Hail No (Hail Raisers Book 1)

by Lani Lynn Vale

  “Sources in Balthazar’s employ say he went a little mad when his prized peacocks were eaten by his neighbor’s dog. He went to confront her and one thing led to another.”

  Walter’s blood shot eyes came to me.

  “You think that Balthazar killed a woman over his freakin’ peacocks?” he clarified, wiping blood away from the corner of his lip.

  I shrugged. “What reason did they give you as to why I did it?”

  I mean, it was Kennedy’s chickens that had been killed and they weren’t prized, but they were her sole source of income.

  Sure, they made her money, but I didn’t have the same attachment to her then as I did now.

  Not to mention they weren’t even mine.

  I would have no reason to bring harm to that woman.

  “Your dog.”

  I looked over at my bike, thinking about Gertie, and shrugged. “No harm there. I had an ironclad contract when it came to Gertie. Not to mention there’s probably a gazillion cameras in that state of the art facility of hers. If they wanted to know what exactly went down, then they’d pull the feed.”

  Walter grunted something unintelligible. “Whatever. I’m just going off of what I hear, and nobody would shoot another person over a fucking peacock. Guaran-damn-tee it.”

  With nothing left to say to that, I left him to it and walked back to my motorcycle, wondering idly if my brother should even be considered a brother if he didn’t even like me.

  I mean, at what point did a brother become a brother, and not just a sibling?

  I would trust the boys at HAR—Hail Auto Recovery—with my life. Would I trust Walter?

  Turns out, it was a good thing that I didn’t trust him.

  Seems that the chief of police wasn’t the only one who was dirty.

  Chapter 27

  What’s right isn’t always legal, and what’s legal isn’t always right.

  -Evander to Kennedy

  Evander

  Kennedy was riding my cock. She was seconds away from coming. I could feel the rippling of her pussy as she started over that peak.

  I was letting her do all the work, my hands fisted behind my head, as I watched her take what she needed.

  Her breasts were jolting with each slam of her hips, and I was counting to one hundred in my head to keep myself from coming before her.

  I was doing a shitty job of it, too.

  If she didn’t hurry, I’d come without her.

  Literally, blow everything before she even crested.

  In fact, I was focused on ignoring the way she was slamming down on me, giving me everything that she had to give, when I heard the sound.

  A sound that one shouldn’t hear in the dead of night.

  I’d woken Kennedy up around two in the morning after I’d felt her ass pushing up against my cock for over an hour.

  Finally giving up, I’d rolled her over on top of me, and then fitted my cock to her entrance.

  Which led us to now, her still riding me, and me hearing a noise.

  It sounded like a door opening.

  One that I didn’t use every day, because it creaked slightly, and thankfully so, since it was now alerting me to the fact that someone was entering into my domain.

  Gertie must’ve heard it, too, because he started barking.

  At first, it was just an alert bark—kind of like, Hey! I heard that!

  But then it turned into something more sinister. Into something that was akin to “you shouldn’t fucking be in here.”

  The barks were ferocious, and I had Kennedy rolled off of me and pushed to the floor within seconds.

  All my honed instincts from my military days and then from my auto-recovery days, had me on my feet, sliding my pants on and reaching for my gun in under ten seconds.

  Only, I no longer had a gun.

  I had a fucking baseball bat.

  There were two fucking things that you didn’t do when you were in a gunfight.

  One, you didn’t pursue if you didn’t have anything adequate to protect yourself.

  Two, you didn’t bring a knife—or a fucking baseball bat—because that was the first thing that would get you killed.

  “Call the cops,” I ordered, then opened the door and closed it just as quietly.

  She didn’t argue, and I could hear her scrambling behind me. Then I cursed.

  If I could hear her, that would mean that someone else could hear her, too.

  I backed into the shadows of the hallway and stepped quietly, sticking to the side and letting my back just barely skim against the wall so I didn’t hit anything that Kennedy and I had left when we’d gotten home yesterday.

  Like our clothes and our shoes.

  A hoarse curse, followed by a short bark of gunfire, had me moving faster.

  The most eerie thing was the utter silence that followed.

  No more barking. No more movement.

  No nothing.

  And I knew.

  Gertie wouldn’t have stopped barking.

  He wouldn’t.

  Sick to my stomach, I finally hit the end of the hallway and glanced around.

  There was nothing there.

  At least not at first glance.

  My eyes were adjusted to the darkness, but there was enough moonlight shining through the curtains of the living room for me to see that there was a large black lump on the ground next to the couch.

  There was also somebody sitting in my chair.

  “Turn on the lights and join me.”

  I knew that voice.

  It was one that would haunt me for the rest of my life.

  The man who had been responsible for framing me for a crime that I did not commit.

  “I can see you. I have night vision eyewear on,” Balthazar drawled the moment I’d started to move. “Now, come out from behind that wall or I’ll have my associate kill the woman.”

  I swallowed thickly and stepped out, knowing from some sort of sixth sense that he wasn’t joking.

