“Will do.” Josephine smiled at Becky and gave her a wave as she headed back to her room. She couldn’t help but feel a spark of warmth glowing inside her.
This was the kind of town where people knew their neighbors and were always reading to offer a helping hand, without expecting anything back. And without casing your house for potentially valuable items to boost. Suddenly the thought of going back to Bitter Valley made her feel cold and small and alone.
Chapter Five
“So, what’s on the agenda for today?”
Cooper was sitting barefoot on the edge of the bed, hair tousled, wearing jeans and a blue polo shirt.
Josephine was sitting at the desk, wearing a pink t-shirt, khaki clamdigger pants, and pink espadrilles, counting out her tips from the day before. $175. Dang, she thought. Not bad.
“You tell me first,” she said, tucking the money into her purse without looking up. “What’s on your agenda?”
“Sticking to you closer than a shadow.”
She turned to shoot him a look of annoyance. “Gee, this day is going to go great. I’m super excited about it.”
Cooper lay back on the bed, propping himself up on his elbow. Shafts of sunlight streamed through the window, like a spotlight on a painting hung in a gallery. Josephine looked at the cupid’s bow curve of his upper lip and forced herself to look away.
“You know,” Cooper said. “Your dinner shift doesn’t start until 4:30 and until then you’re not going to get a damn thing done as far as finding your brother, because I’m going to be on you like a fly on honey.”
She turned back to him, shooting a frosty glare at him. “Your point?”
“Well, you’ve got various options. You could just tell me where your brother is and we could go talk to him together…”
“I’m getting tired of repeating myself, Cooper. I have no idea where he is.”
“Oh, you have some idea where he is. You just don’t know exactly where he is, and you don’t want to tell me what clues you have. That’s fine. Patience is one of my few virtues. In the meantime, we could find a way to pass the time…” His lips curled in a smile and he looked her straight in the eye.
Josephine couldn’t help it; she flushed red with embarrassment, and her nipples sprang to attention, swelling and hard against the thin fabric of her pink scoop neck t-shirt. She quickly folded her arms across her chest to hide them, but it was too late. His eyes drifted very deliberately to her chest, and his smile grew feral, with a gleam lighting his brown eyes. He knew exactly what effect he had on her, and he wanted her to know that he knew. Bastard.
Josephine crossed her arms over her chest defensively, leaning back away from him in her chair.
“You can’t keep leering at me like that. It’s…it’s sexual harassment!”
He threw back his head and laughed. “Sexual harassment? That only applies in the workplace, and if you think that’s sexual harassment, you’ve been dealing with amateurs.”
Scowling, she turned her back on him. “Why don’t you do something useful and go get us some coffee? I’ll even pay for it.”
“Nice try. I never let a woman pay; I’m old fashioned that way. And you’d be long gone when I get back. I have another idea…as long as we’re stuck with each other, why not get to know each other a little better? Let’s trade information.“
“For the millionth time –“
“Settle down there. How about if I ask you something that has nothing to do with your brother or his whereabouts? And you’re not allowed to ask me anything about what I know about him, either.”
Josephine considered it a minute. She’d do anything to get him to stop flirting with her, because she was one step away from giving in.
“Fine,” she said. “Ask away.”
“Show me how you picked that lock.”
Josephine laughed. “Really? Fine.”
He pulled out the suitcase, and she knelt down on the floor. He knelt next to her, achingly close, his leg brushing up against hers. He had put on cologne, something that smelled like cedar with a hint of patchouli.
God, she really needed to find her brother and get the hell out of town. It was pathetic how just sitting next to this man turned her into a puddle of lust.
Quickly, she pulled a hairpin from her hair and expertly worked the lock until she had it open.
He shook his head in amazement. “Damnation, woman. You are talented. Who taught you how to do that?”
“My father. When I was six.”
“Oh.” His face grew serious. In that one simple word, there was anger and sympathy and many words that he wanted to speak, but didn’t.
