A Devil’s Bargain
By Jonathan Watkins
Bright & Fletcher Mystery series Book #4
The devil you know...
Darren Fletcher and Issabella Bright are finally getting some romantic alone time when a letter arrives from the Fletcher Group. Luther, Darren’s brother and corrupt coheir to the ancient firm that Darren renounced years ago, has asked Darren to stop investigating the firm’s shady business dealings.
But a call from a friend in crisis means he has no time to brood about his past.
...is in the details
Theresa, the owner of Winkle’s Tavern, and one of Darren’s only friends, is the prime suspect in a murder that happened outside her bar. The victim is unknown to both Darren and Izzy, but the black key card in his wallet is familiar. Darren has one just like it; they’re given to all associates of the Fletcher Group.
Izzy knows that Darren won’t stop until he’s figured out exactly how Luther is involved in Theresa’s arrest. But it’s an older case, the one that derailed Darren’s career and haunts him to this day, that ultimately threatens all they’ve worked so hard to build.
When you bargain with the devil, you’d better win.
Book Four of The Bright & Fletcher Mystery series.
Edited by Kerri Buckley
76,470 words
Dear Reader,
If there’s one thing we have learned from the kickass heroines of the fiction we read and publish, it’s that you should always be in control of your own happiness. And, if you’re reading this, I’m guessing you’re like me and books make you happy. So this February, during Valentine’s month, instead of waiting for someone to put some romance in your life, go ahead and do it for yourself: buy yourself all the books!
Shannon Stacey always brings a fantastic blend of humor, heroes and sigh-worthy romance, and her novella A Fighting Chance is no different. All work and no play makes Adeline Kendrick a dull girl, so when she heads to a casino resort for a friend’s bachelorette weekend, she’s ready to have a good time. Until she runs into Brendan Quinn, professional fighter and the one who got away—the one her family drove away—and things take a turn for the interesting. When the weekend is over, Adeline isn’t ready to give up her second chance that easily.
An unexpected fresh start leads to an unlikely—but absolutely perfect—pairing in Getting Him Back, a male/male contemporary romance from bestselling gay romance author K.A. Mitchell. Ethan may have followed his high school sweetheart to college only to get dumped his first day there, but he’s not going to let that stop him. And then there’s Wyatt. Mysterious, grouchy...hot. And possibly not gay. New college goal? Get Wyatt into bed and into Ethan’s life.
In Anna del Mar’s debut romantic suspense, The Asset, a woman fleeing from her sinister past must defy her fears and risk her life to care for a wounded warrior, a SEAL who will push the limits of his broken body and protect her to his very last breath. Don’t miss this first Wounded Warrior novel.
If you’re looking for a melt-your-panties hot erotic romance read, look no further than Wolf’s Ascension by Lauren Dane. Attacked by werewolves. Mated to the Alpha. Declared a queen. Kari is having an unusual day. In the Cherchez wolf pack, loyalty is earned, not given. For Andreas, the pull he feels toward Kari cannot be ignored, a physical bond immediate and unbreakable—though Andreas wants to win Kari’s heart as well as her body. And be sure to watch for book two, Sworn to the Wolf, on sale in March 2016.
In the explosive follow-up to Joely Sue Burkhart’s darkly erotic romance One Cut Deeper, life on the run with an assassin isn’t what Ranay thought it would be. In fact, parts of it more closely resemble a sex-fueled vacation—until duty calls. The FBI believe Charlie’s brother is working for a human trafficking ring, and Charlie is the only one who can bring him down. Two Cuts Darker brings you back into the world of dark romance but delivers the same satisfying happy ending.
The only doctor who can stop a man-made killer flu couldn’t hit the broadside of a barn with a grenade launcher—so his bodyguard, Sergeant Ali Stone, has her work cut out for her in Viral Justice, the last book in the Biological Response Team romantic suspense trilogy by Julie Rowe. And you can still pick up Deadly Strain and Lethal Game wherever Carina Press ebooks are sold!
Tempted to off your significant other for forgetting Valentine’s Day again? Satisfy your more murderous urges with our two mystery offerings this month.
Jonathan Watkins combines mystery with romance in A Devil’s Bargain. Past sins and dark secrets threaten to blow apart the lives and careers of criminal defenders Issabella Bright and Darren Fletcher when their friend, Theresa Winkle, is charged with the vicious murder of a man behind her bar—a man Darren learns is connected to his own family’s corrupt history and to the one case that has haunted him for years. Go back to the beginning of their romance, and indulge in all of the fantastic Bright & Fletcher mysteries now available: Motor City Shakedown, Dying in Detroit and Isolated Judgment.
In Brenda Buchanan’s latest Joe Gale Mystery, Truth Beat, a newspaper reporter struggles with unreliable sources while covering two explosive stories—the apparent murder of a priest who stood up to his church and a spate of increasingly destructive bombings.
