by Diane Kelly
“No!” the guy shrieked. “You have to stop!”
“Jeez! Don’t get your jockeys in a bunch.” I eased off the gas pedal and applied the brake. “Think the cop will let me off if I slip him a twenty?”
“Don’t do it!” He gripped his phone so tight it was a wonder it didn’t break in his grasp. “You’ll get arrested!”
“I don’t know.” I shrugged. “Maybe I’ll get lucky and the cop will let me go with a warning.”
He sputtered, his eyes wild. “This is going in my review!”
Oh, yeah? Bite me.
I pulled to the side of the road and stopped the car. The squad car pulled in behind us. A few seconds later, Josh eased by in his G-ride. When he glanced my way, I subtly acknowledged him by raising my fingers off the wheel.
A bulky, dark-skinned male officer climbed out of the cruiser and walked up on the driver’s side. I unrolled my window. “Hello, Officer Sexy.”
My rider unrolled the back window and looked up at the officer, too. “I’m not with her!” he cried. “I’m just a paid rider!”
The cop, who was in on the situation, fought a smile. “I understand, sir.” He turned back to me. “You know how fast you were going back there?”
I scratched my head. “I’m guessing it was too fast?”
“You’re a good guesser, ma’am.” He held out his hand. “I need to see your license and insurance.”
I retrieved my insurance card from the glove box and pulled my fictitious Sara Galloway license from my wallet, along with a twenty-dollar bill. I put the bill on top and held them out to the officer.
He eyed the bill before shooting me a wink with his left eye. “Are you trying to bribe me?”
“No, siree,” I said. “Just showing my gratitude for your faithful service to the citizens of Dallas.”
He took a step back. “I’m going to need you to get out of the car.”
“Okay.” I took the keys out of the ignition and climbed out of the car, closing my door behind me.
“Put your hands on the hood.”
I stepped to the front of the car, turned, and put my hands lightly on the warm hood.
He stepped back to the open window and looked in at my passenger. “I’ll need you to exit the vehicle, too, sir.”
“Why?” the guy cried. “I didn’t do anything! I told you, I’m just a rider! She’s a driver with Backseat.” He pointed to the yellow placard hanging from my rearview mirror. “See? I don’t even know her!”
“No worries,” the officer said. “It’s standard procedure. Now step out, please.”
The guy audibly fumed, but complied.
“Hands on the trunk,” the officer said.
“Why?” He threw his hands in the air. “I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Standard procedure,” the officer repeated. “No worries.”
Oh, this guy should be worried, all right. Luckily, he seemed to buy the explanation.
As my rider turned to face the car and put his hands on the trunk, Detective Booth emerged from the squad car and approached from behind.
My passenger must have seen her reflection in the back window. His eyes went wide and he turned his head. “Who are you?”
When she offered only a victorious smile in reply, he seemed to realize the whole thing was a setup. The officer reached for the guy’s hand, but before the cop could cuff him, he took off running in the same direction we’d been traveling.
Dang it! We’d been so close to making an easy arrest.
With fruitless shouts of “Stop!” and “Get your ass back here!”—the latter came from my mouth—the three of us took off after him, our footsteps pounding on the pavement and competing with the noise of the cars rushing by on our left. One of them honked in encouragement. Beep-beep! I wasn’t sure if the driver meant to encourage those of us in law enforcement, or the criminal attempting to evade us.
My rider had sprinted only a dozen or so steps when a rubbernecker inadvertently turned his wheel as he turned his head and nearly plowed the con artist down. He shrieked and jumped aside, leaping right out of his left shoe, leaving the loafer behind as if he were Cinderella running away from the prince’s ball. He continued to run in a lilting gait, one leg three or four inches longer than the other with the special shoes and lifts. Up-down. Up-down. Up-down.
Though I was giving it my all, Booth and the police officer were both taller than me and had longer legs. They gained on the guy quicker than I could.
