BLUE STEELE BOX SET - BOOKS 1-3
BLUE STEELE BOX SET 1
Remington Kane
Contents
Introduction
Join My Inner Circle
Acknowledgments
BLUE STEELE - BOUNTY HUNTER
I. Blue Steele
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
II. Going Home
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
III. Call Me Ramón
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
IV. What Goes Up?
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
V. Normal Life
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
VI. The Monster In The Woods
Chapter 17
BLUE STEELE - BROKEN
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
BLUE STEELE - VENGEANCE
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
BLUE RETURNS!
Afterword
Join My Inner Circle
Bibliography
Make Contact
Coming Soon
Introduction
BLUE STEELE – BOX SET – BOOKS 1-3
BLUE STEELE – BOUNTY HUNTER
BLUE STEELE – BROKEN
BLUE STEELE - VENGEANCE
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Acknowledgments
I write for you.
—Remington Kane
BLUE STEELE - BOUNTY HUNTER
BLUE STEELE – BOUNTY HUNTER - Book 1 of the Blue Steele Series
Part 1
Blue Steele
Chapter 1
It was a Friday night and I was on yet another blind date. At least this one was cute.
He had blue/green eyes, curly blond hair and smelled great. His name was William Grant and he was an architect, thirty-two, divorced, no children. William, Billy as he liked to be called, was clean-shaven, articulate, and well read.
We were in Fort Worth, Texas, at a restaurant called The Round-up. The décor was western and the dress code, casual. I was wearing my best boots along with a blue dress that hung three inches above my knees. I was also displaying a tasteful bit of cleavage, well, all right, it was an ample bit of cleavage. But hey, they’re one of my best features and I never met a man who disliked looking at them.
I was having a good time, and that’s when Mickey Kyle walked into the restaurant. Mickey was a lifelong thug who skipped bail three weeks ago and now had a four-thousand-dollar bounty on his head.
Mickey walked up to the bar and spoke to the bartender for a moment. She reached under the counter and brought out a large paper bag. Take-out, Mickey was picking up a take-out order.
“Billy,” I said.
“Yes?”
“Do you remember I told you that I was a bounty hunter?”
He smiled, did I mention that he had a great smile, well he did.
“Of course, I remember. Why do you ask?”
“Because I have to go to work now, see that man at the bar, the one with the white bag in his hand? His name is Mickey Kyle and he’s worth four thousand dollars to whoever brings him in.”
Billy turned his head and stared at Mickey. Mickey Kyle was forty, stood six-foot-four, and weighed nearly three hundred pounds. At the time, he was wearing a sleeveless T-shirt that displayed his many and varied tattoos. He was also bearded and his broad nose hooked a little to the right, while his beady eyes had a mean slant to them.
Billy turned back to me with a look of puzzlement.
“You’re calling the cops, right? I mean you’re not going to try to arrest him yourself, are you?”
“Mickey is all mine; I’ve been looking for him for weeks.”
I opened my purse and grabbed a pen just as Mickey left the bar. I then hastily scribbled my number on Billy’s palm.
“I had a great time, call me?”
Billy nodded as he stared at his hand and I rushed out of the restaurant while searching my purse for my truck keys. When I reached the parking lot, luck was with me. Mickey was standing outside the restaurant talking to a redheaded woman with too much make-up and shoes I wouldn’t be caught dead in. I mean, who wears open-back shoes?
They were standing by a motorcycle that I assumed was Mickey’s, but a few moments later, the redhead straddled the bike and rode off. With a gun in my right hand and cuffs in my left, I walked over toward Mickey and smiled.
“Hello, Mickey, nice night huh?”
Mickey looked at the gun and the handcuffs and then stared at me. He didn’t begin laughing until his eyes found mine.
“Are you kidding me? You think your skinny little girl ass is gonna take me in? The damn cops must be getting desperate if there hiring chippies now.”
“I’m not a cop; I’m a bounty hunter.” I tossed the cuffs to him. “Put those on.”
He made no move to catch the cuffs; they hit him on the chest and fell to the ground. They were followed by the bag of food, as a second later, he was charging at me. I stood my ground, took careful aim, and pulled the trigger.
I carried a thirty-eight with a two-inch barrel. My gun had a short barrel because it made it easier to carry and I rarely needed it for distance. If I ever had to shoot a target more than a dozen yards away, the gun would have been next to useless.
Mickey was six feet away when I shot him in the left knee. He fell at my side, moaning.
The sound of the shot brought the restaurant crowd outside and I spotted Billy standing near the front. His eyes were wide, and he looked frightened. A moment later, a man pushed past him and headed over to me.
