Page 1 of A Daddy for Christmas 2: Kitt

Chapter One

Riordan

Just a few days before Christmas and what was I doing? Was I getting together with family that I hardly ever saw during the year to stuff my face with way too much rich food? Was I putting up decorations only to take them back down again a few days later? Or maybe joining the teeming crowds at an overpriced mall, shopping for expensive Christmas presents for people I didn’t even like all that much?

None of the above—although, come to think of it, none of that sounded like anything I wanted to do anyway.

Instead, I was sitting here in what was actually one of my favorite kinds of places—a seedy, dimly lit gay bar that smelled of sex, spilled whiskey, men’s cheap cologne and maybe a little desperation. I was a thousand miles from home, waiting for the right opportunity to approach the gorgeous little fugitive I’d been tracking for the past few days and maybe figuring out a way to get him into bed before we started the long trek back to Atlanta. Maybe this was shaping up to be a pretty good Christmas after all.

When I first left the Army, I’d had trouble finding a job, because former Rangers tended to sometimes make bad employees. We’re too damn independent and don’t take direction well, or at least not in a civilian situation. That’s what my first two bosses had claimed, anyway, as they were firing me.

After a few months of trying to work for other people, with at best mixed success, I decided to start my own business and became a Bail Enforcement Agent, working with a couple of bondsmen in town. That, of course, is a fancy way of sayingI became a bounty hunter. Though while “bail enforcement agent” looked better on forms when you were trying for a small business loan at the bank, it just didn’t sound nearly as badass.

I fucking loved the job, and I was damn good at it, so I didn’t want to give it up, even though it turned out that running my own business wasn’t something I actually excelled at. I hated doing paperwork, and dealing with bondsmen meant you had to stay on top of them to get your money in a timely manner. And that was another thing I couldn’t seem to be bothered with. I soon learned that running my own business meant I didn’t have the luxury of taking only the jobs that interested me, which made it a lot less fun.

When I’d first gotten out of the Army, I’d had a little trouble finding a job I wanted right away. I’d been living in North Carolina then, and for a while I was beginning to think I’d made a big mistake in leaving the service at all. Then one day I reconnected with an old friend at a bar I used to frequent. He was in town visiting old friends. Lucas Hayes was an ex-Army buddy, who had left the Rangers a year before I had, to go to work for his father-in-law, who had opened up his own private detective agency. He invited me to come see him in Atlanta where he now lived and meet his father-in-law, who was an impressive guy and who might have a job for me.

His name was Ed Colton, and though I called the business he ran a detective agency, in reality, it was more than that. I think he did some work for the government that was above my pay grade, and that was fine with me. The less I knew the better, as far as I was concerned. Plausible deniability and all that.

Ed was ex-FBI or ATF or some other alphabet agency—he was pretty cagey and secretive about which one, and there was definitely a story there that I wasn’t privy to. Probably because it was none of my business, and as I said, that was all right withme. He seemed like a good enough guy, and best of all he paid well.

When he found out I was recently out of the Army and looking for work, he’d asked me to step into his office and have a chat. Lucas came in too, and while I was there, Mr. Colton asked me about my service record. When he found out I had some commendations from my time in Afghanistan, along with a wound that had taken out my knee and caused me to take an early retirement, he had offered me a job. I had an artificial knee now, and I was still working at the agency, going on three years now, doing whatever they needed me to do.

So far, my job had consisted mostly of looking for people. All kinds of them. Runaways and missing persons, for sure, but also those who had skipped out on their bail or who had stopped paying their court-ordered child support. I was a lot like a bounty hunter in that regard. In Georgia, I didn’t even need a license to hunt them. I just took a state course, and my agency paid the fees. The officers who worked for the state called themselves Bail Recovery Agents in Georgia, but I kind of liked the more old-fashioned term of bounty hunter—or what my boss called me, which was an “Acquisitions Specialist.”

I really enjoyed tracking down deadbeat dads who weren’t paying any child support and encouraging them to make a better effort. I was given quite a bit of leeway, and maybe that’s what I loved the most. State laws varied with regard to the rights of bounty hunters, but as a general rule, we had greater authority to arrest someone than even the local police. A fugitive could be taken into custody and removed to any state without extradition, and all I needed was a copy of Jazz Devlin’s guardianship papers, which was in my suitcase, along with some airline tickets. Armed with that paperwork, I didn’t need a warrant and could enter private property unannounced if I had reasonable suspicion. I didn’t even have to read him his rights when I took him inbecause at that point, he didn’t have any. All I needed was that handy reasonable suspicion that the fugitive was on the premises, and I could waltz right in. It was what enabled regular law enforcement to go anywhere they pleased in search of a suspect.

As a bounty hunter, I had the same rights. Even better because I didn’t have to have a warrant like the police did. I was also authorized to use deadly force, if I needed to. I gave my bail jumpers a choice. I told them I could bring them in warm or I could bring them in cold. It was totally up to them. So far, most of them had made the right choice.

