The Bad Judgment Series: The Complete Series

by Leigh James

  “You’re staying in the car from now on,” I said, as we drove towards the outer rim of the parking lot so we could steal license plates. “Everybody notices you.”

  “Everybody notices you,” he said, and leaned over and brushed his fingertips against my face. “Because you’re so beautiful.”

  He hit the brakes, leaned over, and kissed me slowly, even though we didn’t have time for that. “There’s no one else I’d rather be on the run with,” he said, leaning down and kissing my neck.

  “Mmm….that feels good,” I said, kissing him back, rubbing his chest eagerly with my hands, feeling myself get all fired up.

  He pulled back and smiled at me, putting distance between us. “I know, it does. But I need to keep you safe,” he said. “That need’s gonna have to win, every time. Even over all the other pressing ones.”

  “Boo,” I said, disappointed. I was still hot and flushed by his touch, even though I knew he was right.

  “Boo hoo,” he said, and took his foot off the brake.

  I exhaled a shaky breath and scanned the parking lot for suitable plates. I mentally shook my head at myself. When had I become such a slut?

  “I don’t know what’s gotten into me,” I said.

  “Me, babe,” Walker said, and the smug look was back. “It was me.”

  * * *

  We made it to South Beach area of Miami in the early hours of morning, well before the sun came up, just like Walker had predicted. We misappropriated some more plates right outside of Fort Lauderdale, so at least the Audi would look local for the rest of the night. We were probably going to have to ditch it soon. And then maybe misappropriate a car.

  Even though we were the good guys, we were sure doing lots of illegal things. I didn’t let myself think about it too much. I couldn’t. I told myself that it was a necessity, and that someday, when we could get the real killers arrested, all of this would be worth it.

  I hoped.

  We checked into a cheap hotel a few blocks from the beach. Walker didn’t want to.

  “We can’t afford a luxury hotel,” I argued with him. “We need to stay somewhere off the radar. People in a nice hotel would notice us.” I pointed to my Bruins hat and my dirty black T-shirt.

  “I hate cheap hotels. The sheets make me itch,” he said, looking at the sign for the hotel we were considering: The Majestic. “It makes me want to sleep with my socks on. And I don’t have any socks.” He looked at me, his brow furrowed.

  “Don’t be such a snob,” I said, grabbing his arm and pulling him through the door. We needed to get out of sight. Socks or no socks.

  The Majestic had seen better days, I’d give him that. The clerk, a reedy young fellow wearing mascara, barely looked at us. “It’s one twenty-four for the night,” the clerk said. “I need to put a hundred-dollar block over that in case you break anything.”

  “We’d like a room facing the street,” Walker said. He handed him several prepaid credit cards. The clerk smirked when he saw them; he probably thought we were a couple having an illicit affair, not wanting to be traced.

  Which is actually what we were. Sort of.

  Walker put our backpacks in the dingy room and checked all the windows, playing with the blinds and ascertaining what he could see of our surroundings under the streetlights. He looked around the room with distaste. “I was hoping for an upgrade from our place in Southie, or at least for something Art Deco,” he said. “But this is just depressing. It’s good for surveillance, though.”

  “Where’s the office?” I asked.

  “It’s downtown, right off Ocean Drive,” he said, pointing out the window to the left. “We’ll go first thing in the morning.” He sat down on the bed and yawned.

  “You must be exhausted,” I said.

  “I’m fine. It’s funny, I was so used to living the hard life in the military — rough places to stay and never enough sleep — but being in the corporate world made me soft, I guess. It’s just going to take some time. Getting used to living lean, again. No Egyptian cotton sheets and no filet mignon.”

  “Now it’s all drive-thru’s, stolen cars and motels,” I said and shrugged. There were worse things, I knew. “Take a shower and get some sleep. I’ll take the first watch.”

  “Oh no, young lady. You’re coming with me. Shower first, then bed. Together. We can start being paranoid and taking surveillance shifts after we get some rest. Otherwise, we’ll start hallucinating. Besides, we have some unfinished business I have to take care of.” His eyes flashed at me.