“My mother died giving birth to my brother. I was six and my brother was four, when the state placed us with our father again.” She looked away from him, out the window, blinking into the rising sun as it climbed higher in the sky.
“Why?”
“The foster parents we were living with died in a car accident.” The Garabedians. She still remembered their kitchen and the chocolate chip cookies they’d made together and how that house was the only house that had ever really felt like home. Before or since.
“I’m sorry. But you were able to overcome your upbringing, right? You’re an EMT. You’re going to nursing school, you –“
“Was. I was going to nursing school. It’s too expensive.” She shrugged, going for nonchalant She’d spent years struggling to take the college classes that she needed to get into nursing school, while working full time to support herself. She’d finally saved up enough money, and then…
Some dreams weren’t meant to happen.
“Josephine, is it possible…”
She held up a hand to stop him. “I know what you’re going to ask me. Is it possible that Jason really did do that armed robbery to get me the money for nursing school?”
“Well, is it?” he asked gently.
“No,” she said wearily, not angry, just resigned. She turned to meet his gaze, her face serious. “Not just because that’s not my brother. Because he also knows that I would never take a cent that was stolen from someone else. Never have, never will.”
Her blue eyes burned with passion as she said it, and he looked her in the eye and believed what she said.
Josephine was at her core an honest person. Unlike her father and her brother, she would never dream of making a living manipulating others.
The realization made his heart pulse in his chest. He didn’t like where this was going.
He was physically attracted to her, which was fine. But he didn’t want to like her as person. He wanted her to be what he’d thought she was when he first started looking for her brother. A thief and con artist from a family of criminals.
But no, she was a woman who’d turned her back on her family’s life of crime, taking the often dangerous, low paying job of EMT, a career dedicated to helping others. She was a woman who doubtless could have used any money that her brother had offered her, but it was painfully obvious that she never had. The neighborhood she’d lived in, and her beat-up, broken down car, and the fact that she couldn’t afford the tuition for nursing school, were all proof of that.
Add to that the fact that she was smart and funny and stubborn…mentally, he shook himself. Focus, he scolded himself; you’ve got a job to do.
“I promised you we could exchange information,” he said, to get his mind off Josephine and how much he didn’t want to like her. “What do you want to ask me?”
She laughed. “Oh, all kinds of things. But I’ll settle for this. Why did you decide to become a bounty hunter?”
Ouch. Giving her an honest answer would stir up painful memories, but fair was fair.
“My uncle and my dad were cops. My uncle was shot to death by an armed robber who had skipped bail, who was holding up a convenience store when my uncle answered the call. Turns out I have a knack for investigation; I helped track him down. I had graduated from the police academy, planned to go into law enforcement, but after I
found him…finding guys like that and bringing them to justice is my way of putting things right with the world. My way of finding justice.”
He blinked at the memory and then made his face a mask, stuffing the hurt down deep where it belonged. His uncle, snuffed out like the light of a candle, there one day and gone the next. His laughter and his corny knock-knock jokes and his brushy red mustache, vanished forever because some dirtbag felt that his burning need for crack was more important than George Thomas’s need to breathe.
“I’m sorry, Cooper. About your uncle. But my brother is nothing like the man who killed him, you must understand that.”
There was nothing Cooper could say to that. Her brother was a suspect in a number of shady con jobs, as well an armed robbery, but he was her little brother, and Josephine was never going to see him for what he really was.
“Are you getting hungry? I’ll buy us breakfast,” he said.
Minutes later, they were walking down the boardwalk in the center of town when Cooper felt it. An eerie prickling sensation, the hairs on the back of his neck lifting.
Somebody was watching him.
It was a typical summer day in Crooked Creek, which meant that the streets were packed with tourists. He scrambled up the steps of the Crooked Creek Old Tyme Photography Studio, scanning the crowd. He thought he saw sudden movement, a head ducking in the crowd, several blocks down.
It had to be Jason.