Booth grabbed at his jacket, but it was buttoned and there wasn’t enough give in the fabric to get a real grip on anything. She went for his arm next, grabbing his elbow as his arm swung back. When he continued to struggle, trying to rip out of her grip, the male officer charged him, body-slamming him against the retaining wall. Ouch. That had to hurt.
Pop-pop-pop!
Small chunks of concrete fell from the wall just ahead of me. What the hell?
Pop-pop-pop!
YEE-OW! I felt a jab in my shoulder, like someone had stabbed me with an ice pick.
Pop-pop!
“I’ve been hit!” the cop cried, ducking.
“Me, too!” hollered Booth, putting a hand to her stomach as she fell to a crouch.
Luckily for the alleged leasing agent, the body slam he’d received had shielded him from the gunfire. Nevertheless, he screamed in panic and melted to the ground, his hands over his head to protect himself.
Grimacing in pain, I grabbed the guy off the pavement. “Get in the car!” I shouted. “If you know what’s good for you!”
We hustled him back to the cruiser and dove inside, Booth and me in front, the officer and the leasing agent in back, and all of us with our heads down. The DPD officer had been hit in the upper back, right at lung level, and gasped for air. Even so, we’d been incredibly fortunate. All three of us had been hit in the torso, our lives saved by our ballistic vests. The gunshots hurt like hell, but they wouldn’t kill us. At least not these gunshots. There was a chance the shooters could circle back and take another go at us.
Booth grabbed the mic for the cruiser’s radio. Before pushing the talk button, she asked, “Did any of you see the car where the shots came from?”
“Not me!” I grunted out through the pain.
“Me, neither!” cried my rider.
The officer was in too much agony to speak, but he shook his head.
Booth pressed the talk button and shouted into it. “Shots fired at officers on Central Expressway northbound at Mockingbird exit! Backup needed! Send an ambulance!”
The three of us pulled our weapons and held them at the ready in case the shooters returned.
I also pulled out my phone and called Josh. “Any chance you saw the car the shooters were driving?”
“What shooters?” he asked. In other words, he hadn’t seen anything.
“We took fire,” I explained. “Someone shot at us while we were making the arrest.”
“Holy shit!”
Holy shit, indeed.
We kept our heads down and, while I can’t speak for the others, I’m fairly certain we all prayed. Fortunately, no further bullets came our way. The shooter probably realized additional law enforcement would be en route.
Backup arrived in less than two minutes and the officer, Booth, and I climbed out of the car, but not before taking a look around at the elevated overpass and exit ramps to make sure the shooter hadn’t set up shop there, hoping to get a head shot in as we exited the cruiser.
When the leasing agent made to get out, too, I put up a hand to stop him. “Where do you think you’re going?” I reached that same hand out to snag his wallet from his pocket, then put the hand to his chest and shoved him back against the seat. “Stay right there!” I hollered, my pain making me extra hostile. I took advantage of the opportunity to poke the guy in the shoulder. Yep. Alicia had been right. His suit had shoulder pads.
I opened the wallet and thumbed through the contents. The guy had an assortment of credit card
s and driver’s licenses in five different names from just as many states. None were Texas licenses. I leaned down to the glass. “Who are you?” I asked.
All I got in reply was a death glare.
He might not be talking, but we’d figure out who he was sooner or later. I slammed the door in his face.
The officer jabbed his key fob to lock the guy inside. Click. He tossed the keys to a backup officer.
Though Booth’s wounds, like mine, were more superficial, she climbed into the ambulance with the officer who’d been shot in the back. She took his hand where it lay on the gurney. “It’s going to be okay.” With that, she raised her other hand in good bye to me as the medic closed the door.
Josh circled back for me in his car, screeching to a stop where the ambulance had pulled out only seconds before. “Are you all right?”
“I will be after you get me to the doc.”
Leaving my car behind on the shoulder, Josh drove me to the medical clinic.
