And they were smiling.
And it wasn’t the only thing on Chace Keaton’s face that was smiling.
So when I lost sight of him, it was my turn to smile.
*
Angel
One and a half weeks later…
“You are fuckin’ shittin’ me,” Angel Pe?a clipped to the DA.
“Nope, failure to appear. Jumped bond,” the DA replied.
Angel shook his head.
Duane “Shift” Martinez. A pain in his ass.
“Means your afternoon is free, Angel,” the DA went on.
Angel didn’t want a free afternoon. He wanted to sit in the courtroom and watch then testify at Martinez’s preliminary hearing.
Shit.
“Head’s up, you need to make sure the paperwork is processed so his bondsman knows real fuckin’ quick that he’s FTA. He doesn’t get someone out on this guy’s ass right away, he can kiss his bail money good-bye,” Angel advised.
“No bondsman posts bail without collateral,” the DA returned.
“Martinez is known to fib about collateral. The bondsman got dibs on Shift’s Momma’s house, he’s gonna learn soon Shift has no Momma. I don’t know what he put up, I just know there’s a twenty-eighty chance he don’t got it.”
“No bondsman is that dumb,” the DA replied.
“The one who bonded out Martinez is. He’s already kissin’ ten percent of his bond good-bye ‘cause he needs a bounty hunter to round him up. Shift was a huge flight risk. He took flight. This is not a surprise. Martinez perpetrated the ultimate fuck to his best fuckin’ friend, you think he won’t fuck his bondsman on collateral, you’re whacked. The longer this shit is delayed; the more chance Martinez has to get to Mexico.”
Or Colorado but, pray God, Angel hoped not.
He watched the DA’s mouth get tight.
Then he watched him pull out his phone.
Message received.
Angel jerked up his chin and walked on his cowboy boots out of the courtroom and through the halls of the courthouse automatically listing in his head who would get calls and their priority.
First, Ty Walker.
He was pushing through the front doors of the courthouse, pulling his phone from his inside jacket pocket when the drive-by happened.
The automatic weapon fire took down three innocent bystanders.
It also drilled four rounds into Detective Angel Pe?a, the intended target.
Chapter Twenty-One
He Took That Too
Ty
Ty stood, hip against the kitchen counter, eating oatmeal and watching his wife shuffle around the kitchen fixing her own oatmeal and a travel mug of coffee for him.
His eyes slid from her, his torso twisting, his gaze moving to the latest addition in their house.
Next to the fireplace, a black frame, in it two sheets of glass and pressed between that glass side by side were two pieces of paper with the logo of the hotel in Vegas where they’d stayed when they were married. The first was her note to him and the second was his note to her the next day.
For reasons he didn’t know and didn’t process mostly because they were obvious and didn’t need processing, he carried her note with him every day, in the morning with his wallet and phone, shoving it in his pocket so his was ragged and worn. A little over a week ago, Lexie had discovered it. He was taking a shower after coming back from the gym; she was sorting out his gym bag after setting his protein shake on the vanity.
She’d probably handled it numerous times but his woman gave him privacy, one of the multitudes of things he loved about her. When he was ready to share, she was there. Until that time, she gave him space.
Why she unfolded it that night, he didn’t know or ask. But when he came out of the shower with a towel around his hips, she was sitting on their bed. Without delay or words, she lifted up the unfolded note, words out and showed it to him.
Then her other hand came up and she lifted up an identical piece of paper, this had folds in but it was not worn and it was his much shorter message.
She’d kept his note too. It only had one word and two letters on it but she’d kept it.
He felt the roots of that thing inside him dig deeper. It was embedded in a way it would never go away but that didn’t mean, frequently, it didn’t push deeper, swell and spread.
His eyes went from the notes to her.
“I carry it in my wallet,” she whispered, her head tipped back, her face soft and he knew in about five seconds she would start bawling.
So he walked to her, carefully pulled the pieces of paper out of her hand, set them on the nightstand, bent deep, wrapped his arms around his wife picking her up, planting her deeper in the bed and then he pulled off his towel.
Then he took his time fucking her.
This was his means to the end of stopping his woman from crying. It was also, as it usually was, fucking brilliant.
She didn’t tell him she was taking it to the frame shop but he came home the night before to see it mounted on the wall. No one would get it and most would probably look at it and think it was whacked.