The man was holding a badge in one hand and a gun in the other. His name was Deke Thomas, and he was a Texas Ranger. Deke was John Wayne tough and tall, and even looked a little like ol’ Duke. Deke had been a friend of my father’s and I went to school with his oldest daughter, Jenna.
Deke looked down at Mickey and then over at me.
“Hey, Blue, is that Mickey Kyle?”
“Yep.”
“He’s worth what, three grand?”
“Four grand.”
While we talked, Mickey moaned, and I do believe I saw tears in his manly eyes.
“Shot him in the knee, huh?”
“He called me a chippie and charged at me.”
“Well, judging by the look of that knee, I’d say his charging days are over.”
A police cruiser arrived, and Deke talked to the cops getting out of it. I looked back at the crowd, searching for Billy, but saw him nowhere in sight.
When all the dust settled, I arrived back home at 2:23 a.m. and fell into bed with a splitting headache.
Billy never called me.
Maybe I should have shot him in the knee too.
Chapter 2
A few days later, Becca and I were out for a run in Trinity Park.
Becca was my best friend and had been such for as long as I could remember. Her family and mine were neighbors and we were born only two days apart. Becca is a natural blonde with brown eyes, who these days wears her hair short. She says that with five kids under the age of ten, she has no time for worrying about her hair.
My hair is dark and my eyes gr
een. I wear my hair long, always have, and even if I had five kids I would still do so. I am vain when it comes to my hair.
We were both wearing shorts with tank tops and we were both sweating from head to toe. It was a miserably humid day in Fort Worth and the temperature, at eleven a.m., was already in the eighties. We came to a stop near the Mark Twain statue and caught our breath.
“Are you working today?” Becca said.
“Yeah, a man by the name of Vincent Caine jumped bail yesterday; he’s an accountant, the bounty is ten grand.”
“What did he do?”
“He murdered his wife.”
Becca made a face. “Must you always go after the dangerous ones? Doesn’t anybody ever skip bail for not paying their parking tickets?”
I smiled. Becca worried about me more than my mother did.
“I’ll be careful, and I’ll be ten thousand dollars richer when I find him.”
“You’re really determined to buy a ranch someday, aren’t you?”
“Not someday, by the time I’m forty, and I’m well ahead of schedule.”
“That Vermont trip really paid off, huh?”
“Yeah,” I said, and smiled. A few months ago, in Vermont, I was tracking a fugitive named Sebastian Rojo. I didn’t get Rojo due to… unusual circumstances, but I did get the hundred grand in uncut diamonds he was carrying.
Becca walked over and stared at me.
“Do you still think about him?”
“About who?”
“Don’t play dumb, Blue, not with me.”
I nodded. “Yeah, I still think about him. You would too if you had met him. But, hell, he’s married; I mean he’s really married.”
While in Vermont, I met a man named… well, his name doesn’t matter, but he was unlike anyone I had ever known. Sebastian Rojo had taken his wife, Dr. Jessica White, as a hostage to make his escape. I teamed up with the doctor’s husband to rescue his wife and capture Rojo. We got his wife back and I wound up with Rojo’s diamonds.
Becca reached out and gave my hand a squeeze.
“I’m sorry, baby, but you’ll find the right guy someday, ya know?”
“Like you did? You and Richie have been together since the eighth grade. Do you know how lucky you are?”
Becca grinned shyly, “Yeah, I do.”
I spent the next few days talking to anyone who knew anything about Vincent Caine, his neighbors, relatives, clients. I learned two things. One, most of the people in his life didn’t believe that he killed his wife, and two, most of them didn’t like his wife.
Lucinda Caine, Vincent’s dead wife, was described as selfish by many who knew her. She had been fifteen years younger than her husband, and some thought that the age difference had been part of the problem. I was told that she cheated on her husband, gambled them into bankruptcy and refused to get a job to help dig them out of it. In fact, Lucinda Caine seemed so universally disliked that I sought out the one person who should have something positive to say about her, her mother.
Bobbi Reed, Lucinda’s mother, lived in Dallas with Lucinda’s little sister, Rachel. The house turned out to be a double-wide trailer in a mobile home park off interstate 30.
No one was home when I got there, and so I sat on the trailer’s steps and waited. Sitting in the weeds near the trailer, was an old Volkswagen Beetle that looked like little more than a pile of rust. There were weeds surrounding it, but I noticed that the weeds in front, by the trunk, looked trampled, as if someone had been standing there recently. The trailer too was sunbaked and had paint chipping off.
The trailer had seen better days and so had Bobbi Reed.