Kelsey glanced up as I entered, noting the fresh grimace on my face. The ride over had been nothing short of torture, my shoulder impacting the seat each time Josh braked.
“Ooh,” Kelsey said. “This one’s bad, isn’t it?”
“Gunshot,” I grunted out.
All heads in the waiting room turned my way.
“It’s okay.” Kelsey held up a palm to reassure the other patients. “She’s in law enforcement.”
While Josh took a seat in the lobby, the nurse rushed me back to a room and brought Ajay to me right away. “You were shot?”
I nodded. “I’m wearing a vest, but it still hurts like the dickens.”
He helped me out of my clothing. “Nice boobs,” he said. “They’re perky.”
Damn. I’d forgotten that Josh was wearing my bra. “Just make the pain go away!”
“All right. Be forewarned, though. You’re going to have a hell of a bruise come tomorrow.”
Ajay fixed me up with another ice pack and prescription painkiller, giving me my first dose right there in the exam room. Soon, I was living in la-la land. And, ahhhh, what a lovely, wondrous place it was.
chapter twenty-eight
The Big Day
The time between the shooting on Central Expressway and the wedding seemed to pass in an instant.
Booth called me the morning after the shooting. “The guy still won’t tell us who he is. His fingerprints were of no help, either. They’re not on file.” In other words, he had no prior record.
“Leave it to me,” I told her.
Nick drove me over to Metroplex Mutual. The insurance company’s attorneys hadn’t yet had time to respond to the warrant I’d sent over the day before, but now that we’d made an arrest, it was probably a moot point. If we showed his photo around, surely someone here could tell us who the guy was. I’d brought the con artist’s mug shot with me. While the HR staff couldn’t readily identify the guy, they called in supervisors from each of their departments to take a look.
“I have no idea who that is,” said the first.
The second said he looked “vaguely familiar.”
The third nailed him instantly. “That’s Caleb Beck,” she said. “He works in my department. We process new applications for some of our larger clients. You know, major employers.”
“Any chance he handles applications for A-1 Awnings, Bloomfield and Associates advertising agency, Glassen Incorporated, and EZ Autos?”
“He does.”
Not anymore!
Nick dropped me at the Dallas Police Department, and Booth and I drove over to Beck’s house to search it. It was sparsely furnished, making the job easy.
“Check this out,” the detective called from his bedroom.
I followed her voice to find her crouched down in his closet, a gym bag in front of her. The zipper was open to reveal stack after stack of twenty-dollar bills, held together with red rubber bands.
“Wow! You found the mother lode.”
She carried the bag to his coffee table and we took seats on the couch to count the stash.
When we finished, I pulled out my phone and used the calculator app to add it up. “There’s over a hundred grand here.”
She raised her hand and we exchanged a high five. The victims had lucked out. Beck had spent only a small fraction of what he’d taken in and saved the rest.
We confiscated Beck’s computer and turned it over to Josh. He came to my office later that day with a handful of printouts.
I took the documents from him and quickly perused them. E-mails. Browser history. Bank records. I’d read through it all in more detail later, but for now I wanted the general gist. “What did you find?”
“Lots. Beck was the victim of a rental scam himself last year. He’d made a reservation at a place on the beach for him and his girlfriend. She dumped him by e-mail a day before they were supposed to leave for the trip. If that wasn’t bad enough, he’d been turned down the week before for a better-paying job at the insurance company. He drove all the way down to the beach anyway, only to find out the rental listing was a scam.”
Under normal circumstances, I’d feel sorry for someone who’d taken so many hits in quick succession. But this guy? Nope.
Josh went on. “He lost twelve hundred dollars in the rental scam and never recovered a cent of it. He filed police reports, did a lot of digging, figured out how the con artist had duped him and executed the scam.”
I put two and two together. “So first he was angry, then he realized he’d learned enough to run the same con himself. He got greedy. If he couldn’t make more money honestly, he’d make it dishonestly.”
