“What’s this?” I asked again.
“It may have just been about catching Tyler Jay to you, but it wasn’t to the police department or the sheriff’s office. And, like you said, no one has ever found the guy three times. You deserve it.”
“That is awesome!”
Smiling all the way into the bank, I deposited the money into my account. Suddenly I felt much better about my job situation, and I was reconsidering my previous decision to accept White’s promotion, even if temporarily.
Ellmann and I spent the afternoon looking at houses for rent. Around four o’clock, we ended up in a nice neighborhood near Front Range Community College. Most of the homes sat on spacious lots full of mature landscaping. They were starter homes for people buying their first house or raising their families. But one of them, obviously a bit smaller than the others, sitting on one of the biggest lots at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac, appealed to me even from the street.
We met the landlord and took a tour. It was slightly smaller than the place I was moving out of, with two bedrooms and an office, a smaller living room and kitchen, and almost nothing of a formal dining room. But it had the attraction of never having been a crime scene. The two-car attached garage and enormous yard were what finally did it for me.
The guy had a contract ready for me to sign right there. I paid the security deposit and first month’s rent then took the keys.
The place needed some work, but I could move in immediately. That was ideal, because I’d signed an agreement with Fort Collins Property Management saying I’d be out of their place by seven o’clock the following evening. The landlord left shortly after our business was completed. Ellmann and I sat on the front porch, the evening quiet and warm around us.
“Have you thought any more about what you’ll do for work?”
I shook my head. “Not really. I’ll go back to work at White Real Estate for now. Nothing else has really worked out for me. Maybe that’s a sign.”
“I think I may have a job for you.”
“Really?” I asked, surprised. “Doing what?”
“Well, you tend to wind up knowing things other people would prefer you didn’t. You’re pretty good at finding people who don’t want to be found, or at least having people who don’t want to be found find you. I think you could put that talent to work.”
“Sounds interesting. I’m listening.”
“Bond enforcement agents get paid to track people down. That’s sort of your thing.”
“What’s a bond enforcement agent?”
“A bounty hunter.”
At the height of my recent ordeal, I’d just wanted my life to go back to the way it was. But, really, my life could never be the same. And not all the changes were negative.
I no longer lived with my mother (or roommates who used all my shower products). I was growing fonder of my truck now that it drove without any issues, and it had been more than a week since I’d entertained ideas of pushing it into the reservoir or in front of a train. And the last few days of my vacation were really looking up. I’d slept in three mornings in a row, no one had tried to kill me, and no one had accused me of a crime. Yesterday afternoon, I hadn’t move from the sofa. I’d watched hours of TV, and I’d already finished a whole book.
My relationship with Ellmann was, without question, the best thing to come out of it all. We were still working on getting to know one another, but I felt hope and confidence growing every day. Only time would tell regarding our longevity, but Ellmann is different; that much I already know.
My mother going to prison for a very long time was a close second. Our relationship now had the buffer of time and distance, and that was already helping. As predicted, she’d fallen into depression. The prison had put her back on her meds, which she was, so far, taking compliantly. In a few more weeks, she’d be leveled out again. A few months after that, she’d want to stop taking the pills, starting the whole cycle over again. This time, however, the prison psychiatrists would be monitoring her. It would be more difficult for her to be noncompliant—not impossible, just more difficult (this is my mother after all, and I’d gotten it from somewhere).
Work would also be different. With Paige and Sandra serving prison sentences of their own, the office would be a friendlier place. I ran almost zero risk of being fired by White, and I had never appreciated White or my job more than I did after the recent fiasco of trying to find a new one. I still felt the best thing for everyone, including me, was to find something else for the long-term, but I was content in the short-term.
So, I signed up for the certification course to begin my bond enforcement career. I didn’t know if it would work out, but Ellmann had made some valid points: I am pretty good at finding people, and I do have great instincts (or luck, as he calls it). I thought the least I could do was give it a try. I also figured it would be more like self-employment, which might make it more difficult for me to get fired.
On top of it all, I was making regular trips to see my therapist again. And she was having a field day with all the new material. Killing people, being kidnapped and shot, having people try to kill me—it had all provided the means for several more weeks of therapy.
Oh, and I’d lost eight pounds. Turns out, getting shot and spending two days in the hospital aids weight loss.
All in all, I was adjusting to my new normal. And I thought I could get used to it.
But then, I should have known, I have never been that lucky.
About the Author
Catherine Nelson has worked in healthcare for the last ten years. She is a Colorado native and currently lives in and writes from Fort Collins, Colorado. Be sure to follow her at catherinenelsonbooks.blogspot.com and visit her Facebook page at facebook.com/CatherineNelsonBooks.
Preview of The Trouble with Theft
Turn the page for a preview of the next book in the Zoe Grey series.
1
The trailer park off Harmony Road is almost completely obscured by a shopping center that had been constructed a few years before. Now, only those who already knew it was there ever spotted 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. I made my way through the roundabouts then made 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, the standard white that someone had tried to spruce 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 didn’t the court appreciate that, but the bond company, which I worked for, didn’t either. Now here I was, cuffs in my pocket and capture paperwork in my bag, assigned to haul his dumbass 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 the 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’d 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 turn, and now it was mine.
When I’d first shown up at Sideline Investigations and Bail Bonds with my toylike 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.
&
nbsp; 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, I’m not any good at running. In the last six weeks, this reality had been thrown into sharp relief. I’d discovered this new job of mine involved a great deal of running.
But this job wasn’t one I was 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 the fact 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 a.m. If I couldn’t catch him when he ran, I had to make sure he didn’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 I 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 held 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. Using the shovel, 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 inwardly that my plan was working.
I moved down the hall to the bedroom 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 barrel shotgun. An instant later there was an enormous boom and a burst of orange light. I threw myself to the floor and felt the round spray over me, 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 injury 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 burst to my feet, my left hand closing around the gun and forcing it upward, while my right hand gripped the front of the pink bathrobe and pushed 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 deep 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, thus 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 drunk bastard was a second away from slipping past me again.
In a moment of blind desperation, I hurled the shotgun at Dennison. I didn’t 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, going 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 under me. 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 shattered against the floor a foot from me. With another screech, she flung herself forward. In the faint street light pouring in through the open door, I saw her face for the first time. It was wrinkled with age, contorted with anger and a dose of madness. Her eyes were black, and her mouth was open. She had two snaggleteeth remaining, which made her look that much more demented.
“Shit,” I hissed, straining to keep a 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 under 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 had gotten 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 her hurt. 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, or 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 anymore. I threw my shoulder into her, knocking her back.
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 a
ttention, 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 Fort Collins Police Department. Tall and lean, with dark hair and brown eyes, Frye is a nice guy and a good cop. The shorter of the two was obviously young, with blond 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, he’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?”
The Trouble With Murder Page 36
