by Mandy Rosko
“Huh,” Rickman said. He was actually leaning forward in his chair, arms on his desk as his eyes scanned Alice’s profile one more time.
“Starting to think you’re the one I should be putting in handcuffs,” he said.
Alice sat in the corner, her knees drawn together, holding her mug of black coffee in both hands. She seemed to cringe a little in on herself when Rickman said those words. “Statute of Limitations is up,” she replied quietly.
It seemed that was going to be her go-to defense. Not that he could blame her, of course.
Rickman made a noise in the back of his throat. “Do I need to worry that these men might try shooting up my town?” He looked to his computer. Already, he had several profiles up. He had Jake look at them just to confirm they were correct. “These other guys are small time, but they can be dangerous when they think they’re moving up in the world or have something to prove. This other one, Robert Hammer? I can’t even believe that’s his real name.”
“He had it legally changed,” Jake said.
Rickman’s eyes widened. “Seriously?”
Jake nodded. “I know, pathetic, right?”
Alice singsonged under her breath, “Jake the Snake.”
Rickman looked over at her. “What was that?”
Jake cleared his throat. “She didn’t say anything. Anyway, yeah, Bobby’s the main problem here. He has money, enough of it that he was able to hire a bunch of other goons. Uh, you should know he’s got a bunch of dogs with him, too.”
Rickman glanced up at him. “What kind of dogs?”
Jake had to be careful with this. Very careful. “The well-trained kind. Rottweilers. I don’t think they’ll go after civilians, but they definitely have Alice’s scent, and mine now, too,” he added after thinking about it for a minute.
“Uh huh,” Rickman said, and his eyes turned hard as he stared at Jake. “They shifters?”
Jake had just been in the process of sucking back another gulp of coffee, and it was either swallow it down or spit it out.
Since spitting it out would mean getting the chief right in the face, he forced himself to swallow it all down, despite the fact it was so much that it hurt his throat and made him have to pound his own chest.
Alice spoke up just as Jake got a handle on not choking to death. “How did you know?”
“So I was right.” Rickman leaned back in his chair, lacing his fingers over his belly. Despite being in good shape, it turned out that he did have something of a softer middle.
Must’ve been from age.
“I always worry I’m going to spit that word out and people will look at me like I’ve lost it, but so far, every time, my guesses have been correct. I thought I heard you call him Jake the Snake a second ago. That what you are? A snake?”
Jake scratched the sudden itch that was on the back of his neck. “Yeah. Diamondback rattlesnake.”
Rickman whistled. “Jesus, that sounds deadly.” He nodded his head to Bobby’s most recent photo. “Is that why his face looks so fucked up?”
“I had to bite him,” Jake said quickly. “He was going to hurt Alice.”
Jake forced himself not to look back at her. He didn’t want to see the look on her face when he said something like that. It seemed too personal.
“I’m thinking your story from before makes more sense.”
“Do the rest of the police know?”
“I’d say about half the town is in on what goes on around here,” Rickman replied. “Makes it easier to get things done. Kind of hard to hire new people, though.”
Jake supposed that would be a problem. Lunch breaks must be weird when a man knew that half of his coworkers knew about the secret of the town, but the other half didn’t.
“So what are you? Something that I assume makes it easy to take things that aren’t yours?”
“Um, flying squirrel,” Alice replied.
Rickman’s thick brown brows shot up high. “No shit. Thought for sure you would’ve said a ferret or a crow.”
Jake looked back at Alice just as she shrugged one shoulder. “Most rich people don’t lock their higher windows. Sometimes they even leave them open.”
“And you just glide right in?”
Alice nodded, grinning as though remembering some fond experience. There was a light in her eyes as she spoke of it, but then she seemed to realize Jake was looking at her.
The light went out, and the grin vanished quickly.
“I don’t have to worry about you flying in through any open windows, do I?” Rickman added.
Alice got that familiar, troublesome look on her face that she got whenever something bothered her. “Well, actually, flying squirrels don’t really fly.”
“Just answer the man, Alice,” Jake said. He wasn’t in the mood to get in trouble with the chief of police.
“No,” Alice said. “I won’t be jumping through any windows. I haven’t done that in years.”
Rickman looked to Jake.
He sighed. “As far as I know, she hasn’t. I’ve been tracking her for a while and haven’t found anything that would suggest she’s been doing anything she hasn’t.”
“So how did you track her?” Rickman asked.
“She’s just not that good at hiding.”
He felt the heat of Alice’s glare on the back of his head and ignored it.
Rickman lost that serious note in his eyes, and he chuckled. “Well, aren’t you both just the pair?” he said. “I’ll make sure all my men are in their cars tonight doing rounds. If we come across anyone, I’ll find a reason to at least ticket them. They’ll get the hint they’re not welcome here.”
“You can’t arrest them?” Alice asked.
Jake already thought of this, a whole lot of times, and he already knew the answer. “Your friend Bobby already served his time. Short of catching him doing something that would get his parole revoked, no. The others he hired don’t have anything outstanding against them either. That’s probably why Scarface hired them.”
