulders and shoved a hand through his hair. Then, blowing out a sigh, he climbed into the car.

It already reeked, a sickening mixture of body odor and fried food. As he started the car, he hit the button for the window. A blast of hot air came through, and in the back, Blanford swore.

“Shit, man. It’s hot out. Ain’t this thing got AC?”

Quinn ignored him.