Page 2 of Redemption

“Mayor, with all due respect, what other bounty officers do istheirbusiness.”

“Cutting deals—”

“We all cut deals.”

“The dirty kind, Victoria. Not like the ones you work out. I get the good-old-boys club. But there’s a line, and at some point, I have to call a spade a spade. He’s jumping in bed with the Russians, with Mayhem, with everyone.”

“The Russians are starting to be a big problem. That’s what I hear.” She tried to watch him out of the corner of her eye. Mayhem had always been Sweet Hills’s biggest concern, but now there was a new player in town. The status quo might not be the same anymore if what Victoria heard was true.

The mayor shrugged, avoiding eye contact. “I don’t see the gunrunners’ future as profitable as Mayhem’s.”

Fair enough. The Russians were newer on the scene and rumored to stick to guns, whereas the motorcycle club dabbled in everything and were a multi-club force with a national network. Strictly from a business point of view, the mayor was probably right. “I plan to keep on keeping on.”

“You know what bail-jumper Lee’s hunting?”

“Don’t know, don’t care,” she mumbled, stuffing her mouth with a snickerdoodle. If she couldn’t speak, she wouldn’t get herself into a pickle.

“Sheriff heard some scuttlebutt that—”

“Scuttlebutt, really?”

“Now you sound like my wife.”

“Marjorie knows when you sound ridiculous, sir.” Victoria took a step back, wanting another snickerdoodle more than Sheriff Turnball’sscuttlebutt.

“In all seriousness, I’d prefer if I had both you and Lee searching for this one.” He pulled a folded-up paper from his back pocket. “One of Vashchenko’s right-hand men.”

She unfolded it and read over Yuri Maysak’s sheet and the amount attached to it. That was a decent bit of money. More than normal. “Call me interested.”

“Maysak’s woman is a bartender at the Ice House out on Route 209.”

“I’ll check it out.” And she would too, because that cash would be a solid paycheck. “Thanks.”

“They’re due a new shipment at week’s end,” the mayor mumbled. “Then another later this month.”

She screeched to an internal halt, surprised that half the room didn’t hear the sound of the record scratching that was in her head. “I assume that’s not going to happen?”

“It is.”

His lips barely moved. For everything he said about wanting to keep crime away and Sweet Hills safe, he was letting them set up shop and plant their roots. “You’re going tolet themsell their guns? That’s such bullshit.”

“Nothing we can do about it. There are forces beyond my control on this one.”

She glared at him. “I’ll go after Maysak but not because I’m competing with Lee or because you told me to.” She was trying to float a business, a mortgage, all kinds of things that people didn’t do at her age, when they were normally thinking about graduating college.

“That’s all I was suggesting, and I knew that.”

“You did not.” She rolled her eyes.

Why did it feel as though her sweet town always had criminal SOBs circling it in the near distance? As every real estate agent within a dozen miles always said, location, location, location. Sweet Hills was at that special juncture in the middle of the country that made it a crossroads Mecca for the criminally traversing. Then again, there was always that chance that the mayor was trying to play some political move, thinking she wouldn’t see it—or couldn’t—simply because she was younger than most everyone involved in the community.

Though… she didn’t see it. Letting a gun sale go through? All she saw was a BS olive branch to some criminals. The ‘why’ evaded her.

Victoria shifted, the awareness of her past always sitting on her shoulder like a silent voice, pushing her to do whatever the mayor asked in order to always prove she was a good girl. Shewasgood, and nothing anyone did could change who she was.

The door to the community center opened, and Seven, Victoria’s closest friend, walked in. Half the cookies and pastries that covered the table were from her mom’s coffee shop, and her friend’s bright blue-and-pink hair matched some children’s summer outfits.

No one thought Seven would be able to keep the Perky Cup open when her mom had a stroke, but no one knew Seven the way Victoria did. Everyone underestimated them because of their age and “life decisions,” as the scuttlebutt crowd liked to call it, when Victoria decided to get a PI license instead of go to community college, and Seven continued on, brightly, with her family’s long-steeped, gossip-inducing history in Sweet Hills.

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