  He stood up and grabbed my hand, taking me into the bathroom. He turned the water on for the shower and steam started filling the room, and he took off my hat, my shirt, my bra. He kissed my neck and I pulled him to me, taking off his shirt and the rest of his clothes, glorying at the muscles that tautly covered his massive chest. We stepped into the shower and the hot water ran over us, washing away the heat and the stress of the last two days.

  Walker gently ran soap over my body. While he did this, he stopped being sexy, if that was possible — he just seemed like he wanted to take care of me, to make me comfortable, to make me feel normal. I did the same for him, kissing him lightly on the lips as we got out.

  We dried off and things shifted between us. Walker was looking at me with his jaw set. I could feel the waves of heat rolling off of his body. I watched as he became hard, looking at me, and I went to him. I didn’t care that the room was ugly and the carpet was stained. I didn’t care that we’d shot people today and stolen two sets of license plates. I loved him. He kissed me slowly, running his hand down my neck, my side, almost as if I might break.

  I pressed up against him, not able to tolerate any distance between us. As soon as his cock touched me, he moaned and then he kissed me deeper. The ever-present ache between my legs became a throb as I ran my hands down the outside of his powerful thighs, his luscious, thickly-muscled ass. He continued to kiss me deeply and then he put his hands on me, lifting me up so that I was pressed against him. I wrapped my legs around him and he carried me to the bed.

  “The hotel’s not so bad,” I whispered to him as he started to nuzzle and suck my nipples. He drew lazy circles around them with his tongue while he rubbed himself in between my legs, making himself slick with my wetness.

  “I’m starting to hate it less,” he said, and put the tip of his cock in me. He held himself above me for a minute, and I shuddered, waiting for him to enter me.

  “Wait….” he said, pulling back and standing up. I groaned in frustration as he went and grabbed a condom from one of the boxes. He rolled it on expertly and then came back to the foot of the bed. He grabbed me by the back of the knees and slid me down towards the edge, so that my ass met the bottom of the bed. He got on his knees, spread my legs slightly apart, and tentatively kissed me. I moaned in pleasure, but this wasn’t what I wanted. I’d been close to getting what I wanted a few seconds ago. He kissed me again, making heat and pleasure flush my body. He started licking my clitoris, intermittently sucking on it.

  “Please,” I said.

  “Doesn’t that feel good?” he whispered, but he knew the answer. He put his mouth around my clit and sucked hard. I threw my head back and cried out, running my hands over his head.

  “Don’t make me come like this,” I said, desperate to have him inside me. “I just want….”

  “This?” He said. He stood up at the foot of the bed, his hardness pressing against me.

  I put the heels of my feet on his ass and tried to draw him into me, little by little. I was so wet, he was sliding in easy, even with the condom. Please, I thought, but he was being merciless, making me wait as he moved in slowly, inch by hot, throbbing inch. Finally, he moved his hips and thrust all the way into me, to his hilt, and we both cried out in relief. He took my knees and pushed them back towards me, bending me open, so he could get deeper. He thrust into me over and over again. I felt my body start to shake, to shudder, to shatter. But Walker wasn’t stopping. He fucked me hard
, through my orgasm, and then he came apart, moaning my name. He collapsed on top of me afterwards, breathing hard, and I decided that the lowly Majestic might be my most-favorite hotel ever.

  Chapter 6

  In the early morning heat, South Beach smelled vaguely like the ocean, but further from the water it smelled like any city during the hot, humid months — like decomposing trash and stale urine. The neighborhoods around the corner from Ocean Drive were a far cry from the Art Deco opulence of the restaurants, bars and fancy hotels that fronted the beach. There were low, stucco office buildings with shingles dangling from them. There were lots of signs for quick-cash companies, and also lots of modeling agencies. I'd never been to Miami before, but this section seemed seedy, weeds growing up through the cracks on the sidewalk, paint chipping from some of the signs, like a fancy nail polish that hadn't been properly removed and looked garish in the morning light.