Bobby could be smart like that. The man’s smarts might work in their advantage.
“He’ll leave town,” Jake said.
“What makes you so sure of that?” Rickman asked, lifting a brow.
“I know him,” Jake said. “He’s smarter than your average drug dealer. It was how he kept his sentence light and managed to move up the ranks so much faster than normal. He’s smart enough to hire the right people, but also smart enough to know when the heat’s on. You’re right. He won’t do anything to get him in trouble with his parole board. If we can convince him that Alice is out of state, then it’s even better, because he won’t be able to follow her.”
It was bad enough the man was on the road at all. It suggested a level of crooked dealings with whoever was his parole officer.
Jake would have to look in on that. One of Bobby’s most favorite things in the world was getting leverage on someone. It was his philosophy that he could make anyone do anything, so long as he had the right amount of money or the right kind of information on them.
He shared all this with Rickman, and good man that he was, he offered to look into it.
“Meanwhile, I think you two should spend the night here,” Rickman said. “It’s not a lot, but if your old pal is anything like you said he is, I doubt he’ll come sniffing around here.”
Jake couldn’t agree more. He heard the tiny groan that Alice let out.
“You know, I never thought I’d be spending my nights as an innocent victim inside of a jail cell.”
“The doors are open. It’s not like you’re locked in,” Jake said, looking over at the barred door in question.
He and Alice were given separate cells, but they were right next to each other. It seemed the good police chief didn’t think it was proper for them to share a bunk.
Considering there was nothing going on between Jake and Alice now, he supposed that made sense. Still, he hated it. There wasn’t anything separating him from Alice, other than a wal
l of steel bars between their cells and Jake’s inability to get off his ass and go over there.
Not that he knew exactly what he would do when he got there. He knew what he wanted to do, but that was a different matter.
“I didn’t think any jail cells still used bars. I thought this would actually be, like, a concrete room with a big, thick door, you know?”
“Small town like this is probably waiting for the funding,” Jake said. “They might even be in the process of switching over soon. Who knows?”
“Why are you so irritated?”
Jake didn’t answer. He didn’t even look at her.
Their bunks were also on opposite sides of each respective cell. Probably to make sure no one in the opposite cell could reach over and strangle their neighbor while they slept. Seemed like a good idea, but it was just that much more space between them while Jake lay back and stared at the ceiling.
It was quiet, and it felt strange, considering everything that had happened, and even where they were. It had been years since Jake was a cop, and even then, it had felt like longer since he’d walked into a precinct. He just remembered a lot of ringing phones, some shouting, and maybe if he was lucky, a fight would break out while some stupid car thief tried to get away.
The adrenaline rushes on those were the best.
Nothing here. There was a secretary out front and a couple of cops at their desks. One even offered to order them some takeout from the local pub. Small towns. It seemed that if a man lived here and asked nicely, he could get a place to deliver when delivery wasn’t a normal option.
Strange.
At least Alice was now safe. All these years of looking for her, damn near obsessing over her, and now that he’d found her, he almost didn’t know what to do with her. Fantasies were always better than reality. If this was an action movie or a romance, she would’ve been in his arms by now, but when Jake turned his head, she was still all the way over there, lying on her cot, her slim, pretty fingers laced together on her flat stomach.
He watched her inhale a deep breath, watched the way those perfect breasts rose and fell, and then she spoke. “Why didn’t you tell the chief about, you know, us?”
Jake’s blood chilled inside his veins. “Us?”
She turned her head to look at him. “Yeah, us.”
Color flooded her cheeks, and she looked away so quickly it was impossible for him to not take note of it. “I mean, sorry, not that there’s an us, but what we went through. What we did.”
Jake cleared his throat as quietly as he could. “It wasn’t important.”
A brief silence. “It wasn’t?”
“No,” Jake said, shaking his head a little. “It has nothing to do with the case now. It’s not information that would help catch or detain Bobby either. No point.”
Not that he wasn’t fairly certain Rickman didn’t already suspect something. Jake wasn’t sure what he’d expected from the chief of police around these parts, but this guy was smart. He didn’t seem like the type who would be fooled too easily over anything. Which meant Jake was pretty damned grateful the man hadn’t said anything.
Jake had followed Alice all over the country, searching her out when he didn’t have to, when she wasn’t even his problem anymore. How could anyone not realize something had been going on?
Alice didn’t say anything for the longest time. “He’s not going to give up until I’m dead, is he?”
Jake didn’t need to think about what he said before he said it. “I won’t let that happen.”
“You can’t stop everything.”
“I can stop him.”
He’d done it once before. With her help, of course, but he’d still done it. Getting shot in the process hadn’t been the least bit fun, but he could remember taking a great deal of satisfaction from the look in Alice’s eyes as she tried to stop the bleeding. She’d been so scared for him. It was kind of sick how pleased he’d been at the time, and how much he’d hung onto that specific memory, but oh well. It couldn’t be helped.
