Catherine Nelson - Zoe Grey 02 - The Trouble with Theft

Also
by Catherine Nelson

The
Trouble with Murder

The
Trouble with Theft

A
Zoe Grey Novel

Catherine
Nelson

Copyright
© 2011 Catherine Nelson

All
Rights Reserved

Cover
and author photos Copyright © 2014 Catherine Nelson

All
Rights Reserved

Cover
design by Sabrina Johnson

SabrinaJohnsonPhotography.blogspot.com

For
Grandma.

You
have been the heart and soul of this endeavor.

Thank
you.

Table of Contents

Author’s Note

Acknowledgements

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

About the Author

The characters,
entities, and events in this story are entirely fictitious, or used
fictitiously. No character or event is intended to represent any real person or
event, past or present.

Thank you to Mandi,
Grandma, Nancy, Sabrina, Erin O., Kacy, Erin S., Karissa, and Andi—the best
friends and beta readers a girl could ask for.

Thank you to Sabrina
for another stunning book cover, and to Nancy and Patrick for modeling. I know
it’s a boring job, but you make the cover look so good.

Thank you to Tami
Robertson for helping me make sure I got all my bounty hunter facts straight.
Any mistakes are my own, intentional or otherwise.

The trailer park off Harmony Road is
almost completely obscured by the shopping center that had been constructed a
few years before. Now, only those who already know it’s there ever spot it. I
found I was spending quite a bit of time here recently.

It was five a.m. on
Thursday morning, and this was my second trip to this particular trailer park
this week—the third to trailer parks total. I made my way through the
roundabouts then took the first right, cruising around the periphery of the
park until I came to the lot I was looking for. It was a double-wide, and plain
white, though someone had tried to spruce it up with pink shutters (horrendous
even in the dark) and a window planter. It was late June, but the planter was
empty.

Albert Dennison was
out on bail and had failed to appear for his court date earlier this week. Not
only did the court not appreciate that, but the bond company, which I work for,
didn’t either. Now here I was, cuffs in my pocket and capture paperwork in my
bag, assigned to haul his dumb ass back to jail.

Of course, I don’t do
this kind of thing for free. Each skip I drag back to the pokey is worth ten
percent of his or her bond. In Dennison’s case, eight hundred bucks. Bonds
vary, but some capture fees are six figures. I haven’t tracked down any of
those guys yet, but I’ve only been doing this four weeks.

I drove past
Dennison’s mother’s trailer and made a left down the next street. I turned
around in an empty driveway and parked near the corner, eyes on Dennison’s
place. I’d been assigned Dennison on Tuesday. This was his third bond this year
alone. He almost always skipped, but he wasn’t hard to find. He was something
of a “starter” case for newbies like me. All the other guys had taken their
turns, and now it was mine.

When I’d first shown
up at
Sideline
Investigations and Bail Bonds with
my toy-like badge and course certificate asking about work, Dean Amerson, the
office manager, had taken one look at me and paired me up with an old school PI
and skip tracker named Roger Blucher. Blue, as he was called, spent three weeks
showing me the ropes. Dennison was one of my first cases working solo, assigned
to me because I was lowest on the totem pole and needed the experience.

The majority of
Dennison’s arrests were alcohol related. There were notes in his file about his
favorite watering holes. Turned out, he wasn’t hard to find. But he was
slightly more difficult to
catch
. He may have been a middle-aged drunk,
but he was fast. Both times I’d found him, he’d bolted before I’d had a chance
to put a hand on him.

I will admit a small
degree of culpability in this, as I am not a runner. I don’t want to run, I
don’t like to run, and I’m not any good at running. In the last six weeks, this
reality had become painfully clear; I’d discovered this new job of mine
involved a great deal of running.

But this job isn’t one
I’m willing to walk away from. Six weeks ago, I’d been more or less fired from
a string of jobs for circumstances largely outside my control. One of the most
appealing aspects of my new job is that I’m something of an independent
contractor; it’s much more difficult for me to be fired. Also, I’m good at
this. Call it luck like my boyfriend Ellmann does, or dumb luck like Amerson
does, or instinct like I do; I have an uncanny knack for finding people who
don’t want to be found. Even if that sometimes means
they
find
me
.

