“In the business of enforcement—” Ice Veins shrugged “—these misunderstandings sometimes happen.”
“But we’re talkin’ Choke here, boss. We worked together for nine, ten years, and this dude—”
Ice Veins’s tone went glacial. “But when it comes to my final payment, which I’ve doubled to fifty thousand, I will tolerate no more misunderstandings—or any more delays.”
Unlacing her hands to glare a challenge, Sierra shook her head. “You and I both know it’s twenty-five, and I’m not about to pay a penny more.”
The small man in the oversize coat, which Ace realized was a rich shade of deep purple, scowled down at her. “I’ll tell you what the debt is...and the interest once you miss a payment and defy me.”
Agile as a soccer pro, he landed a vicious kick against Sierra’s side, one hard enough that Ace could hear the thud—and possibly a crack.
At her cry of pain, Ace yelled, “Stop!” boiling over with a homicidal fury he never would have guessed that he possessed.
But as Sierra moaned, he was drawn up short by the bald thug’s sneer as he sighted along the length of his gun barrel.
“Go on,” the huge man taunted. “Give me an excuse to pull the trigger. Then my boss’ll take your money and sit back and watch while I kick the legs off this little deadbeat so he won’t have to dirty up his fancy boots.”
Ignoring the oversize threat for the moment, Ace focused on Ice Veins—and on controlling his own desire to grab hold of that red beard and jerk the loan shark’s sadistic head off his shoulders. Ace reminded himself he had to play this smart, to draw things out until help arrived. The help that was his only chance of saving both his and Sierra’s lives. “Kill me, and you won’t see a penny. I’m not a man who troubles with cash dealings—” jerking his chin toward Sierra, who was struggling to make it to her hands and knees, he added “—or a man who ever pays full price for damaged goods.”
Shaking his head, Ice Veins spared him a perplexed look and pointed his knife in Ace’s direction. “Just who the devil are you—and what do you want with the bounty hunter?”
“He’s gotta be working with her,” the bald goon said, “the way he took up for her before.”
“The hell I am,” Ace ventured, deciding to try an unexpected tack. One that might just appeal to the man’s desire to avenge his family member, along with his avarice. “The truth is, she came to bring me in, just the way she did your nephew. She packs a hell of a punch, too.” He gestured toward his swelling temple. “She’d just hammered me when your boys interrupted the proceedings—and I’m willing to pay to have a little private time with this lovely lady by myself. This lady...in my own lair, with my own weapons of choice.”
“What?” Brows rising, Ice Veins shook his head and asked uneasily, “That makes no—what exactly are you wanted for?”
Ace caught Sierra’s glance, a spark of comprehension in it, before she turned a seemingly desperate gaze back toward Ice Veins. One hand cradling her injured ribs, she begged, “Please don’t take this monster’s money. Let me zip-tie his hands and take him in, collect the reward and—then I promise you I’ll pay you every penny. The twenty-five thousand can just be a down payment.”
“Or we can do an electronic transfer,” Ace said. “Have that money in your account in five, ten minutes, tops.”
“No!” she cried. “Don’t you get it? This man’s a stone-cold killer. A sick sadist. Surely, you’ve read about his victims in the papers. The things this creep will do to me—” She threw in a shudder so convincing that Ace was almost disgusted with himself.
“They’re lyin’,” the bald ox insisted. “He shot Choke, I’m telling you.”
“What’s done is done,” Ice Veins told him before Ace could offer up some explanation. “All I really care about is how fast you can drop that cash, all fifty thousand, into my account.”
When the bald thug kept muttering under his breath, Ice Veins ordered him to pipe down. “And while you’re at it, shut her up, too. You got a handkerchief for a gag, don’t you? And tie her hands, too. I don’t need her arguments while I’m trying to do business.”
As the thug descended on her, Ace glimpsed Sierra’s face go pale with terror in the moonlight. Trust me, he wanted more than anything to tell her, even as sickening fear crawled up the back of his throat.
