Shot

by Lexi Ostrow

  The room didn’t erupt as he’d expected it too. A few people scoffed at the idea, but no one jumped down his throat again to disprove his theory. This should have made him feel ecstatic. The fact that cops could be killing their own took away any feeling of glory he had at creating a viable explanation.

  “If only there was a way to sniff them out,” Captain James said, his face etched with annoyance. “For now, we keep thinking. Thank you– Trellins, was it? Please sit back down as we are not done here.”

  His mind tried to turn over several different possibilities as he tuned out more of the worthless babble occurring throughout the room once he’d sat back down. The trick was to find out what the counties had in common–what criminals and what crime statistics–anything that could paint a better picture. It pissed him the fuck off that he couldn’t think of anything.

  Jeremy riffled through the gigantic stack of stapled papers in front of him that held all the evidence they currently had. Sitting here, talking and turning pages, wasn’t going to do anything.

  “Time to call your families, folks. This is going to be a long night.”

  He wasn’t certain who had said it, but he was pretty certain every person in the room groaned. None of them loved nights like this, not even him. He narrowed his eyes at the paper and sat up a little straighter in his chair. He’d done things like this with Danvers before. If they gave power to the biggest department, they weren’t getting out of here until they had a suspect, a target, and a date for what might be the next attack.

  “Son of a bitch!”

  Without thinking, Trevor threw his cell phone across the room. He’d secured the needed minimum wage job at a Chipotle to keep his parole officer off his back. He’d been waiting throughout that shift to find out where the final Jimmy O’Casey on the list lived. Sadly, his phone had died on his shift, and there were no chargers on the bus. He didn’t like excess connection with his boys, safer for everyone involved that way, so he had to wait. But, he wasn’t a tech guru, he didn’t have the smarts to things on his own so he needed his team.

  He’d been practically salivating at the idea of sending his guy, Mikey, into snatching the ex-cop so he could torture him. Getting back to his tiny one bedroom apartment in Escondido, he hadn’t expected to find that the fucker already dead.

  His hands clenched. His knuckles whitened by the second from clenching so hard after launching the phone. “That son of bitch wasn’t allowed to up and die on his own terms.”

  Huffing, he stalked over and picked up the phone up off the floor and continued to read the rest of the article on the cop’s death. As he did a slow smile spread across his lips.

  “Well, well, well. At least if I couldn’t take him down the way I wanted to, it’s nice to know that someone did. I wonder how often these idiots fail to catch killers.”

  He let the thought wash over him. He’d been planning his revenge for four hundred days. He’d made sure each and every gun was essentially unmarked, belonging to a dead person that he’d gotten on the black market, ensuring their safety. He’d taken painstaking time to ensure each gun was disposed of so it couldn’t accidentally be used again. Each group had different shooters, with the exception of himself. If one person could get away with shooting a cop in plain sight, then he and his boys had nothing to worry about.

  He dragged a hand over the screen and continued to smile. Jimmy O’Casey had a very hot daughter. He felt the swell of his dick and shifted his pants. He hadn’t gotten hard thinking about anything other than killing cops in months. Feeling something by looking at a photo was a shock, but he wasn’t about to ignore it – not completely.

  He pushed the number to reach Mikey and waited impatiently as it rang.

  “Do we have a hit tonight? I thought you wanted to wait a day or so?” Mikey’s voice sounded a little panicked.

  “It’s ok, we’re actually going to push this back a little. How are your hacking skills?”

  He could practically see the grin spreading over his oldest accomplice’s face in his tone of voice. Mikey had been the brightest star in their group back in the day. He’d been the only one of them in school and he’d been a fucking genius.

  “Better than ever. What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “I need you to check up on someone. Someone I want to add to the list of cops I want to take down at the LAPD.”

  “We had a list? I thought that Cheryl bitch was the only one you specifically wanted other than O’Casey?”