So if I can’t run my
skips down, it just means I have to outsmart them. This isn’t usually
difficult. Which brings me back to sitting outside Albert Dennison’s mother’s
trailer at five in the morning. If I couldn’t catch him when he ran, I had to
make sure he couldn’t run.

I’d followed Dennison
last night. He was on his third bar by the time I’d finally called it quits. I
was betting he’d closed down whichever one he’d ended up in last and would be
sleeping it off right about now. His mother was home, but from my search of the
place, I knew she took sleeping pills. Plus, she was seventy. I didn’t see her
posing much of a threat.

I got out of the
truck, stuffing the capture paperwork into my pocket and holding a flashlight
in one hand. I hustled over to Dennison’s place and bypassed the front door.
The trailer had lots of windows but only two doors. I’d expected a sliding
glass door off the kitchen but instead found a regular one. I went to the back
and found a square shovel propped against the siding with some other yard
tools. I arranged it under the door handle and reinforced the other end with a
couple cinder blocks that were serving as steps. Then I returned to the front
door.

When I’d searched the
house, I’d also discovered a spare house key in a drawer in the kitchen. I’d
pocketed it, because I’d quickly learned those things come in handy. And it did
now.

I let myself in and
closed the door, taking time to lock it. If Dennison slipped past me, that
would buy a few seconds. Immediately, I heard snoring. I grinned; my plan was
working.

I moved down the hall
to the bedroom on the left I knew to be Dennison’s. As my hand twisted the
knob, I felt all the little hairs on my body stand up. Something was wrong. The
snoring had stopped.

Shit.

Before I could make my
next move, the door at the end of the hall swung open, and I saw the business
end of a double-barreled shotgun. I threw myself to the floor. An instant
later, there was an enormous
boom
and a burst of orange light. I felt
the round spray over me and heard it pepper the furniture in the living room.

As I scrambled
forward, toward the shooter, I heard the pump rack the next shot. My shoulder
burned in pain as I desperately charged the shooter. An instant before I closed
the distance between us, I caught a glimpse of fuzzy slippers and a pink
bathrobe.

Great
, I thought,
I’m going to get
shot again by a seventy-year-old woman. I’ll never live that down
.

I jumped to my feet,
my left hand closing around the gun and forcing it upward, my right hand
gripping the front of the pink bathrobe and pushing the woman back. The gun
boomed again, this time spraying the ceiling. Then Dennison’s door crashed
open.

“Let go!” the woman
squawked at me, batting at me with her free hand. “Give it back! Let go!”

I tried to yank the
gun from her hand, but she refused to let go, displaying unnatural strength
born of confused conviction.

“Lord, forgive me,” I
groaned as I let go of her robe and reached for her neck.

I closed my hand
around the front of her neck, squeezing her carotid arteries closed,
interrupting the blood flow to her brain. Within seconds, her obdurate grip on
the gun slackened. I ripped it away and turned back in time to see Dennison
fumbling at the lock on the front door.

“Stop, Albert!”

“Fuck you!” he
slurred, practically clawing at the door.

I charged forward, but
I heard the lock retract. That drunken bastard was a second away from slipping
past me again.

In a moment of blind
desperation, I hurled the shotgun at Dennison. I hadn’t been necessarily aiming,
and it never crossed my mind I was giving a gun to a bad guy.

The gun flew through
the air and banged into Dennison’s shoulder, knocking him off balance. He cried
out in surprise and pain and went down on one knee as the door swung open. Then
I was on top of him. There was a loud crash as I collided with him, and we
landed in a pile on the smelly carpet.

A brief struggle
ensued, in which I nearly vomited from the old beer stench clinging to him,
then, after a lot of swearing and name calling, I finally got him face-down on
the floor. I held his right hand behind his back as I reached into my pocket
for handcuffs. Before I could get them on, there was a screech behind me.

I flung myself
forward, lying flat over Dennison, as I glanced back. The old woman had grabbed
up a lamp, still plugged into the wall, and chucked it at me. Clearly, she’d
recovered from my assault.

The lamp jerked
against the cord and crashed to the floor a foot from me, shattering. With
another screech, she flung herself forward. In the faint street light pouring
through the open door, I saw her face, wrinkled with age, contorted with anger
and a dose of madness, her eyes black and her mouth open. She had two
snaggleteeth remaining, and they just made her look that much more demented.