  He had someone in the house with him, and somehow, some way, he’d gotten that associate in without me realizing it.

  “I’ve taken care of the leaks in my organization,” he said the moment I reached for the lights. “Thank your source for rectifying one of my problems for me. It’s hard to know who tells what lies. Though, it’s true that my prized peacocks were killed, only one man knew that. Now that man is no longer in my employ.”

  I growled under my breath and tried not to freak the fuck out.

  Then, hoping I was right and he hadn’t taken the goggles off, I flipped the lights on and started to move.

  All at once I flew into action, and I was rewarded for my quick actions.

  Balthazar doubled over as he practically yanked the glasses off his face and threw them to the ground in his haste to get them free.

  I knew the feeling.

  It hurt like a son of a bitch to have happen.

  “The only problem with the infrared night vision goggles?” I growled, hefting my bat. “Is that you have to adjust your eyesight. Fuckin’ hurts to have light added to your vision with those bad boys on, doesn’t it?”

  Then I swung my bat, hitting Balthazar straight across the side of his head.

  He slumped down into the chair like he’d had his strings cut, and I turned to go back to Kennedy.

  Only, the moment I stepped a foot in the direction of her, my front door was kicked in and Detective Mueller was there.

  “Drop the weapon!” he screamed.

  I dropped the bat and gestured to the hallway, wary of the gun that the detective had pointed at me.

  “Get on the ground,” he ordered, gesturing to the ground.

  I’d been avoiding the ground.

  Looking at the ground was admitting to myself that Gertie was gone, and I refused to do that right then.

  In a while, once I was sure that Kennedy was okay, then I’d confront one of my worst
fears.

  Then, I’d look.

  Right now? No, I was not getting on the ground.

  “There’s someone else in the house with my fiancé,” I told Mueller. “He’s in my bedroom. She’s in there, likely naked and vulnerable, and I’m not leaving her to whomever has her.”

  Mueller stared at me, gauging my sincerity, and nodded once.

  He moved past me down my hallway, shuffling his feet and making so much goddamn noise that I wanted to pull my hair out.

  The man was inexperienced, and I had no doubt in my mind that he was about to kill not just himself, but me and Kennedy right along with him.

  I was right behind him, ready to intervene if I was needed with my bat, and wasn’t prepared.

  Not for what I saw the moment that the door was thrown open by Mueller.

  First rule in combat, always be prepared.

  Mueller hadn’t even anticipated the shot that came at him before he threw the door open.

  Hell, he’d just stood there like a goddamn idiot.

  The lucky thing for him—and for me—was that he was about half a foot shorter than me, something that, unfortunately for the man who was holding my woman, he hadn’t expected.

  And Walter had wasted his shot.

  He’d thought that it was me, and he’d aimed high.

  Mueller returned fire in the next instant, making my heart leap straight out of my chest.

  I wasn’t confident in his detective skills, and I sure as fuck wasn’t confident in his hostage negotiation skills.

  But the man was nothing if not lucky.

  He took one shot, and that one shot missed Kennedy’s face by less than an inch.

  Nobody would’ve ever taken that shot on the fly like Mueller had without first taking the time to aim.

  No, not Mueller.

  He just shot at hip level and let it fly, nearly losing his head when I barely corralled the urge to aim my bat at the stupid fucker’s head.

  My brother hit the floor with a meaty thud, and Kennedy went right along with him, the weight of his body still holding onto hers and taking her down whether she wanted to go or not.

  But she didn’t stay there for long. Moments after hitting the floor, she was scrambling away, heading straight for me.

  Mueller walked over to the dead man, nearly stepping on Kennedy’s fingers, and pressed his hand to Walter’s neck.

  “Shit, he’s gone.”

  He picked up the gun that Walter had in his hand before he fell, and then shoved it into the waistband of his jeans.

  “You okay?” he asked Kennedy, who’d finally arrived at my feet and crawled her way into my arms.

  I was shaking.

  I couldn’t breathe.

  And I was seconds away from beating the living shit out of Mueller.

  Literally, if there wasn’t so much wrong with this situation, I would’ve beat the man to death until there was absolutely nothing left of him that was recognizable.

  That’s when I became aware that we weren’t alone in the house any longer.

  Which was a good thing, because I was an instant away from losing my shit.

  That, and Kennedy was losing it in my arms.

  “Oh, God,” she whispered over and over. “Oh, God. Oh, God. I’m so sorry, Evander. Oh, God.”

  I squeezed her tighter.

  “Get down on the ground!”

  That was the chief of police.

  Just fucking lovely.

  “I said get down on the ground!”

  That’s when I realized that he was talking to me.

  ***

  “Sir, my client was in his own home. In his bed. Practically naked.” My new lawyer, some hot shot from a few towns over named Todd something or other, growled at the chief of police. “He’s, in fact, still in his underwear. You haven’t given him food or water in over seven hours, and you’re violating so many of his rights here that I don’t even know where to start.”

  I agreed.

  Yet I kept my mouth shut.

  “I’ve got a few men that want to have a chat with you.”

  That was news to me.