  “It seems our dear pal has met his end, but has a hot as Hell daughter, I want her. Bridget O’Casey, so says the article I found on her dad. She’s a model. Track her down. Find out where she is. If she’s back in the Los Angeles area, she’s mine.”

  Mikey was quiet. For a moment Trevor thought he lost him, but then an impressed whistle came through the phone several seconds later.

  “Damn, O’Casey made a beautiful kid.”

  “That he did,” Trevor reached down and stroked himself through his pants, feeling excited as he thought about Bridget O’Casey. “So, you’re going to find her. You’ve got till this evening. I don’t want to lose all the fear we’ve built. I want this last attack to happen this week. I just want to include a little extra fun. A side dish to the main course.

  Mikey chuckled. “Give me ten minutes, and I can have anything you want on her.”

  “Good. You’ve now set a timeline for yourself.” Trevor disconnected the call and tossed the cheap smartphone onto the bed, and sat down on the edge. “Five hundred and ninety-seven days in jail, and it’s finally almost over.”

  His voice was low as he slid his pants off and grabbed himself and slowly stroked his aching cock. Bridget O’Casey’s face was burned deep into his mind and he was never one to let a good erection go to waste.

  * * *

  Trevor smirked at the incoming text. It amazed him how talented Mikey was, and how stupid people were with their information systems. Bridget O’Casey’s address was now in his hands, Complete with directions from the nearest bus stops to her front door. Which meant there was nothing that was stopping him from looking in on dear old Jimmy’s baby girl.

  If he was going to snatch her, which was the only plan he could think of right now, he’d need to stop by her house a few times and to look at the surroundings, not to mention learn her habits.

  “So give yourself two days. See when she comes and goes, and check on the neighbors.”

  He released a pent-up breath. The idea of having to snatch someone else made him sweat, literally. Taking Cheryl hadn’t been impossible, but doing it again was a test of skill he hadn’t perfected.

  Trevor grabbed his wallet off the desk and headed for the door, punching in the bus route information as he walked to it. Not once did his footsteps fumble along the way. His mind raced, though it was laser focused as ever on the task at hand. Getting caught tonight, or during any surveillance time, would ruin it all.

  The cold didn’t bother him as he waited for the bus. The bitter annoyance that he would be reporting in for a god-forsaken early morning shift at the restaurant was the only thing that bothered him.

  Just keep it together. This is it. The final step before you punish everyone who put you away for no reason. His voice buzzed in his mind as he stepped onto the bus.

  He rummaged through his pocket for the change and dropped his ass into a seat three rows back. According to the directions, he had twenty minutes to wait until his stop.

  Trevor thrummed his fingers across his jean-clad knees. Twenty minutes isn’t so bad. Having a place in LA was a damn good idea. He just needed to distract himself. Because right now all he could think about was sinking his hands into the short cut hair of Bridget O’Casey. He wanted to fuck her. There was really nothing that said he couldn’t, or shouldn’t.

  “Not like they make a rule book for this shit.” He hadn’t realized he’d spoken out loud until he saw the man next to him giving him a look.

  Trevor shrugged his
shoulders and pulled out his phone. It wasn’t fancy, but he could surf the Internet a bit in the meantime.

  The Internet didn’t help. His thoughts alternated between fucking the lovely female and slitting her throat. Something about the way blood seeped out over him, the way he could feel the pulse before it stopped, felt so much more personal. The airlock suction sound of the bus door opening snapped him out of his reverie just in time for him to jump off the bus and race off. He practically threw himself out of the bus and then stopped to take a look around.

  “Son of bitch.”

  He’d already forgotten the next step in the directions. Grumbling, he pulled his phone back out and scanned them over before lifting his head to double check the street sign in front of him. Sucking in a deep breath to calm the anger rolling within him, he started walking.

  It was a nice area really. He passed several small businesses along the way before slipping into the nice picket fence area. She lived just outside the city, and probably liked it out here. He knew he did. It was quieter, cleaner, and luckily for him, had considerably less cops wandering around unless called.