“Stay here! I mean it!” he barked at Josephine, and took off through the crowd, sliding between couples, leaping over a startled dog on a leash, dodging a horse-drawn carriage…
His movement was blocked by a stream of tourists piling out of a tour bus in a solid, unbroken line. He jostled with a portly Canadian woman, finally pushing past her and through a group of people who were taking pictures of each other in front of the Dry Gulch Saloon’s swinging doors, and raced down the boardwalk, and…
Nothing.
Whoever had been watching him was gone.
And, sure enough, when he turned back to where he’d left Josephine, she’d used his distraction to escape as well.
Gritting his teeth in frustration, he walked down the sidewalk, fishing in his pocket for his cell phone.
Deputy Mancini had been sympathetic when he’d explained the situation to him yesterday. If there was a fugitive bank robber in his county, he wanted him caught just as much as Cooper did, before anyone got hurt. He’d be a valuable asset in Cooper’s search.
Before he could punch in any phone numbers, his cell phone rang, with a Pennsylvania area code.
He clicked to answer.
“Cooper, what’s up?”
Cooper winced. It was Trent Sanchez, Jason’s probation officer, who’d shown up at Jason’s apartment to find it vacant, and apparently was getting reamed by his bosses, who didn’t think he’d kept a good enough eye on Jason.
“Hey, Trent. Have you heard any news?”
“No, not a thing. How about you? Are you making any progress?”
“Some progress, yes. I’ve got a general idea of where he is. I’m working on narrowing it down.”
“That’s great! Where do you think he is?”
Cooper could hear the eagerness in Trent’s voice, and he hesitated. He didn’t want to risk Trent finding a way to mess things up for him out here.
“As soon as I find him, I’ll give you a call, I promise you that,” Cooper assured Trent.
“Oh…okay. Thanks, Cooper. I appreciate it.” Trent’s voice was dejected as he hung up.
Cooper shook his head in frustration. He felt a ball of tension tightening in his gut. This chase was personal. Every pursuit was personal. He couldn’t let Trent Sanchez down, couldn’t let his own family down, by letting an escaped criminal roam unpunished. Not on his watch.
And damn Josephine for getting in his way and distracting him from what needed to be done.
Irritated, he punched Deputy Mancini’s number into his cell phone.
Chapter Six
Betsy had answered as soon as Josephine called, racing from the newspaper office to pick Josephine up in her car. She stopped to pick up Cheyenne, who was at Carlotta’s house, along with Carlotta’s twin boys.
“Whooo hooo! We’re running from the law! We’re badass banditos!” Carlotta whooped as they cruised along with the windows rolled down.
“Carlotta, you’re married to the law,” Betsy pointed out.
“I know, but sometimes you just want to break out and misbehave a little. Well, I do, you don’t, because you’re Betsy.”
“Whoo hooo! Whoo hoo!” The twins hollered from their car seats. “That’s my little bandits,” Carlotta smiled fondly.
“Where are we going?” Josephine asked.
“Somewhere your bounty hunter stalker can’t find us. I’ll pick a spot by the river; what do you girls say?”
“Anywhere that I can get a break from Cooper for five friggin’ minutes is okay by me,” Josephine said.
“So Cooper just took off running and left you? Maybe he saw your brother?” Betsy suggested.
Josephine shook her head. “Definitely not. I mean, he may have thought he saw my brother, but he’d be wrong. My brother’s not an idiot; there’s a reason he’s never been busted for a single felony. There’s no way he’d be out strolling down the main street of town when there’s a warrant out for his arrest.”
Soon they turned off the main road onto a narrow dirt road, and they rattled and bumped their way along until the road dead-ended.
The riverbank was minutes from the end of the road, and Crooked Creek flowed deep and so clear that Josephine could make out the pebbles on the bottom, and fat brown trout darting through the water.
Carlotta pulled a plastic bottle of bubbles from her purse and blew shimmery rainbow bubbles to entertain the twins, who screamed with joy and swatted at the bubbles with their fat little hands.
