Foster Justice

by Colleen Shannon

  Chad kept on a-comin’. He stopped ten feet away and said calmly, “I don’t think so. You’re already going to be tried for one murder, maybe two if Mary doesn’t make it. On the other hand, I’m plumb exhausted. I’ve already missed several shots today, so maybe I’ll miss again. You want to try me?” Chad glanced at the old man. “Howdy, Buster.”

  The old man responded, “Howdy, Chad.” He didn’t seem overly concerned at the knife still held to his throat.

  Chad sighted down the shiny old pistol, pulling back the hammer with a loud click. “On the other hand, I’d purely love to send you to prison with a shattered kneecap.” The rancher was so skinny he didn’t make a very good shield, and Kinnard’s left leg was fully in Chad’s line of sight.

  Kinnard’s grip loosened slightly. The rancher stomped on Kinnard’s foot and dove sideways. Chad leaped for Kinnard’s knife hand. Kinnard, his teeth bared in hatred, was fresher. But Chad was meaner . . .

  Chad had holstered his pistol so his hands would be free. He used them to slam Kinnard’s knife hand against the side of the heavy old truck. Crying out, Kinnard dropped the knife. Chad kicked it away.

  Quick as the snake he was, Kinnard grabbed for Chad’s gun. He had it out of the holster and was aiming for Chad’s ribs when they both heard sirens in the distance. Chad’s brutal grip around Kinnard’s one good wrist slackened.

  That was all Kinnard needed. He kneed Chad in the groin. Chad anticipated it and moved sideways, but his grip on Kinnard’s wrist loosened further, allowing Kinnard to fire. The shot passed so close, it singed Chad’s shirt. It also ricocheted off the side of the truck, grazing the rancher. He winced and caught his arm.

  That was all the motivation Chad needed. Body-slamming Kinnard against the sturdy truck, Chad wrenched his gun away. In one smooth motion, he opened the cylinder and dumped his ammunition in the road, closed it with a click—and then used it butt first on Kinnard. Right cheekbone first, which resulted in a satisfying howl and crunch of bone, and then the left cheekbone. Nose, chin, the gun making a wonderful cudgel, all the more satisfying because it was a Foster legacy. Kinnard’s face grew bloody, and he sagged, unconscious, held up only by Chad’s weight propping him against the truck.

  Chad’s arm was caught in midstroke. “Easy, Chad,” came Corey’s soft voice. Chad blinked, moisture stinging his eyes. He didn’t know if it was sprayed blood or tears, but finally he staggered back. Kinnard fell to the ground.

  Neither bothered to catch him. After Chad checked on Buster, who showed him that the bullet had barely grazed him, Chad accepted the canteen and red kerchief Corey handed him. Chad took a long swig, poured water on the kerchief, and wiped his face and eyes. “Where’s Captain Sinclair?”

  “He went back to the office. We airlifted Mary into town.”

  Chad gave him a concerned look, but Corey shook his head. “It doesn’t look good.” His serious expression was softened by that impish grin. “He picked up your gal as he passed your homestead. She was walking to town.”

  Chad closed his eyes. “She’s not my gal.” Yet . . .

  “Well, she was madder’n a wet hornet when he wouldn’t let her leave. He had to hold her on charges. She was pissed you didn’t take her with you.”

  Chad nodded. Typical. “She hasn’t done anything.”

  “That’s not the way the California HP tells it.” Corey chuckled.

  Great, now he’d be the latest joke around the office, Chad thought glumly. Cops of every stripe were merciless in their ribbing. He visualized a leather harness poised above his desk.

  After they revived Kinnard, read him his rights, and took him, dazed but able to walk, into the backseat of a cruiser, Chad tried to marshal his depleted energy. “I’d rather face an army of Kinnards than that pissed-off redhead.”

  Corey’s grin widened. “You can let her cool her heels for a night. She’s in an isolated cell, so she’s fine.”

  “Just take me home, Corey,” Chad said. “I have to . . . see to Trey. Or get some more ice. And I have to go on the Internet and check Houston information.” Chad ignored Corey’s curiosity and got into the passenger side of the truck, for once leaving his colleagues to clean up the rest of the mess.