More silence. He couldn’t fucking take this. They used to talk about everything, for hours on end. Granted, a lot of what he had to tell Alice had been lies and half truths mixed in to keep himself from getting confused, but they’d had a connection back then that Jake had never had with any women before or since.
Now it was like they couldn’t speak more than a couple words at a time to each other. It was driving him insane.
“I’m sorry about your father,” Jake said.
From the corner of his eye, he saw as Alice snapped her head to the side to look at him.
Fuck, maybe he shouldn’t have brought it up, but it was too late now.
It was several years too late to offer his condolences, but he wanted to do it. “I, ah, heard about it a couple of years ago. I’m sorry.”
Alice looked away much more slowly than when she’d originally looked to him. “I guess he brought it on himself. Kind of like me.”
“Don’t say that,” Jake said, shutting his eyes. He was half annoyed and half in despair that she would even make a connection like that. He didn’t ever want her to think she deserved something like that.
The way her father had gone was just…bad.
Jake could remember feeling insanely angry at the man. When he’d learned he was the reason why Alice had even fallen into the life she had, that she’d had to take up his bad habits to clean up his debts, well, it had been easy to forgive her and do everything he could to make sure she got away.
He’d almost succeeded. Alice was right. The statute of limitations was up, and he sure as hell hadn’t been able to track her down because he’d followed her thefts. Mainly because she hadn’t been stealing.
If it wasn’t for Bobby, she could be living the life he’d wanted her to live, back when she first told him how she’d fallen in with such a crowd. Back when he’d wanted to risk his cover, his life, everything, just to get her out.
Being so deep under had colored his world view for a while, and meeting her…he’d needed to save her.
Alice blew out a long breath. “Well, at least they gave us extra blankets and pillows.”
Jake laughed.
*****
Jake had requested that he be alerted every time there was so much as a knock at the front desk, so they’d given Jake a radio, like the ones the cops all wore on their shoulders.
He wasn’t wearing it, but Alice still liked to pretend and imagine what it could possibly look like if he did. What would he look like if he were in a uniform? Probably really good. He’d looked really good, even when he’d been thinner, posing as another gangster wannabe.
She hadn’t been able to see through him at the start, but eventually she had. He’d given away too much to her for her not to know something was up.
When the radio crackled and the officer at the front told them their sandwiches had arrived, Alice tensed. Her fight or flight instinct was back up and flaring, and it was mostly on the flight side, as per usual.
But nothing happened. No gunfire sounded, and when Jake went to check everything out first, he came back with a soft smile and a couple of bags. “We’re invited to eat with our hosts. Wanna come and sit with me?”
Alice got to her feet. “Sitting with a bunch of cops? How could I resist that?”
“Not a cop anymore.”
“You’re cop-ish enough.” Jake actually laughed at that. It felt good to make him laugh. Felt almost normal.
It was a little awkward sitting with two people in blue uniforms. One was a dark-skinned man, and the other was a buff-looking woman with her hair pulled back in a tight bun. The delivery guy was still there, and that made Alice insanely nervous until she reminded herself she wasn’t in the city anymore.
Small towns. So long as television and books hadn’t lied to her, then that at least meant everyone knew almost everyone else around here. Bobby wouldn’t be able to hire someone to pretend to be the delivery boy in Woodland Creek, and these cops were tal
king to the kid like they knew him.
They tipped him and sent him on his way. The guy must’ve been in late high school, or just starting off in college, because there was definitely something of interest in the way he looked at her and Jake. Nothing suspicious, not really, but he was smiling, as if he was excited just to be there. This was probably more action than he’d seen in a long time. Did the Woodland Creek Police Department ever have to arrest anyone for anything other than drunk and disorderly on a Friday or Saturday night?
Alice still thought it was weird sitting between two cops and Jake as she ate, but the food was insanely, stupidly delicious. She shut her eyes and actually moaned because of the flavors in her mouth.
Jake stared hard down at his sandwich, as if he was trying to find out what was so interesting about it. Or just embarrassed for the noises she made. The female police officer actually chuckled. “Better than the fast food shit you got in the city, right?”
Alice nodded eagerly. It was better than every fast food and greasy spoon she’d come across in all her travels.
Screw the danger. She’d set up shop permanently in Woodland Creek if it meant getting food like this.
Even though it was strange to be sitting among the police without being under arrest, as well as sitting with Jake, trying to get the mental image of him as both a thug and a cop out of her mind, she forgot about all of that quickly.
The two police officers were nice, and the food was good, too.
Maybe she should’ve turned herself into the cops a long time ago. That might’ve saved her one huge headache when it came to running for her life from Bobby, or the goons he sent after her.
She was innocent now. Sort of. Alice was aware that just because she could no longer be arrested for her crimes, it didn’t mean she was suddenly an angel, but now that she was safe from that, why hadn’t she gone to the police?
Too worried they wouldn’t care, or wouldn’t take her seriously, she supposed. That was it. Also…
Alice glanced up at Jake, who was still staring down at his food while he ate it. He might’ve been ignoring her, but then again, he’d always been a little territorial around his food.