  Every house was perfect. Nothing cookie cutter, the area was too old for that. Each one had a perfectly mown lawn with expertly trimmed bushes and power washed driveways. According to her online Lazy Girls page she was with American Model Management; whoever the hell they were, she was a model. He could easily see how she’d amassed the money to live out here at such a young age. If he took a second to really think about it, he’d probably be jealous.

  Nothing had ever been easy for him. His family had grown up blue collar. Mom and Dad made just enough to feed him and his three brothers, but there was never anything extra to go around. No huge Christmas’s or birthdays. No car when he or his brother’s turned sixteen.

  It had been his dad’s temper that had been the problem. The man hadn’t even needed to drink to take a swing at them for something. His older brother, Travis, had protected them as long as he could. He’d joined the Marines, though, and it had left him alone to protect his two youngest brothers.

  A shudder raced through him as he thought about how many beatings he had taken, many of which had been meant for his brothers. It’s a shame I can’t get back at that son of a bitch now.

  The thought crossed his mind and a bitter mood passed over him. His dad had died three years ago. He’d heard about it through the lock-up grapevine. His mom had gone to visit him, but he’d told his mother to go away. Not like it really mattered that the old man was dead, but he should have pretended to be as good of son as he was pretending to be a model citizen.

  “3752, 3754…” Travis quietly repeated the numbers of the houses across the street. Bridget lived in 3808, just a few houses down.

  When he got to it he stopped across the street next to a blue Honda parked along the sidewalk. Trevor decided to sit down behind it and just observe from across the way. He wasn’t sure how long he would have, and he wanted to memorize what the area was like at night. He’d also check it out during the day tomorrow to see which time would be the best to grab her, assuming she even stayed home during the day. She was a model, there was no information as to what she’d be doing right now, or how long she even planned on staying in the area, just that she’d returned home for her father’s funeral.

  A light was on in the front window. He wondered if the blinds ever opened. His cock throbbed for a moment, eager to get a glimpse of her in her own home. He lifted his hand up and bit down on the back of it to deflate the sudden rise of his desire. It worked like a charm, and he was able to focus again on watching.

  Forty minutes went by. The beeping of his cell phone shocked Trevor from his seated position behind the car. Nothing had happened. Some people had walked by on her side of the sidewalk, but she hadn’t come out and the light in the upper window hadn’t gone out. Nor had any others turned on. If she had a dog, it hadn’t barked like the others in the area twelve minutes ago. Which meant she was most likely in for the night and alone.

  The quiet of the suburb was nice. It meant that he would have less trouble getting into her house because less people would be out. It did mean he would need to be quieter if she lived alone, which he thought she did as it was a one-car garage, then she would hear any intrusion. He would need to sneak into her home before she came back.

  His phone beeped twice. He growled at it, like it would help silence it from dying. If his phone died, he’d miss the last bus back. Pushing himself off the cold ground, he stretched a little and started heading back towards the bus. Two more would be running before midnight. He had plenty of time, even if it was almost a forty-minute walk from the stop.

  The night hadn’t been a bust. It hadn’t told him much, but it had confirmed a few things. She was home at night, she had no pet, and she lived alone. He would just need to get back here on the first bus in the morning to see when she went out, if she did at all.

  A small smile spread across his lips. In a matter of months he’d added kidnapping, stalking, and murder to his list of crimes. It was a shame they’d never catch him to lock him up for the shit he really had committed.

  Jeremy couldn’t stop the yawn as he pulled up outside of Bridget’s house. They’d been at it for almost twenty-four hours straight at the station and his head was spinning. What was worse was they weren’t any closer to figuring out how many people were behind the shootings, or who any single one of the perps was. He put the car in park and stretched when he got out of the vehicle.

  “I will not miss those sessions. I will not miss those sessions.” He chanted it like a mantra as he slammed the car door.