  Twenty-four hours later, a shaved, rested, washed Chad, wearing his newest jeans and work shirt, along with his dress boots, entered the cell block at the DPS holding tank. Sinclair was on his heels, that ever present smile tweaking an otherwise impassive expression.

  Chad glared at him, wishing he’d go back to his paperwork. He checked his watch. It was time.

  Then Jasmine was there, wearing the same T-shirt and jeans she’d worn all the way from California. Her hair was mussed, but even without a scrap of makeup, she was gorgeous to Chad. He noted that her tattoo had faded even more. The glitter paint was gone, and the bright yellow was more of a cream.

  He met her eyes. He knew Sinclair had told her about Mary’s passing; his indirect role in that couldn’t help matters. For once, he didn’t make excuses or ask forgiveness. He just stood there, drinking her in, hoping his eyes could convey the hope for a future with her that he couldn’t quite express, at least not with Sinclair so close.

  Now was obviously not the time anyway . . .

  “How dare you hold me against my will like this?” Jasmine’s fury was all the more dangerous given it was delivered in an icy tone. “Is this any way to treat a cooperative witness? I have a good mind to go back to California. You can’t hold me without habeas corpus, you have to charge me—”

  “I can hold you for looking at me crossways for a few more hours if I want to,” Sinclair rejoined. “You’re a material witness in a case against a man responsible for millions in fraud damages and two murders we know of.”

  “You got your man, so let me go,” Jasmine ground out, clenching the cell bars as she glared at Chad. “Or so help me I’m going to sue you all for false arrest and illegal incarceration. I lost my best friend, my home and my job helping in this investigation and this is the thanks I get? I have the right to call a lawyer!” Her voice trailed off. Her eyes widened as a new arrival was ushered into the cell block.

  Chad stepped aside so the old, silver-haired but still very erect and dignified man could approach Jasmine. “It’s about time. My number’s still the same.” Judge Routh cleared his trembly voice and gave his daughter a pleading look.

  Chad gave her an even more pleading look over his shoulder, and then he retreated as the jailer unlocked her cell. But he was happy to see Jasmine fly into her father’s arms, crying.

  Judge Routh patted her back awkwardly. “I’ve missed you, child. Let me see you.” Jasmine looked up at him with a luminous smile.

  That was enough for Chad. At least he’d done one good thing for her, even if she never forgave him. Knowing he’d made his Mama and Trey proud, Chad followed Sinclair back to the offices for more paperwork.

  But he couldn’t concentrate. He paced up and down, waiting, as it seemed he had for a lifetime, for the woman he knew now was meant for him, no matter how different they were. He stopped, glaring into Corey’s and Sinclair’s smiling eyes. “What’s a man who knows nothing about women doing falling for a woman who knows everything about men?”

  “Sounds like a match to me,” Corey said. He pulled something from a box on his desk and fixed it to dangle from a light fixture above Chad’s desk. Chad scowled, but Corey only twiddled the toy kitten wearing a harness and carrying a whip. It spun in a circle.

  “Besides,” Corey added, “we all want to see pictures of you in a leather harness.”

  Sinclair burst out laughing. Chad tossed his hat at Corey, who ducked. Chad continued his pacing.

  Sinclair needled, “I have a deer head on my mantel that looks braver than you.”

  Corey grew serious. “Trey gave you a great gift, Chad. Don’t let it go.”

  “I know that.” Chad barely glanced at him, he was so fixated on the door that led to the holding tank. Finally it opened and Judge Routh entere
d the office. With a grateful handshake and a smile for Chad, he left with a smile at his daughter, who brought up the rear.

  Jasmine was carrying her satchel. Chad knew what it contained. She didn’t need him for anything at all . . . well . . . he glanced at the kitten over his desk . . . especially now her father was back in her life. His heart in his throat, he waited.

  So did Corey and Sinclair.

  Jasmine said, “I’ve signed the release papers, though I still think it was wrong for y’all to put me in jail.” As she looked among them, her gaze settled on the toy sex kitten above the desk.