  I glanced at the door when it was opened, surprised to see three large men standing there.

  Rafe was one of them. With him was an older man with a fan-fucking-tastic beard and another male who looked ready to rip everyone’s head off.

  “What kind of horse crap is this?” Fowler seethed, standing up so abruptly that his seat behind him hit the wall with a crack. “This is my fucking police station. Get out!”

  Rafe stepped inside and shook his head, eyeing Fowler like he was unimpressed.

  It was, indeed, his police station. But it wouldn’t be for much longer. I wasn’t sure that Fowler had ever seen that particular side of the interrogation room table.

  “Actually,” Rafe drawled. “This is no longer your police station. As of right now, the Texas Rangers have opened a corruption investigation of this office and all officers associated with it due to the recent events. There is no longer a functional police station in the city of Hostel.”

  Fowler’s face went beet red.

  “You can’t…”

  “No, but I can.”

  A Texas Ranger in full uniform walked straight up to Fowler and held out his hand. “Pending the outcome of this investigation, you are officially relieved of duty until such a time as you are either exonerated of the charges that have been leveled against this office or you are otherwise deemed fit for duty.”

  I knew that wasn’t going to happen.

  Any decent investigator would see this farce of a police department as the fucking den of dishonesty that it is.

  Hell, I hadn’t even been here for the last four years—although I did have first-hand knowledge of how corrupt these cops were, seeing as I went to jail either because of their inability to adequately conduct an investigation or, even worse, their role in framing me for this crime.

  I also now knew that there were at least two dirty police officers in Balthazar’s pockets. My brother and Fowler.

  “You can’t…”

  The Texas Ranger grinned. “I just did.”

  And that was that.

  Chapter 28

  If a boy gives you butterflies, your heart is in danger.

  -Fact of Life

  Kennedy

  I dug a hole in the ground.

  My hands were blistered. One finger was bleeding due to a splinter, but I wouldn’t stop until the hole was big enough.

  I hiccupped on a sob as I scooped out another shovelful of dirt.

  “Would you please, for the love of all that’s holy, let me help you?”

  I shook my head at Rafe’s insistence and kept scooping.

  The hole I was digging was large, but it wasn’t large enough.

  Not to hold a deceased dog of Gertie’s size.

  “God, this is the hardest thing in the world to watch.”

  I glanced up to see that I’d gained another man in my audience.

  This one was a man in full uniform.

  A Texas Ranger, if I had to guess.

  “That’s what I’ve been saying for the last hour,” Rafe grumbled to himself. “You get Evander home?”

  “I did,” the Texas Ranger confirmed. “He was released on his own recognizance about half an hour ago. Though, I don’t think that he knows that his woman is out here doing this, or he wouldn’t have insisted on going to the hospital looking for her.”

  I frowned. “Why does he think I’m at the hospital?”

  The Texas Ranger looked at me. “Apparently, you were supposed to be there undergoing some tests.”

  I had been…over two hours ago. Now I was here, doing this.

  “Rafe?”

  Rafe looked at me, his gaze unwavering.

  “Yeah?”

  “If I let you finish, will you go pick up Evander and bring him back here?”

  Rafe
nodded, looking relieved.

  “Yeah.”

  I let the shovel drop from my limp hands, and then sat on the edge of the hole and waited.

  Rafe disappeared sometime later, and I could tell that men were still surrounding me.

  At some point, two got into the hole and started digging around me.

  They made short work of it.

  Made it look so much easier than I had.

  I didn’t care, though.

  I didn’t speak.

  I only waited.

  It wasn’t long.

  Maybe fifteen minutes at most.

  I heard the motorcycle before I saw it, and then turned my head to watch as Evander came barreling around the curve of the driveway. He came to a stop directly in front of where I’d been digging, and then threw his leg over the bike before marching toward me.

  I stood up, and with very little effort on his part, he hauled me up into his arms and buried his face in my neck.

  “Are you okay?” I asked him shakily.

  He didn’t reply, only squeezed tighter.

  I wasn’t sure whether to take that as a yes or a no.

  “I was digging a g-g-grave,” I said. “For Gertie.”

  Evander’s big body shuddered.

  He still didn’t reply.

  “Do you want me to get them to bring him out here?”

  He couldn’t stay in there much longer.

  His large body had been covered with a sheet in the middle of the living room.

  Unfortunately, with everything else that was going on, including Evander’s house being a crime scene, I couldn’t do any more until they’d officially released it back to us.

  And that hadn’t been for another eight, long hours.

  If we had waited much longer, it would have begun to smell.

  And I didn’t want Evander to remember Gertie like that.

  “I’ll get him.”

  “No,” I refused to let Evander see him.

  It was bad.

  Really bad.

  “I’ll do it,” Travis muttered.

  Then he was gone.

  And I held onto Evander as he tried to pull away.

  “Please?”

  Evander’s face lifted, and he stared into my eyes.

  Something in them must’ve struck home, because he nodded and waited.

  Travis appeared moments later, the black draped form cradled in his arms.