Last, this month I’m excited to present a new romantic suspense series that I’ve been highly anticipating from Carina Press author Nico Rosso. Undercover agent Art Diaz had no choice but to drag Chef Hayley Baskov into the world of Russian mobsters, but when her tentative trust turns to full passion he vows to stop at nothing to protect her during the final strike. Be sure to pick up the first in the Black Ops: Automatik series, Countdown to Zero Hour.
So kick off your shoes, curl up in your favorite cozy spot, and treat yourself to a Valentine’s month of books. (When it comes to books, one day of indulgence is never going to be enough.)
And then look forward to next month, with releases from Shannon Stacey in contemporary romance, Dee Carney in paranormal romance and j. leigh bailey in male/male romance.
As always, until next month here’s wishing you a wonderful month of books you love, remember and recommend.
Happy reading!
~Angela James
Executive Editor, Carina Press
Dedication
for Carrie
Contents
Prelude
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Excerpt from Motor City Shakedown by Jonathan Watkins
Prelude
The freak was firing machine guns in the tennis court again.
John Krane stopped whisking the four eggs he meant to be his omelet and waited for the sound of the next volley. From two floors down, the rapid barking repeated itself and Krane knew it was the Romanian AK-47 with the 75-round drum magazine. The freak’s favorite toy of the moment.
Krane looked at his watch. It was only a few minutes after eight in the evening. He left the restaurant-grade grill on and walked out of the first floor’s expansive main kitchen, padding in his socks down a set of winding stairs. A
nother volley of gunfire erupted, louder than before. He continued past the landing for the first basement level and kept on until he was walking down the carpeted hall of the final level. It stank down here. Stank of marijuana and cigarettes and the piled laundry of a man who didn’t bathe. He passed two doorways, both of them secured with a ten-digit security keypad. Krane had never been inside those rooms, and had no real desire to ever alter that fact, so he kept on. At the doorway to the tennis court, Krane paused and waited for another burst of gunfire to finish before opening the door.
Reggie Chalmers was hunched down a few feet away, with the drum magazine open so he could feed more rounds into it. Several boxes of ammunition were littered around his feet. Spent casings were everywhere, reminding Krane of the time he’d been to Alabama as a kid and the whole town of Florence had been blanketed in brittle June bug shells. The tan, alien-looking things had been everywhere underfoot, in the pool at the Howard Johnson, the sidewalks, the streets.
His toes kicked the brass cartridges and sent them spinning across the hardwood flooring.
Reggie Chalmers looked up.
He was a slight and ugly little man with a long, creased face that lacked anything that could be objectively considered a chin, a small, pale smear of a mouth, and eyes that were two different colors, one blue and the other an unsettling, smoky yellow, like a dollop of lemon sherbet beneath unclean glass. His hair was short and spiked, caked with too much styling gel and dyed maize-blonde. His eyebrows were dyed the same color and meticulously plucked, like a woman’s, Krane thought, narrow scallops too high above the eyes.
Reggie stood up and slung the weapon over one stooped shoulder. He took his shooting earmuffs off and said in a wispy monotone, “I don’t like you coming down here.”
Krane was two heads taller than the freak, so he didn’t have to peer around him to get a look at the place. Nothing much had changed. The tennis court’s net had been unfastened from its posts and discarded. Energy drink cans were strewn about. Candy bar wrappers. Fast-food bags. Pages from old skin mags, a lot of them balled up and thrown away, some of them still spread out flat. The back wall was cinderblock and so shot-to-hell it could have been transplanted from a warzone.
“This is a private zone,” Reggie went on in his wispy monotone. “This whole floor is a private zone. Get out. I don’t like you coming down here.”
“I ain’t wild about it myself,” Krane said.
“So get out.”
“You said you were going to be out late. I wanted to make sure everything was square.”
“Everything’s square, Mister John Wayne.”
“You went to the movies.”
“That’s what I said.”
“Nowhere else? Just the movies?”
“That’s what I said, asshole.”
“What movie did you see?”
Reggie sneered.
“The one with all the whores in it.”
“Yeah? I didn’t know there was one like that out. What was it called?”
Reggie’s little smear of a mouth bent into a frown and Krane knew the freak was getting to that point where he’d start shouting and shaking and swearing. A Reggie tirade. Krane didn’t want to silently wait out a Reggie tirade.
“I went to the movies,” Reggie said, biting each word off for emphasis. “Now I’m back. I don’t like your tone and I don’t like you being down here so go away. Go the fuck away. Go the fucking fuck the fuck away you fuck.”
Krane felt himself slowly smile without humor and knew that in another time and another place it was a look that had never failed to get the men around him to shut up, wake up and pay attention. But this wasn’t that time or that place. He had no command. He was a babysitter for a genetic mistake whose family had more money to their name than some Third-World nations.
“Sure, Reggie,” he said.
“Don’t call me that. We’re not friends.”
“Okay, Reginald.” he said and didn’t tell the freak that he didn’t have any friends to call him Reggie, so maybe he should be thankful there was one person in the world being paid enough to talk to him like he was a human being.