Josephine took a deep breath of sweet country air and let it out slowly. She was going to have to trust these women with her brother’s life and her future.
“I know you don’t know me, and you have no reason to help me, but I’m desperate. I’m at a dead end,” she said. “I came here to find my brother, and to find out why he skipped out on his probation. And it’s going to be impossible for me to do it myself with that damned bounty hunter on my ass every step of the way.” She briefly paused at the tantalizing mental image that conjured up, than dismissed it from her mind.
“I’m in,” Betsy said. “This is like being in a Nancy Drew Book. What about you guys?”
“I’m in,” Carlotta said, waving her plastic bubble wand in the air. “It’ll give my mind a break from wiping baby butts and doing laundry all day long.”
“I’m in because I like being on the wrong side of the law,” Cheyenne said. “So what do we know so far? Why is your brother in Crooked Creek?”
“This is all I know so far. A few months ago, when my father died, we cleared out all the junk in a storage unit that he had been renting. Among the junk that we found was this wooden trunk full of really old stuff, papers, clothes that looked like they came from the old west…Jason took the box home with him. And all of a sudden, he started asking me about these old stories that our dad used to tell us.”
“Bruno! Get back here!” Carlotta yelled as one of her boys dashed towards the creek bed. “Sorry, go on.”
“My roots actually go back to Crooked Creek. My great great et cetera great grandfather was from here –“
“I knew it! I sensed it! She’s Crooked through and through!” Betsy crowed triumphantly. “She totally belongs here – and she’s finally found her way back home!”
“Quit interrupting,” Carlotta scolded her.
“Crooked all the way through…” Josephine laughed. “Oh, man. I’ve been told that since I was a baby. It’s kind of true; it runs in the genes. My distant great-great many times over grandfather was a spectacularly untalented card shark, sometime bandit, and gold prospector named Levi M
iller…”
“Oh, my GOD!” Betsy sat bolt upright, her jaw hanging open. “You’re the descendent of Lucky Levi?”
“Lucky Levi? From what I’ve heard, he was the opposite of lucky,” Josephine protested. “Every nugget he ever found during the gold rush, he lost in poker games and bordellos.”
“Exactly. Hence his name.” Betsy’s eyes were alight. “I am sooo jealous of you. You’re descended from bandits! God, I wish I was descended from bandits…instead of a bunch of nerdy public servants.”
“You, descended from bandits,” Cheyenne hooted with laughter. “Betsy the bandit! Never in a million years.”
“Drop dead,” Betsy said. “I could be a criminal if I wanted to.”
“No, you couldn’t. You’re the original goody two-shoes. You actually just said ‘drop dead’. If you had the least little bit of criminal potential, you’d say Fuck You, bitch, and threaten to shank me.”
“Good lord! The twins are like five feet feet away! Keep your voice down, you child corrupter!” Betsy hissed.
Cheyenne and Carlotta exchanged amused glances.
“Oh yeah?” Betsy said, wounded. “Screw both of you. B-bitches.” Her voice trembled on the last word, and she spoke in a low tone so the babies wouldn’t hear, but she did her very best to wrinkle her face into a menacing scowl. Cheyenne shook her head pityingly, and Betsy knew what she and Carlotta were thinking: amateur.
“Anyway, back to you and your ancestor Levi. So, your brother started asking you all kinds of questions about him? Like what?”
“Weird questions. Like where in Crooked Creek he lived, if he had any other property besides his house, who lived in the house he’d owned…”
“Didn’t your dad tell you both the same stories?” Carlotta asked.
“Jason was never that interested in them. Him and my dad always clashed with each other. Honestly, that’s why Jason ended up living the lifestyle that he did. Allegedly. He works as a bartender and a bouncer most of the time, but the rumor is that he targeted people who made their money swindling others, and he conned them out of their money with things like shady investment schemes. And he never got caught. It was sort of like he was thumbing his nose at my father, going, see, I can do what you never could.”
Curvy Girls: The Big Girl and the Bounty Hunter Page 4