With no choice but to play out his ruse, Ace turned his attention to the loan shark. “Just make sure my merchandise stays in good condition,” he told Ice Veins as he pulled the cell phone from his pocket. “I’ve got big plans for her later.”
Ice Veins frowned, discomfort playing over his pinched face, before chuckling and slapping Ace’s shoulder. “Soon as that money hits my account, you can have yourself as big a night as you want. Bought and paid for.”
“I’ll need your account and routing numbers,” Ace said as he opened up his banking app. As he began punching in digits, he kept wondering how long he could string this all out—and if he’d bet tragically wrong to rely on Spencer Colton’s ability to gather reinforcements and make it here in time.
How could he be certain that Spencer had even gotten his text? Mentally, Ace kicked himself, wishing he had copied the message to Ainsley and maybe another of their siblings, too, asking them to call 911 immediately just to be certain.
“Where is it? Where’s the money?” Ice Veins demanded, staring at his own phone. “Has it left your account yet? I’m not seeing it.”
“Let me double-check,” Ace said. “What was that routing number again?”
Clearly impatient, Ice Veins once more ran through the coding until finally, Ace had no choice but to show the man what he was doing and hit the send button, transferring a very real sum of money into the account of a lowlife loan shark.
But with his and Sierra’s lives on the line, Ace told himself the money was the least of his issues.
Or so he thought until he clicked, and a new message splashed across his screen.
Accounts Frozen. Please Contact Customer Support.
His mouth going dry as ash at what he presumed to have been a law enforcement action, Ace turned the screen away, praying Ice Veins hadn’t seen it.
“There it goes,” he said, trying to disguise his rapidly escalating stress level. “It shouldn’t take more than five, ten minutes, tops, depending on how fast your institution is at processing this sort of transfer, and—isn’t it one of those weird bank holidays? So it could be a little slower than a normal—”
“Hand me over that phone,” Ice Veins demanded, his small eyes glittering like the knife’s edge. “I need to see where you sent it. And I need to see what you’re playin’ at right freakin’ now.”
Chapter 5
With the bald goon looming over her, holding a filthy-looking gag in his ham-size fist, Sierra managed to look past him, to cut a look in Ace’s direction. In that moment she saw everything in his face. Regret. Sorrow. A wish that they had had more time to explore the astonishing but undeniable connection that had flared to life like a struck match between them. Or maybe it was the unspoken apology for what his roll of the dice was about to cost them both.
It was enough for her to take her own gamble that a distraction might save at least one of them. With a determined yell, she summoned every bit of strength she had to push upward off her bent legs and catapult her bowed head up and forward—
Spearing herself straight into Bald Thug’s crotch.
Bellowing at the direct hit, he keeled over, reflexively squeezing off a round.
With the whine of a bullet passing her ear, Sierra rolled away and clumsily struggled to get her cramped legs underneath her and working once again. To her right, Ace and Ice Veins were both shouting at once—the two men blurs of motion.
“Freeze, police!” boomed a loud voice as a blinding spotlight forced her to raise an arm to shield her eyes.
An instant later the beam was eclipsed by the huge shape of the bald goon, coming at her with a roar. With no time to evade him and no doubt he was about to kill her, Sierra could only shriek before the crack-crack of gunfire brought him crashing down, bloody blooms erupting on his upper chest from the officers’ bullets.
Still panting on the ground only inches away, her gaze glued to the fish-eyed dead man, Sierra heard an officer order, “Drop the weapon! Drop the weapon now!”
Ace yelped in pain, a sound followed by deep, aggressive barking moments before a police dog, a big chocolate Lab, charged past him, leaping toward the man in the long purple coat.
A vicious sneer on his face, Ice Veins raised the knife and swung it downward, clearly intent on stabbing the K-9. Instead, Ace, blood plastering his shirt to his chest, slammed into him with one broad shoulder, taking both to the ground.
