“I know Cara. I work there,” the kid behind him spoke up. “At least I did until I ditched work today.”
“Maybe she’ll take you back, kid.”
“She’s not the forgiving sort.” Iceman’s eyes took on a far-off look and a fleeting glimpse of regret before he steeled himself and put the tough-guy mask back in place.
“Let’s hope she’s the hiring kind.”
“Can I get a ride?” The kid eyed his father, who rose to his feet and faced off with King once more.
“Get in the truck.” King didn’t move, but stood his ground in front of the guy who wanted to take another shot at him, but didn’t because Iceman gave him a slight shake of his head to hold him off.
Lucky King. He’d gotten Iceman on his side. Or at least earned a reprieve for now. King was under no illusions that Iceman wouldn’t check him out with Scott and by any other means to make sure he was on the level for why he was here.
King shifted his gaze from Iceman to Tim’s abusive father. “You hit the kid again, next time you won’t wake up.”
Tim’s father took a step forward. The two guys who’d been standing next to Iceman grabbed his arms and held him back. Some silent command from Iceman.
“Who the fuck do you think you are?”
“The guy who laid you out and will do it again if you hurt that kid.” King limped back to the truck, his back to the men, but aware of their heavy scrutiny.
“What happened to your leg?”
King turned back to Iceman and looked him in the eye. “I’m sure Scott will tell you all about it when you contact him to check me out.” Direct. Forward. He wanted Iceman on notice that he knew the game and how to play even if he didn’t ask to be part of the team.
Tim didn’t say a word as King climbed into the truck cab. He stared straight ahead, too afraid to look over at the other men, including his father. King didn’t look back either as he drove away.
“Thanks,” Tim mumbled, his head turned to the side window now that they were away from his dad.
“No problem.”
“Does your hand hurt?”
King barely glanced at his swollen knuckles. “I’ve had worse.”
They ached. One of the cuts from the near-riot split open and bled again. He’d been in his fair share of skirmishes while working for the DEA but nothing like what he’d faced in jail with guys throwing punches just because they had nothing better to do or to prove themselves for whatever gang they belonged to or wanted to join. He’d learned to keep his guard up and fight back and ask questions later. Most of the time, the fight amounted to nothing but some bumps and bruises. Nothing he couldn’t handle. But that last attack nearly ended badly for Scott and him. If not for his quick reflexes, he’d be dead. And so would the guard who got in the way and nearly got killed trying to break up the fight.
King rubbed the heel of his hand over his thigh and the still-sore and stitched wound.
“You okay?” Tim eyed him from across the bench seat.
“It’s nothing. What were you doing out there with those guys?”
“Trying to get out of doing what my father ordered me to do.”
“Are you part of their crew?”
“No.” Tim rolled his eyes. “Sometimes.” The anger fisting his hands and flashing in his eyes told King the kid resented being dragged into their world as an unwilling accomplice.
“Shouldn’t you be in school?” The kid couldn’t be more than sixteen, seventeen years old.
“I graduated last year. I’m saving up for college. I’ll probably go to the junior college first, then transfer to the university later. It’s expensive, but I promised my mom I’d get my degree and do something smart.”
King shook his head. “Smart is staying away from those guys. Unless you want to end up in jail.”
“My mom used to say that’s the only place I’ll end up if I see my dad.”
Used to say. “What happened to your mom?”
“She died a month after I graduated. Doc found a lump. Ten weeks later, she’s gone.”
“That’s some bad luck, kid. I’m real sorry to hear it.”
“I think she knew about it for a long time, but was too afraid to go to the doctor.”
King pressed his lips together. “Some people don’t want to face what’s hard in life. If you don’t know the truth, you don’t have to deal with it.”
“That’s stupid. If she’d gone sooner, they could have saved her.”
“Maybe. Every choice we make has consequences both good and bad. Like you seeing your dad today.”
“There’s nothing but bad when it comes to him. I got hit. I’ll probably lose my job. Or worse, Cara will tell me how I disappointed her again.”
If Cara’s opinion mattered that much, the kid should try harder to live up to her expectations instead of living down to his father’s. “You like her?”
“She’s tough. You’ll see. But I think it’s because she cares and knows what will happen to me if I join up with my dad and . . . those guys.”
King read between the lines. Tim purposefully left out that those guys included Cara’s father. That secret, or at least the need to keep it quiet, was protected by everyone around her. No good came from your association with known drug dealers because rival gangs out for revenge or just to prove something wouldn’t think twice about going after your family.
As a DEA agent, he had to worry about the same thing.
King stopped at a red light and took out his cell. He quickly sent off a text to Trigger.
FLASH: Perkins Produce truck from Guzman warehouse raid sitting on Miner’s Way. Go get it!
The light turned green just as his phone dinged with a return text.
GINGER: You don’t waste time. On it! And the game begins.
Trigger used the stripper guise when undercover. Though this message wouldn’t fool anyone, King would delete these messages and use “Ginger” in the future if he needed help.
“Is that your girlfriend?”
King distracted Tim with a question of his own. “What do you want to study at school?”
