I Got You, Babe (3 page)

After a month of investigation, John had finally nabbed a nasty little scumbag who’d been beating up senior citizens and then robbing them in the hallways of their apartment buildings. Only one of the victims agreed to testify—a stoop-shouldered, gravel-voiced octogenarian who told John, essentially, that he was mad as hell and wasn’t going to take it anymore. Then the day before the trial, the old guy had a myocardial infarction and ended up a vegetable in the coronary care unit at Tolosa Medical Center. Later that day his family pulled the plug, and the prosecution’s case went to hell.

Without an eyewitness to tell his story, the defense attorney was able to fill the jurors’ minds with a truckload of reasonable doubt about the identity of the perpetrator. John showed up for the verdict, and when the jury pronounced the guy not guilty, his stomach twisted into a tight knot of fury and frustration. He tried to tell himself it was just part of the job. You won some, you lost some. The world went on. But all the while he seethed inside, hating the thought that some bad-to-the-bone, guilty-as-sin loser he’d fought to incarcerate was free to walk the streets again.

Then, as he came out of the courtroom, he saw the little bastard standing in the marble-tiled lobby, grinning like a hyena and backslapping his attorney. As if on cue, he turned and met John’s eyes. A slow, cocky smile spread across his lips, joined by a mocking stare that screamed louder than any words could possibly have.

I win, sucker. And that means you lose.

John wanted desperately to cross the lobby of the courthouse, back the guy up against a wall, and choke him until his eyes bugged out. As an officer of the law, though, he hadn’t been free to exercise that option. Instead he headed to the men’s room to cool off. He took several deep breaths and doused his face in cold water, hoping that would do the trick, and when it didn’t he spun around and whacked the paper towel dispenser with his doubled-up fist.

Now that had felt good.

It felt so good, in fact, that he did it again. And again. And again. And all the while he thought about how
wrong
it was that somebody could hurt defenseless people, take their money, then never have to answer for any of it.

Unfortunately, the bathroom fixture John was substituting for the guy’s face wasn’t in the best of shape, and slug number five dislodged it from the wall and sent it crashing to the floor. About that time, two uniformed cops wondered what all the noise was and hurried into the bathroom. To their great amusement, they saw that a certain police detective had gone three rounds with a paper-towel dispenser, leaving it bruised and battered on the floor in an uncontested knockout.

By the end of the day, John’s battle with an inanimate object was comic legend around the station, leading his colleagues to ask him if he intended to beat up a trash can next, or maybe take on a toilet or two. By then he truly regretted losing his temper, but that hadn’t stopped Lieutenant Daniels from calling him in and giving him a twenty-minute lecture on professionalism, impartiality, and the inadvisability of dropping by the courthouse for jury verdicts.

Forget guilt or innocence, DeMarco. Your job isn't to make sure justice is served. Your job is to bring the scum in so other people can make sure justice is served.

In John’s mind, those people were doing a piss-poor job of it, but in light of the circumstances he’d kept that thought to himself.

An emotionally involved cop isn’t worth a damn, Daniels went on. They do dumb things. You know, like murder an innocent paper-towel dispenser in the prime of its life.

The lieutenant had concluded his lecture by handing John the keys to his out-of-the-way cabin on Lake Shelton with the suggestion that he take a little vacation. John had read between the lines. The vacation wasn’t optional.

He’d reluctantly taken the keys and started out the door, but Daniels hadn’t been through with him yet. He’d mentioned— quite offhandedly, of course—that he’d made his annual contribution to the Joseph DeMarco Foundation to benefit the families of officers killed in the line of duty. And the timing of that remark had really pissed John off.

Eight years before, John’s father had taken a fatal bullet during what should have been a routine traffic stop, and it wasn’t by accident that Daniels chose that moment to mention the foundation set up in his honor. It was his not-so-subtle way of saying to John,
What would your father think about how you’re behaving now?

If he were alive today, Joe DeMarco, the most by-the-book cop the Tolosa Police Department had ever known, would have plenty to say about what he would deem to be another of his son’s frequent lapses in judgment. And he would have said it far more vehemently than Daniels could ever have hoped to.