  Chad held his breath, expecting her to get angry, but instead, she laughed. She tucked her hand in Chad’s arm. “All right, darling, let me see this ranch house of yours so we can see if the beams are sturdy enough.”

  Chad walked out with her on his arm, his heart about two tons lighter, his colleagues’ laughter ringing in his ears.

  But this time, he knew only the scent of Jasmine.

  Two weeks later, Jasmine and Chad pulled up on the high cliff overlooking the canyon. They’d deliberately waited until dusk. Jasmine jumped off Chester, and Chad stepped down from his new quarter horse, still learning the green young stallion’s eccentricities.

  Jasmine leaned back against his chest, her arms wrapped around his, where they cradled her. A small but fine-quality diamond engagement ring bedecked her left hand, and the tattoo was gone in the vee of her blouse. She drank in the beauty of the colorful landscape washed now in the red, gold, and purple of sunset. “It’s so beautiful here. I understand why you’ve never wanted to leave.”

  “Thanks for paying the back taxes, Jasmine. I’ll pay you back.”

  She looked at him, and the love in her eyes was a gift he knew he didn’t deserve. “You’re right you will. For about, say the next fifty years . . .” She looked back at the view. “It looks just like Trey’s painting, except it’s in full color.”

  “No more gray days for me. And I’m not alone.” Chad’s throat tightened with emotion, so he did what he usually did when he was moved. He made a joke. “A man will give up a lot for a woman, but my horse?”

  Jasmine smiled. “He’s just like you, darling. He chose me and he wouldn’t take no for an answer.” And there, on a canyon rim as old as time, they kissed, celebrating yet again a love that would keep them new.

  On the rise behind the homestead, a freshly dug grave bore a simple headstone that read, “Trey Foster. Beloved brother. Family is all that lasts.”

  Two empty black landscape buckets rolled a bit in the wind as the sun sank below the horizon. Lush green foliage and white blossoms fluttered in the breeze behind the headstone, where they would grow and nurture Trey’s grave. The identifying plastic spikes in the freshly turned dirt around the plants read “Jasmine.”

  Meet another one of Colleen Shannon’s rugged Texas Rangers in

  Sinclair Justice, available from eKensington next July . . .

  CHAPTER 1

  The sign said: Amarillo: 50 miles. Beaumont to El Paso: 1046. Welcome to Texas.”

  Managing not to roll her eyes at the typical Texas braggadocio, Mercy Magdalena Rothschild pressed slightly on the accelerator, impatient to get this interminable trip over with. A new BMW M5 convertible was a great way to cover the miles, but it was still a very long way from Washington D.C. to the booming metropolis of Amarillo, Texas.

  ‘Emm’ as her best friends called her, was not looking forward to her destination or to her tasks, but as soon as she saw this job posting she knew she had to apply. For Yancy.

  But the fact that she had another mission in coming to this border state besides her new job as Historic Preservation Trust Officer in D.C. never left the back of her mind. An unapproved mission even her parents didn’t know about, but one thing she’d learned in her very expensive ten years of higher education: how to do research.

  Even of the criminal variety.

  Even of the missing persons variety.

  But thinking about Yancy and Jennifer would only bring the tears, never at bay very long, back to her tired eyes, and on this long and winding road, she couldn’t afford that. Trying to distract herself, she shuffled to that very Beatles tune on the iPhone connected to her sophisticated iDrive in the car’s onboard computer system.

  The song, one of her favorites, still wasn’t distraction enough, even when she sang the lyrics she knew by heart.

  She broke off when she reached the part about the road leading to “your door.” Yeah, like she’d meet someone in Texas. To say men didn’t get her was putting it mildly, but their rejection had a universal ring, as different as all five of them had been.

  One of them had even declared plaintively, “You’re just weird, you know? And why do you use such big words?”

  Because words are the font of knowledge and life, you dullard, learn a few, she’d wanted to say, but had held her tongue until the door closed behind him.

  Emm sighed, doubly depressed now. Her eyes burned behind her sunglasses, but the ache had nothing to do with the bright spring sun. Yancy had been missing for six months, nine days—she glanced at her watch—and thirteen hours. Jennifer longer than that. She’d never forget the knock on the door at her tiny efficiency that night almost exactly six months ago.