  It was very early and very quiet, except for the people out on their morning runs. We walked down the boulevard and I frowned at the business signs. “Blue’s office is right between a bunch of modeling agencies?” I asked.

  “South Beach has a ton of modeling agencies. Plus, Lester set the whole thing up,” Walker said, pulling the brim of his hat down and clasping my hand. “So you really shouldn't sound so surprised.”

  “Lester Max,” I said, in an assessing tone, remembering his shiny, copper penny of a face. “Did you ever trust him?”

  “I told you — I don't trust anyone. Except for you. And Adrian,” he said, his voice trailing off for a second in a way that made me know he missed her. “But to the extent that I had to — yes, I did trust Lester. He really only wanted to make money. Money was his thing. And I paid him enough of it that I thought I was ensuring his loyalty.”

  “I guess,” I said, “if he's responsible for what's happening, he was greedier than you thought.”

  “He can’t be solely responsible,” Walker said, squinting at the signs. “But he's definitely greedier than I thought. And that's saying something.” We kept walking, reading the building numbers. We were getting closer.

  “Lester is not a personal risk kind of person, though,” Walker continued. “He doesn’t mind being risky with other people’s assets. But not his own. He always wanted to keep every dime he made — that’s part of the reason he was always fighting with his ex-wives. He’d rather spend it on legal fees than share it with them.”

  “Whatever it was then, it must have seemed like a risk-averse scheme,” I said. “If he was taking money and giving it to himself and to my law firm, he must have felt like there was some guarantee that he would come out on top.”

  “Someone had to have some real bandwidth to give him a guarantee like that,” Walker said.

  “Someone like the United States Government,” I said. My thoughts swirled around me. “But why? Let’s say it was the government that planted the bomb on your boat. They tried to kill you and it didn’t work. And then they fabricated charges against you, to put you away for a long, long time, so they could make nice with your Board and whoever your new CEO was going to be. Then they could help themselves exclusively to your technology.

  “So why would they have been following us like that, breaking into your house and bugging it? Why did they kill the delivery guy and set the bomb off outside the firm?”

  I stopped for a second. I didn’t like where my thoughts were leading me.

  “Umm…they wanted to follow me? And if I did something they didn’t like — kill me?” Walker asked, his voice slightly sarcastic.

  “But they’d tried that,” I said, my brow furrowing, “and they were trying an alternative. Bringing you to court. I don’t know why they’d wait to drag you into a public trial to kill you again,” I said. My head was spinning. The conversation was making me sick. I didn’t want to face that the people that I’d believed in, that I’d trusted, could be so dirty.

  And that it was over money.

  Money is at the heart of this, I remembered Mimi saying, back when I'd called her, desperate for advice. It's not something dignified like honor or love. Follow the money, she’d said.

  "Walker," I said, stopping and pulling him over to the side of the sidewalk. I hoped it was safe to do so, but so far, we were alone out here — it was five thirty in the morning, the only people who had passed us were roller-bladers and runners with large headphones over their ears. “Maybe they were following…me. Maybe they were after me because I’d figured something out, something that was going to get in the way of what they wanted — of all the money they wanted.”

  “It’s definitely possible,” he said. “Maybe the payments from Miami were what they looked like. Payoff money. Maybe they knew that you were onto something, and it was going to screw up everything they’d been working for.” Walker made a fist with his hand, and casually hit it against the wall. “If that’s true — if what happened after my indictment was all about you — I’m probably going to have to kill some people.”

  I sighed and rolled my eyes at him. “You can’t do that,” I said. I watched him hit the wall again; this time it was a little harder. I grabbed his hand. “Stop. We have to be better than them. We have to prove who did what. We can’t kill anybody — that’s not justice. It’s just two or more wrongs not making a right.”

  “If you say so,” he said, and his voice was tight. He raised my hands to his lips and kissed it. “Some people think that money can save them,” he said. “They don’t understand that they can’t take it with them when they go. If they try to hurt you again, I might have to teach them that lesson.”