Now John was forced to vegetate in a backwoods cabin for a week, with the implication that he was to do some serious soul-searching and arrive at an effective means of controlling his temper. But as badly as he hated to admit it, Daniels was right. And his father would have been right, too, if he’d been around to orate on the subject. John knew he’d gone over the edge. Find them, arrest them, move on—that was what he had to do. Other cops seemed to have no trouble maintaining that all-important professional detachment. Why couldn’t he?

He finished off the last few sips of his coffee, managing to down it before it congealed into a dark blob of pure caffeine and crawled right out of the cup. Harley filled it again, then checked his watch. He called over his shoulder.

“Hey, Marva! John’s been waitin’ twenty minutes! Move it on the steak!”

A gravelly, two-pack-per-day female voice boomed out of the kitchen: “You want it fast, or you want it good?”

“I want it today!” Harley growled.

“Shut up, you old coot! You’ll get it when I bring it!”

Harley rolled his eyes a little, then leaned over the counter, his expression becoming one of a long-suffering saint. “Thirty-three years I’ve put up with that. Can you imagine?”

John didn’t buy Harley’s “poor me” routine for a minute. He knew shtick when he heard it, and this pair had mastered it. If they were smart, they’d start collecting a cover charge for entertainment. When he was younger and a whole lot more naive, John assumed that someday he’d have a wife he could fight with right up to their fiftieth wedding anniversary. But the older he got, the less likely it seemed that would ever happen.

The kitchen door swung open and Marva appeared, a gigantic horse of a woman wearing purple polyester pants and a Hawaiian-print shirt. Her iron-gray hair was swept back in a sweat-soaked bandanna. She slapped a platter down in front of John. The chicken-fried steak lopped over the edge of the plate, dripping gravy onto the counter. It smelled like heaven.

“There you go, sweetie,” she said with a smile full of hospitality. “That rotten husband of mine doesn’t understand that good things take time.” She shot Harley a look of total disgust. Right on cue, Harley sneered back.

Marva turned to John. “Thirty-three years I’ve put up with that. Can you imagine?”

With a weary shake of her head, she clomped back into the kitchen. Harley glanced furtively in her direction, then reached under the counter. “Hey, buddy. Take a look at this.” He slid a
Playboy
onto the counter and opened it to the centerfold, displaying a healthy brunette in all her naked glory. “Miss October. Ever seen anything like her in your life?”

“Can’t say as I have,” John said, admiring the photo. Hell, it had been so long since he’d seen a naked woman, he was surprised he still recognized one.

“Didja see Miss September?”

“Sorry. Missed that one.”

“Shoo
wee
. She was better’n this one, if you like ’em blond.”

Just then Marva reappeared carrying a rack of silverware. She saw Harley’s reading material and rolled her eyes. She slapped the silverware onto the counter, then closed the centerfold and the magazine with a definitive
whap, whap, whap.

“Dirty old man,” she muttered. “Didn’t I tell you to keep your hands off the smut?”

“I’ll show you smut, woman,” he retorted, meeting her nose-to-nose. Then the edge of his mouth rose in something that just might have been a smile. “Later.”

Marva rolled her eyes. “Promises, promises.” She turned to John, talking behind her hand in a loud stage whisper. “Ever since he turned fifty, that’s all I get.
Promises
.”

As she headed back toward the kitchen, Harley gave her a smack on her generous rump. She squealed and went on into the kitchen, then looked back out the window of the swinging door, shaking her finger at him before disappearing again.

“Women,” Harley muttered. “Gotta keep ’em in line, or they’ll walk all over you.”

John wasn’t sure who was keeping whom in line, but somewhere deep inside he felt a funny twinge of longing. No, he did not want to lose half his teeth, marry a backwoods Amazon woman, and run a shabby diner in the middle of nowhere. But sometimes, in the middle of the night when it was just him alone in a double bed, he wanted
someone
so badly he could taste it. But a cop married to his job made one hell of a poor husband. A cop who had a hard time controlling his temper when faced with the realities of the job made an even worse one.

Maybe he should get a subscription to
Playboy
and let it go at that.