  A shit ton of effort had gone into a meeting that had largely gone unfulfilled. Time he could have been spent enjoying his technically new relationship with Bridget. Instead, he’d spent it with too much coffee and creamer, and a lot of stodgy old men and uptight women.

  Not that they didn’t have anything to be that way about, he thought as he looked around Bridget’s quiet, upscale neighborhood.

  The sleepy little suburban area was quiet, as it should have been at 5:45 in the morning. The sun’s golden rays were slowly peeking over the hills. For a split second, he actually missed the open plains of Alabama, and watching the sunsets and dawns there.

  He wondered if Bridget would be awake. The last thing he wanted to do was to quietly sneak in and get assaulted if she had a registered weapon. She was a cops kid – she likely had one somewhere. For his own safety, he pulled out his phone and sent her a quick text asking if she was awake.

  While waiting, Jeremy leaned against his car and stared off into space. His eyes and mind were tired. All he wanted to do was curl up next to Bridget in bed for a few blessed moments, though he knew she’d be leaving soon for her training classes. The final week they let them start a little later, but everyone was normally so wound up mentally, they didn’t care.

  Something moved near the side of her house and he was instantly alert. His hand went to where his holster would have been and he cursed. He might be over reacting, but he’d been damned certain a person had shifted in the shadows.

  Slowly, Jeremy pushed himself off the car and started to walk toward the side of the house. As he turned the corner, he saw a man run down the street, passing by him so quickly that he was at a loss as to how to trap him.

  He warred with himself, wanting to go after the man. Someone was spying on Bridget and it unnerved him. Granted, she was a fairly well known model for those who knew those things, it could have been paparazzi. The last thing he needed was an assault charge. He cracked his knuckles and let out a long sigh. He would leave this up to Bridget. The worst that could happen is she would be pissed he hadn’t chased the man down.

  His cell phone vibrated and he pulled it out of his pocket.

  Come on in.

  A smile eased across his face, replacing some of the nervous tension. It dissipated completely as he slipped the phone back into his jeans pocket. He hurried and walked around the fro
nt of the house. Jeremy’s eyes widened as he turned the knob on the front door and it opened slowly.

  “Sweet Jesus, Bridget. You’re trying to kill me, aren’t you, Darlin’?” his voice was immediately thick with desire.

  She laughed, the whimsical sound one he loved so much, and tossed her head backward. A devious smile spread over her lips as her hips swayed as she literally sauntered over to him. He felt the blood rush to his dick, and his tongue felt swollen in his mouth as he thought about all the things he’d was going to be doing with it.

  “I might be. Or I might have just been up early and slept in this.”

  His eyes trailed up and down her body, taking in the black silk and lace corset that pushed her perfect breasts higher, made them even more perfect. She wore a tiny scrap of a thong with a rhinestone bow at the top of it and black heels to match.

  “Oh, right. I forgot, people think all southern men are stupid,” he said playfully.

  He took a step forward and wrapped a hand behind her head, pulling it up as he leaned down to kiss her. Their mouths fit together as if they were made for one another. Her small sigh of pleasure made him smile against her lips. He was more than ready to give her what she wanted, but his mind reminded him of what he’d seen moments ago. A frustrated groan escaped him as he drew himself back.

  “Before I push you against that wall and show you exactly what that little number is making me think of doing, we need to talk.”

  She pouted her lips, and he felt his dick get even harder by the second.

  “There was someone outside just now. Near the side of your house. When I walked up to him, he bolted.” She frowned and he immediately kept talking and wondered if he shouldn’t check out the rest of the place. “I thought he was a papa, but I didn’t look to see if he had any equipment.”

  She looked down at the carpet for a moment and then back at him. “They have found me more than once. Models aren’t always entertaining, but when you were as close to supermodel status as I was, well, you become much more interesting.” Though she spoke the words, he wasn’t convinced she believed them.