Sierra struggled to get up, desperate to help Ace and find out how badly he’d been injured. But figures emerged from the darkness, uniformed and plainclothes, obscuring her view and shouting at her, “Stay down! Don’t try to move and keep your hands in sight!”
* * *
The next few hours passed in a blur of pain, stress, and exhaustion as she and Ace were both transported to the hospital in separate ambulances. While he was whisked off to surgery to close his wound, she did her best to explain to Sergeant Spencer Colton what had happened—and convince him that the “evidence” against Ace deserved a second look.
Before she could make much headway, however, a technician rolled her from the exam room for X-rays. Eventually, she was released, and an officer drove her back to her lodging outside of town before asking her to remain available for follow-up interviews.
“I’ll be happy to answer more questions,” she told him, “but I can promise you my answers will make a lot more sense once I’ve had a chance to sleep off the pain meds they gave me in the ER.”
Startled awake by her ringing cell phone late the following morning, Sierra jerked upright—or tried to—before crying out as pain arced around her injured rib cage.
Blinking in her room, where she’d come to catch a few hours’ rest, she thought again of Ace’s surgery. Though the police had placed him under guard, refusing to let anyone see him, she’d at least been able to reach his sister Ainsley by phone before collapsing into bed and had gotten Ace’s sister to promise to let her know how he was doing...and whether he’s asking to see me.
Okay. That last part was pure fantasy. Ridiculous, considering the hurdles he was facing. Dealing with a deep slash across his upper chest from Ice Veins’s blade, what Sergeant Colton had indicated were looming criminal charges and a raft of complicated family issues, Ace surely had far more on his mind than the bounty hunter who’d dragged him from the relative safety of his hidden bunker to a near-death situation.
Before he could be transferred, she promised she would pull herself together and head back to the hospital, where she fully intended to plead her case to be allowed to see him.
Her phone’s Caller ID showed the name Brie Stratford, a fellow boxer with whom Sierra sometimes worked out at the gym or grabbed the occasional lunch or coffee when their schedules weren’t too hectic.
“Sorry, Brie. Can’t spar today. I’m out of town on a job,” Sierra told her, keeping the details to herself of how badly wrong the job had gone.
“So I’ve heard. At work.” Brie was using her cop voice, a sure sign that she was calling in her capacity as a detective with the Organized Crime Bureau of the Las Vegas Metropolitan PD.
“Oh?” Sierra said. Though she’d known plenty of officers over the years, and for the most part got on with them well, Sierra was a firm believer in maintaining personal space. With cops, with friends, with anyone she sensed who might get close enough to eventually want more than she was willing to give. Or to take too big a chunk of her when they eventually walked out of her life forever, the way her mom had the day before her seventh birthday.
“Word is you took down Ice Veins Harris,” Brie said flatly, “and two of his muscle.”
“It wasn’t me.” Sierra felt fear twisting through her. Because that was the kind of rumor that could prove hazardous to her health with the loan shark’s associates. “Ice Veins got tangled in his own feet, trying to slash his way out of a situation when the cops showed up. He ended up falling on his own knife.”
Sierra could still hear the moans, the gurgling and choking from before he’d mercifully gone silent. She shuddered with the memory, thankful beyond measure that she, Ace Colton and the young motel clerk, who’d regained consciousness as he was being loaded into an ambulance, had all left that bloody scene alive.
“Considering the kind of grief he’s caused so many people, that’s practically poetic justice,” Brie said of the loan shark.
“And the local cops took down his thug,” Sierra quickly added, deliberately leaving out Ace’s name out of the discussion. Because it was bad enough that her name was linked to the deaths. In custody and injured, Colton didn’t need more trouble coming his way.
“Well, nobody in the department’s taking up a collection to send flowers to any of the funerals for those three, I can tell you,” Brie said drily, clearly referring to the second goon found dead in the brush, as well. “But are you all right? I’ve heard...some things.”
Sierra sucked in a deep breath, triggering a flare of pain in her side. When she’d recovered, she quoted Brie’s response after the last time Sierra had popped her too hard during sparring. “All right, enough.”