Bobbi Reed was forty-four, but looked at least sixty. I caught her coming home from work on the night shift at the hospital; she was a nurse. Her daughter Rachel was with her and was quite a contrast. Rachel Reed was sixteen, shapely, and had about the biggest blue eyes I’d ever seen, while her curly blonde hair fell about her dimpled cheeks.
The three of us sat around the living room with the TV on, but the sound turned down. I was sipping on a cup of coffee that was surprisingly good and listening to Bobbi Reed tell me about her oldest daughter.
“She was a saint, a saint to put up with that man,” Bobbi Reed said.
“Why do you say that? What did Vincent do to her?”
“He treated Lucinda like property and wouldn’t spend any money on her. The man owned an accounting firm for God’s sake; he must have been rolling in money.”
“Did you know he filed for bankruptcy recently?”
“That was just a trick to fool the IRS, believe me, Vincent Caine is devious.”
“Maybe, but the police think that he killed your daughter to collect on her life insurance.”
“He’s greedy, that’s all. He used my poor daughter from the moment he met her. Did you know that she was only fourteen when they met?”
I raised an eyebrow. “No, I hadn’t heard that.”
“Lucinda swore to me that nothing went on between them until she married him at eighteen, but I’m not a complete fool, plus, there was that trouble with the neighbor girl.”
“That was just a misunderstanding, Mom,” Rachel Reed said.
I looked over at her. “What was a misunderstanding?”
“Lucinda and Vincent had a neighbor woman with a teenage daughter,” Bobbi said. “Lucinda told me that she caught the girl leaving their house one day when she came home earlier than expected. The girl was attractive and looked older than she was, but she was only fifteen for God’s sake.”
“What did the girl say?”
“She told Lucinda that she had just stopped by to talk to Vincent about donating money toward new band uniforms.”
“That’s possible, isn’t it?”
“The girl had never been in the band. If she was playing an instrument that day, it was a skin flute.”
“Mom!” Rachel said, while I laughed, despite the seriousness of it all.
“What did Lucinda do next?”
“She told the girl’s mother about her suspicions; not long after, the girl and her mother moved away. Can you imagine having to tell another woman that your husband may have been fooling around with her child? Lucinda said their marriage was never the same after that.”
“How long ago did this happen?”
“A few years ago.”
“If she believed he was a child molester, then why did she stay with him?”
“I hate Vincent for killing my daughter, but there is one thing about him I can’t deny, the man’s a charmer, always was and always will be. Despite his faults, Lucinda loved him.”
The doubt I harbored at that statement must have shown on my face, because Bobbi frowned at me.
“Let me guess, people have been telling you about Lucinda’s affairs? Well, it’s true, but they weren’t affairs, it was just one man, Harold Weidman. He was Lucinda’s dentist and he wanted her to leave Vincent and live with him.”
“Why didn’t she?”
Bobbi shrugged. “Vincent charmed her out of it, said he was a changed man. Two weeks later, she was dead.”
As I was leaving the trailer, I stopped at the bottom of the steps and asked Bobbi one last question.
“You say that Vincent met your daughter when she was only fourteen, how did they meet?”
Bobbi Reed stared at me a while before answering.
“Back then… Vincent was my boyfriend.”
And then, she slowly shut the door.
Chapter 3
Dr. Harold Weidman had a dental practice in a Fort Worth office building that was a short walk away from the Kimbell Art Museum.
After I explained who I was and why I was there, the doctor agreed to talk with me. We spoke in one of the examination rooms. The antiseptic smell of the place and the sight of the drills made my teeth itch. I hate visiting the dentist.
Dr. Weidman was a pleasant looking man. He was in his mid-thirties and had short brown hair with gray eyes seated behind a pair of round
glasses.
“You say that you’re a bounty hunter, Miss Steele; that’s an unusual profession for a young woman, no?”
I smiled, while hoping that he spotted no flaws in my teeth.
“Bail Enforcement Agent, and there are a few of us, doctor. Now please, tell me everything you know about Lucinda and Vincent Caine.”
“About Vincent, I know almost nothing, about Lucinda… it would take a year.”
“You loved her?”
“Oh yes, from the moment I laid eyes on her.”
“Do you believe that Vincent killed her?”
He shook his head slowly.
“I don’t know, probably, or else why would he have fled?”
“Did Lucinda ever mention a place that Vincent might run to, such as a childhood friend, or a relative that he was particularly close to?”
The doctor stared at me. “We spoke of him as little as possible.”
“Yes, of course.”
“The police have asked me all of this already; do you really think that you’ll locate him before they can?”
Blue Steele Box Set Page 1