“Looks that way. It also looks like Beck planned to buy himself a cabin near a ski resort in Colorado once he’d swindled enough to cover the cost plus living expenses for a few years. He’s run a bunch of searches for real estate listings in Vail and Aspen, prime vacation spots.”
Between the fraud charges and resisting arrest, the only vacation Caleb Beck would be taking was to state prison. Three to five years, at least.
In addition to pulling evidence from Beck’s computer, Josh accompanied me when I went to the young mother’s apartment with a check for nearly the full amount of the deposit she and her husband had given the con man. Once again, she was wearing the adorable baby on her chest like a human corsage.
“Surprise!” I held out the check.
She took it from me and looked down at the numbers. “Oh, my gosh! This is amazing!” She pulled me into a hug, her baby squirming between us, happily gurgling and cooing. “We’ll be able to get a house now!”
It hurt like heck when her arm pressed on my gunshot wound, but the pain was offset by how good it felt to be a hero.
While we’d wrapped up the rental-scam case, we still hadn’t definitively identified the people who were after me. We’d reviewed the dash cam on my G-ride again, as well as the one on the police cruiser. Though we’d determined that the shots had been fired from a white Dodge Dart with two occupants, once again the lawbreakers had changed the license plates to untraceable tags, this set stolen from a Chevy Sonic in a shopping mall parking lot.
The Shreveport police had spoken with Leah Dodd and determined that, once again, she had no ironclad alibi. She claimed to have been at home alone napping around the time of the shooting, alleging that she’d never heard the officers knock on her door until they came back a second time hours later. Leah had voluntarily submitted to a gunshot residue test at that time and passed. But had she scrubbed her hands clean in the interim? We couldn’t disprove her claim, and no arrest could be made.
Even with my would-be killer still on the loose, there was no way Nick and I would postpone our wedding. We’d put too much money and time into the event not to go through with it. Besides, who would be stupid enough to try to kill me at an event that would be attended by multiple armed members of law enforcement? In addition to us IRS agents, DEA Agent Christina Marquez-Maju would be at the wedding, serving double duty as a bride
smaid and bodyguard. Detective Booth had also offered to keep watch both at the church and the reception as a security measure.
Nope. No way would we let anyone ruin our big day.
* * *
The weekend of our wedding finally arrived. With so many people in town for the event, a good number of them armed federal law enforcement agents, whoever had been after me would have to be a fool to try anything here. Still, there were a lot of fools in this world. Even though we were nearly certain nothing would happen, none of us fully let our guard down.
Detective Booth sat sentry in a Dallas PD cruiser outside the church Friday night, and the rehearsal went off without a hitch. The church didn’t catch fire. Nobody tried to knife me on the way down the aisle. Nick’s truck didn’t explode when he started it to drive the two of us to the rehearsal dinner afterward. I was beginning to think that the couple who’d threatened me had not only lost their minds, but had lost their nerve as well. Or maybe their bloodlust had been satisfied when they’d shot me, even if they hadn’t killed me.
Given the large number of people who’d arrived on the party bus, our group packed the patio at the barbecue joint. Heck, nearly everyone who’d be at the wedding the next day was also at the dinner. The food was served, the keg of beer was tapped, and toasts were exchanged, the guests clinking their beer mugs. Tomorrow it would be champagne flutes, but tonight was all about casual fun.
Afterward, while many retired to their hotel rooms, a more intimate group drove out to my parents’ place. Since it was a relatively small town, there weren’t many venues for holding bachelor and bachelorette parties. Holloway Manor was just as good a place as any, especially now that my parents had put a new floor in the barn that would make it great for dancing, as well as adding a pool table, dart board, and a cornhole set.
While the men hung out in the barn and polished off another keg of beer, the women gathered in the living room with pitchers of Bonnie’s peach sangria, bottles of wine, and an assortment of brownies, pies, and, of course, my mother’s famous pecan pralines. We shared memories and laughs until well into the evening.