“Criminology.”
“You want to be a lawyer or a cop?”
“DEA.”
King whipped his head toward Tim, whose cheeks burned with embarrassment. “You want to be DEA but you’re out there with them doing . . . whatever they were doing that probably had to do with drugs.”
“Stupid, right? But after what happened to Cara, what those guys, including my dad, do. The crap they put on the streets.” Tim’s eyes fired with outrage. “I want to take them all down and get that shit off the streets and out of schools.”
That last part especially seemed to bother Tim. “Did your dad make you sell at school?”
“Sometimes. But I stopped when a friend overdosed. She nearly died.” The sadness in those words hit King right in the chest. “Do you think it’s stupid that I want to be a cop and take my dad down?”
“No.” King gripped the steering wheel tighter. He understood that kind of driving need to do something when you felt responsible for what happened to someone you cared about. He stayed focused on the road and not the past and what happened to Erin. “If you do something you believe in, you’ll be the best person for the job. Sounds like you’ve got the inside track on those guys. You know how they think and what they’re likely to do.”
“I hate that I’ll have to wait to do it.”
“You want to do something now, don’t participate anymore.”
Tim rolled his eyes again. “It’s not that easy.”
“If you’re not fixing the problem, you’re part of the problem. You use drugs or get busted, you’ll never be a part of the DEA.”
Tim stared out the side window. “It’ll probably never happen anyway.”
“Every goal has steps to reach it. Make sure every step you take leads you to that goal and not away from it. Before you know it, you’ll get there if you really want it.”
“I do.
They need to pay for what happened to Cara.”
King wanted to ask what happened to her, but the second he pulled into the Crossroads Coffee parking lot, Tim opened the door and jumped out. “I’ll go find Cara and tell her what happened and let her know why you’re here.”
King didn’t like using an innocent woman. Of course, many of his counterparts in the DEA didn’t believe she was so innocent. Speculation circulated that Iceman kept her a secret to insulate her, so she could help him by hiding drugs and laundering money without her getting caught and selling out Iceman. The file King read on her left him and everyone else on the team wondering if they had everyone fooled.
King walked up to the coffee shop door.
Time to find out which side of the legal line Cara Potter played on.
Chapter Four
Cara held the bowl of pumpkin spice donut batter to her chest and put all her frustration into mixing it together. The bell over the door dinged. She caught a glimpse of Tim rushing in before she turned her back and rolled her eyes. She didn’t want to hear the string of excuses he’d give her for sneaking out during his shift. She knew why. She even understood it. But it pissed her off that her father and his interfered in their lives without any thought or care for the consequences or damage they did.
Intended or not.
“Cara, you won’t believe what happened.”
“Aliens abducted you.”
The sarcastic comeback made Tim sigh. “I’m sorry I left without telling you. My dad—”
“Is the same kind of prick as mine. He doesn’t pay your salary. I do. He’d just as soon see you in jail or dead than do what’s right for you. I told you, if you ditched work to break the law with him and the others you might as well not come back. Seems to me, you made your choice.”
“Come on, Cara, you know it’s not like that.”
She turned then and faced the boy who stood five inches taller than her but didn’t have the strength of conviction she did to stand up for himself. “It’s simple, Tim. When he calls, you hang up. When he asks you to do something, you say no.”
Tim sighed with everything inside of him in the frustrated exhale. He planted his hands on the counter, leaned in, and gave her those puppy dog eyes only a teen boy thought would get him out of anything. “I’m sorry.”
“People have been saying sorry for the things they do even though they knew they shouldn’t have done them in the first place since time began. It didn’t mean anything then. It doesn’t mean shit now. We have had this conversation one too many times.”
“Please, Cara, it won’t happen again. I swear.”
“You swore the last time.”
He swore when she hired him. Before that, Tim’s father dragged him into her shop a couple times a week before they left to do God knows what against Tim’s will. One day, he came in alone, all shy and afraid to look at her, but with enough nerve to ask for her help. They had a lot in common with their fathers’ lives impacting theirs. She’d wanted to help him and understood his desperation to be free of that world. She’d given him the job and told him if he worked hard and kept his nose clean she’d help him reach his dream of going to college just like he promised his mother. But he wasn’t living up to his end of the bargain.
Neither the fear in his eyes nor his split lip stopped her from pushing. He needed to learn a lesson. Maybe if she made him believe he was about to lose the only good things in his life—his job and her support—he’d think twice the next time his father called on him to put his life and future on the line. She hated to be so harsh, but she was trying to save him from getting sucked into a world that offered nothing but unhappiness, threats, jail, and possibly death.
Tim had so much potential. She didn’t want to see his life go up in flames.
“I didn’t do what they wanted. This guy showed up and knocked my dad out. I mean, he laid him flat with one punch. You have to hire him.” The words tumbled out of Tim’s mouth so fast she had a hard time keeping up. “He’s here. He needs a job.”
