Page 7 of Deadly Evidence
If that’s who they were.
Maybe hewaswith the DEA—she’d seen his badge and had accepted his obvious knowledge of her conversations with the local office.
But that didn’t mean he was honest.
Sometimes, the vast amount of money flowing through the bigger drug trafficking organizations was too great a lure for those sworn to stop it.
Her thoughts flicked to Aubrey Booker, the previous county sheriff, who’d collected his salary and then tripled it with payoffs from drug traffickers who used Gelman County as a convenient trade route.
Apparently, they hadn’t been satisfied with his cooperation. Found dead in his living room with a bullet through the heart, he hadn’t lived long enough to enjoy an early retirement.
Maybe she’d welcomed a man to the Triple R who was just as dangerous as the ones who crossed her land under the cover of night.
A man who would now be living within sight of the main house...and thus know exactly when her young daughter and elderly grandfather were alone.
She whistled softly to Mojo as she gathered up her reins and eased into her saddle.
She knew this land like she knew her own face. By the light of the half-moon above she could ride parallel to him, move faster and beat him home.
She brushed her fingertips against the reassuring weight of her rifle and scabbard, then urged Duster into a dead run.
And prayed that Brady wasn’t what he seemed.
Dante watched the old man trudge up the six steps to Saint Mary’s.
“Come in with me,” Vicente had urged him, as ifthatwould ever happen. Any religion Dante had as a kid had been ground to dust long ago.
His mother had worked hard at two jobs after his dad split, and she had taken in a brood of his cousins when their parents were sentenced for running a meth lab.
She’d never missed attending mass. But despite all that goodness in her life, she’d died in a hit-and-run accident with a lousy drunk at the wheel when Dante was fourteen.
His two sisters and cousins ended up living with another aunt and uncle. He’d ended up living on the street.
Two years later, his sentence to one of the toughest detention centers in Texas had confirmed his lack of belief in a God who cared about him.
God sure hadn’t been watching Dante’s back any time it counted.
Not when his mom lay bleeding to death on a street corner.
Not when another juvie secretly slipped a shiv made from a stolen table knife under Dante’s bunk for safekeeping just before inspection.
For that, Dante had spent the last four months of his sentence—until he turned eighteen—in solitary. Was that even legal for someone that age?
Twenty-three hours a day in a windowless, six-by-ten cell, with one hour of exercising alone, had nearly driven him crazy.
But now he was free.Free.
And there was no way he’d risk going back. Maybe a Saturday night in this one-dog town wasn’t exciting, but at least he could feel the hot wind in his hair and do just what he wanted.
He sauntered down the empty sidewalk, still feeling—after nearly six months—almost light-headed as he looked at the cheerful scattering of lights glowing from the houses huddled close to the two-block-long main drag.
Colorful neon Corona and Miller beer signs hung in the windows of Juan’s Cantina a few doors down, a place where you could buy a good Mexican dinner and a beer with a ten-dollar bill and still come out with enough change to buy a magazine in the little grocery store next door.
He’d done that for a while, anyway, until Juan’s wife Trinidad had folded her arms over her massive bosom and demanded Dante’s ID. One glance at the fake and she’d tossed it in the waste bin by the front door.
“You can come for the food,” she announced, her dark eyes flashing and her mouth pulled in a grim line. “The rest, when you turn twenty-one.”
The memory still rankled, but there was no other place open in town and Vicente’s mass would last another forty-four minutes. Setting his jaw, he strode to the cantina and jerked the door open.