Renee reached the parking lot of the diner, gasping a little at the uphill jog in the cool evening air. She glanced back over her shoulder at the train, encouraged to see that it didn’t seem to be picking up any speed.

She thought about ducking into the woods behind the diner, zigzagging in and out of the dense foliage, but the piney woods of east Texas went on forever. She had no food, no water, no coat, and no sense of direction, so sooner or later she’d be buzzard bait. Besides, it was past sunset and nearly dark, and she feared snakes and bobcats and great big spiders almost as much as she feared Leandro. Spending the night hugging a tree and praying a lot didn’t seem to be the best solution.

What she needed was wheels.

In the parking lot she spied a tired old Corvette, a beat-up red Chevy pickup, and a forest green Explorer with dark-tinted windows. She took a serpentine route through the lot, nonchalantly scanning each of the vehicles for keys, then realized she was actually considering car theft.

No. She couldn’t steal a car. That would be a
real
crime, and she promised herself eight years ago that she’d never commit: one of those again.

Well, okay. There
was
the little fire she’d just started in a certain bounty hunter’s car. Destroying personal property was a crime. But really, when you thought about it, that car of Leandro’s was a rolling fire hazard anyway. It was bound to happen sooner or later. One cigarette butt flicked in the wrong direction, and
poof
!—up in smoke. She’d done nothing more than hasten the inevitable.

Renee took a deep, calming breath. All this rationalizing was making her a little woozy. She needed another plan, and fast. Surely the owner of one of these vehicles could be persuaded to take her...somewhere.

She opened the door to the diner and stepped inside. She was greeted by warm air and the smell of deep-fried everything. A teenage kid was taking his change at the register, his arm draped around a dark-haired girl. They probably belonged to the Corvette. It was a two-seater sports car, though, and Renee figured she’d be a little too easy to spot if she rode on the roof.

That left the pickup truck and the Explorer.

She matched the pickup with the overall-clad hayseed standing at the snack-cake rack trying to decide between Twinkies and Ding Dongs. She weighed the possibilities for a moment, then discarded his vehicle in favor of the Explorer with its tinted windows. Perfect for tooling around the countryside incognito. By process of elimination, she decided its owner must be the man sitting at the counter having dinner.

From the back he looked like a standard-issue country bumpkin, with a red-plaid flannel shirt stretched over a broad pair of shoulders, threadbare blue jeans, and boots. His dark hair just brushed his collar in the back, and she’d bet the rent he didn’t even own a comb. And he was undoubtedly dumb as dirt.

Okay. She had her target. But what was she going to say to get him to take her anywhere but here?

She couldn’t lie and tell him she had car trouble, or that she’d run out of gas and needed a lift. A lift where? To a phone? There was one right here. Back to her car? She didn’t have one. And if Leandro showed up, she couldn’t say he was the bad guy and expect anyone to do anything about it. He probably had ID that said he could drag her anywhere he pleased. Besides, he had a very large gun and a face that would scare the average person out of ten years’ growth. Asking for protection from him would be like asking someone if they minded pulling you out of the jaws of Godzilla.

If only she had time to think.

Praying a plan would come to her, she slid onto the stool next to the guy having dinner. “Hi, there.”

He turned at the sound of her voice. Renee blinked with surprise. This was not Jethro Bodine. This was not L’il Abner. No way, no how, not in her wildest dreams.

She’d been fooled into thinking he was a local yokel when his back was turned, but she wasn’t fooled now. This man didn’t belong here any more than she did. He looked to be in his early thirties, but she got the feeling those thirty years hadn’t come easily. A few days’ growth of beard darkened his cheeks and chin, but it couldn’t hide the sharp planes of a boldly handsome face. His skin was still sun-bronzed even in early October, his nose sharp, his jaw well defined. By contrast, his lips looked warm and sensual, a surprising feature on a face that held so much raw strength. His dark eyes regarded her with blatant intensity, as if he were assessing every breath she took and didn’t much like what he saw. Somehow he managed, with just a few seconds of eye contact, to make her feel wildly attracted and scared to death all at the same time.