The bell over the door dinged again. She glanced over, ready to dismiss whoever Tim was talking about, but the second the tall stranger entered the shop, her heart and time stopped as he stood there staring at her. His blue eyes locked on her and seemed to take her all in without moving from her face. His expression didn’t change, but she felt a shift in him. A pull. Some kind of strange knowing and recognition.
She didn’t know the guy.
She’d remember him.
He didn’t shy away from her stare. In fact, he held it with a kind of dare for her to either turn away or acknowledge the electrical connection that crackled between them and rose the hairs on the back of her neck. Not in warning, but excitement. That odd mix of fear and joy when you rose up the long climb on a roller coaster and your gut clenched, anticipating the drop down the other side. You welcome the speed and danger and the thrill of the ride.
Here was a temptation to walk on the wild side.
“Iceman thought Scott sent him here to work for him, but he came to find you. He saw my dad hitting me and he punched him. Once. My dad dropped like a rock. Man, I couldn’t believe it.”
Tim’s voice sounded far off in her mind as she took in what he said. She dropped her gaze to the guy’s big hands. His right-hand knuckles were red and swollen. Dark red blood congealed on an open cut. The deep purple bruise fringed in yellow-green on his scruffy jaw looked older. She wondered how he’d gotten it. If he took down Tim’s father, had the other fight ended with the other guy worse off than this guy?
“Iceman let us go. I didn’t have to drive the truck.”
The buzz humming in her head and body cut off the second she whipped her gaze away from the man walking her way and she pinned Tim in place with her heated gaze. “What truck?”
Tim’s lips disappeared into his mouth as he pressed them together and looked away.
“Details. Now.”
“It’s nothing. I didn’t have to do it because he”—Tim cocked his chin toward the man taking up the wide space in the kitchen entry—“stopped them from making me do it.”
Cara locked her gaze on the man, demanding an explanation without words. Since she didn’t ask a question, he didn’t say anything. “You knocked him out.” He didn’t acknowledge what she said in any way, like it didn’t matter. But it did. Especially to her. “Why’d you stop?”
He shrugged. “It was the right thing to do.”
That made her laugh, though it held no humor. “Not many people do the right thing. Especially when Iceman and his cohorts are involved.” It didn’t make much sense that Iceman was there at all. He preferred to stay in the shadows and not give the cops a chance to pick him up. Whatever brought him out today must have been important. She hoped he didn’t plan to make one of his surprise visits to her.
“I was so focused on Tim’s father hitting him I didn’t see Iceman and the other two guys. Wouldn’t have mattered anyway. Anyone who stands by while a kid is getting a beat-down is just as bad as the guy doling out the punches.”
The flutter in her belly trilled with his words. Could it be? A genuine nice guy who did the right thing even when it didn’t have anything to do with him in the first place. The skeptic in her didn’t believe it. But her heart wanted to, judging by that strange melty feeling going on in her chest.
“Who are you?”
“Flash.”
“He’s fast.” Tim punched the air, mimicking Flash punching his father. His eyes twinkled with gratitude. And why not? No one stood up for Tim and made his father pay for the terrible things he did to him.
The kid had it bad.
Hero worship for the guy who slayed Tim’s dragon.
Cara hoped Flash deserved the adoration. Tim didn’t need one more person letting him down.
As for Flash, she still had her reservations. He gave her the nickname, but it didn’t seem to roll off his tongue like he’d lived with it his whole life.
She cocked an eyebrow, wo
ndering why he seemed uncomfortable giving her that name.
“Chris Hickman,” he hastily added. “But everyone just calls me Flash now.”
“Now?”
His gaze went to the ceiling for a second before he looked her in the eye again. “Scott Lewis gave me the name in jail. We shared a cell. He gave me your name and said you might give me a job while I’m on parole.”
She’d seen her fair share and then some of ex-cons. This guy didn’t strike her as the kind of guy who spent his life thumbing his nose at society and the law. The stint in prison didn’t jibe with the guy who’d pull over to save a kid from getting knocked around by his old man, especially when he was on parole.
Probably why Scott thought she’d be willing to help him out.
“What were you in for?”
“Possession with intent to sell.”
She narrowed her gaze. She knew dealers, guys in the business to make a quick buck and a name for themselves. That kind of guy wasn’t standing in front of her. He didn’t have that desperate, the-world-is-against-me look. He didn’t look like a party boy or a guy who had nothing but hard times.
“How long were you in?”
“One hundred and fifty-three days of my six-month sentence.”
And he didn’t like a single day of it. He got out early. Lots of people did thanks to overcrowding. But she had an inkling it had to do with something more. “Good behavior?”
His eyes flashed with unwarranted anger. “I’m not all that good.”
So he wanted her to think he was a badass. In some respects, she believed that, but he wasn’t hard like the other men she knew.
She crossed her arms under her breasts. He didn’t even look as she pressed them up with her arms. Not one little dip in his gaze. Not a single leer, the way most men would look, especially a man who’d been in jail for one hundred and fifty-three days.
Definitely good behavior. Manners. The posture of a soldier. The patience of a guy who’s smart enough to only answer the question asked and shut up before he said too much or nothing at all with a bunch of unnecessary conversation.
True to You Page 3