I was in Albuquerque, New Mexico so close to Christmas due to an unfortunate incident involving a drunken poker game and a recent bad run of luck. My personal bank account was currently a little lower than I liked it to be, so I had agreed to take this assignment when my boss offered it to me, as it involved a nice little bonus for working over the holidays.

I glanced over at the kid again, Kitt Devlin, again to make sure he hadn’t moved from his chair and that he was still quietly, steadily getting drunk, though it was hard to see how those fruity little drinks he was putting away could do much more than give him a headache in the morning.

This bar was the kind of place that did much better with the lowest lighting possible, and the murky, low-lying smoke hanging in the air helped too. I’d been in a lot of places like this over the years, and it was beginning to get just a little old. Or hell, maybe I was.

It occurred to me that I should consider settling down. Find myself someone cute and cozy to come home to and stay closer to my base in Atlanta.

It wasn’t all that late, maybe around nine o’clock, but the place was nearly empty. I guess it was a slow night. A few customers were scattered around the room at various tables andbooths, but nobody was on the tiny scrap of a dance floor. Hell, I was shocked there even was a dance floor, but I guess this place had once seen better days. The majority of people in the room were sitting at the large, semi-circular bar.

An old and catchy Dolly Parton tune, “Hard Candy Christmas,” was playing softly in the background, with Dolly singing about how she was, “barely getting through tomorrow, but still I won't let sorrow bring me way down.”

I felt that in my soul.

Kitt Devlin, the one I was here in Albuquerque to pick up, must have been feeling it too, as he was tapping his fingers on the side of his glass, keeping time, and he had a thoughtful look on his pretty face. One thing I could definitely say about the little punk—he was probably the best-looking thing I’d seen in…hell, maybe ever. Tall, but not too tall; lean but not too lean; dark hair that fell perfectly across his broad, unblemished forehead. I felt like one of the bears in the Goldilocks story assessing him, because to me, he looked just right.

He had the look of a wealthy, spoiled brat too. A haughty nose—the better to look down on people with—and dark slashes of eyebrows, one of which was currently quirked up on the side, showing his nearly complete contempt for this place. Nevertheless, here he was, and considering the early hour and the fact that he didn’t look over legal drinking age in this state, it was a bit surprising that he’d managed to get served at all and able to get drunk so quickly. It probably spoke to both his ingenuity and his strong determination. I knew he had a fake ID—I’d seen him flash it—but he really didn’t look twenty-one, so the bartender must be letting it slide.

He sure wasn’t doing it on his charm alone, as he looked and acted sullen, jaded and extremely bored. Not to mention moody, like the bad-tempered teenager he wasn’t all that far from being. Boredom was a big problem for Kitt, according to hisfile, because when he got bored, that was when trouble seemed to blow up around him.

I was a little surprised at the strong reaction I was having to him. From the first moment I laid eyes on Kitt two days ago in person, I’d felt an instant attraction that I’d been fighting hard ever since. I mentally chastised myself, because I should have been concentrating only on the job at hand—which was keeping him in one piece and getting him back home to Atlanta.

My eyes fell to his wrists when he lit the cigarette, and I noticed not only how slim and somehow fragile they were, but also the little red and green beaded bracelets he was wearing on both wrists—a lot of them. Friendship bracelets, the Swifties called them. According to his file, he was only ten years younger than I was, but he seemed like such a kid.

Kitt had a history of being a loose cannon. It hadn’t been long since he was kicked out of his college, and since then, he had been picked up by the police on three, separate occasions. Two of them were drunk and disorderly charges along with one resisting arrest charge. Since I’d been following him, he seemed to be almost always short of cash and was sleeping wherever he could find an empty couch to crash on. He drank too much, smoked too much, and ran that smart, little mouth of his way more than was good for him. He was also far too inquisitive—he liked to stick that patrician little nose of his in other people’s business, which was probably part of what had landed him in the trouble he was in now.

From the information I had about him, he had witnessed a shooting in Atlanta, after being out clubbing half the night. The participants were members of the Everybody Killa gang, a hybrid criminal street gang based in the area that had ties to a major national gang called the Bloods. They had long been engaged in a violent feud with Red Tape Gang, another hybrid criminal street gang based in the city. For years, the rivalrybetween EBK and the RTG had resulted in several shootings and homicides. On the night in question, at around three in the morning, a man named Jamal Ferguson and four of his friends left a nightclub in a section of Atlanta called Five Points. As Ferguson and his friends headed to their vehicle, a second vehicle came down the street, stopping immediately next to Ferguson’s car. A few seconds later, without provocation, multiple occupants of that vehicle opened fire on Ferguson and his friends. Ferguson and his friends returned fire, and both Ferguson and another man with him had died at the scene as a result of the injuries they sustained in the gunbattle.

A person in a third vehicle parked in alongside Ferguson’s car had witnessed the entire thing. And guess who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time?

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