  “You should explain it to them,” I said, knowing full well that wasn’t what he meant. “You would know. You’re the billionaire.”

  “I don’t think I’ll feel like explaining when I finally get my hands on whoever’s responsible. I think my hands are going to be too busy throttling them.” He looked at me and smiled while I looked at him and frowned in disapproval. “Let’s get going,” he said, grabbing my hand and pulling me back down the street. “We have errands to run after we check out the office and get breakfast.”

  “What errands?” I asked.

  “You’ll see.”

  * * *

  The Miami outlet of Blue Securities appeared to be a one-room office at street level. There wasn’t even a sign out front. We only found it because we had the street address I’d written down in my notes back in Boston, from the Secretary of State’s website. The office name was listed with about seven others above the mailboxes in the entrance alcove. It was written with cheap, shiny stickers; the sign said it was #1. I squinted through the entrance and saw that the first office to the left, with windows facing the street, was labeled #1.

  “This is it,” I said, walking back to the sidewalk and peering in through the window and its plastic vertical blinds. At this time in the morning, the office was empty and dark. I could make out one desk, a computer, and a land-line telephone. There was nothing on the whitewashed walls.

  “Not quite as nice as corporate headquarters,” I said.

  Walker was scowling at the view. He had a dark, heavy look on his face like his mood was a thundercloud, just about to burst. I grabbed his hand and squeezed it. “Let’s go,” I said. “I can tell you’re grumpy. We need to feed you.”

  His jaw clenched as he let me lead him down the street. “That doesn’t look like an office where any actual work gets done. Or has ever gotten done. I just might have to kill Lester Max, after all,” he said, under his breath. “You just might have to let me.”

  “Maybe you could just beat him up? Really bad?” I asked, keeping my tone light.

  “Maybe,” he said, but his eyes looked distant. “But that might not be quite good enough.”

  “Let’s just see how this shapes up,” I said, trying to stay cautiously optimistic about our prospects. “Let’s check it out later, during business hours, and see if anyone’s here. And then we can figure out what’s good enough for Lester Max. M
aybe instead of killing him, taking all of his money and having him end up in jail would be better.”

  Walker glowered at me.

  “And beating him up. I forgot the beating him up part,” I said, and clasped his hand.

  * * *

  After breakfast at a low-key, sweaty diner where we had excellent Cuban coffee, Walker brought me to a pharmacy. “Is this the errand we needed to run?” I asked, watching as he carefully read the labels on several bottles of painkillers. Satisfied, he finally grabbed a bottle of acetaminophen and headed to the cashier.

  “You have a headache?” I asked.

  “No,” he said. “But I’m going to be in a little pain in a little while. I just want to be prepared.”

  “What sort of pain?” I asked, panicking. Was he planning some sort of attack on the office?

  We headed down the street, towards a small Mom and Pop hardware store. “You said I was too recognizable,” he said and shrugged. “No one’s been following us since we’ve been down here. But we need more time. I want to look less like myself, to maybe buy us some.” Once we were in the store, he selected heavy-duty duct tape, pliers, and large black trash bags.

  “Walker, you’re starting to freak me out,” I said, nervously.

  “Finally,” he said and laughed. “But I’ve gotten you in so much trouble since you met me that you’re a little late.”

  He paid for the items and we went back to our hotel. There was a different clerk at the front desk; she was older, round and tan, with long, stringy bleached hair.

  “Stay here,” Walker said, and I waited by one of the waxy-looking chairs in the Majestic’s lobby.

  “Hi, there,” Walker said. “I’m Mr. White. I’m in Room 139.”

  She looked up at him and smiled, the smile spreading as she took all six-foot-two of him in.

  “Mr. White,” she said, her voice husky. “Are your accommodations okay? Is there anything I can do to make your stay better?” she asked, and I felt my hackles rise. From the way she said it, I was pretty sure she didn’t mean just anything — she meant something pretty specific.