“Shit,” I hissed,
straining to keep hold of Dennison struggling beneath me. “Lady, stop. Stop!”

To be fair, I think
she was too far gone to hear me. She barreled into me. Had she weighed more
than a hundred pounds, she would have knocked me over. As it was, she mostly
bounced off, landing on the floor on her ass. Her spindly legs stuck out in
front of her from underneath the bathrobe, which was frighteningly askew.

“Stop, now,” I said
again, cinching the cuff on Dennison’s right wrist. “Just stay down.”

Her black eyes were
fixed on me, and she worked to get to her feet. She seemed oblivious to the
broken lamp as it cut into her legs and hands. Dennison continued to struggle,
and as I finally got hold of his left wrist, he shot a glance at his mother.
Even in the poor light, the blood was obvious. Dennison screamed.

“Mama!” he cried,
wrenching his wrist away from me.

I groaned my annoyance
and increasing desperation and flung myself forward again, pinning his face to
the floor.

“Stop!” I ordered him.

I caught his wrist
again and managed to get it behind him, ignoring the pain in my own shoulder.
The old woman got to her knees. On all fours, she came at me again. She crashed
into me and clawed at my face and neck.

I didn’t want to hurt
her. Bottom line, she was old. Her body was fragile. If I threw her around like
I knew I could, like I so badly wanted to, I could very easily cause serious
damage, even kill her. I had enough bodies on my conscience; I didn’t want
another. But that was hard to remember as I felt her talon-like nails tear into
my skin.

“Mama! Mama!”

The old woman was
screeching in my ear, her rancid breath hot on my cheek.

I couldn’t take any more.
I threw my shoulder into her, knocking her backward.

She squealed as she
fell, and Dennison howled. I roughly clamped the cuff on his wrist and
squeezed, hearing the satisfying click over the racket. Then I was up.

The old woman was
righting herself, ready to make another run. I wished I hadn’t left my damn
cell phone in the truck. Not only did the woman need medical attention, but I
thought a few cops would be useful right about now. I couldn’t remember seeing
a phone when I’d been in the house the first time.

She threw herself at
me again, stumbling slightly over her son as he thrashed on the floor between
us. By some miracle, I managed to get a hold of her around the middle, pinning
her arms to her sides. She twisted and fought against me, but she was no match.
I lowered her to the floor, holding her in front of me as she fought for all
she was worth, screeching all the while. I began to worry she would give
herself a heart attack or a stroke. And I was seriously wondering what to do
now.

When blue and red
lights began to dance over the walls of the trailer, I was almost giddy with
relief. A moment later, two uniformed officers came to the front door, guns
drawn and flashlights on.

“Zoe? I should have
known.”

The taller of the two,
Derek Frye, is a patrol officer for the Fort Collins Police Department. Frye, tall
and lean with dark hair and brown eyes, is a nice guy and a good cop. The
shorter of the two was obviously young, with blonde hair cut in a high and
tight. I’d seen him before, but I didn’t know his name.

“Hey, Frye. I’m really
glad to see you.”

He pointed his
flashlight at the old woman and Dennison floundering on the floor. Then he
tipped his head to his partner.

“Have a look around,”
he said.

The second officer
moved down the hall toward the bedrooms, searching for anyone else inside.

“Neighbor called 911,”
Frye said to me. “Reported gunshots.”

Frye and I went back a
couple months, to shortly before my bounty-hunting days. I’d been mixed up in a
big drug/murder case in which people kept trying to kill me. Incidentally,
that’s also how my shoulder was injured: gunshot wound. Also, Frye’s a friend
of Detective Ellmann’s. I was coming to think of him as my friend, too.

“Thank God. I wasn’t
sure I could handle her on my own. Speaking of, will you call an ambulance?”

“Sure,” he said,
holstering his gun. “Wanna explain things to me?”

I tipped my head at
Dennison. “He’s FTA. When I came to escort him back to jail, his mother took
exception. She shot at me and then attacked me. She’s not well.”

Frye looked from the
old woman, still struggling in my arms, to the rest of the living room and then
the ceiling. I saw him shaking his head.

“Things got a little
out of hand,” I admitted.