  The D.C. detectives who’d taken the missing persons report had stood there, looking uneasy. “Ma’am, we have news about your sister and her daughter. May we come in?”

  In her matchbox living room they’d laid it out to her. The reward she and Yancy had posted for information leading to Yancy’s missing daughter Jennifer had, he told her, finally yielded a clue. Yancy had, as usual, been hell bent and determined to follow up on her own. Emm, embroiled in her orals for her PhD, had begged her to wait. Then Yancy had disappeared, too . . . .

  Of her own volition, before she even completed her orals, Emm had traveled the D.C. metro area to the low-end bars Yancy favored, handing out and posting flyers for both women. Mother and daughter strikingly resembled one another and Yancy had been a teen mom, so she was only in her late thirties and looked a decade younger.

  Finally, three months after Yancy’s disappearance, nine months after Jennifer had been taken, one of the flyers yielded a tip. The night cook at a seedy little café in downtown Baltimore was coming off duty at one in the morning, and he’d seen a woman who matched the picture of Yancy being forced into a big black sport truck with Texas plates. Her scream was choked off as she was forced into the front seat between the man who snatched her and the driver. He gave a description of the man who grabbed her but never saw the driver.

  When the detectives asked why he hadn’t come forward earlier, he gave the usual spiel about being afraid of being deported, but when the señorita—that was you, Ms. Rothschild, they’d told her—had pleaded for information, he overheard and felt guilty. Besides, he wanted the reward to send back to his family in Mexico.

  “But what exactly does this mean?” Emm had asked. “Yancy was taken to Texas? What about Jennifer?”

  The detectives seemed uneasy. The younger one had looked away, but finally the older detective answered quietly, “We had an urgent message from Yancy asking us to call, saying she had a lead on her daughter’s whereabouts. We were working a dual homicide and by the time we called her back, her phone went straight to voice mail.”

  Emm had wearily rubbed her tired eyes. “So? And I was preparing for my orals so she didn’t even call me to tell me she was going after Jennifer. What does that have to do with her being missing, except prove we’ll all incompetent, self-absorbed assholes?”

  They let that slide. The older detective continued, “We think your sister got too close, that she must have stumbled across the northeastern source of the human trafficking ring. And they . . . took her too.”

  Or worse. Emm heard what they didn’t say.

  “At least that’s what we think if the eyewitness is correct. So we combed surveillance footage all over D.C.’s major arteries for a similar
truck with Texas plates. We found several matches heading south on the interstate but that’s a lot of plates and none of the registered owners match the physical description given by the witness. In the meantime we’ve informed the Texas authorities and were told there’s a high end snatch and grab ring with national reach culminating in West Texas. They bring in the . . . their . . . their . . .” He cleared his throat.

  Emm inserted quietly, “I think the term in your nomenclature is merchandise.”

  He looked relieved and nodded. “Anyway, they bring them from all over the nation through Texas to the border. We still haven’t figured out how they smuggle them across. The Texas Rangers are heading the task force along with the Border Patrol. We’ve given them all the information we have but will still work the case from this end as well.”

  Emm had to clear her throat because as she asked the question, she dreaded the answer. “What are the . . . .the merchandise . . . used for? Surely Yancy is too old for, for . . .”

  He opened his mouth, swallowed, and then looked away.

  She closed her eyes, biting her lip to stifle a moan. She was a trivia and science buff. The average American citizen might not be aware that slavery was worse than ever now in the technological age, partly because of the anonymity of the internet, but she knew the statistics. She also knew the vast majority of the kidnapped women, especially someone as beautiful as Yancy, were forced into prostitution. She was almost forty, but looked twenty-five. After being taken more than nine months ago, Jennifer was probably nothing like the vibrant young seventeen-year-old she’d once been. But she was young and adaptable and would have found a way to survive.

  But Yancy? Her wild, irrepressible older sister wouldn’t tolerate boundaries, or orders. Once on the inside, assuming she’d been taken by the same people, she’d risk her life to find her daughter. And she would not take well to captivity.

  “What can I do?” she whispered over the tears she was restraining.