Krane turned around and walked out. He was back in the kitchen when the next thrumming wave of gunfire sounded. He left the bowl of eggs alone and plucked his phone off the counter. He started typing: RC3 is safe and inside the property again. Deceptive about where he went. Said it was a movie but couldn’t think of the title and wasn’t out long enough to have seen a whole movie. Agitated. He’s slipping back into bad habits, in my opinion. Suggest you approve tightening the leash and eliminating travel privileges. Please advise.
His duty done, Krane whisked the settled egg goop a few times and poured it over the griddle. He salted it, added diced onions, slivered deli ham, folded it, and ate it standing at the island counter with a glass of whole milk. More gunfire. His phone didn’t vibrate. He did a first pass on the plate in the sink and slipped it and the milk glass into the industrial-grade dishwasher. Checked his phone. Nothing.
Krane took the phone and walked through the halls of the mansion until he was in the first-floor gymnasium. He settled into the chest press machine and shoved two hundred and twenty pounds back and forth seven times before his phone vibrated on the floor beside him. He finished the set out, heaving the weight another seven times.
The phone vibrated again. Krane sat still, his breathing coming in quick, short gasps.
He was more frustrated than he had been before starting his evening routine. He put up with a lot of interruptions, being a babysitter for Reggie the Freak. That was fine. He got paid for it. Really paid. But he didn’t like interrupting his weight routine. Twice a day, five days a week, the weights and the treadmill were his time alone. His time to be himself, to be John Krane the disciplined and focused man he knew he was, not John Krane the nanny or John Krane the hall monitor.
Then you should have sent the report after your workout, he told himself. Right? Right. Suck it up, stupid.
The phone vibrated again. He bent down and picked it up. Looked at the screen as he swiped the security key into the digital keypad.
It wasn’t a response to his update on Reggie.
Against a red background, two words flashed urgently.
PERIMETER ISSUE.
Krane stood up and walked out of the gymnasium. The phone alert solidified in his mind and he picked up his pace, jogging down the hall, through three sets of doors, up a flight of stairs, down another hall and finally into the little room where all of the estate’s security apparatuses fed in and out of a single computer and monitor.
He sat down at the desk, in front of the monitor which was flashing the same two-word message as his phone. Krane tapped in his password and watched the monitor change. The flashing message disappeared and was replaced with a split screen. On the left portion of the monitor, Krane was looking at the live feed from the security camera positioned atop the wall beside the front gate of the property. The right half of the monitor was a scroll of text, the most important information highlighted in bright yellow.
Krane stared at the camera feed. The lens was fixed on a dark green Chevy Impala parked on the far side of Rathmore Road, which the estate fronted. The Impala was parked almost directly across from the gate that spanned the driveway to the estate.
Krane tapped a key a few times. The camera zoomed until the driver’s window filled the left side of the monitor. He saw the man behind the wheel, but only barely. In the darkness, the driver was little more than a flesh-toned blur. Krane tapped another key.
The left side of the monitor switched to light-gathering night vision, all of it converted to varying shades of green. The driver came into focus. Bald. White. Heavyset. Bent over a rectangle of bright light. A laptop monitor, Krane guessed. The laptop helped illuminate the driver’s face. Krane didn’t recog
nize it.
His phone vibrated again. Without looking away from the driver, Krane put the phone to his ear and said, “I’m looking into it now.”
“Yeah? What have we got? Couple kids boning before heading back to mommy and daddy?”
He knew the voice. He’d heard it half a dozen times in the past, whenever any sort of security issue reached the point of concern. The sound of his voice was all he knew about the man. That, and the fact that he worked for Reggie’s father.
“Not this time,” Krane said. “White male in his early forties. Dressed in a suit and tie. Driving a Chevy Impala. No other occupants at eye line.”
“So a guy on the road getting ready to take a piss or call his girlfriend. Goodie. I was in the middle of a god-tier League match and I get this bullshit.”
“What kind of league?”
“Nothing. A computer game. Never mind. Is the guy doing anything or can I hang up on you now?”
“You can hang up whenever you want. I didn’t ask you to call.”
“Cute.”
Krane shifted his attention to the right side of the monitor. He began reading the scroll of text.
“I read your update,” the man said. “So maybe Reginald went to the movies or maybe he didn’t. Is that it?”
“He’s getting manic,” Krane said. “Working himself up. Testing the leash. I think he’s going to keep testing until he can get away with doing something that isn’t easily contained.”
“Your update was pretty vague, Mister Krane.”
Krane stopped reading and leaned back in his chair.
“Okay, here’s something specific. The driver in the Impala outside the gate plugged the name Reginald Chalmers III into a search engine. Twenty seconds later he searched for this address and pulled it up on Google Maps. Twenty-three seconds after that he accessed a smartphone and sent out an encrypted text message that the equipment your people have me using here can’t touch.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“Yep. He ain’t moving. What’s the word?”
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