Because in the tough, male-dominated worlds where each of them operated, it mattered, being a woman who could take a hit and stay on her feet. And nobody wanted to hear them whine about it, either.
Brie gave an irritated snort. “I’m not asking as an opponent, looking to find a weakness I can exploit the next time we’re in the ring. I’m asking as a friend here. Why didn’t you tell me you had trouble with that dirtbag, the kind of trouble that sends three men all the way to Mustang Valley, Arizona, of all places, looking for you?”
A cold chill had Sierra’s skin erupting into gooseflesh. Swallowing came hard, her throat so tight it felt as if she were trying to choke down a fistful of poker chips.
“Sierra? You still there?” Brie pressed after the delay grew awkward.
“Where did you hear that?” Sierra blurted, her pulse popping.
“From one of my CIs first,” Brie said, referring to the confidential informants used by the department. “And five minutes later from a colleague, who’d caught wind of it elsewhere. This is big news on the Strip, Sierra. Which leads me back to my question. Why didn’t you tell me you were tied up with that loan shark?”
Sierra’s tongue lay heavy in her mouth, the habit of her silence too powerful to break.
“I can’t help if you won’t tell me.” As Brie spoke, Sierra could picture her friend, who fought a couple of weight classes above her, staring down at her, her expression a mixture of concern and exasperation. “And I can never be a real friend if the sharing only runs one way.”
Sierra squeezed her eyes shut, knowing Brie was right. Whenever the two of them got together, the tall detective would blow off steam about her frustrations over what she saw as bureaucratic interference at work or her live-in boyfriend, Max, who imagined he could cook but always left her kitchen a disaster. Or she’d gripe about her mother, who wouldn’t quit trying to set her up with higher-earning prospects—even when poor, hapless Max was in the same room. All the while Sierra, whose own mother had never once checked in after skipping town on her and her father, remained locked up as tight as Fort Knox, her own problems far too complex, too dangerous to share.
But she was terrified of losing one of the few friends who’d stuck by her since her father had fallen ill. Terrified enough that she finally forced herself to admit, “It was my dad, his problem. His gambling debt. Not mine to share.”<
br />
“That’s some inheritance he left you.”
“Yeah...but Ice Veins wanted more from me than money. He wanted his nephew turned loose. You know that homicide where he—”
“I know the one. You brought him in. How that creep ever got bail in the first place...”
“I’m not sure what changed that caused Ice Veins to get mad enough to head down here in person, but—”
“Eddie Harris was stabbed,” Brie said, naming the nephew. “Shanked over at the jail, either by one of Ice Veins’s enemies or maybe just some fellow traveler who held a grudge over one of his past exploits.”
“He still breathing?”
The detective murmured in the affirmative. “Breathing, talking—maybe even finding a way to get out the word that if a certain female bounty hunter turned up dead, there could be a substantial reward.”
“What?” Waves of shock rolled over Sierra. “Eddie’s ordered a hit on me?”
“I’m not telling you this officially, because we’re still working to confirm the rumors, but as a concerned friend, yeah. That’s exactly what I’m saying.”
“He did this from the jail infirmary?”
“He had to be transferred for surgery, under guard, of course. But slip-ups can happen, sometimes bribes—or maybe the word was put out via another associate. You could try waiting for the official word, see if I could maybe scrape together enough funding for protection.”
“You don’t sound very confident.”
“Because, speaking strictly off the record, I like your chances a whole lot better if you stay far away from home.”
“But what about—I can’t just—What about my Rocky?” Two years earlier, the battle-scarred gray tomcat had marched inside her townhouse and decided he was staying where the living was easy and the canned food plentiful. With his chewed ears and half-feral nature, Rocky Balboa would never be the most affectionate of cats, but Sierra had seen to the old reprobate’s vetting and arranged for the retired schoolteacher down the block to care for him whenever she was out of town.
Hunting the Colton Fugitive Page 6
